American Gigolo · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man lays clothes on a bed. Shirts fanned out, ties uncoiled, soft Armani jackets in rows, and Smokey Robinson on the hi-fi singing that the love he saw was just a mirage. Julian Kay says nothing. He doesn't need to. The scene tells you everything by showing a person assembling himself out of merchandise, and watch how John Bailey's camera handles the garments with the same care it gives Richard Gere's face. Cloth and skin, equally valued, equally for sale. This is the whole film in one wordless interlude, which is why it's the place to start. American Gigolo is about a man who has become indistinguishable from the surfaces he sells.

Deleuze has a precise name for what that wardrobe scene does. He calls it the gest: not a gesture in passing but a posture that lays bare a social relationship — a body caught exposing the system it lives inside. Julian's grooming ritual is the purest gest in 1970s American cinema. He is labor and product at once, the worker maintaining his only instrument, and the editing (Richard Halsey lets it breathe into a near-musical number) refuses to break the spell with dialogue or plot. You learn the character entirely through objects and the way he tends them. The film argues, in this scene, that a self can be a commodity all the way down.

Notice where it happens, too. Julian moves through spare apartments, glass-walled houses, hotel corridors, designer showrooms — spaces that have stopped functioning as settings for action and become pure mood. Deleuze calls this the any-space-whatever, the espace quelconque: a place emptied of its job as a stage for events, so that what's left is sheer affect, beautiful and vacant. Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who built the cold modernist surfaces of Bertolucci's The Conformist, imported exactly that European emptiness into Los Angeles, and the lineage runs straight back to Antonioni's L'Eclisse, where reflective architecture stands in for erotic anomie. Schrader names this his art-cinema debt openly. The achievement was to graft Antonioni's drained interiors onto an American crime plot — to make alienation look like a magazine spread.

What keeps the film from being mere decor is that the surfaces start to reflect. Bailey slices his light through blinds, bounces it off glass, builds the world from hard mirroring planes — and Julian, who narrates himself in the lonely-diarist mode Schrader inherited from his own Taxi Driver script and from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, keeps catching his own image. Deleuze's term is the crystal-image, the hyalosign: a moment where you can no longer cleanly separate the actual person from his reflection, the present from its glassy double. Julian has no inside that isn't already an image of itself. The murder plot, when it lands, doesn't violate this world so much as expose its rot — an ordered, expensive surface decomposing from within, which is the crystal at its most corrosive.

Then the genre turns on its host. Noir promises a man who acts to clear his name; Out of the Past supplies the frame-up engine, the fatalistic loner set up for a killing he didn't commit. Schrader, who literally wrote 'Notes on Film Noir,' borrows the machinery and then breaks it. The investigation doesn't empower Julian. It dismantles him, stripping away the autonomy he prides himself on, until the man of control can only watch his own undoing. Deleuze would call this the crisis of the action-image: a protagonist who can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. Julian becomes a seer rather than an agent — someone who endures and observes where a noir hero would punch back. The sensory-motor circuit that drives classical American cinema, situation into action into resolution, quietly seizes up. The suspense plot keeps running, but it has nowhere to discharge.

Which is why the ending arrives the way it does. Schrader models the last scene beat-for-beat on Bresson's Pickpocket: Michelle declares her love and provides the alibi, and Julian presses his face to the prison visiting-room glass. Salvation does not come from anything he does. It comes from outside the whole circuit of action, as grace — the way Bresson's thief is reached across the bars of a cell. In Deleuzian terms the film finally abandons movement for a pure optical situation, an image of time and waiting rather than of doing, and that's where its emotion lives. The barrier of glass, the recurring surface of the entire film, becomes the membrane through which love is received. The thing that imprisoned Julian becomes the thing that lets feeling through.

What did this do to film as an art? It taught American genre cinema to be a surface and to mean it. The cool electronic pulse of Giorgio Moroder's synthesizers, the Armani tailoring elevated into character, the desaturated reflective sheen — these became the template for the 1980s erotic thriller, for Body Heat, for the look of Miami Vice and a whole decade of glossy crime. More than that, it proved you could run Bressonian transcendence and Antonioni's emptiness underneath a Paramount thriller and have it pay. Schrader's recurring man-alone-in-his-room migrated here from Travis Bickle's grime into chrome and wool, and the diary survived the move. Watch it again for the clothes on the bed. A man is building a soul out of objects, and the film already knows it won't hold.