A Star Is Born · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Shrine Auditorium. Jack is already out there playing the opening figure, and the camera isn't on him. It's on Ally in the wings, and it stays on her while she decides. You can watch the decision cross her face in pieces. Then she walks out, and the film has earned its title.

Cooper's first instinct as a director was to spend his most expensive minute on a face waiting to move. Deleuze has a name for that shot worth borrowing: the potisign, the icon of power. He split the close-up in two. Some faces reflect a single quality and hold still under it — wonder, grief, a surface you read at a glance. Others are built out of micro-movements gathering toward a threshold, and what you're reading isn't a feeling but a pressure climbing to the point of release. That's Ally in the wings. The distinction earns its keep here more than in most films, because the plot of A Star Is Born is public property. Nothing in the story can surprise you. So Cooper moves the drama down to a scale where surprise is still available: the inch or two of a face, shot handheld and faintly unstable by Matthew Libatique, eyes and mouth kept center, the venue behind her dissolved into backlit haze.

Which brings us to the thing everyone knows about the film and usually files under stunt. The songs were sung live on set. Musicals had run on playback for ninety years — Cukor's 1954 version included, and nearly every classical musical before and after it — which meant the number you watched was a perfected studio object being mimed. Cinema's original break with painting and theatre, in Bergson's account that Deleuze builds on, was that it stopped posing the ideal moment and started sampling motion at any-instant-whatever, taking whatever this ordinary instant happens to contain. The playback musical smuggled the pose back in. Cooper takes it out again. Shooting inside real festival windows at Glastonbury, Coachella and Stagecoach, in front of crowds who were not going to stand there for a second take, he gets contingency instead of perfection: the take is the take. Bazin would recognize the wager exactly. The recorded event carries a charge no reconstruction can fake, because something actually happened in front of the lens and the film can't lie about it. What you're watching in "Shallow" is not a performance of a threshold being crossed. It is a threshold being crossed, by Gaga, on the day.

That's also why Deleuze's late idea of a cinema of the body applies so cleanly. In the older cinema the body is the instrument of an action — it goes, it strikes, it resolves. Here it carries duration instead. You watch breath get budgeted, a throat take strain, a note come out slightly worse than a record and better than a record. Jay Cassidy's editing protects this by holding the numbers longer than a concert film would, so a song lands as one event rather than a montage of angles.

Sound is where the film does its strangest formal thing. Deleuze calls it a dicisign when the image perceives a character who is perceiving, so that we feel the apparatus's own perception. Cooper does it in the mix. Jack's tinnitus and failing hearing are written into the sound design, and periodically the film stops giving us the world's sound and gives us his hearing instead. In a musical, the mix is the object of desire — the record, the thing everyone is chasing. Cooper turns it into a symptom.

Watch, too, how unevenly the film spends time. The parking lot, the grocery store, the bathtub: nothing advances there and the film sits in it, dead time in the technical sense, the everyday held. Then Ally's career gets compressed to almost nothing. And notice what changes in her as it does. Styling teams, dyed hair, choreography, the television apparatus. She stops moving and starts being moved. Deleuze called this the movement of world, the case where the character goes still and the world does the traveling, the dance absorbing the dancer. The film's argument about manufacture is never stated in dialogue. It's in who is moving.

Jack goes the other way, and this is the film's real structure. He begins with the sensory-motor circuit intact — he sees a singer in a drag bar and acts, and the act changes everything. Then the handlers arrive and physically crowd him out of the frame, and he perceives something he cannot do anything about. That's the crisis of the action-image, and Deleuze's next term names what's left of him: the seer, a man who watches and endures. The concert photography keeps giving us his reverse angle, looking out at her. Underneath runs what Deleuze called a line of slope, the irreversible downhill of naturalism — drink, deafness, humiliation, the walk out of her life. Even his voice is borrowed. Cooper built Jack's weathered baritone on Sam Elliott, cast Elliott as Jack's brother, and let the film say so out loud. A man speaking in a voice he took from someone else, going deaf. The marriage at the center of this movie holds a movement-image and a time-image in the same bed.

And the beats themselves work as what Deleuze calls marks: objects that mean by their customary chain, when you see X expect Y. The discovery, the name change, the drunk public disgrace, the last walk. Cooper follows the skeleton laid down in 1937 nearly beat for beat, which the 1937 film had already taken from What Price Hollywood? (1932), and adapts Pierson's 1976 script directly. His craft debts are specific and worth naming. The 1954 Garland version taught him that a song staged as a near-single-take club performance is a dramatic scene, not an interlude. The 1976 version put the numbers on real stages before real crowds. Les Misérables (2012) supplied the actual technique, lead vocals to an earpiece piano instead of prerecords. Nashville (1975) supplied the ethos, performers writing and singing their own material in overlapping live sound, which is what Lukas Nelson's band is doing behind Cooper. Nothing here is invented from nothing. Everything is inherited and put under new pressure.

So the audience's foreknowledge stops being a liability and becomes the instrument. You know where this ends, which converts suspense into dread, and dread is patient. The film can afford the grocery store.

Its significance is small and permanent: it made the number contingent again. After this, lip-sync in a serious music film reads as a costume. Whoever makes the fifth version will have to sing.

Watch it again and try this. Track who is moving under their own power in each scene, and when that stops. Then listen for the moment the mix goes over to Jack's ears, and ask whose film you have been in all along.