Once Upon a Time in America · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the last image, because the film does. Noodles lies in a Chinatown opium den in 1933, and the camera holds on his face as the drug takes him. His mouth widens into a slow, beatific smile — a smile with nothing under it, no cause we can point to, no relief it discharges into action. He just lies there and grins at the ceiling. Leone freezes us inside that smile for what feels like a held breath too long, and the whole sprawling four hours we have just watched curls back toward it like smoke toward a draft. Everything we saw may have been assembled behind that smile.

That is the door. Walk through it and you find the film Deleuze would call a pure time-image — and more precisely a film built out of sheets of past. In an ordinary movie a man perceives a problem and acts to fix it; cutting serves the chain, and time is just the ruler we measure the action with. None of that survives here. Noodles does almost nothing across the present-tense scenes. In 1968 he comes home, an old man, and mostly he looks: at a peephole, through a bus-station locker, across a banquet table at a ghost he was told died decades ago. De Niro plays him, in the dossier's exact phrase, as 'a study in passivity' — and passivity is not a flaw of the character, it is the film's whole engine. Deleuze has a name for this figure: the seer, the one who can no longer react adequately to what he sees and so is condemned to register it. When acting stops resolving anything, time stops hiding inside movement and shows itself directly.

And it shows itself in a very specific shape. Deleuze borrows from Bergson the picture of the past not as a string of dated snapshots but as vast coexisting sheets — whole regions of a life that are all there at once, that you move through the way you'd move through rooms, not the way you'd count to ten. Watch how Leone cuts. He almost never gives us a tidy flashback that says 'remember, years ago.' Instead a sound carries you across a wall of time: a telephone rings in 1933 and keeps ringing — past the cut, past the decade — until it is answering a phone in another year entirely, because it is really ringing inside Noodles's guilt and won't stop. That insistent phone is the clearest case in the film of what Deleuze calls the irrational cut, the join made across a gap rather than along a continuity. The shots don't connect; the interstice between them does the speaking. (Leone learned the move, the dossier notes, from the bone that becomes a satellite in 2001 — the graphic match that leaps an epoch. He turned a single trick into a grammar.) The 1920s child and the 1968 mourner are never sequenced. They are superimposed, coexisting, two depths of the same standing water. That is a sheet-of-past, not a recollection.

This is also why the studio's crime against the film is so clarifying. When the U.S. distributor recut it into strict chronological order, it didn't just shorten the picture — it destroyed the concept. Linearized, the sheets collapse back into a timeline, the time-image reverts to a long, ordinary movement-image, and (everyone agreed) the meaning drains out. You can rarely watch a Deleuzian idea proven by its own negation. Here the butchery is the proof.

Then there is the smile, and what hangs on it. If those final scenes are an opium dream, the 1968 strata — the betrayal that supposedly survives, Max alive and renamed and powerful — never happened outside Noodles's narcotized skull. Leone refuses to settle it. He builds the film so that the dream reading and the real reading are both fully loaded and mutually exclusive, and he declines to break the tie. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false: not lying, but making true-versus-false undecidable and turning that undecidability into the creative principle of the work. The cinema's old contract — the camera as witness, the image as something that, whatever else, happened — is suspended. Two incompatible accounts are offered as co-true. The film becomes a crystal, present and memory and possible-hallucination caught in a single facet you cannot turn to see which side is real.

Morricone makes the crystal audible. Because the themes were largely composed first and the scenes staged to them — the method Leone had perfected on Once Upon a Time in the West — the music doesn't accompany the images so much as remember them in advance. Deborah's theme and Zamfir's keening pan flute are grief that precedes its own occasion. The whole film has the texture of something being mourned while it is still being lived, which is exactly what a sheet of past feels like from inside.

What did this do to film as an art? The Godfather Part II had already braided two timelines so each ironizes the other. Leone took the braid and cut the thread of chronology entirely, letting three eras stand in the mind at once, sorted not by date but by rhyme — a sound, a face, a bridge framed down a Brooklyn street. He proved a popular epic could be organized like memory rather than like a clock, and that audiences would follow. Every later film that trusts an unreliable, time-folded consciousness to carry a crowd-pleaser owes something to this one. He spent his last film teaching the gangster picture how to dream. Watch it again and watch for the seams that aren't there — the cuts that join nothing, and mean everything.