Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Breaking Away
1979 · Peter Yates · Breaking Away on Sightlines
The cat is named Fellini.
That's the detail I keep. A nineteen-year-old in Bloomington, Indiana looks at the animal asleep in his parents' house and decides it belongs to another country: one he has never seen, whose language he has assembled from records and race results, whose great living emblem in his mind is not a city or a grandmother but a film director. Dave Stohler's Italy isn't a place. It's a cinema. He renames the household after it.
Hold onto that, because it makes Breaking Away stranger and better than its reputation as the nice bike-race movie.
Deleuze has a figure for Dave, and it comes from an unlikely corner of his film writing: the forger. Not a liar. A liar hides something that exists; the forger manufactures, and the manufacture starts working. Deleuze gathered such characters under the powers of the false, his name for films that let true and false go undecidable and treat that as a creative engine rather than a moral emergency. Dave is the sweetest case imaginable. The accent is a costume. He sings opera at the dinner table while his father, a used-car salesman, waits for one plain English word. He poses as an Italian exchange student to court a sorority girl on the campus he has no business crossing. All of it invented. And the legs are real, the training is real, and the counterfeit self is the machine that builds an actual racer. That's the forger's scandal in Deleuze: the false has a productive power of its own.
Then Tesich and Yates spring the trap. The Italian team Dave has spent years imitating comes to town, and they cheat him. The original turns out to be the crook. There was no authentic Italy underwriting his performance, only other people's performances, and the kid in Indiana was the sincere one. Dennis Christopher plays it as a loss of faith, which is exactly right, because what breaks in him is the belief that somewhere there is an original to be faithful to.
Deleuze has a second word that fits even better, and it's a political one: fabulation. Legending. Catching people in the act of inventing a story for themselves because no available story has room in it for them. That's the whole town. The cutters are the sons of the men who quarried the limestone the university is built out of, and the film puts that fact in the masonry before anyone says it aloud: collegiate-Gothic grandeur on one side, plain commercial streets and small houses on the other, the same rock. Deleuze would call the university the encompasser, the situation so large that it does the calling, pressing on people until somebody acts. Bloomington's encompasser is made of stone the fathers cut and the sons can't walk into.
So what do you do with a situation like that? Mike, the ex-quarterback, does nothing, brilliantly. Dennis Quaid plays him as someone who sees the entire shape of his life and has no move: he'll be a cutter forever, he says so, and the saying changes nothing. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image, the point at which films fill up with people who perceive their situation accurately and cannot react adequately to it. American cinema of the seventies had its own dialect for that stall, the drift film, and Breaking Away descends straight from two of them. American Graffiti gives it the shape: one summer after graduation, an ensemble circling, cruising, stalling, about to scatter. The Last Picture Show gives it the register: real regional geography standing in for a future, working-class kids with nothing to do but wait. Deleuze's name for that shape is the balade, the trip that transforms nothing.
The surprise is that this film plugs the balade back into an action and gets away with it. The Little 500 is a textbook large-form action-image: the encompassing situation presses, one decisive contest transforms it, private growth turns into public standing. Yates was the right man for the job. He had cut the Bullitt chase, and he brings that grammar to the peloton: tracking alongside the pack, inserts of feet and gears and faces, the geography kept legible so you always know where Dave sits in the field and how much he has left. Rocky had already proved that a working-class nobody plus a single public contest plus swelling music would work. What's different here is that the winning fiction belongs to the boys. They have no standing in that stadium except the word the students use to insult them, and they enter under it.
Which is why the film needs its other rhythm, the loose one. Whole stretches advance nothing: the hangout scenes, the kitchen, the flooded quarry with its green depths where the four of them swim and dive and are simply themselves. Deleuze calls this dead time, the everyday just held. A pure sports picture cuts it. Breaking Away is largely made of it, and the race only lands because the idleness was taken seriously first.
Two notes on placement. The bicycle here is doing borrowed work. The debt runs back to Bicycle Thieves, where the bike was dignity and survival photographed in real streets, the cinema Bazin loved because it showed a world without arguing a thesis about it. Dave has seen that cinema and mistaken it for a wardrobe, which is touching and a little damning, and it tells you what he actually wants: a way of being poor that has some grandeur in it. His Italianness, meanwhile, is what Deleuze would call a gest, a posture that exposes a social relation. The accent makes visible that around here an identity is something you can rent.
The significance is easy to understate, because the film is so unassuming. In the year Hollywood was consolidating around tentpoles, a cheap regional character picture written by a Yugoslav-born immigrant and directed by an Englishman took five Academy nominations including Best Picture, on nothing but performance and place, and won for its screenplay. It also shifted the sports film's center of gravity. Winning became almost incidental to the class reckoning it interrupted, and the class-conscious youth films of the eighties took the lesson.
Watch it again and count the pretending. The accent, the fake exchange student, the father's patter, Mike's hardness, the fraternities' pedigree. Then notice which pretenses hold weight and which collapse under it. The ending won't tell you what Dave becomes; its optimism is careful and small. It only shows you that the forgery got him this far.
Concepts in play
- le faussaire (the forger) — Dave invents an Italian self wholesale — accent, opera at the dinner table, the cat renamed Fellini — and poses as an Italian exchange student to court a sorority girl; the fabricated identity is what actually produces a racer.
- puissances du faux (powers of the false) — The visiting Italian team Dave idolizes and imitates cheats him: the 'authentic' original is the fraud and the counterfeit boy is sincere, so his disillusionment reads as a loss of faith in there being any original at all.
- story-telling / legending — Tesich (born in Užice, emigrated as a teenager, raced the Little 500 himself) writes Dave's imagined Italian self as self-invention, and the cutters — sons of the stonecutters, named by the students' insult — enter the race under that name.
- crisis of the action-image — Mike, the ex-quarterback who peaked too soon, delivers speeches about being a 'cutter' forever: he perceives his future precisely and has no available action, his bitterness masking fear.
- the voyage/balade form — The episodic single-post-graduation summer inherited from American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show — the ensemble's collective drift, cruising and stalling in a town with no place for them.
- action-image, large form — The Little 500 supplies classical three-act resolution: the town-wide class antagonism presses until one public contest transforms it and private growth becomes public vindication.
- the encompasser — The staging's architectural irony — collegiate-Gothic university buildings raised from the very limestone the boys' fathers quarried, set against the cutters' modest homes and plain commercial streets, 'present in the frame before it is ever spoken.'
- temps mort (dead time) — Scheider's editing alternates percussive race cutting with loose hangout rhythms that 'let scenes breathe' — the kitchen, the garage, the flooded quarry where the four friends are outside the class economy.
- the gest — Dave's Italian accent and singing as recurring sound gags, and his father's exasperated monologues about '-ini' foods and refunds: a posture that theatricalizes the class relation rather than stating it.
- symbol — The bicycle condenses the film's organizing relation, carrying the neorealist inheritance from Bicycle Thieves (the bike as working-class dignity shot in real streets) into Dave's Italophile fantasy and the Little 500 contest.