Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of What We Do in the Shadows
2014 · Jemaine Clement · What We Do in the Shadows on Sightlines
The camera crew wear crucifixes.
Nobody in the film remarks on it. You catch it at the edge of a frame, on somebody backing out of a hallway with a boom, and then the movie goes back to being about whose turn it is to do the dishes. It's the best single decision in the picture, and it tells you what Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi understood that most mockumentary directors don't. The crew is a character. In this house, the crew is food.
Deleuze has a name for a shot where you feel the camera as a presence rather than a window: a dicisign, an image that perceives someone who is themselves perceiving, so the framing carries a point of view with something at stake in it. Usually a director gets this through a look, by having us watch someone watch. Here it comes from wardrobe. The crucifix turns the person holding the camera into a body in the room, mortal and edible and professionally polite about it. Every interview afterwards runs two perceptions at once: a vampire performing for posterity, and a frightened New Zealander keeping the frame level.
That's also the film's argument with documentary itself. The form's whole authority is that somebody was in the room; Bazin built his case for photographic realism on the image carrying the trace of a thing that was actually there. Mockumentary borrows that credit and spends it on the impossible. Zelig is the ancestor here, and Zelig's trick is exactly this one, sustaining the dry register of the record while smuggling in something that cannot be filmed. Shadows pushes the smuggling further and does it by hand: floating on wires, transformations in camera, mirror gags built rather than rendered. The crucifix is the receipt. Someone really was in the room, and they took precautions.
The interview grammar comes straight from This Is Spinal Tap, sit-down confessionals cut against fly-on-the-wall footage, everything delivered dead straight to an acknowledged offscreen crew. What the film does inside that grammar is new. Deleuze took a word from Bergson, fabulation, for people caught in the act of legending themselves, inventing the story that will let them exist. He meant it politically: a people with no image of themselves has to fable one. Vampires have the opposite problem. They have ninety years of images and almost no life. So when a flatmate sits down and narrates his own centuries to a stranger with a camera, he's running the concept backwards, a creature over-represented by cinema trying to legend himself back into a person, to journalists who nod encouragingly. And the method made it literal. The film was shot from a story outline, largely improvised, 125 hours of footage carved down to ninety minutes. The legend wasn't written and then performed. It got invented while the tape ran.
Now look at their bodies. Petyr is a waxwork of Max Schreck's Orlok from 1922, bald and taloned and rat-fanged, held in that rigid silent-era posture, built with prosthetics the old way. Down the hall, Lost Boys leather. Across from that, the ruffles of Interview with the Vampire. Deleuze's late books turn from what characters do toward how they stand, and he calls the significant posture a gest: the attitude that exposes a relation the character would never state out loud. Not a gesture that means something. The way a body has been arranged by its history. Nobody in this flat has a personality, exactly. They have postures, each one issued by a different film, and the pecking order of the house is the pecking order of those postures. The comedy is a gest meeting a chore wheel. Hold the 1922 undead rigidity, then get asked about the dishes. It's a fair question whether that's only true of vampires.
Which makes the flat stranger than a roommate joke. Deleuze's term for eras coexisting is sheets of past, whole regions of time sitting alongside one another rather than filed in order behind us. Resnais moves a character through them. This film gives each sheet a bedroom. 1922 and the Lost Boys eighties and 1994 share one bathroom, and the friction is real, because the older the sheet, the less it can be spoken to. The past here isn't remembered. It's flatting.
Deleuze on Visconti: an aristocratic world already finished and not yet informed, crystallising as it rots, the ceremony still perfectly observed in rooms nobody needs. He calls it decomposition. Vampires are the undead aristocracy by definition, and the line of descent runs through Interview with the Vampire, which made the vampire house a domestic melodrama of ancient creatures nursing small grievances. Shadows literalises that into a rota. The ceremony survives, the world it was for is gone, and what's left is a rental in Wellington. Visconti played it as grief. Clement and Waititi play it flat, which isn't the same as playing it cheap. The film never once looks down on them.
Underneath the flat is appetite. Deleuze's naturalism describes a concrete setting that turns out to be the thin skin over an originary world of pure drives, the derived milieu over the savage one, and this is where the nastiest ancestor arrives. Man Bites Dog invented the black-comic documentary etiquette gag, a courteous crew embedded with a killer. Shadows reworks it as journalists solemnly filming vampires who feed on people. The two registers stay on the same floor, housekeeping and predation in identical tones of voice. Most horror comedies change key for the kill. This one doesn't, which is why it stays funny and stays a horror film.
The jokes have a shape worth naming too. Vampire cinema is almost pure habit, and Deleuze's word for an object that means something because of the chain it customarily belongs to is a mark. Cape, mirror, crucifix, the invitation at the door. Ninety years of horror trained you to see one and expect the next. A demark is the anomaly that snaps the chain and makes you interpret instead of anticipate. This film is a demark machine. The mirror gag turns a metaphysical condition into a wardrobe problem. Floating becomes a way of getting around a small house. And the werewolves are not swearwolves, one of the great throwaways of modern comedy and a perfect demark: the emblem of feral appetite turns out to be enforcing an etiquette rule.
Here's what it changed. The mockumentary had mostly been a weapon. Spinal Tap, Guffman, Man Bites Dog, all of them getting their comedy from exposure, from a subject too vain to notice the camera undressing him. Waititi and Clement kept the etiquette and dropped the cruelty. The Flight of the Conchords line reading, the one that refuses to flag its own joke, turns out to be a way of taking monsters seriously rather than a way of mocking them. That's the invention: affection pitched at exactly the same flat level as ridicule, sustained for ninety minutes, over a genre archive nobody had thought to treat as a house rather than a reference. Six seasons of the American series came out of it, plus Wellington Paranormal turning the same vérité courtesy on a police procedural, plus Waititi's move to the front rank. Most of the deadpan supernatural comedy of the last decade is written in this key.
Watch it again for the postures. Then watch the edges of the frame. The crucifixes never get explained. Somebody just decided, before rolling, that the crew should be able to go home.
Concepts in play
- dicisign — The camera operators wear crucifixes: the mockumentary apparatus becomes a perceiving, mortal body in the room, so every confessional is the camera perceiving a vampire who is performing for it.
- fabulation / legending — Spinal Tap-derived sit-down confessionals in which centuries-old creatures narrate their own legend to an acknowledged offscreen crew — and the Guffman-school method (125 hours of improvised footage cut to 90 minutes) means the legend was genuinely being invented as the tape ran.
- the gest (attitude/posture) — Petyr held in Max Schreck's rigid silent-era Orlok posture, built with practical prosthetics, sharing a flat with Lost Boys leather and Interview with the Vampire ruffles: each housemate is a posture inherited from a different film, and the household hierarchy is the hierarchy of those postures.
- cinema of the body — The film's comedy lives in undead bodies carrying centuries of ceremonial bearing through everyday domestic chores — the chore-wheel flatmate routine performed by bodies arranged by their own history.
- sheets of past — 1922 Nosferatu, Lost Boys-era leather and 1994 Interview ruffles coexist as separate eras of vampire cinema given their own bedrooms in one Wellington flat, rather than being reached through flashback.
- crystal of decomposition — The undead aristocracy's ceremony outliving its world: the Interview with the Vampire debt (vampire household as domestic melodrama of ancient creatures nursing petty grievances) literalised as a chore rota in a rental.
- derived milieu / originary world — The Man Bites Dog debt — a polite crew embedded with killers — reworked as journalists solemnly filming vampires feeding on people, so the flat's domestic surface and the appetite beneath it stay in the same room and the same tone of voice.
- demark — The film breaks the customary vampire chain rather than completing it: in-camera mirror and floating gags turn metaphysical conditions into wardrobe and household-logistics problems, and the werewolves' 'not swearwolves' rule converts the emblem of feral appetite into an etiquette code.