Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A baby tree dances to "Mr. Blue Sky." Behind him, far behind him, soft and blurred and almost ignored, the rest of the team is fighting an interdimensional monster. The camera stays with the tree. That is the first thing James Gunn shows you in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and it is a thesis: the spectacle you bought the ticket for, pushed into the depth of field so a small happy thing can hold the front of the frame.

Deleuze has a name for what's up front. He calls it a power-quality: an intensity put on screen for its own sake, not because it is about to cause anything. Joy, raw, with no job to do. Behind it is the action-image, the engine of commercial cinema since Griffith, where a situation presses on people, people act, and the act changes the situation. Gunn leaves the engine running. He just declines to look at it, and makes that refusal the funniest minute in the movie.

That's not a one-off gag, which is why the lens is worth keeping. The complaint filed against Vol. 2 was that it wanders. It splits the company into three weakly tied strands (Quill on Ego's planet; Rocket, Groot and Yondu escaping the Ravagers; Gamora and Nebula settling a very old account), cross-cuts among them, and withholds a villain-driven plot for most of its length. Critics called it a step down in momentum from the first film's tight heist engine. Deleuze had exact words for that loosening, worked out for postwar European films in which the old action machine had failed: the dispersive situation, characters linked too weakly for any encompassing situation to gather them into one line. In Rossellini or early Antonioni that slack registers a loss of faith. Acting on the world had stopped changing it.

Here it registers something else. The apparatus carries the causality: Vol. 2 is engineered to seed later installments and signs off with five separate stingers, so the series will handle consequence and the film is free to spend its runtime on feeling. A blockbuster that no longer has to be a self-contained action arc can afford to digress on purpose. Whether that's liberation or symptom is a fair argument. It is unarguably a change in what mass-market narrative is allowed to do.

What it does with the freedom is Ego. A man who is also a planet: every surface, every geometric garden, every candy-bright hill is his own body. Deleuze's crystal-image is one where a thing and its reflection stop being separable, and its saturated form is a world sealed inside its own mirrors with no outside. Ego's paradise is designed to be flawless, then slowly reframed as narcissistic and lifeless. The set makes the argument before any dialogue does. It is also an originary world in Deleuze's harsher sense: pretty scenery revealed as the skin of an appetite.

And Ego is a forger — Deleuze's figure who doesn't lie about the truth so much as manufacture one and then live inside it. He forges a planet, a human body, a fatherhood. He forges a song, too, taking a hit single and retelling it as scripture about himself: a parable of a man who loves his voyage more than any person. Kurt Russell plays it with enough warmth that you almost buy it. Set against him is Yondu, the mercenary who becomes the actual father over the course of what is, in Michael Rooker's hands, the picture's most sustained dramatic achievement. The true father turns out to be the fake one.

The song is not decoration in that scene, and it never is here. Awesome Mix Vol. 2 works structurally: "Father and Son" under the Yondu material, "The Chain" tracking the family coming apart and back together. This is Deleuze's relation-image in its purest commercial form: meaning that isn't in the shot but in a relation the viewer supplies. Gunn skips a whole scene of exposition because you already know what Cat Stevens means. And the tape itself is a symbol in the strict sense, an object that condenses the film's organizing relation: a mixtape is what somebody who loved you leaves behind. Quill's carries his mother and his grief for her, which is precisely what Ego cannot forge.

That method has a pedigree, and Gunn knows it. Mean Streets established the licensed record as authorship, doing emotional work no composed cue could. American Graffiti ran wall-to-wall diegetic pop as generational memoir, which is the direct model for a tape that functions as character and memory at once. Pulp Fiction set cheerful oldies against carnage, the exact move of scoring monster combat to ELO. Flash Gordon gave him a comic-book cosmos built from saturated primaries and scored to pop-rock, which Henry Braham's photography extends into pure affective colour, hues pushed past naturalism into Silver Age printing so that the Sovereign's gold is a temperament rather than a light source. The Empire Strikes Back gave him the paternity bombshell as a third-act pivot that reorganizes an ending around pathos instead of plot. E.T. gave him permission to be unguardedly sincere inside genre furniture, the earnestness running under every joke.

Then there's what the film quietly proves. Bazin's case for cinema was that the image is a trace, a mold taken from light that came off something real. Almost nothing in Vol. 2's most-loved shots was there. Rocket and Baby Groot are entirely computer-generated performances; Ego's interior and his Celestial light are constructions; the film was among the first shot on RED's 8K sensor and finished as data. The close-ups still land. A synthetic raccoon holding grief is the affection-image surviving the loss of the photograph, which is not a small thing to have proved in 2017.

It ends at a funeral. The scattered Ravager factions converge into one valedictory image, a crowd rendered as a single feeling: Deleuze's dividual, a collective that registers as one affect rather than a set of individuals. A comedy of overwhelming color and volume closes on that.

Watch the opening again and notice where the focus is. Gunn told you at minute one that the monster was never the point. The question he leaves open is the interesting one: when the action-image becomes optional, when the plot is carried by the machinery outside the movie, what actually holds a film together? Vol. 2's answer is a song somebody else chose for you, years ago, and left behind.