Gerry · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

You remember the walk before you remember anything else. Two men in tight profile, heads bobbing against a ground that slides past, their gait falling into near-lockstep until it stops being walking and becomes something closer to a pulse. Nothing happens in the shot. That is the shot. Harris Savides holds it long past the point where any normal film would have cut to a map, a destination, a reason — and in that holding, Gerry tells you what kind of film it intends to be: one where the duration of putting one foot in front of another is the event, and the event leads nowhere.

This is the easiest place to meet Gilles Deleuze, because Deleuze built a whole theory of cinema around exactly this break. In most movies a character sees a situation and acts to change it: lost in the desert, you'd read the sun, find the trail, walk out. Deleuze called that circuit the movement-image — perception flows into action, action resolves the situation, and the cuts serve that chain. Gerry severs it. The two Gerrys perceive their predicament with perfect clarity and can do absolutely nothing adequate about it. They walk, and the walking doesn't help. Deleuze named this collapse the crisis of the action-image: the moment the sensory-motor link goes slack, when a character can still see but can no longer convert seeing into a meaningful act. Van Sant doesn't dramatize the crisis. He is it, for 103 minutes.

What fills the vacuum is what Deleuze called the pure optical and sound situation — the opsign and the sonsign. When you can't act on what you perceive, you're left simply looking and listening, and so are we. The amplified crunch of footfalls, breath, wind across open country, then the startling intrusion of a spoken word: these aren't atmosphere, they're the new content. The men become what Deleuze called seers (voyants) rather than agents — figures who endure and witness instead of intervening. Casey Affleck's haunted, depleted face late in the film isn't building toward a decision. It's registering a world it can no longer master. That is the time-image's protagonist: not the one who does, but the one who undergoes.

And because nothing advances, time itself rises to the surface. Deleuze borrowed a phrase from Italian neorealism — dead time (temps mort), the stretches where the everyday is simply held and nothing pushes the plot forward. Gerry is almost entirely dead time, and it weaponizes the edit to make it worse. Van Sant cuts between Argentine salt flats, Death Valley, and Utah to stitch one impossible geography, so that landmarks refuse to accumulate. You lose your bearings exactly as the characters lose theirs. The cut, normally cinema's orienting tool, here becomes a disorienting one. That's a real formal invention: editing that produces durée — felt, sticky, directionless time — instead of measuring movement.

The desert that swallows them is what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — a space stripped of its function as a setting for action, reduced to pure affect. The salt flats are its purest form, emptiness: white fields where scale dissolves and the two figures shrink to specks crossing the frame. There's no 'here' to act in, only an indifferent expanse charged with feeling. And in the celebrated dawn sequence, the relation inverts — the men go still and silhouetted while the sky cycles through gradations of color behind them. Deleuze had a name for this too: the movement of world, where the character falls quiet and the world itself takes over the motion. Nature moves; the men are absorbed into its time. No line of dialogue could carry the indifference of the universe the way that lightening sky does.

This lens earns its keep because Gerry is otherwise easy to dismiss as a tedious art-stunt. Read through Deleuze, the tedium is the argument. The film belongs to a genealogy it wears openly. Van Sant has acknowledged Béla Tarr as the model — the trudging long takes of Sátántangó and the bound, pedestrian Steadicam of Werckmeister Harmonies are the direct template for Savides's mobile long-lens tracking. From Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman he takes the permission to let real time run past its narrative usefulness until repetition becomes content. From Antonioni's L'Avventura and The Passenger he inherits the search that dissolves and the desert that eats psychology whole. From Tarkovsky's Stalker comes the metaphysical hush — figures on foot through a hostile zone, duration as a spiritual vehicle, which is why Arvo Pärt's tintinnabuli tones arrive like grace over the silence. What Van Sant added was the importation: he smuggled European slow cinema into the body of an American independent film, made by two movie stars, and aimed it at a survival-thriller premise it then refuses to deliver.

This is, finally, a cinema of the body — Deleuze's late category, where the everyday body carries time in its postures and exhaustion. The acting is in the trudging, the cracked lips, the stumble. And it sets up the rupture you won't see coming, the one that lands precisely because the film taught you to read bodies instead of words. Watch it again. The boredom you feared is duration handed back to you as a thing you can finally feel.