Blue Moon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A short man sits at the end of a bar and will not go home. A few blocks north, on the evening of March 31, 1943, Oklahoma! is opening, and the whole future of the American musical is about to spill out of the theatre and into Sardi's, where it will find Lorenz Hart with a drink in one hand and a monologue running down. He has nowhere to go and nothing he can do about any of it. He can only talk. Richard Linklater bets the entire film on that, and wins.

Start with what Hart can't do. In the kind of movie Hollywood knows how to make, a man in his spot perceives a threat and acts on it. He schemes, wins the girl, writes the better show, crashes the opening and reclaims his crown. Deleuze had a name for the engine of that cinema, the movement-image: a character sees a situation and moves to change it, and the cut carries the action toward a resolution. Hart does none of this. Weiland will not be his. Rodgers has already gone pastoral without him. The show is a hit before Hart can say a word against it. This is what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image — the point where a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. The dossier's phrase is exact: "the gap between Hart's verbal command and his actual powerlessness." He commands language and nothing else.

When action drains out, something else floods in. Deleuze called them opsigns and sonsigns, pure optical and sound situations: moments where a character, and we with him, can only look and listen because there is no useful move left to make. Sardi's is one long opsign. Hart watches Rodgers arrive to be congratulated. He listens to a party swell for a triumph that is also his funeral. The bar stops being a place where things get done and becomes a place where things are witnessed. Hart is the witness — Deleuze's voyant, the seer who endures rather than acts. Ethan Hawke plays him as a fountain going dry, the wit still firing while the man behind it empties out, and Bobby Cannavale's bartender is the film's second seer, the one who absorbs it all and says little. The dossier is right that "the drama lives in how they listen." That listening is the affection-image at work: feeling registered on a face, held there, never discharged into an act.

Time is the real subject, and Sandra Adair, who has cut nearly every Linklater film, knows it. She edits for breath. She holds shots past the point a normal drama would cut and lets the entrances and exits of a filling barroom do the punctuation. Deleuze, following Bazin, prized exactly this: dead time, temps mort, stretches where nothing advances the plot and time is simply had. You are kept in the room with Hart for the whole of his unraveling. Nothing is compressed. That is the point.

Here the film finds its sharpest idea. Hart's whole art — urbane, ironic, drunk on interior rhyme — is being retired in real time by Hammerstein's plain prairie sincerity a few blocks away. Deleuze has a figure for an ordered, aristocratic world rotting quietly from inside: crystal-decomposition. Blue Moon is a crystal of a dying style. The caricatures on the wall, the tables set for celebrants coming to toast the thing that killed his idiom, the party physically crowding into his refuge — the room is a sophistication going antique while you watch. The film doesn't argue the eclipse. It stages it as décor closing in.

Even Hart's body carries the argument. The historical Hart stood roughly five feet; Hawke doesn't, so Linklater shrinks him with forced perspective, low blocking, sightlines that keep taller people over him. Deleuze would read this as a gest — a posture that exposes a social relation rather than just illustrating a trait. The camera is never neutral here. It is always quietly managing the lie of Hart's stature, and in doing so it makes visible the thing the whole night is about. The era is making him small, and the lens agrees.

What keeps him upright is talk, and talk here is fabulation — Deleuze's word for a subject caught in the act of legending himself. Hart tells stories to keep the dark at bay, spins fluency out of a life that has run out of plot, pins a whole romance on Weiland's letters because the story is better than the fact. He forges a self at the bar because the true one is unbearable. The wit is real and the ground under it is gone, and the film lets both be true in the same breath.

Blue Moon didn't reinvent anything, and doesn't need to. It is the far, quiet end of a line Linklater has drawn for twenty-five years. Tape put a whole drama in one motel room in real time. Before Sunset made screen time equal story time on the strength of Hawke walking and talking. Further back sit My Dinner with André, where conversation at one table is the entire event; Rope, which turned the classical unities into a camera strategy; and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the boozy chamber duel lit like a real room. Me and Orson Welles gave Linklater and Robert Kaplow the backstage-1943 register this film reprises. Blue Moon's contribution to that discourse is small and real: it proves the time-image can be built from almost nothing, one bar and one ruined talker, and that obsolescence itself can be filmed directly as time rather than plotted as event.

Watch it once for Hawke. Watch it again for one thing: how the party gets louder as Hart gets quieter. The world keeps moving and the man goes still inside it — Deleuze's movement of world, the dance that goes on absorbing the dancer until he can't follow. By the end Hart isn't leaving because there's nowhere the night can take him that isn't this. He just wanted to keep talking a little longer. You understand why.