The Aviator · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The peas arrive blue.

Not blue exactly — a faint aquatic green, wrong in a way you can't place, on a plate in front of Katharine Hepburn's family. You could blame a bad print. Don't. Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson graded the film's early passages to mimic two-strip Technicolor, the first color process, which caught reds and cyan-greens but couldn't see true blue, so skies tilt teal and peas curdle toward the sea. Nobody at the table remarks on it. That's the point. Before we know a thing about Howard Hughes's mind, we are already looking through a way of seeing that cannot correct itself.

Deleuze has a name for color used like this: the colour-image, affective colour — color that doesn't describe a scene so much as absorb it, soaking up the mood until the hue is the feeling. Most films color the world. The Aviator colors time. As the decades pass the palette warms and fills into the lush three-strip Technicolor of Hollywood's heyday, done not with period cameras but with a digital intermediate, then a new trick: scan the film to a digital master and repaint it. Scorsese turned a lab tool into a clock. The image ages with the man. And because Hughes is himself a producer, obsessed with how things photograph, the film's color is also his condition — a compulsion to control the look of everything, running in the emulsion itself.

That word — compulsion — is the second key. Deleuze's impulse-image is cinema of appetite and drive: a world where beneath the social surface something more primitive keeps erupting, and the erupting drive drags its owner down a line-of-slope, an irreversible grade toward exhaustion. Hughes's whole arc rides that slope. The film even hands us the etiology, a little too neatly, in the childhood prologue: his mother bathing him, intoning quarantine, planting the germ phobia like a seed. What blooms from it are symptoms in Deleuze's precise sense — acts that read as signs of a drive the actor can't name. Hughes's verbal loops are the clearest: show me all the blueprints, the way of the future, phrases that snag and replay until the soundtrack itself starts to stutter. The sound design lets his compulsions colonize the mix, so the roar of crowds and flashbulbs curdles into dread. His genius and his illness grow from one root, which is why the film is tragic rather than merely sad — you cannot cure the second without killing the first.

Then the mirrors.

Late in the film Hughes seals himself into a screening-room bunker, naked, surrounded by his own reflections and by film he can watch but no longer leave. This is Deleuze's crystal-image at full pressure — the hyalosign, an image where the actual thing and its reflection can no longer be told apart, present and mirror folded into one another with no outside to appeal to. The mirrored bathrooms earlier were rehearsals; the bunker is the crystal saturated, an enclosed world of reflections with no exit. And it is a very specific crystal — Deleuze's crystal-decomposition, the ordered, aristocratic world rotting from within. Hughes built an empire on the promise that everything could be made perfect, controlled, photographed clean. The perfection is the rot. The same drive that broke aviation records also required that his milk be sealed and his hands scrubbed raw, and the film watches the ordered kingdom decay from its own inside, no enemy required.

What holds all this together is DiCaprio's face, and Deleuze would send us straight to the affection-image — the close-up, a feeling registered but not yet spent in action. Better, the qualisign: a face expressing a single held quality. Watch the terror arrive under the charisma and stay there, unable to discharge into any act that would fix things. That stalling is the film's deepest Deleuzian gambit. The classical biopic runs on the action-image, the man of action who perceives a situation and acts to master it, and for a while Hughes is exactly that engine — buying planes, breaking speed records, out-maneuvering Pan Am and a senator. But Scorsese is staging the crisis-of-the-action-image, the moment the sensory-motor circuit jams: a man who can still perceive with terrible clarity and can no longer react adequately to what he sees. Schoonmaker's editing dramatizes the jam directly. The productive passages cut fast and forward; the compulsive episodes go held and airless, the cut sticking, as if the film has the same disorder as its subject.

The lineage is worn openly. From Citizen Kane comes the mogul-tragedy scaffold, an empire studied through the wreckage of one obsession across a selected span of years. From Scorsese's own Raging Bull comes the method of staging pathology as physical sensation and the Schoonmaker rhythm of propulsion against stillness. From Powell's The Red Shoes comes the conviction that saturated period color can be emotional weather, not decor. From Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons come the thresholds and sealed interiors that frame a decline. Scorsese's own invention is to make the medium historical: color as a symptom that ages, a biopic whose very stock is sick.

The last shot puts Hughes at a mirror, repeating the way of the future, unable to stop. No uplift, no cure — the crystal doesn't open. Watch it again for the color. The film is telling you when you are, and what it costs this man to see it, in the same breath.