Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of A Nightmare on Elm Street
1984 · Wes Craven · A Nightmare on Elm Street on Sightlines
Nancy falls asleep in the bath. That's all that happens, and the film doesn't mark it. There's no dissolve, no wobble, no change in the light. Her head tips back, and between her knees a glove rises out of the water with knives for fingers. Then she's pulled under, into water much deeper than any bathtub, and we realize we never saw the moment she crossed over. Craven got the shot by building a bottomless tub over a tank. It's a cheap trick and a perfect one, because it holds the whole film in small: the danger isn't in the room. It's in the seam between waking and sleep, and you can't see the seam.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books about cinema, gives us a useful way to see what's at stake in that seam. He divided film into two broad regimes. In the first, the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and continuity editing exists to link seeing to doing. In the second, the time-image, that link breaks. Characters can only look, endure, remember. Between the two sits what he called the dream-image: sleep switches off the sleeper's ability to act, and the images start running on their own, each one sliding into the next.
For Deleuze the sleeper is simply someone whose senses have come unhooked from their muscles. Craven turned that unhooking into a murder weapon. In the slasher films he inherited, above all Halloween, the babysitter survives because she can still act: run, lock a door, fight back. Freddy Krueger kills you at the one point in the day when you can't. That's why the premise felt incoherent to the studios that passed on the script. It has no rules an executive could hold, because it attacks the rule underneath all action cinema, the guarantee that a body in danger can respond.
Deleuze notes that dream-images come in two kinds. Some are rich, full of optical tricks. Others work through ordinary images that just drift. Elm Street uses both, and the mix is the point. Some nightmares announce themselves. The stairs turn soft and Nancy sinks into the treads. Freddy's arms stretch absurdly down an alley, scraping both walls. Jacques Haitkin lights these in steam and hard sidelight, sodium and blue. But other dreams are shot exactly like the flat suburban daylight around them, so a straight match on action can carry a character from a fluorescent classroom into the boiler room. The cheapness of the effects helps here. A spandex sheet stretched over a wall so Freddy's face can bulge through the plaster above Nancy's bed doesn't look real, and dreams don't either.
The real invention is in Rick Shaine's cutting, and here a second Deleuzian idea helps. Writing about Hitchcock, Deleuze describes the mark: an image whose meaning comes from habit (when you see X, you expect Y). Then there's the demark, the thing that breaks the habit and forces you to interpret. In horror the wake-up cut had been a mark. A character sits up gasping in bed, and the nightmare is over. Shaine stacks false awakenings until that grammar turns into a demark. Nancy wakes, and she's still dreaming, and she wakes again. The debt here runs to Carnival of Souls, which moved its heroine between worlds on an ordinary cut with no dissolve. Another runs to Suspiria, where Goblin's synth score drifted across cuts. Charles Bernstein's synthesizer score works the same border, wetter and more processed than its models. Before long we've learned to distrust every edit. This is the film's deepest dread, and no amount of blood could produce it.
At its limit this pushes toward what Deleuze calls the crystal-image, where the actual and the imagined become indiscernible. You can no longer say which side of the glass you're on. The film doesn't live in the crystal, though. It fights it, and Nancy is the fighter.
This is where the film gets moving. Heather Langenkamp plays Nancy as practical: haggard, sleep-starved, building traps. Her practical streak is an attempt to win back the movement-image, to get the monster into a world where cause and effect work, where a booby trap goes off and a cop can kick a door in. She's trying to restore cinema's old contract by force.
The parents, by contrast, are stuck in the wrong regime. Marge bolts bars onto the windows, which turns the family home into a cell and does nothing at all against a monster who comes from inside. Deleuze would call this the crisis of the action-image: an act aimed at the wrong situation. Ronee Blakley plays her drinking as the body of a secret. That secret is spatial. Beneath the lawns, the station wagons and the crosses lies the boiler room, all catwalks and furnace glare. Deleuze, writing about naturalism, describes a realistic derived milieu that turns out to be the thin surface of an originary world of raw drives. Elm Street is the derived milieu. The boiler room is the originary world, the town's buried crime given architecture. Freddy is bound up with what the parents buried, and the children's jump-rope rhyme carries it like folklore, sung in that flat playground voice by kids who don't know what they're singing.
Craven stages Freddy sparingly for the first half: in silhouette, in fragments, at the edge of the frame. That is the relative out-of-field, space just past the border that we fill with dread. It's Halloween's staging moved into the sleep cycle. One early nightmare plays out in a room built inside a rotating drum. The camera turns with the set, so the trick that let Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling becomes a way to show that the room has no floor you can count on.
Even the ending carries this history. Craven and Robert Shaye fought over it, and its final shape is the moment franchise logic got into American horror by contract rather than by choice. That's an uncomfortable fact about the film, and an interesting one.
What Elm Street did to the art was move horror's threat from the woods into the cut itself. It made the audience watch the grammar of film for a trap. That self-consciousness leads straight to Scream, where Craven's characters know the rules out loud. It was here first, though, unspoken, in a bathtub.
Watch it again and keep track of the wake-ups. Every time someone sits up in bed, ask what told you it was over. Usually it's only habit.
Concepts in play
- dream-image (onirosign) — Nancy dozing in the bath with no dissolve or lighting change before the glove surfaces; dreams shot sometimes in rich low-key effects (melting stairs, elongated arms) and sometimes exactly like waking scenes; the sleeper's suspended ability to act is the condition for the killings
- demark — Shaine's stacked false awakenings turn the habitual wake-up cut (the nightmare is over) into a broken habit that forces the viewer to interpret, so no edit can be trusted by the last act
- mark — The genre's customary wake-up cut, a character sitting up in bed meaning safety, which the film sets up and then corrupts
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — By the final act waking and dream are indiscernible; nothing in the editing ever guarantees that a waking is real
- originary world — The boiler room, an industrial underworld of catwalks, chains and furnace glare beneath manicured Elm Street, where the parents' buried crime lives
- derived milieu — The suburb of lawns, station wagons and Christian iconography, shot in flat drab naturalism, revealed as the surface over the boiler-room world
- crisis of the action-image — Marge's window bars turn the home into a cell and do nothing against a monster who arrives from inside; action aimed at the wrong situation
- the movement-image — Nancy's practical, sleep-starved resourcefulness, an attempt to restore the link between perceiving and acting
- relative out-of-field — Freddy staged sparingly in the first half, in silhouette, in fragments, at the edge of frame, inherited from Halloween's withheld-killer staging