Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of American Honey
2016 · Andrea Arnold · American Honey on Sightlines
A van, a phone propped up somewhere, a crowd of kids shouting "We Found Love" until the words come apart. Nothing happens in that scene. Nobody decides anything, nothing is at stake, the plot doesn't move a foot down the road. It's the scene everyone remembers.
Hold onto it. It explains why this film runs 163 minutes and why that isn't indulgence.
Deleuze cut cinema in two. Most films are what he called movement-images: a person sees a situation, acts on it, the action changes the situation, and the editing exists to keep that chain tight. The other kind he called the time-image, and its defining feature is that the link between seeing and doing has gone slack. The character watches. Time stops being the yardstick of an action and becomes the thing you're actually looking at.
The road movie is the movement-image in its most American form. You want out, you drive, the driving remakes you. Arnold keeps the driving and takes out the motor. Star crosses Oklahoma and Kansas and whatever comes after, and arrives nowhere in particular. The structure is episodic and accretive, and the pressures on her — Jake, Krystal, the sales hustle — recur and deepen instead of resolving. Deleuze took a name for this from the European films of the late fifties, where the action-image first came apart: the balade, the trip that transforms nothing. It isn't a failure of plotting. It's the subject.
Which makes Star a voyant, a seer: Deleuze's word for a character whose main capacity is watching something she can't act on. Look at what the sales calls actually do. She crosses a threshold into an oil worker's kitchen, and later into a wealthy suburban house, and the scene hands her nothing to do about the difference between them. It hands her something to see. Deleuze calls these pure optical situations, opsigns — images that stop being cues for action and become things to look at. The film is full of them, and it's generous with time around them. Long stretches where nothing advances. Hands out of car windows. The light going gold. Deleuze borrowed the Italian term for this: temps mort, dead time. Joe Bini, who cut Herzog for years, lets scenes run well past the beat where a normal film would leave. That isn't slackness, it's the argument: experience, not incident.
Robbie Ryan's camera is the other half of that argument — handheld, close, jostling, Star in frame almost continuously. Deleuze has a name for a camera you can feel watching someone who is watching: the dicisign. We aren't given her point of view. We're given her presence, and the fact of being near her. Arnold built that instrument in Red Road, where the handheld stayed welded to a working-class woman's face, and refined it in Fish Tank with a non-professional lead found off the street and a 1.33:1 frame.
Which brings up the boxiest decision in the film. A road movie in Academy ratio is close to a provocation. Widescreen is the genre's entire argument: the land is enormous, you are free inside it. Ryan takes the width away and fills a near-square frame with a face. America doesn't vanish; it gets pushed out of the frame and comes back in fragments. A sunset through a windshield. Light on skin. An insect at the edge. Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field — the next room, the other side of the road — from the absolute out-of-field, a beyond that no pan could ever reach. Arnold's frame manufactures the second one, and that's the social point. The prosperity Star is selling her way toward is never in the shot with her. Structurally, it can't be.
Insects, dogs, a bear, wind moving through a field: Arnold keeps cutting to things that have no business in the story, a device she takes straight from Days of Heaven. Deleuze would call this the Open — the sense that the closed frame belongs to a larger whole that goes on changing regardless of anyone's plans.
The crew scenes work differently. Arnold stages them as swarms: bodies pooled, noise, everyone moving at once, the group shot as one thing rather than as a set of individuals. Deleuze's term is the dividual, a collective given as a single unit of feeling. And in the singalongs something further happens, which is why they land so hard. Deleuze noticed in the musical that at a certain point the dancer stops producing the movement and the movement starts producing the dancer. Movement of world. The song is bigger than the body and carries it. Arnold gets there with a phone speaker in a van. She earns it by refusing a score: every piece of music here is in the room, playing off someone's phone or coming out of someone's mouth. Score stands outside the world and tells you how to feel. Source music is an object in the world that the bodies have to meet.
On the doorsteps there's something sharper. Star arranges her face and her story for whoever opens the door, and the same body reads differently in the oil worker's house than in the rich one. A posture that exposes a social relation is what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls the gest. This film is built out of them. It's also, in the plainest sense, a cinema of the body: Arnold cast non-actors, shot largely in sequence so the ensemble's real bond thickened along with the fiction, and let ordinary bodies carry the duration instead of performing it.
That method has a political name in Deleuze. Fabulation: catching real people in the act of inventing themselves. He treats it as politics rather than decoration, because the people such a film would speak for don't exist as a constituency. The people are missing. Nobody represents a mag crew. Arnold doesn't speak for them, she films them making themselves up — on doorsteps, in motel rooms and gas-station lots, the kind of any-space-whatever that other films use as somewhere you pass through on the way to a scene.
Film theory has a name for the contract too. Bazin argued that neorealism's non-actors and real locations were an ethic: respect the ambiguity of the real instead of resolving it in the cut. Deleuze's twist on him was that neorealism didn't add realism, it changed what an image is for. American Honey is the British inheritance of that ethic carried onto American ground intact, on 35mm, with Film4 money.
So: a 163-minute American film with no score, a first-time lead found on a beach, and barely any plot, and it moves. The debts run back clearly. Red Road for the surveillance-close watching. Fish Tank for the whole template. Wuthering Heights for the tactile, available-light grammar of rain and hair and skin and animal inserts. Kids and Gummo for the embedded, near-real-time portraiture of actual teenagers and the plotless vignette architecture. What Arnold refuses is Clark and Korine's downward slope; their kids degrade, and Star doesn't. Forward, the debt is diffuse rather than traceable to one title: the decade's habit of casting non-professionals, dropping the score for music the characters are playing themselves, and shrinking the frame until it can only hold a face.
The question the film leaves open is the hard one. Is Star's watching a kind of freedom, or is watching what the system hands you when it has nothing else to give? Arnold won't settle it.
Watch it again, and watch the edges of the frame.
Concepts in play
- voyage-balade-form — The picaresque structure: 'a loose chain of episodes strung along a journey, organized by mood, encounter, and Star's evolving inner life rather than by escalating stakes,' with tensions that 'recur and deepen without necessarily resolving' — a road movie whose road transforms nothing.
- the-seer (voyant) — Star is kept 'almost continuously in frame,' watchful, carrying nearly every shot; on the sales calls she enters class-stratified homes — oil-worker households, a wealthy suburban house — where she can only read the threshold, not act on it.
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The door-to-door encounters 'staged so that Star (and the viewer) reads each threshold as a small anthropological study' — images offered for looking, not as cues for action.
- dead time (temps mort) — Joe Bini's cut 'embraces duration: scenes are allowed to breathe well past conventional beats'; the film dwells on 'interstitial, in-between moments: hands trailing out of car windows, bodies in motion, the golden hour.'
- dicisign — Ryan works 'handheld and close... often in tight, jostling proximity, so that the audience shares her physical and emotional vantage' — the camera's presence is felt watching a character who is watching.
- out-of-field-absolute — The 4:3 Academy frame 'refuses the panoramic sweep; the American landscape enters not as spectacle but in fragments — a sunset through a windshield, light on skin, insects at the frame's edge.' The prosperity Star sells toward is never in the shot.
- the Open — Recurrent cutaways to insects, a bear, dogs, 'the natural world pressing in' as counterpoint to the human hustle — the poetic nature-interruption device inherited from Days of Heaven.
- dividual — 'Arnold stages the group scenes as swarms of movement and noise' — the crew's 'world of pooled bodies and communal disorder' rendered as one affective unit before Star is extracted from it.
- movement of world — The communal singalongs, including the shared performance of Rihanna's 'We Found Love,' where source music from phones and car speakers becomes an emotional set-piece and carries the bodies rather than being produced by them.
- the gest — The doorstep pitch as posture: the same body read differently across 'class-stratified American homes... from oil-worker households to a wealthy suburban home,' each threshold exposing the social relation.
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — Non-professionals recruited from around the country, Sasha Lane cast off a beach with no acting experience, and shooting 'largely in chronological sequence so that the cast's on-screen bonds could develop in step with the shoot.'
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Non-actors playing versions of themselves through Arnold's improvisational method, and the sales hustle itself — young sellers composing a story at each door to make the sale.
- people are missing — The film's subject is the 'exploitative mag crew economy' that recruits disaffected youth — Star pursuing 'a stake in an America whose prosperity she only ever glimpses from the outside,' a constituency with no representation to appeal to.
- any-space-whatever — Staging in 'motel rooms, gas stations, parking lots, the interiors of the van' — transit spaces held as the film's actual world rather than as settings for action.