Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Greatest Showman
2017 · Michael Gracey · The Greatest Showman on Sightlines
A bar, late. Two men across a counter, one selling and one refusing, and somewhere in the middle of the argument the negotiation turns into choreography. The camera doesn't cut away to think about what's happening. It travels with them, one long move, until the deal is closed. Nothing in "The Other Side" gets settled by anything either man says.
That's the first honest thing to notice about The Greatest Showman, and it's precisely what critics held against it. Almost nobody in this film changes their mind in a scene. They change it in a number.
Deleuze called the default operating system of narrative cinema the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, acts to change it, and the cutting serves that chain. Barnum's story is built for it. Poverty, ambition, the museum, the circus, overreach, ruin, home. Textbook large form, where a whole situation presses on a man until one decisive act transforms it. But look at where the causation actually sits. The film's connective scenes are compressed to the point of thinness — the critics weren't wrong about that — and the transformations arrive by song.
Deleuze has a name for what takes over. He calls it the reflection-image, where action is transposed into figure and spectacle rather than carried out. His touchstone is Eisenstein's montage of attractions, and Eisenstein lifted that phrase from the fairground and the music hall: the circus turn as a self-contained unit of shock, aimed straight at a paying crowd. A circus film running on the attraction-image isn't a cute coincidence. It's a form arriving at the subject it was made out of.
Which raises the question of what Michael Gracey, a commercials and visual-effects man with no feature behind him, actually contributed. Not the anachronism. Moulin Rouge! had already put chart music under period spectacle, and Gracey's whole sonic strategy is inherited from Luhrmann. Not the beat-locked cut either; Chicago established that, and Chicago's writer, Bill Condon, co-wrote this. Here's the difference. Luhrmann's numbers erupt as editing, shredded into delirium. Gracey's are traveled. Ashley Wallen's choreography was built for long developing takes, and Seamus McGarvey's camera glides through them and rises to find the ensemble geometry. Deleuze separates montage, where the cut carries the change, from the mobile section — the shot whose own movement expresses the change in the whole. Gracey took the pop-anachronistic musical away from montage and gave it back a body moving through continuous space. McGarvey's lighting follows suit: those amber interiors and pools of jewel-toned color aren't reconstructing 1850s New York, they're absorbing the scene into a feeling. The color is doing the period's job badly and the emotion's job exactly.
When the camera lifts over the ring, you're looking at Busby Berkeley, digitally revived. Gold Diggers of 1933 is a real debt here: human-ornament mass choreography, bodies arranged into a pattern no single dancer can see. Deleuze's term for a crowd rendered as one affective unit rather than a set of individuals is the dividual. Siegfried Kracauer watched precision troupes in Weimar Berlin and heard the factory in them. Gracey's version is warmer, and it's after something else. In "This Is Me" the troupe locks into a single body precisely because they've been denied individual standing anywhere outside the ring.
Which is where the film gets genuinely interesting. Late in his life Deleuze wrote about fabulation — storytelling not as decoration but as the act of inventing a people who don't yet exist, undertaken by those for whom no community has made room. Not deception. Legend-making, by people who need a legend and have been issued none. The concept says the political begins with the fact that a people is missing. Keala Settle stepping out of the wings and refusing to stay backstage is that idea, on screen, unmistakably. And it explains the strangest fact in the film's history: "This Is Me" outgrew the movie entirely, becoming an anthem far past the picture's own footprint, on a soundtrack that outsold the film's cultural life. The audience finished the fabulation the movie started.
Now the hard part. That legend is being written by a studio, and inside the story, by Barnum. Deleuze's fabulation belongs to minor cinema, people speaking themselves into existence. This is the majority apparatus performing a minor gesture, staging the "curiosities" as a found family while eliding an enterprise that sold them. So meet the other Deleuzian figure standing in the frame: the forger. Not a villain. The forger is the one who makes truth and falsity undecidable and creates in the gap, and Barnum is the historical original. The film declines to dramatize his deceptions, and then quietly commits one of its own. Rebecca Ferguson stands on the concert stage as Jenny Lind, opens her mouth, and the voice is Loren Allred's. Every number in the film is pre-recorded and lip-synced, which is just the modern pipeline, but here the seam means something. The film's most rapturous claim to authentic feeling is a stitched thing, a body and a voice joined by the same trick that made a Feejee mermaid. Nobody minds. Barnum would have recognized the business model.
One more concept, and it's the one Deleuze reserved for musicals. Watching Astaire and Kelly, he noticed that the dancer's own movement stops being personal and passes into a movement of world that picks them up and carries them. "Rewrite the Stars" is staged as an aerial trapeze duet between two people whose situation — class, race — offers them nothing to do. So the film hands them a world that moves instead. On a trapeze you let go and the arc does the work. Note what the film honestly admits: they come down, and nothing has changed. The movement of world is where this picture stores everything its story won't authorize.
So: critics judged a biopic, which is where the film lies, and audiences received a number-machine, which is where it doesn't. Both readings are correct, and Deleuze is useful here mainly because he lets you say so without splitting the difference. What it did to filmmaking is smaller and realer than its defenders claim. It inverted the jukebox musical, manufacturing songs that then left home rather than assembling a film from songs already famous, and it made the wholly original studio musical commercially thinkable again.
Watch it again and track where the causation lives. Then ask whether a crowd completing a legend the film only half-tells is a failure of the film or the oldest move in showmanship. Barnum's entire method was leaving the customer something to finish.
Concepts in play
- the Figure (reflection-image) — "Dramatic causation is delivered largely through song; the numbers do the work of interiority and transformation that dialogue scenes might otherwise carry," with connective scenes compressed "to the point that critics faulted the storytelling as thin between songs" — action transposed into spectacle rather than performed.
- attraction-image — "Numbers are conceived as theatrical events within the world — the ring, the stage, the rooftop — so that the film's artifice is diegetically motivated by the subject of showmanship itself"; the visual grammar is "explicitly presentational — the film addresses the audience as an audience."
- the movement-image — The biopic-musical spine the dossier lays out: "poverty, ambition, the museum and the circus, the Jenny Lind tour, reversal, and reconciliation" — the sensory-motor chain intact as structure even as the numbers take over its work.
- action-image-large-form — The archetype the screenplay organizes around: "the striver who overreaches and rediscovers what matters" — a global situation pressing until a decisive act transforms it.
- the mobile section (plan) — Choreography "designed to be captured in fluid camera moves and long developing takes"; "the opening 'The Greatest Show' and the barroom deal-making of 'The Other Side' are staged as continuous or near-continuous kinetic set-pieces" — against the Moulin Rouge! debt, where numbers "erupt as delirious editing set-pieces."
- dividual — The Gold Diggers of 1933 debt: "Busby Berkeley's kaleidoscopic overhead ensemble geometry and human-ornament mass choreography... digitally revive[d] for its ring-filling crowd numbers," with McGarvey's camera "rising to catch the geometry of ensemble numbers"; the troupe rendered as one body in "This Is Me."
- story-telling / legending — Keala Settle's Lettie Lutz delivering "This Is Me" — the troupe legending itself into standing — and the fact that the song "became the film's emotional and commercial keystone" and "an anthem well beyond the movie's own footprint."
- people-are-missing — "The 'curiosities' of Barnum's troupe are staged sympathetically as a found family of the marginalized, a framing choice with real thematic and ethical consequences" — a people with no constituted place, given one only inside the ring, and given it by others.
- le faussaire — The film is "untroubled by the historical Barnum's documented deceptions and exploitations, which the screenplay elides or reframes" — and organizes itself as "fable rather than biography," a forger's film about a forger.
- puissances du faux — "Never Enough" performed on screen by Rebecca Ferguson as Jenny Lind but "sung on the soundtrack by Loren Allred as the voice of Jenny Lind" — the film's peak of authentic feeling manufactured by the same seam Barnum sold tickets to.
- audiovisual-disjunction — "Pre-recorded, studio-produced vocal tracks to which performance was staged and lip-synced," chosen so the songs carry "the sonic scale of a chart single" rather than the intimacy of live capture — the classical playback convention pushed until the voice's detachment from the visible body becomes the film's own subject (not the modernist voice-off of Duras, but the same seam).
- movement of world — "Rewrite the Stars" staged as an aerial trapeze duet for Efron and Zendaya, "the interclass, interracial romantic pair" — characters with no available action are carried by a world that moves for them.
- affective color — McGarvey lights in "saturated, high-contrast, jewel-toned registers, favoring warm amber interiors, deep blacks, and pools of theatrical color that read as heightened rather than historical," prioritizing "emotional legibility and spectacle over period texture."