I, Tonya · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Before she skates, Tonya looks in the mirror, wipes the tears, fixes her face, and forces out a smile. Hold on that beat. The film has just shown a woman assembling a self she doesn't feel — the face made to order — and it wants you to watch the manufacture. That small act is the whole movie folded into one gesture. I, Tonya is about people building flattering versions of themselves and daring you to pick one to believe.

Most movies run on a quiet promise. André Bazin called it the realist faith: the camera doesn't lie, what it shows happened, and our job is to read it honestly. Documentary leans hardest on that promise; the mockumentary borrows it and then betrays it for laughs. I, Tonya betrays it on principle. Steven Rogers built the screenplay from separate interviews with the real Harding and Jeff Gillooly that flatly contradict each other, and instead of choosing a winner, the film puts both on screen as true. Harding swears she knew nothing about the attack on Kerrigan until after; Gillooly remembers otherwise. She says he beat her; he turns to the camera and says he never did. The film does not reconcile them. It can't, and it won't pretend to.

Deleuze has a name for what happens when cinema stops believing in a single true account: the powers of the false. In ordinary storytelling there's a 'man of truth' — a stable world the camera reports faithfully. When that breaks down, the forger takes over: narration that produces incompatible versions and presents them as equally real. Deleuze calls this falsifying narration, and I, Tonya is one of its purest popular examples. The 'incident' exists only as competing edits of itself. There is no master tape underneath the contradictions to cut back to.

Watch how the film enforces this. A dramatized scene is rolling — a fist, a thrown object, a screaming match — and a character freezes it, looks at us, and objects: that's not how it went. The image we were trusting gets overwritten by the person inside it. Deleuze would call this crystalline description: an image that builds up its object and then replaces it, so the 'real event' never settles into something we can hold. The dramatization isn't evidence; it's testimony wearing the costume of evidence. And the engine of all this is Tatiana Riegel's editing, which is the film's real author. The cut here isn't continuity — it's doubt made rhythmic. It whips between decades, between the interview chair and the past, between two people's incompatible memories of the same night, fast and percussive and timed to the needle-drops. The cut becomes the unit of unreliability. That's the formal achievement: the film turns the unreliability of memory into structure rather than theme.

Every actor is in on it. Deleuze's forger isn't a liar so much as a creator of self — and the ensemble is built so that each performer plays both a 'real' person and that person's flattering account of themselves. Robbie's Harding is defiance and wounded pride and a publicist for her own innocence, all at once. Allison Janney's LaVona narrates her cruelty as tough love. Paul Walter Hauser's Shawn Eckhardt casts himself as a counterterrorism expert. Nobody is simply lying; everyone is forging a usable past, and the film lets the forgeries stand side by side.

Which brings us back to the mirror. That gesture — the working-class girl scrubbing off the truth of her face to produce the smile the genteel skating establishment requires — is what Deleuze calls a gest: a posture that exposes a social relation rather than just expressing a feeling. The homemade dresses, the scored-down marks, the demand that she be 'wholesome': Harding's whole life is a body forced to perform a class it doesn't belong to. The mirror beat shows you the cost of the forgery in one held shot.

The lineage is exact. The premise — one event, irreconcilable eyewitnesses — is Rashomon (1950) rebuilt for tabloid America. The structural ethic, a biography assembled from contradictory testimony that refuses to say who the subject 'really' was, is Citizen Kane (1941), the film Deleuze himself read as cinema's great machine for the depths of time. The texture is Scorsese: the wall-to-wall arena-rock needle-drops and the freeze-and-address-the-camera of Goodfellas (1990), the dueling incompatible voiceovers of Casino (1995), and the mid-scene fourth-wall correction — 'actually, that's not what happened' — that The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) handed straight to Robbie before she carried it here. The talking-head confessional comes from This Is Spinal Tap (1984). I, Tonya gathers these debts and points them at a real woman the public had already decided about.

That's its significance. It takes the powers of the false — a concept Deleuze drew from austere modernist cinema — and proves it can run a crowd-pleasing comedy that also indicts the crowd. Because the same cut that lands a joke lands a beating, the film makes your laughter complicit, then names the complicity outright when it turns to the media circus. It rewards re-watching the way a mind-game film does, since every scene is quietly asking which witness you're trusting and why. You leave unsure what happened on the ice in 1994. You leave very sure about what we did to Tonya Harding afterward. The film withholds the truth and hands you the verdict you already reached — and asks where you got it.