Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Coco
2017 · Lee Unkrich · Coco on Sightlines
A bridge made of flower petals. Not a stone bridge strewn with marigolds — a bridge that is nothing but heaped petals, glowing, holding a boy's weight over open air while a city of stacked towers burns on the far side. Everything Coco knows is in that shot. The dead are held up by what the living keep putting out for them. Stop scattering flowers and the bridge is air.
Lee Unkrich and his co-director Adrian Molina spent years on research trips in Mexico, and the cosmology they came back with isn't decoration. Death is not the end in this film. Forgetting is. That turns a family cartoon into a detective story about memory: who gets remembered, who does the remembering, what the living owe.
Gilles Deleuze, writing about cinema in the 1980s, made a distinction that sounds technical and turns out to be about ghosts. Every frame has an outside. Usually it's the relative outside — the next room, the street you'll cut to in a second, space that is merely offscreen. But some films carry the pressure of an outside that isn't anywhere in their geography, a beyond you could never reach by panning. That's the out-of-field-absolute, and it is the engine of nearly every ghost story ever filmed.
Coco does something almost impudent with it. It builds a road there. Marigold bridge, border crossing, a photograph scanned like a passport. The absolute outside gets a customs desk. Something is lost in that, mostly mystery, and something remarkable is gained: the beyond stops being a mood and becomes a place with rules you can lose on.
Deleuze has a name for an object that means by habit, by the chain of what customarily follows it: a mark. Your photo on the family ofrenda, and you may cross. No photo, no crossing. (The gag descends straight from Spirited Away, where a child's passage into the spirit world also runs on paperwork.) The same photograph doubles as the film's symbol, the one object condensing its whole organizing relation: to be pictured is to exist. André Bazin argued that photography began as embalming — the mummy complex, art as a defence against time, the image preserving a body from disappearance. Coco takes that essay and turns it into physics. In this universe Bazin is literally right, and if the last picture of you comes down, you go out.
Now the part that should be more famous than it is. Bergson's idea, which Deleuze took over whole: the past isn't filed away and fetched. It coexists with the present, in layers, entire, and remembering means leaping into one of those layers and moving around inside it. Films that build the past as an order you move through, rather than a dated flashback dropped into a scene, are what Deleuze called sheets of past. Resnais made a career of it, and it is hard going.
Then a Pixar movie builds it as architecture. The Land of the Dead is a vertiginous metropolis of stacked colonial towers, generation tiered on generation, ancestors reachable by elevation. Miguel doesn't recall his family's past. He walks into it and has to negotiate with it. The layers coexist exactly as Bergson said, and when the last living person forgets you, your layer goes dark. I don't know of a clearer picture of the memory-cone anywhere in cinema, and it was made for eight-year-olds.
Compare the prologue, which is the other kind of memory image entirely: a family history narrated over papel picado banners, decades of loss compressed into cut paper and music before the plot starts. That's a recollection-image, the past represented and told, and the technique is learned from the wordless "Married Life" montage in Up. It's a small master class. But notice the difference the film itself draws. The banners show you the past. The city is the past, standing up and walking around.
For all that, Coco's chassis is unembarrassed classical Hollywood. Deleuze's name for the old circuit is the action-image, and its grandest shape, the large form, runs like this: an encompassing situation presses on a character until one decisive act transforms it. The situation here is enormous. A ban on music older than anyone alive, and a boy stranded on the wrong side of a border that opens for a single night. The act is a boy singing a song to an old woman. The Land of the Dead does the work Deleuze assigned to the synsign, the encompasser: a milieu specified down to its border guards and its paperwork, so thoroughly built that it dictates what can even be attempted inside it.
And the climax is Griffith. Organic montage in the American line — convergent cross-cutting driving at a last-minute rescue. Unkrich had already perfected the shape in Toy Story 3, at the incinerator: push the audience to grief, then release. Coco runs that identical editorial rhythm with one substitution that changes everything. The thing bearing down isn't fire. It's forgetting. Miguel races to sing before Coco forgets, which means the rescue happens inside another person's mind and the victim is a memory in an old woman's head. As narrative machinery goes, that is genuinely new.
The mystery under the plot concerns a star, an idol kept alive by reels and posters and a song. Deleuze's word for people who make themselves up is fabulation: subjects caught in the act of legending themselves, which he thought was how communities without power invent a people they don't yet have. Ernesto de la Cruz is the parasitic version, a man who legends himself with cinema's own equipment, and a murder sits under the official story. The film's design is the other version. A real community's cosmology, its principal roles cast entirely with Latino actors, handed the full blockbuster apparatus. For a time it was the highest-grossing film in Mexico's history. The machine that manufactures a false legend is the machine that restores the true one.
Worth marking the limit. Welles's forgers make truth undecidable; Coco doesn't. The false story is unmasked and the right man remembered. For a children's film the question was never can we know but what do we owe, which is an ethical problem rather than an epistemological one.
Its debts are honest ones. The Book of Life arrived first with the petal bridges, the sugar-skull faces, the tiered land of the remembered; Coco refines that iconography in CG and fixes it for a generation. Corpse Bride set the colour logic it inherits, the afterlife saturated and the living world drab, an inversion that lets marigold gold flood the frame until the colour carries the feeling by itself. Ratatouille supplied the research-driven sensory authenticity and the engine underneath: Remy's cooking against his clan, rhymed here by music against shoemaking.
Watch the city next time. It's stacked, and where the dead stand in it has something to do with how well they're being remembered. Then watch what the film quietly asks of you. An ofrenda is a display of photographs that keeps people present. So is a movie theatre. For two hours you're the one keeping the picture up.
Concepts in play
- Sheets of past (order of time / coexistence) — The Land of the Dead built as a vertiginous metropolis of stacked colonial towers, generation tiered on generation — the past not recalled but walked through, with layers going dark when the last living person forgets.
- Out-of-field-absolute — The beyond that no pan could reach is given a road: a bridge of marigold petals, a border crossing on the one night the boundary is thin, a photo-passport checkpoint.
- Symbol — The ofrenda photograph condenses the film's whole organizing relation — to be pictured is to exist; death is not the end but forgetting is.
- Mark — The photo-passport gag at the border: a photograph means by its customary chain — displayed on the ofrenda, you may cross; absent, you may not.
- Recollection-image (image-souvenir) — The prologue narrated over animated papel picado banners, compressing decades of family history into image and music — the past represented and dated, a technique learned from Up's 'Married Life' montage.
- Action-image, large form — An encompassing situation (a generations-old family ban on music, a boy stranded across the border) presses until one decisive act — singing to Coco — transforms it.
- Synsign (the encompasser) — The Land of the Dead as a fully specified milieu with its own border crossing, passport rules and bureaucracy, descended from Spirited Away's bathhouse, generating the actions available inside it.
- Organic montage (American / convergent) — The climax is a cross-cut last-minute rescue — Miguel racing to sing before Coco forgets — reusing the editorial rhythm Unkrich perfected at Toy Story 3's incinerator, with forgetting substituted for fire.
- Affective colour (colour-image) — The palette inversion inherited from Corpse Bride — a drab living world against a saturated afterlife — lets marigold gold absorb the Land of the Dead and carry its feeling directly.
- Fabulation (legending) — Ernesto de la Cruz, an idol maintained by reels, posters and a song, legends himself with cinema's own apparatus, while the film hands that apparatus to a real community's cosmology with an all-Latino principal cast.