Remarkably Bright Creatures · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the glass. An octopus flattens one eye against the acrylic and watches an old woman push a mop across a wet floor after closing time. She doesn't know she's being read. That image — a person and an animal on either side of an inch of glass, one of them understanding far more than the other — is the whole film compressed into a single blocked two-shot. It's worth asking why it moves us before either character has solved anything.

The answer is that Marcellus, the captive Pacific octopus, is the film's real perceiver, and Newman builds the picture around his angle of vision. Deleuze called this the perception-image: the moment a film stops merely showing a world and starts foregrounding the seat from which the world is seen. Most movies perch that seat behind a human eye. Here it sits behind a boneless, eight-armed one. The editing (as the novel demands) braids Marcellus watching, then the human event he has already grasped — so we don't just see the octopus, we see him seeing. Deleuze had a name for that doubling too: the dicisign, where the camera perceives a creature who is itself perceiving, and we feel the watching presence as a weight in the frame. The tank glow, the caustic wavering light, the reflections sliding over glass — this is perception made liquid, what Deleuze called a reume, an unanchored flowing vision carried on water and current rather than fixed to a standing body. The film's whole visual problem, inherited from the cold blue-green aquarium palette, is really a philosophical one: how to give a fluid, centerless animal a point of view without turning it into a cartoon.

And here's the tension the film both exploits and softens. A captive octopus can only look. Behind glass, no action is available to him; he cannot leave, cannot intervene except in the smallest ways. In Deleuze's terms he is a pure seer — a voyant, the figure who watches and endures because the ordinary link between perceiving and acting has been cut. In the great time-image films that figure opens onto empty duration, onto time felt for itself. Marcellus is that figure literally, trapped in his tank. But Remarkably Bright Creatures is a consolation narrative, not an art film, and it does something telling with its seer: it harnesses his enforced watching to a warm mystery-plot. His helplessness becomes the engine of dramatic irony rather than an experience of stalled time. That conversion — pure seeing put back to work for a hopeful resolution — is exactly what keeps the film inside the movement-image tradition of the popular tearjerker even as it flirts with something stranger.

The irony itself is where Deleuze's relation-image takes over. Meaning here is built from relations the audience holds and the characters don't: Marcellus knows what became of Tova's son thirty years ago, and through him so do we, well before she does. We become the knowing third party watching two people fail to see what an octopus has already worked out. That's warm irony, not cruel — the film wants us ahead of Tova, aching for the gap to close. It works because the octopus is a demark: an anomaly that breaks a habit and forces us to interpret. An animal in a tank is normally scenery, a background creature you don't question. This one looks back, understands, and remembers, and that single break in expectation is what makes every glance through the glass legible as thought rather than reflex.

Meanwhile the human half of the film lives in the body. Tova's grief isn't spoken so much as performed in routine — the compulsive cleaning, the mop and bucket, the geography of the shift, the tidy house. Deleuze's cinema of the body names this: the everyday body carrying duration, a posture that says what dialogue would spoil. The material rewards underplaying because the sentiment is structural; the acting has to resist it.

The lineage is honest and specific. My Octopus Teacher gave this film its tactile close-focus grammar and, more importantly, cultural permission to treat a cephalopod as a genuine mind rather than a monster or a gag. Life of Pi and, further back, Babe are the craft debts for the animal co-lead who must carry real emotional weight and register as a creature with interiority rather than an effect — the exact stand-or-fall problem Marcellus poses. The Art of Racing in the Rain is the close sibling, solving the same first-person-animal-narrator puzzle by anchoring the melodrama in a reflective animal voice. And the direct production model is Newman's own Where the Crawdads Sing: a buried small-town mystery surfaced through clean, emotionally legible coverage.

What did it move forward? Not the avant-garde. Its quieter achievement is to smuggle a genuinely radical proposition — that the perceptual center of a film need not be human — into the most mainstream, most consoling of forms, and to make an audience accept a non-human witness without a flicker of alienation. The octopus behind the glass is a seer the movies usually reserve for difficult cinema, put to work here to help a grieving woman find her way back to wonder. Watch it again for the two-shots through the tank. Ask who is really doing the seeing.