Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Crooklyn
1994 · Spike Lee · Crooklyn on Sightlines
For a few minutes in the middle of Crooklyn, the picture goes wrong. Faces narrow. Figures pull tall. The world looks like a reflection in the back of a spoon. In 1994 theaters put disclaimers in the lobby so audiences would stop blaming the projectionist, and Spike Lee was asked to correct the prints and wouldn't. An anamorphic lens squeezes a wide picture sideways so it fits on the film; the projector's lens undoes the squeeze on the way to the screen. Lee shot the Southern section anamorphic and let it arrive with the squeeze still in it. The world is the wrong shape for exactly as long as Troy is away from home.
Start there. That refusal is the film's whole argument about what a memory is, and it's the best door into what Deleuze can do for a movie like this one.
The rest of Crooklyn is a block in Bed-Stuy in the 1970s, and almost none of it is plot. A schoolteacher (Alfre Woodard) keeps a brownstone and five children running. Her husband (Delroy Lindo) is a jazz purist too principled to play the music people will pay for. Soul Train is on the television. There are stoop games, sibling warfare, and a wall of Stevie Wonder and the Stylistics that never quite stops. Describe the events to a friend and you'd run out in a minute.
Deleuze has a name for the stuff you'd leave out of that description: temps mort, dead time. Not boring time. The everyday held on screen longer than any story needs it, until you stop waiting for the payoff and start living inside the duration. He took the idea from postwar Italian cinema, where a character sees something terrible, can do nothing adequate about it, and the film keeps running anyway. Before that, the working grammar of movies was a circuit: perceive a situation, act, resolve it. Crooklyn barely touches that circuit. The conflict between the mother's arithmetic and the father's principles never resolves into an act. It just goes on being the weather in the house.
Deleuze has another term that fits this household precisely: a dispersive situation, a set of people linked too weakly for any single line of action to gather them. Five kids, a block of neighbors, no one problem for anyone to solve. This is where the Deleuzian lens earns its keep, because the standard complaint about Crooklyn — that it's shapeless, that nothing happens — is really the complaint that the film won't run the circuit. It won't. It's running something else, and the something else has a structure.
That structure is a ten-year-old's perception. Zelda Harris plays Troy, and the film pins itself to her. She is what Deleuze calls a voyant, a seer: not an agent who changes a situation but someone who takes it in at full strength with no action available. A child is the natural case. The money, the marriage, her father's stubbornness all reach her as sight and sound, never as a problem she's allowed to help with. Deleuze's name for images built that way is pure optical and sound situations — moments constructed so that looking and listening are all that's left to do.
What fills the space where action would be is bodies and records. The stoop, the bickering, five kids negotiating too few rooms: Deleuze called this a cinema of the body, ordinary posture carrying the time the plot isn't carrying. And the music does something stranger than nostalgia. American Graffiti had shown that near-continuous period pop could serve as a film's real score and its time machine. Cooley High had shown what that method does to a Black coming-of-age story, and what happens when sudden loss breaks the record. Crooklyn takes both and goes further: the songs aren't decoration laid over the memory, they're the unit the memory is stored in. Nobody remembers 1973. You remember what was playing.
Which brings back the stretch. Deleuze's late concept of the lectosign covers an image that has lost its self-evidence and has to be read rather than simply watched. The unsqueezed South is exactly that. No dissolve introduces it. No voice explains that this is a memory. The distortion is a pure quality, wrongness presented for its own sake, and you have to do something with it. What you do is recognize it: the feeling of a kid parked far from home, where the food and the accents and the light are all slightly off and nobody else seems to notice.
There's a name in film theory for the doubleness of that shot. Pasolini called it free indirect subjective, and Deleuze kept the term: the camera sees with a character while the author's own style stays visible on the surface of the image. Lee wrote this film with his sister Joie and his brother Cinqué out of their own Bed-Stuy childhood, and dedicated it to the mother they lost young. So the stretched frame is two things at once — a child's disorientation, and the pressure of the adult hand doing the remembering.
That's Lee's specific invention here, and it's worth naming exactly. Filmmakers have always had conventions for marking subjectivity: soft focus, slow motion, a sepia wash, a voice from the future telling you how it was. All of them are polite. They announce that a memory is coming and leave the picture correct. Lee put the subjectivity into the optics of the apparatus itself, in a form the exhibition chain would read as a defect, and then refused to fix it when the complaints came in. He accepted being thought incompetent for the length of a reel in order to hand you the inside of a child's head. One film after Malcolm X, that is not a small bet.
He didn't arrive at the block from nowhere. Amarcord gave him the shape: a remembered town as a string of vignettes, seasons doing the work a plot would otherwise do. Meet Me in St. Louis gave the crowded household where the drama is daily friction and the era arrives as song. Killer of Sheep gave the hardest debt, the poetic-neorealist patience to watch Black working-class domestic life and children's play without converting any of it into incident. Bazin's old claim for neorealism was that duration itself carries truth; Burnett proved it on a Los Angeles lot, and Lee proves it again on a Brooklyn stoop, louder and warmer. The 400 Blows supplies the last piece, the camera fixed to a child's reading of adult chaos.
Going forward, what the film offers is permission. A memory film doesn't need a catastrophe to justify itself; a family and a record collection are narrative enough. And a director who wants to render dislocation has an option beyond the dissolve: break the picture. Put the feeling in the glass and let the projectionist worry.
The lobby signs had it backwards. The stretch was never a flaw to forgive. It's the one passage where you stop watching a child's summer from outside and get handed her eyes. Watch it again and let the picture stay wrong. Then sit with the question Crooklyn leaves open, the one most memory films dodge: how much of what you remember is the thing that happened, and how much is the lens you've kept it in?
Concepts in play
- dead time (temps mort) — The film 'runs on texture rather than plot': stoop games, Soul Train on the television, sibling warfare — the everyday held on screen well past what any story needs.
- dispersive-situation — A brownstone with five children plus the surrounding block, linked too weakly for any single line of action; the parents' money-vs-principle conflict never gathers into a decisive act.
- the seer (voyant) — Seen through ten-year-old Troy (Zelda Harris), who registers her mother's struggle to hold the household together and her father's refusal to play paying music, with no action of her own available.
- pure optical & sound situations — The adult world reaches Troy only as sight and sound — the televised Soul Train, the household's noise, the wall-to-wall Stevie Wonder and Stylistics soundtrack — never as a problem she can act on.
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — Stoop games and sibling warfare in a crowded brownstone: everyday posture and household choreography carrying the duration that plot isn't carrying.
- the readable image (lectosign) — The Southern sojourn shot anamorphic and left unsqueezed: nothing in the story motivates the distortion, so the image forfeits its self-evidence and must be deciphered as feeling.
- qualité-puissance (pure quality presented for itself) — The queasy stretch of the frame is wrongness presented as a quality in its own right, sustained for an entire extended sequence rather than triggered by any event.
- free indirect discourse / free indirect subjective — Written with Joie and Cinqué Lee from their own 1970s Bed-Stuy childhood and dedicated to the mother they lost young, then routed entirely through Troy's eyes — the unsqueezed lens is the child's disorientation and the adult author's visible mark at once.