Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Lady Bird
2017 · Greta Gerwig · Lady Bird on Sightlines
The picture looks slightly used. Sam Levy shot Lady Bird to feel like a photograph handled too often: color set down half a step, whites gone soft, everything a little worn at the edge. Sacramento in 2002 did not look like that. It looks like that because somebody has been carrying it around.
The film's whole argument is sitting there in the emulsion before anyone speaks. Deleuze has a name for it worth borrowing. He noticed that any moment on film has two faces at once: the thing happening, and that same thing already turning into a memory of itself. Movies normally keep those apart. A flashback gets labeled, dated, filed; the past puts on a costume so you know which is which. When the two can't be pulled apart, Deleuze called it a crystal-image, after the way a crystal hands you the same light twice. Lady Bird has no flashbacks. Gerwig put the recollection into the stock instead, so every scene arrives pre-remembered. Why bother with the term? Because it explains something genuinely strange about watching this film: it feels like nostalgia while owning none of nostalgia's equipment. No narrator looking back, no sepia, no framing device, no older Christine in voice-over. And it explains why the fights with her mother hurt on two levels at once. You watch the wound land, and you watch it being stored.
Then there's the cutting, which is Gerwig's real invention. Scenes stop short, on the laugh or on the wound, and a full senior year fits inside ninety-three minutes. Deleuze's term for a cut that doesn't stitch but opens is the interstice, the irrational cut: the gap itself becomes the unit, and what matters happens in the between. Most cinema that makes you feel time does it by slowing down. Antonioni holds an emptied piazza. Tarr walks you down a road at the speed of walking. Gerwig speeds up. She gets duration by amputation. What she found is that memory doesn't store scenes, it stores exits, the last line and the door. The episodes don't cause one another either. Causality goes slack, and the year accumulates the way a year actually does, as a pile of half-scenes rather than a chain.
That dramaturgy has a father, and Gerwig names him clearly. The 400 Blows built adolescence as loose vignettes with the kid as an open stand-in for the director, and ended on departure rather than resolution. Amarcord taught her that a provincial town, not a plot, could be the subject, and warm comic fragments the method. Sacramento is her Rimini. American Graffiti turned local geography into emotional cartography on the last night before leaving, and the overpasses inherit that. Rushmore supplied the deadpan affection for an overreaching kid whose ambition outruns her circumstances. Ghost World showed that a class-conscious teenage girl could be built almost entirely from dialogue and taste. And Baumbach, her collaborator, had already engineered the overlapping, finely calibrated cruelty of parent-child talk in The Squid and the Whale, where people wound each other by being articulate.
Here's where the film does something to narrative. Lady Bird behaves like a classical protagonist for the entire runtime. She perceives a situation, Sacramento, the Catholic school, the mother, and she acts to change it, month after month. That's the movement-image at full tilt. But the form refuses to let her acts transform anything. The film cuts away before consequences settle. She does get out, and the escape turns out to be beside the point. What changes is not the situation but the quality of her looking, and the film says so directly when a nun gently suggests that love and attention might be the same thing. Deleuze's word for the figure who stops acting and starts seeing is the seer, the voyant, and postwar cinema arrived at her through paralysis: characters who couldn't act, so they watched. Gerwig's version is sweeter and much odder. Her heroine can act, does act, wins, and the movie tells her the whole time that seeing was the real work.
Which makes the overpasses the most radical thing in it. Deleuze called deserted, disconnected, leftover spaces any-space-whatever: places that no longer function as a setting for action and register only as mood. American film has used the suburban strip that way for fifty years, as void. Gerwig films the same ranch homes and connectors with the same refusal to make them a stage, and gets the opposite feeling out of them. The neorealists, and Bazin arguing for them, held that reality shows itself if you decline to cut away. Gerwig amends the contract. Attention isn't a question of how long you look. It's whether you looked at all.
The two faces carry the rest. Deleuze splits the close-up into the reflexive face, a smooth contour holding one quality, wanting, wondering, and the intensive face, where features work against each other and micro-movements climb toward a breaking point. Saoirse Ronan mostly gets the first. Laurie Metcalf gets the second, and her performance is built on doing two incompatible things with one face, loving ferociously and criticizing in the same breath. And the name: a seventeen-year-old christens herself, which is Deleuze's fabulation in miniature, someone caught in the act of legending herself, making a self out of a story that isn't true yet and daring the world to ratify it.
Five Oscar nominations, and then a decade of coming-of-age films made in its image, most of which copied the wrong thing. They took the wry needle-drops and the mother-daughter shouting. The transferable discovery was structural: you don't need a memory device to make a memory film. Put the pastness in the stock and the time in the gaps, and let the scenes end early.
So watch it again and notice how often you're pulled out of a scene before it's finished, and whether you mind. Then the question the film leaves genuinely open. Is attention something you can practice, or does it only ever arrive late, from a distance, after you've already gone?
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Sam Levy's cinematography was designed to feel slightly faded, like a photograph handled too often; with no flashbacks anywhere, the present tense arrives already carrying its own recollection, so actual and virtual can't be separated.
- interstice / the irrational cut — Scenes cut short on the laugh or the wound, a whole year folded into ninety-three minutes: the meaning lives in the gap between vignettes rather than in continuity across them.
- weak-links — The loosely episodic vignette dramaturgy inherited from The 400 Blows — episodes that accumulate rather than cause one another, ending on departure rather than resolution.
- the seer (voyant) — The nun's sideways thesis that love and attention might be the same thing, extended to place as much as people; Lady Bird's year-long campaign to escape changes nothing about the situation, only the quality of her looking.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — Sacramento's overpasses and ranch homes, held as affective fields rather than as stages for action — Gerwig films them the way other directors film Paris, drawing love from spaces American cinema normally reads as void.
- reflexive vs intensive face — Ronan's contour face of wanting-out set against Laurie Metcalf's feature face, which loves ferociously and criticizes in the same breath — two incompatible intensities crossing one set of features.
- fabulation (legending) — The self-christened seventeen-year-old: a name she gave herself that the film takes seriously as a truth in the making.