Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of My American Uncle
1980 · Alain Resnais · My American Uncle on Sightlines
For a few seconds, a man in a suit has the head of a rat. He is René, raised on a farm, risen to management at a textile factory, and something at work has just gone wrong in a way he cannot fix. Resnais plays it flat. No music sting, no dissolve to announce that a metaphor is arriving. The rat's head is there, and then it isn't, and the scene continues. You laugh. Then you notice the film has handed you its entire argument in a form you can't talk your way out of.
Mon oncle d'Amérique has a fourth character and he is a real person. Henri Laborit, physician and researcher, appears as himself and explains what brains do: the reptilian layer, the limbic system, the physiology of anxiety. His thesis is one sentence long. When an organism can neither fight nor flee, the inhibition of action produces stress that turns inward and does biological damage. Resnais had already discovered, in Last Year at Marienbad, that a film could be generated by an external system rather than by character psychology; there the system was architecture and a narrating voice. His invention here is to make the system a live scientific hypothesis, and to put the scientist in the room with it. Three lives get built to test it: René's demotion, Janine's renunciation of her lover, Jean's stalled climb.
This is where Deleuze becomes useful rather than decorative. Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation, acts to change it, and the situation changes; the cutting exists to carry that chain, and the chain is what we call plot. After the war he saw the chain break: characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they perceive, who watch and endure instead of acting. He called it the crisis of the action-image, and he usually described it through postwar rubble and slackened causality. Resnais gives it an etiology instead. Laborit's inhibited action is the broken sensory-motor circuit with a physiology attached. René cannot fight the reshuffle and cannot leave it. The act has nowhere to go, so it goes into his body. Watch the three stories as melodramas and they will seem slight: a man loses a job, a woman gives up a lover, a writer stalls. Watch them as three demonstrations of a cut circuit and they become exact. The film isn't about people failing to choose. It's about the moment choosing stops being available, which is the same moment cinema's oldest engine stops turning.
Deleuze had a name for films that show a social world as a crust over something older and hungrier. He called it the impulse-image, and it has two floors. The derived milieu is the setting with the sociology in it: the offices of corporate restructuring, the provincial farm, the political-literary bourgeoisie. The originary world is what that setting turns out to be a surface of, a place of pure drive and appetite. Usually you have to infer the lower floor from the behaviour on the upper one. Resnais cuts to it. The laboratory footage is the originary world, shown, with rats in it. Laborit supplies what Deleuze called the line of slope, the one-way degradation naturalism always runs toward. Here the slope has a mechanism: blocked action, then stress, then damage you could measure with instruments.
Four kinds of image are interleaved: the three lives, the lectures, the rats, and clips of old French movie stars. A human gesture rhymes with a lever-press, which rhymes with a matinee idol's flourish. Deleuze's term for a cut whose two images share no space and no continuity, so that nothing licenses the join except the join, is the interstice, the irrational cut. Its grammar isn't "and then" but "and." The meaning sits in neither shot. It sits in the gap you're asked to cross, and crossing it is work you do. That is what makes the film a noosign, an image of thought: a film thinking in front of you rather than depicting a character who thinks. And it's why the screen behaves like a brain instead of a window, which is Deleuze's cinema of the brain, a film organised as a topology of layers rather than a chain of events. Resnais gets to build it literally. Laborit describes a brain in stacked strata and the film is cut in the same strata: rats below, the melodramas in the emotional middle, the lecture on top. The star clips are the layer Laborit has no name for, the one that stores other people's gestures.
Which is the film's slyest idea. The characters imitate screen idols without knowing it, and the film produces the evidence: a man holds himself a certain way, and here is the Gabin he learned it from. Deleuze, borrowing the term from Brecht, called a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. These postures are quotations. Pépé le Moko gets filed next to the rats as conditioning material. The movies are part of the wiring, and Resnais, who loved them, says so without a trace of contempt.
Laborit's voice does the stitching, reasonable and faintly ironic, and it never discusses what you're looking at in the terms the image would choose. You watch a woman decide to hand her lover back to his dying wife. You hear about reward and punishment. Deleuze's name for this split is audiovisual disjunction: sound and image telling two stories that refuse to merge, so the image loses its self-evidence and has to be read. The method is Resnais's own, from Night and Fog, where measured commentary ran over montaged archive. Marker had proved the underlying principle in Letter from Siberia by narrating identical footage three ways. Resnais keeps the demonstration and removes its safety net. Laborit isn't performing a rhetorical exercise. He means it, and the film half agrees with him.
Two smaller pieces of Deleuze catch a lot here. A mark is an object that means by habit: see this, expect that. A demark is the anomaly that breaks the habit and forces you to interpret. The rat's head is a demark you can date to the frame. A symbol is the object that condenses a film's organizing relation, and this one is in the title. The uncle from America is the rich relative whose return will rescue you. He isn't coming. Nobody in the film has to say it.
The performances carry a load that ought to be impossible. Depardieu has to be a man whose decline you can read in his posture and his walking pace, while the apparatus keeps reclassifying him as an automaton. Deleuze's spiritual automaton covers both halves of that: the creature running on mechanisms it didn't choose, and the viewer whose thinking the image starts without permission. He never stops being a person and the film never stops classifying him. Resnais declines to break the tie. That refusal is where the warmth comes from, and the reason a picture about determinism is funny rather than cruel.
Hiroshima mon amour had opened a seam between document and fiction; this film widens it until laboratory footage fits through. Kuhle Wampe supplied the nerve to interrupt a drama and state its thesis out loud. What went forward was a whole late cycle in Resnais's own work — La vie est un roman in 1983, L'amour à mort in 1984 — where the structural game is played with a lighter hand than the austerity of Marienbad allowed. The larger inheritance is a change in what a cut can do. Resnais made the cut a proposition: not a transition and not a rhyme, but a claim, one that can be wrong, one you're invited to test against the next two minutes of drama. Films had argued before. Very few have argued while staying this fond of the people being argued about. Watch it again for the moments a body stops belonging to its owner, then put the film's question back to it. If the rat-head is right, what are you doing when you laugh at it? Laborit says the creature that can neither fight nor flee turns the blow inward. The film's answer isn't in the lecture. It's that you can look at the cage. That isn't freedom, but it's the one thing the film will promise you, and it's more than you had going in.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Laborit's central concept — when an organism can neither fight nor flee, the inhibition of action produces stress that turns inward — with René's professional humiliation, Janine's renunciation and Jean's stalled ambition each staged as an instance of blocked action.
- cinema of the brain — Laborit's lectures on the reptilian brain and limbic system, and a film cut into matching strata: laboratory rats, the three melodramas, the lecture — the architecture of the film reproducing the layered brain it describes.
- the image of thought — Editing that is 'associative and argumentative,' in which a cut can function as a thesis, proposing that a character's 'choice' is a conditioned response.
- interstice / the irrational cut — Four kinds of image interleaved — the three stories, Laborit's lectures, lab footage of rats, clips of movie stars — so that a human gesture rhymes with a rat pressing a lever or a screen hero's flourish, with no continuity of space to license the join.
- audiovisual disjunction — Laborit's expository, reasonable, faintly ironic voice runs as the film's connective tissue over fiction scenes it never describes in the terms those scenes would choose.
- demark — The recurring device in which characters at moments of stress are briefly shown wearing rats' heads or set against laboratory apparatus, played with deadpan economy.
- symbol — The title's 'uncle from America' — the mythical rich relative whose return will rescue you — named by the dossier as the film's cycle-defining irony.
- originary world — Quasi-documentary footage of laboratory experiments cut against the sociologically specific milieux of corporate restructuring, the provincial farm and the literary bourgeoisie, so the cage is shown rather than implied beneath the social surface.
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — The film's stated mechanism that inhibited action produces stress that turns inward and does biological damage, embodied in Depardieu's decline from confidence to breakdown, legible in posture and pace.
- the gest — Clips of the screen idols each character unconsciously imitates, with the Gabin persona of Pépé le Moko quoted as found footage — old star cinema treated as citable conditioning material.
- spiritual automaton — Actors required to be fully embodied and sympathetic while the film's apparatus continually reframes them as automata, with Brechtian breaks in the fictional frame keeping the viewer intellectually active rather than absorbed.