I, Tonya · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya is organized around an ethical position: nobody is telling the truth, and the film will not tell you who is lying. What Deleuze calls the powers of the false — narration that abandons any adjudication of the true in favor of incompatible, self-serving accounts — is not a stylistic flourish here but the film's moral argument. Tonya, Gillooly, LaVona, and Shawn Eckhardt each address the camera directly to contest what we just watched; their recollections openly collide, and the screenplay, built from real, irreconcilable interviews, never resolves the contradictions. This is precisely the territory of the mind-game film: Elsaesser's term for structures that break cinema's foundational contract — that films, however constructed, don't lie — gains urgency here because these are real people, and the refusal to adjudicate hands the verdict permanently to the audience. Against this epistemological instability, Belgian cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis deploys vérité / direct cinema with deliberate irony: roving handheld moves through cramped trailer-park kitchens and rink corridors build documentary immediacy that makes each contested testimony feel observed rather than staged, the camera's realism working in counterpoint to the narration's slipperiness. The structural template descends directly from Goodfellas — Scorsese's freeze-frames punctuating wry voiceover, wall-to-wall needle-drops, and a narrator who turns mid-scene to contest the action are the grammar Gillespie inherits wholesale; I, Tonya is, in this sense, what happens when you grant every witness in a Goodfellas that same irresistible, untrustworthy microphone.