Last Night · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

David Cronenberg sits at a desk in a gas company office with a customer list in front of him. He dials. He tells a stranger that service will continue uninterrupted until the end. He is courteous, he stays on script, he gets through the names. There is no fire in the shot, no sky, no crowd. It is the image most people carry out of Last Night, and nearly everything Don McKellar built is inside it.

Toronto has six hours. The film never says what is coming. No asteroid, no war, no plague, no bunker to reach and no scientist to call. The sky stays daylight-bright, and nobody in the film asks why.

Deleuze has a distinction that fits this almost too well. In most films, whatever lies outside the frame is another piece of the same space: the room next door, the street the car turned down. The camera could pan and find it. He calls that the relative out-of-field. Occasionally a film opens onto something that is not anywhere, that no pan could reach. That is the absolute out-of-field, and horror usually rations it out a few seconds at a time. McKellar makes it the premise. Ask the film where the catastrophe is and it has nothing to point at.

You can object that this is just a budget, and you would be partly right. Nobody can now separate the choice from the constraint. A small Canadian commission could not have afforded a burning sky, and McKellar's conception did not need one; both pressures pointed the same way. Look at what the absence does anyway. What the absolute out-of-field opens onto, in Deleuze, is what he calls the Open: the sense that the world inside the frame belongs to a larger whole that is changing. Most films only gesture at this. Here the changing whole is the plot.

Which breaks the machinery that ordinarily drives a movie. Deleuze's first regime, the movement-image, runs on a circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts, and the action changes the situation. His second regime begins where that circuit is cut, where action no longer resolves anything and the character is left to watch and endure. He called the transition the crisis of the action-image, and it usually shows up as characters who can't respond adequately to what they see. Last Night is the limit case. It isn't that response is inadequate. There is no response. Nothing anyone does at 11:50 alters midnight. What's left is what Deleuze calls a pure optical and sound situation: people looking, listening, talking, with nowhere for any of it to discharge. Douglas Koch's camera stays near eye level and gives you faces rather than the geography of the crisis. When the streets fill, you get them at street level, in fragments, never from a vantage that would organize the chaos into a shape you could act on. That's not only thrift. It's the film refusing to give the disaster a setting that could call forth a hero.

The permanent daylight is the real invention, and it's stranger than it looks. Cinema's oldest clock is the sky. Dusk means the day is running out; darkness means we're close. McKellar broke that instrument, and the film cannot use it. So time has to come out of people's mouths: characters tell each other what time it is. Deleuze's name for time presented directly, rather than derived from movement, is the chronosign, and you usually need Resnais or Welles to see one. Here a production constraint does the philosophy. With no visible movement able to measure the hours, the hours arrive as bare announcement, and time stops being the thing movement measures. It becomes the thing everyone is standing inside.

So the film fills up with what Deleuze calls temps mort, dead time, the stretches that don't advance anything. Reginald Harkema lets scenes play. The comedy in the family's out-of-season Christmas dinner depends entirely on holding a shot until the awkwardness becomes unbearable, which means the everyday isn't filler here; it's the whole remaining content. And the dinner is a gest, Brecht's term by way of Deleuze: a posture that exposes a social relation instead of announcing it. Pull Christmas off the calendar, perform it anyway, and you see what the ritual was actually for, which is holding people at a table. Cronenberg's calls are the gest of an institution. Courtesy outliving its function, a call sheet worked through past any conceivable purpose. This is a cinema of bodies and attitudes carrying duration rather than characters executing acts.

The structure comes straight out of Altman. Nashville runs a dozen unconnected urban lives on parallel tracks and tightens the crosscutting as they funnel toward one public event, and that is the chassis here. Deleuze calls this a dispersive situation, and lists it among the symptoms of the action-image coming apart: an ensemble that never consolidates into one protagonist with one problem. Sandra Oh's search for a working phone is a balade, a journey that transforms nothing and arrives nowhere changed. The telephone is the film's organizing object, its symbol in Deleuze's precise sense. In 1998 the phone is fixed to a wall, and the dossier's sharpest observation follows from that: to make a call you have to be somewhere, and being somewhere at the end costs you the chance to be somewhere else. Miracle Mile had already made telephony the delivery system for a countdown. McKellar makes it the countdown's price.

The rest of the lineage is a tradition of manners. On the Beach dramatizes annihilation through a wardroom, a Grand Prix, a last party. The Bed Sitting Room plays post-nuclear Britain as preserved decorum. Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel supplies both halves of the dinner: a rule the film flatly declines to explain, and a formally set table where etiquette outlasts its purpose. Testament is the closest debt, an off-screen nuclear exchange and one household's chores in ordinary domestic light. McKellar's contribution is scale and light together. He widens Littman's single house to a city and keeps the plain afternoon.

Nobody asks why. That refusal is the film's best decision. Deleuze, following Artaud, calls the encounter with what thought cannot think the unthought, and it's normally staged as anguish. McKellar stages it as etiquette. The characters can't think the end, so they think about dinner, about a list, about whether to phone their mother. Not denial. Just the shape a mind takes when the object won't hold.

What this did to narrative is worth naming plainly. A deadline usually generates stakes because action can still alter the outcome. Here the clock alters only where you'll be standing when it runs out, so the countdown organizes attention instead of causality, and the plot becomes a question of allocation. 2000, Seen By… commissioned about ten directors to answer the millennium and got mostly irony back. McKellar answered it literally, and proved that the disaster film's contract — we promise you the money shot — is optional, and that dropping it leaves you with the only material that was ever interesting.

Watch it again for the light. It never dims, never reddens, never once helps you feel the hour. Only people do that, out loud, for each other, which is why the last movement can abandon the distance the film has kept all night and simply come close. The film has been withholding that closeness on purpose. When it arrives, you understand that the plain afternoon was never indifference. It was the film keeping its hands off, so the people in it could decide what to do with the time.