The Funeral · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A coffin sits in the front room, lid open, candles burning down. The youngest brother lies in it, shot dead in the street, and the camera keeps returning to him — a still point the living arrange themselves around. Ferrara opens The Funeral where a gangster picture is supposed to end. The body is on view in the first minutes. Whatever happens after, happens in its presence.

Start with that body, because where Ferrara puts it tells you he has abandoned the one thing the genre is built to deliver: a forward motion, a future to fight for. A normal mob film runs on what Deleuze called the action-image — a man sees a situation, acts on it, and the act changes the world. Cut, consequence, cut. The Funeral keeps the revenge plot (the brothers hunt Johnny's killer) but drains it of that power. This is the crisis of the action-image: men who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. They move toward the killing they've planned, and when it comes it settles nothing, resolving into a near-total slaughter of the family itself. The sensory-motor circuit, the thing that makes gangster cinema feel like cause and effect, has been cut. What rushes into the gap is time.

You feel it first in the editing. The wake in the present keeps getting interrupted by the past. Each interruption is what Deleuze named a recollection-image — a dated slice of a former present lifted whole into the now, memory standing in for a scene we can place on a timeline. Johnny alive, drawn toward labor politics; an old grievance; a debt. But notice what these memories refuse to do. They never add up to a cause. You keep waiting for the flashback that explains the killing and you never get it. That refusal is the deeper figure: the sheets of past, the past not as a filed memory but as a whole region the mind wanders, hunting for the instant something was decided and finding only more past. The film doesn't move forward so much as circle a wound, which is exactly how grief and guilt actually work.

Hold on Walken's face during these long exchanges. Ray barely moves. He delivers the family's fatalism in a low, even voice, as if reciting a catechism he learned as a boy. This is the affection-image in its purest, coldest form — what Deleuze called a qualisign, an immobile reflecting face expressing one quality and not discharging it into action. Ray's stillness is the whole argument: violence is both freely chosen and fatally inherited, and he has stopped being troubled by the contradiction. Ken Kelsch's photography lets the face emerge from near-blackness, lit as if by a single lamp. The shadow here isn't noir glamour. It's a world with the grace switched off.

Chris Penn's Chez is the other pole, and a different concept entirely. Where Ray is a held face, Chez is an impulse-image — Deleuze's naturalism, in which beneath the social surface of rooms and business and family there's an originary world of raw drive, appetite, degradation. Chez's mental illness, his eruptions, his anguish, all of it reads as that originary world breaking up through the floor of the everyday. And naturalism has only one direction. Deleuze called it the line of slope: an entropy that runs downward, toward exhaustion and death, with no level stretch and no climb. Chez is that slope made flesh, and the film's ending is where the whole family slides down it together.

Widen the lens and you get the family as a small, sealed, rotting order — what Deleuze, of the crime worlds in some Visconti and Losey, called crystal-decomposition: an ordered world rotting from within, doomed not by an outside enemy but by its own internal rule. The wives — Sciorra, Rossellini — are the ones who name it. They call the brothers' fatalism the self-justifying lie it is. Their scenes carry the critique the men can't make of themselves, which makes the film something rare in the genre: a discourse-image, an image that poses a problem out loud (free will against damnation) and honestly cannot resolve it. The men talk theology because Nicholas St. John's script makes damnation literal. The film argues it and won't let itself off.

That argument has a bloodline. Two brothers fatally bound in crime, talking damnation in liturgical cadences over noir shadow — that's Force of Evil (1948). The explicit Catholic free-will dispute inside the crime milieu is Angels with Dirty Faces (1938); the Depression tenement texture is The Public Enemy (1931); the family bond curdling into self-destruction is White Heat (1949). And the ceremonial frame — the wake, the open casket organizing every shot — is borrowed straight from The Godfather, then stripped of its opera and romance, with Part II's trick of interleaving present grief and period flashback so the dynasty's doom feels sealed in advance.

What Ferrara did, finally, was negate the gangster film with its own tools. He took the genre's set-pieces and turned off their forward drive, so that the form could no longer offer the consolation it was invented to sell: the rise, the reign, the operatic fall that at least means something. He left the doctrine underneath, naked. Watch it again and watch one thing — where the dead body sits in the frame. The film is always blocking the living in relation to it. That's not decor. That's the argument.