Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of American Splendor
2003 · Robert Pulcini · American Splendor on Sightlines
A bare room. A folding chair, a microphone, no set worth mentioning. The real Harvey Pekar sits in it and talks, in that gravel voice, about the actor hired to be him, while a few feet away the actor waits to go back to work as Harvey. Neither of them wins. That room is the engine of American Splendor, and it's where Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini — documentarians making their first fiction feature, co-authors of this film in every meaningful sense — place their bet. The movie will never tell you which Harvey is the real one. It treats not telling you as a form of respect.
The easy label is "postmodern biopic," which makes it sound chilly. It isn't chilly. It's one of the warmest American movies of its decade, and Deleuze is worth bringing in here precisely because he can explain why a trick this self-conscious produces warmth instead of irony.
In Cinema 2 Deleuze separates films organized by truth — there's a fact, the movie will deliver it or withhold it — from films where truth stops being the organizing principle and undecidability becomes productive. He calls the second the powers of the false, and "false" doesn't mean lying. It means making. He built the idea largely out of Orson Welles, and specifically out of F for Fake, which happens to be one of this film's direct ancestors: the essay that ping-pongs between documentary, staging and confession until art's own fakery becomes the subject. Berman and Pulcini inherit the ping-pong and aim it at one unglamorous Cleveland file clerk.
Deleuze's character for this regime is the forger — not a man who reports a truth but one who manufactures one, changing shape as he goes. Pekar is a forger in exactly that sense, and the film multiplies him: Paul Giamatti's stooped, muttering version, the drawn version in the panels, the actual man narrating over both. The best gloss on it is the editing itself, which treats the multiple Harveys as facets of one unstable identity, so that the rhythm of switching becomes the characterization. You never get a Harvey behind the versions. You get the versions, and a life large enough to need them.
There's a finer word for what Pekar himself is doing: fabulation, Deleuze's term for people caught in the act of legending themselves. Not lying about a life — inventing it into a form where it can be lived. Pekar's founding conviction was that ordinary boredom and small humiliation were worthy subject matter, and the film keeps showing the comics getting made, the writing of the life running alongside the living of it. Then it does the same thing one level up by showing itself being made.
Which brings us to Deleuze's loveliest idea, the crystal-image. Every present splits as it passes: it happens, and at that same instant it becomes an image of itself. We don't normally see the split. Certain films build a structure where we do — a mirror, a stage, a film inside the film — and the actual and its double start trading places. Here the mirror isn't glass, it's casting. The film sets Giamatti beside Pekar, Judah Friedlander beside the real Toby Radloff, and invites you to measure copy against original. The measurement won't resolve, and the reason the scene moves you rather than merely impressing you is that the professionals and the amateurs authenticate each other instead of cancelling out.
The image track runs the same operation. Deleuze calls it crystalline description: a description that doesn't point at its object but composes one and then replaces it. Watch the film dissolve a photographed Cleveland street into a drawn panel. Bazin's whole faith rested on the photograph carrying over something of the being of the thing it recorded; that's why he loved neorealism, which let the world leave its own imprint. A drawing carries nothing over. It's a made mark. American Splendor puts the imprint and the made mark in the same frame, at the same scale, and declines to rank them.
And then it writes on them. Panel borders, caption boxes and thought balloons arrive as a graphic layer laid over photographed reality, which is Deleuze's lectosign made almost embarrassingly literal: the image that has lost its ordinary self-evidence and now has to be read rather than simply seen. You don't watch a thought balloon. You read it.
Sound splits too. The real Pekar's voice floats over Giamatti's body, narrating it and second-guessing it, so what you hear and what you see are telling slightly different stories — the disjunction Deleuze found in Duras, where voices come loose from the bodies they belong to. The joins are this film's real invention. Pulcini is a professional editor and cut the picture himself, and the argument is made at the level of the cut. A dramatized scene hands off to the person who actually lived it, or to a drawing of it, and the transition doesn't connect two pieces of continuous space. It leaps a gap. Deleuze's name for that is the interstice, the irrational cut: the "and" between two images carrying the weight that continuity used to carry. Nearly every laugh in the film lives in one of those gaps.
Underneath all of it is a man who can't do much. Harvey files records at a VA hospital under fluorescent light, loses his voice, courts a woman by neurotic mail, gets lymphoma. No arc of triumph; the film proceeds by incident, holding the dead time the comics were built from. Deleuze's modern protagonist isn't an agent but a seer, someone who registers far more than he can act on. Pekar is a seer with a day job, and his answer to being unable to change anything is to notice everything and write it down. Giamatti's stoop carries the whole social position in one posture — what Deleuze called the gest, an attitude that exposes a relation rather than illustrating a feeling.
What did it change? It handed the biopic a working method for its oldest problem. The genre had always faked interiority and hoped you wouldn't notice. This film makes the gap between a life and its representation the subject, and it did so with borrowed, precisely identified tools: Zelig's compositing of a fictional man into documentary apparatus, complete with mock testimony; David Holzman's Diary, which shot fiction in first-person documentary grammar until performer and subject dissolved into one another; The Thin Blue Line, which made it respectable to set reenactment beside a real talking head; Sherman's March, whose deadpan voiceover over a nothing-special life is the register Pekar's narration inhabits. And Crumb, where Pekar had already appeared on camera as himself, nine years early — the documentary-of-a-cartoonist template this film folded back into fiction. What it passed on is the meta-biopic: a form where the unreliability is the point and the subject gets to talk back.
So watch the seams. The method isn't a puzzle you solve once and then ignore, and the question it opens stays open — whether a life becomes a life only once somebody witnesses it. Pekar's answer was to witness his own, then hire artists to draw it, then let a movie hire an actor to do it again. Watch him watching Giamatti. That's a man checking whether it took.
Concepts in play
- puissances du faux — The film's central wager: rather than dramatize Pekar's life straight, it braids fictional restaging, documentary footage of the real Pekar, comic panels and reflexive commentary, so no version is designated the true one; the metafictional frame 'continually interrupts the story to interrogate its own truthfulness.'
- le faussaire — Pekar manufactures his life as comics while the montage 'treats the multiple Harveys as facets of one unstable identity, and the rhythm of switching becomes a form of characterization' — Giamatti's Harvey, the drawn Harvey, the real Harvey narrating over both.
- story-telling / legending — The film shows the comics being made and the movie being made; Pekar's 'quotidian realism' — the conviction that ordinary boredom and small humiliation were worthy subject matter — is a man storying his own days into a form he can live in.
- hyalosign — The real Pekar, the real Joyce and the real Toby are set beside Giamatti, Hope Davis and Judah Friedlander in a plain recording-studio space, 'inviting the audience to measure the copy against the original,' with the professionals and amateurs authenticating rather than undercutting one another.
- crystalline-description — 'The frame can dissolve from a photographed Cleveland street into a drawn panel, or place Giamatti against a graphic ground' — the drawing composes and then replaces the photographed object it describes.
- the readable image — 'The comic-book apparatus — thought balloons, caption boxes, panel borders — is imported as an on-screen graphic layer, so that the film literally wears its source medium on its surface': the image must be read, not merely seen.
- audiovisual-disjunction — The real Pekar's gravelly voice-over is 'the connective tissue, narrating and second-guessing the images,' floating over and commenting on Giamatti's performed body, so voice and image run separate accounts of the same life.
- interstice / the 'AND' — Pulcini, a professional editor, cut the film himself; 'the picture's whole argument is made at the level of the cut — the constant, controlled movement between Giamatti's Harvey, the real Harvey, comic panels, and talking-head reflection,' joining across a gap rather than by continuity.
- voyant — Harvey clerks at a VA hospital, loses his voice, courts Joyce by neurotic mail and gets lymphoma; 'there is no conventional arc of triumph' — he registers his life rather than altering it, and writes it down.
- temps mort — The anti-heroic, episodic dramatic mode faithful to the comics' 'quotidian realism,' with staging built from the accumulation of records and paperbacks, diner booths and hospital corridors — the everyday held rather than advanced.
- the-gest — Giamatti plays Pekar 'not as impersonation but as a study in stooped, muttering, self-lacerating grievance' — a posture that exposes a class position and a working life rather than illustrating an emotion.