Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2016 · Tim Burton · Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children on Sightlines

Near the end, on a pier at Blackpool, skeletons fight.

They are digital. It is 2016, a Fox tentpole, and every other creature in the picture was made the modern way. But these skeletons move wrong on purpose. They step with that slight stiffness, that sense of a body being set down and picked up again, which belongs to Ray Harryhausen. The skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts is the model, reproduced here as open homage by a director whose whole imagination runs through those films. Look at it long enough and it turns into the movie explaining itself.

Start with the oldest argument about what cinema is. Bergson thought it cheated: you chop movement into immobile slices, run the slices past a lamp, and the eye supplies a motion that was never on the strip. He called it the cinematographic illusion and meant it as an insult. Deleuze spent the opening of Cinema 1 answering him, and the answer turns on which instants you use. The old arts of the pose — sculpture, history painting, the studio portrait — work by privileged instants: the peak of the gesture, the arranged climactic form, the moment worth freezing. Film doesn't. It samples at any-instant-whatever, equidistant and ordinary, nobody's best angle, and out of that indifference you get movement itself rather than a reconstruction of it.

Harryhausen's skeletons sit strangely across that line. Every frame is hand-posed. Every instant is privileged, chosen, sculpted by a man at a table. Then they're run at equal intervals and they walk. Stop-motion builds movement out of a chain of poses, which is why it never quite looks alive and never stops being uncanny.

Now the film comes into focus, because that is its method at every level.

Ransom Riggs's novel was assembled around real vintage snapshots the author collected: strange children, genuine photographs, story written outward from the found image. The pictures came first. Burton was already doing that before the book existed, and Bruno Delbonnel shoots accordingly, favouring composed deliberate framing over restless coverage so the fantastical images can sit still and be looked at. Deleuze has a term for a frame handled this way: the closed set, a composition treated as a dense system in which everything has been placed. Colleen Atwood's costumes do the placing. Eva Green's Miss Peregrine is a silhouette before she is a character, severe and feathered, her avian shape announcing what she is. The children are staged as a cabinet of curiosities. A girl lighter than air. A boy with bees inside him. A girl with jaws at the back of her head.

And the plot is about a day that will not advance.

The loop is a single date in September 1943, repeated, kept turning by Miss Peregrine so that the children stay safe and stay young. Deleuze's crystal-image is an image where the present and its double, memory or reflection or dream, stop being separable; his saturated case, the perfect crystal, is a world sealed on itself with no outside at all. The loop is that idea walking around in period costume. Nothing enters, nothing ages, the day mirrors itself at dusk and starts again. The melancholy the film keeps reaching for is right there in the mechanism: a childhood preserved by cancelling the future.

Then Jacob arrives from Florida and the crystal cracks. Deleuze's cracked crystal has a fissure in it, a line running out of the sealed totality, and that is this film's actual structure. The loop can be entered and it can be exited. The boy who walks in following his dead grandfather's stories is the flaw in the stone.

Delbonnel solves the metaphysics with a light meter, which I find genuinely moving as craft. The loop is warm and enchanted. The present-day Florida and Welsh material is flatter, drearier. Two colour temperatures for two faces of one crystal: affective colour in Deleuze's sense, a colour that soaks up a scene and its feeling and does work exposition would otherwise have to do. You always know which side of time you're standing on.

One more move, and it's the best idea in the picture. An ordinary film would give you the grandfather's stories as a flashback, dated, dissolving in and out. Deleuze calls that a recollection-image: a labelled former present, safely over. Burton gives the flashback an address. Terence Stamp's tall tales turn out to have a postcode, and a boy can travel there. The most conventional device in narrative cinema becomes real estate.

The Hollows are the exception to all this, and the one piece of real thinking the monster material contains. They were designed to be partly invisible, and the sound department carries them: audio cues make present a creature the image deliberately withholds. That makes seeing the stake rather than the means, a perception-image, where a film foregrounds the act and angle of vision instead of just using it. In a movie built out of photographs, the monster is the thing that won't hold still for one.

What fights the whole design is the chassis. Structurally this is a large-form action-image, Deleuze's big engine: an encompassing situation bears down (the peculiars are hunted), forces line up against each other (Samuel L. Jackson's white-eyed Barron against the children), and a decisive act at Blackpool transforms the situation. Chris Lebenzon cuts that climax for kinetic clarity and showmanship, and it works. But the film has to keep moving, and everything it is made of is a held instant. The found photograph. The frozen day. The hand-posed bone. Critics called it overstuffed, stronger on atmosphere than story, and they were right about the symptom. The cause is that a studio commissioned chapter one of a series from a director whose materials refuse to advance.

The debts are visible and worth naming. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad supplies Dynamation, hand-animated puppets composited into live plates, the grammar Burton pastiches for the Hollowgast reveals. Jason and the Argonauts supplies the skeletons outright. Beetlejuice taught him to stage deformed bodies as sight-gag spectacle. Edward Scissorhands fixed the macabre-cute misfit fable and Atwood's silhouette language, inherited here wholesale, minus Danny Elfman, whose absence you can hear. Sleepy Hollow is the compositional template, the controlled palette and gothic tableau that Delbonnel refines. Big Fish had already built a narrative out of tall tales and old pictures years before Riggs published the same conceit.

Downstream, nothing. No sequel came. The property was bought as the start of a line and the line stopped, which is a joke the film would have appreciated.

So: not a landmark, and pretending otherwise would insult it. What it is instead is unusually legible. Cinema's founding operation is making stillness move, and here is a large expensive picture whose source is a stack of snapshots, whose subject is a day that won't turn over, and whose climax is a tribute to the man who animated bone by hand. Burton's invention was always tonal, the macabre and the cute held in one frame without either winning. His contribution here is that he found the one story whose subject is his own method.

Watch the loop reset next time and ask what Miss Peregrine is actually doing. Protecting them, or keeping them. She is a collector with a beautiful cabinet, and the thing you love in this film is the thing in it that refuses to move.

Concepts in play

privileged-instants — Delbonnel 'favors composed, deliberate framing over restless coverage, which gives the fantastical imagery room to register as tableau'; the source novel was built outward from posed vintage found photographs, and Burton stages the ensemble as 'a living collection' of them.
any-instant-whatever — The Blackpool climax stages 'a battle involving skeletons animated in a manner that consciously evokes stop-motion, an explicit homage to Ray Harryhausen' — hand-posed frames run at equal intervals to produce movement.
the closed set (cadre) — Production and costume design stage the peculiars as 'a curated cabinet of curiosities,' with staging that 'repeatedly foregrounds symmetry, silhouette,' and Atwood's 'severe, feathered, avian silhouette' for Miss Peregrine doing the characterizing work.
the perfect (saturated) crystal — The time loop: a single day established as a date in September 1943, 'endlessly repeated to keep the children safe and ageless' — 'a life of perpetual arrested childhood, safety purchased at the cost of the future'; the mise-en-scene includes 'the frozen instant of the loop.'
the cracked crystal — Jacob crosses in from the flatter present-day Florida material following his grandfather's stories, and the dossier notes the loop 'can be entered, exited' — the sealed world has a fissure, and the boy is it.
affective colour — 'The loop world is lit with a warmer, more enchanted glow that distinguishes it from the flatter contemporary scenes, using color temperature and light quality to separate the film's temporal registers.'
mnemosign / image-souvenir — Terence Stamp's grandfather and his stories, which a conventional film would render as a dated flashback, are instead given a geographic address: Jacob 'follows the trail of his late grandfather's stories to that island, discovers the loop is real.'
perception-image — The Hollows are 'rendered as digital effects designed to be partly invisible... monsters the human characters largely cannot see,' with sound design 'using audio cues to make present a threat the image often withholds.'
action-image, large form — A global situation (the peculiars hunted by Barron's predators) presses until the decisive Blackpool confrontation, which Lebenzon 'assembled for kinetic clarity and showmanship,' resolves it.

How Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was received →