Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Hunt for the Wilderpeople
2016 · Taika Waititi · Hunt for the Wilderpeople on Sightlines
A boy stands in the New Zealand bush in city clothes, a dog called Tupac at his heel, and the camera drops low and looks up at him the way it would at a man about to save a city. Then it cuts. The grandeur is gone and he is a kid in the wrong jacket in the middle of nowhere. Waititi does this in bursts across the film: borrows a crane move or a heroic low angle off the blockbuster shelf, hands it to someone who has not earned it, takes it back with a hard cut. That is the joke. Run it enough times and it becomes a method.
Deleuze divided cinema in two. In the first kind, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. Perception goes in, action comes out, and the editing exists to keep that circuit closed. In the second kind, which he dated to after the war, the circuit snaps. People can no longer act adequately on what they see, so they watch and endure instead, and we start to feel time directly rather than as the measure of somebody's progress.
Wilderpeople is not the second kind. Everyone in it acts, constantly, and the plot is a chase. What is odd is that they are all acting from scripts they picked up somewhere else. Paula, the child-welfare officer, runs her pursuit as a paramilitary crusade with escalating self-mythologising zeal; she is not chasing a boy, she is starring in a manhunt. Ricky assembles a 'skux' out of hip-hop affect, bravado and haiku. Psycho Sam is doing bush prophet. Deleuze called this consciousness of clichés and read it as a symptom of the action-image dying: characters who move among ready-made images and know it. Waititi treats the symptom as a resource. The heroic low angle is one of those ready-made images, and when he spends it on two bickering fugitives in an oversized landscape he is producing what Deleuze called the inversion-image, the sublime hero flipped into his feeble version. The move is old. Chaplin and Keaton lived on it.
Then there is the engine. A man walks into the bush with a boy. To us that is grief looking after grief. To the state it is abduction, and a national manhunt follows from one reading of one act. Describing the small form of the action-image, where you are handed an act first and must infer the hidden situation behind it, Deleuze names this precisely: the index of equivocity, a gesture that fits two incompatible situations with nothing in the image to settle which. Most films use equivocity for suspense and then resolve it. This one never resolves it, because nobody in authority ever looks closely enough to be corrected. That is where the lens earns its keep. Calling the film a quirky tragicomedy does not explain why the joke and the wound land on the same frame. Equivocity does. The comic misreading and the tragic one are the same misreading.
The episodes then string along what Deleuze calls the vector, or line of the universe: a zig-zag linking spaces with little in common. A hut. A river. A road with Psycho Sam on it. The intertitled chapters make the zig-zag legible, and they also do something to the grief. A chapter card lets the film step out of a feeling before it thickens and walk back in from a different angle, which is how comedy and pathos end up in close alternation here instead of in separate acts.
Those cards have an address. Rushmore taught the flat centred frame and the curtain-raising chapter. The Royal Tenenbaums codified the literary chapter card as a pacing device for family wreckage, and that is the grammar Wilderpeople borrows outright. Moonrise Kingdom is the near cousin: a child flees civilisation into wilderness, shot in storybook symmetry, divided into titles. Kikujiro supplies the deeper blueprint, a gruff loner and a lost boy built out of deadpan static compositions and vignette titles over warm synth and piano, which is the exact bed Moniker builds under Hec and Ricky. Paper Moon supplies the bickering-into-bonding rhythm Neill and Dennison inhabit. And Boy is Waititi's own prototype, its pop-culture fantasy inserts and deadpan-to-poignant pivots reused here almost wholesale.
His addition is the calibrated deadpan: sincerity delivered flat, absurdity delivered straight, the body held still and facing us inside a symmetrical presentational frame. Deleuze has a term worth borrowing, the gest, meaning a posture that exposes a social or theatrical relation rather than an inner feeling. Flattened and frontal, Ricky's face stops working as a window and starts working as a position. You read what he is claiming to be, and you read the distance between the claim and the bush behind him.
The bush is the other invention. Milne shot real wilderness rather than sets or heavy digital environments, and Bazin would have known why that matters: the location keeps its own indifference inside the frame. The seasonal montage is where indifference becomes grief. Light shifts, foliage turns, and the manhunt advances not at all. This is Bergson's Open, which Deleuze puts underneath everything else: the framed set opening onto a larger whole that is changing on its own account. The manhunt is a small event happening inside weather. Bella is dead and the seasons keep going.
Which leaves the concept Deleuze meant for other films entirely. Fabulation, or legending, he reserved for political cinema, for filmmakers who catch people in the act of inventing themselves because no ready-made 'people' exists to be represented. Wilderpeople is not that film. The mechanism is identical and it runs on everybody in the frame. Ricky's haiku are him narrating himself into being, one stanza at a time. Paula talks herself into a crusade. Hec is stuck inside a legend written before he got there, the 'man alone' that Barry Crump, whose novel this is, spent a career making into national furniture. The film's real generosity is that it lets the legends stand. It never sits Ricky down and explains that he is not a gangster.
What it did for the art: it proved that the most local material a national cinema had, a Crump adaptation, dogs, birdsong, flat delivery, travelled furthest, and that flatness could carry a death without letting it curdle into sentiment. That is the hinge of Waititi's career, and it leads straight into the Marvel commission. Tom Eagles, one of the editors associated with the film, carried the chapter grammar into Jojo Rabbit. Milne carried the storybook-landscape eye to Minari and Stranger Things.
It leaves a question standing, too. If the only heroic shapes available to you come from movies that were never about people like you, is putting one on a delusion or a start? Watch the low angles again. Count how many are jokes. The argument is in the ones that are not.
Concepts in play
- consciousness-of-clichés — Paula styles her child-welfare pursuit as a paramilitary crusade with escalating self-mythologising zeal; Ricky builds an invented 'skux' persona out of hip-hop affect, bravado and haiku; Psycho Sam is staged as an escalating cartoon inside a grounded natural world
- index-of-equivocity — The plot machinery is 'a misunderstanding that spirals into a national manhunt': Hec taking Ricky into the bush is care to us and abduction to the state, and the film never resolves which situation the act belongs to
- inversion-image — Sweeping crane-like moves and heroic low angles briefly borrow the grammar of the action blockbuster before puncturing it, and the mock-epic vistas set enormous natural scale against two bickering fugitives and their dogs
- the-gest — Calibrated deadpan performance (sincerity delivered flat, absurdity delivered straight) inside Waititi's centred, slightly presentational framing, so the held frontal body reads as a claimed position rather than an inner feeling
- the Open — The recurring seasonal montage renders the passage of time through changing light and foliage while the manhunt does not advance; the bush is treated as an indifferent co-lead rather than a setting for action
- line of the universe — A picaresque road movie relocated to the wilderness, organised into titled chapter intertitles that link weakly-connected spaces (hut, river, roadside encounter with Psycho Sam) into a zig-zag trajectory
- story-telling / legending — Ricky's haiku-writing and invented gangster self-image, Paula's self-mythologising crusade, and Hec anchored in the Barry Crump 'man alone' tradition — every figure is caught inventing the legend they inhabit, and the film lets the legends stand