Choose Me · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two people sit side by side at a bar, talking about love, not looking at each other. Window neon lays magenta across one face and cyan across the other. Neither color comes from anything in the room, and neither is pretending to be natural light. Hold that shot. The whole film is folded into it: bodies arranged so they can't quite face each other, and a color doing the talking the dialogue refuses.

Alan Rudolph shot Choose Me fast and cheap in 1984, almost all of it at night, in a bar, a few apartments, a radio studio. He had been Robert Altman's assistant director on The Long Goodbye and Nashville. From the first he took Vilmos Zsigmond's restless camera, always shooting through glass and reflections, and the trick of letting one song return as radio, as muzak, as a band until you can't say where it lives. From the second he took the ensemble. What he would not take was the irony. That refusal is his invention: Altman's form played straight, for longing.

The standing charge against the film is that it's mannered. The dialogue is written rather than spoken, the coincidences are shameless, the feelings get announced instead of dramatized. All true, and all beside the point, which is easier to see with one idea borrowed from Gilles Deleuze, who never wrote a word about Rudolph.

Deleuze called it the crystal-image: a shot in which a thing and its reflection start trading places, until you can't say which one is the original and which the copy. Rudolph builds nearly every frame that way. People stand behind glass, behind mirrors, behind the bottles racked along the bar. Reflections are so constant here that they become the film's argument about self-presentation. And Eve's Lounge is lit by its own signage, so the room reads at once as a real dive and as the inside of somebody's head.

Deleuze sorted crystals by condition. The saturated kind, with no outside and no exit, he found in Max Ophüls. Choose Me descends from Ophüls's La Ronde directly: the daisy-chain of lovers handed off one to the next around a closed circle, the camera circling the couples, an emcee narrating the round from outside it. Rudolph reassigns that emcee to a radio voice. Everyone must pass through the bar, so the geography itself manufactures the coincidences. The night never ends. That's a perfect crystal, and it explains why the film feels hermetic rather than sloppy. There is nowhere else to be.

Then Rudolph cracks it. In Ophüls the circle closes and desire returns to where it started. Here the title is an imperative, and the film's terror is preference: not that these people can't find partners, but that they can't bear to prefer one. The ending settles the romantic geometry without pretending it earned the settlement by anything except wanting it. That unearned wanting is the fissure in the crystal, the single line out of a totality that otherwise has no door. Deleuze located that crack in Renoir. Rudolph gets it from melodrama, where wanting something badly enough has always counted as an argument.

Now Mickey, who says he was a spy, a poet, a pilot, and who has recently left a psychiatric hospital. The film never rules on him, and Keith Carradine plays the claims with such unhurried calm that dismissing them feels like a failure of nerve. Cinema's oldest contract is that the camera records what was actually there: film doesn't lie. Deleuze's counter-idea, the powers of the false, says a character can stop reporting the truth and start manufacturing it. His name for such a person is the forger, and the forger is not a con man; he's an artist whose only material is himself. Mickey isn't alone in it. Nancy Love takes a room under a false name in the apartment of a woman she counsels anonymously on the air. Eve bought a bar named for another woman and moved into that woman's life. The film's most generous idea is that none of this is deception. These are offers.

Sound carries as much of the picture as the light does. Dr. Love's broadcast threads through apartments and cars, sometimes issuing from a visible radio, sometimes from nowhere at all. Deleuze traced this to Marguerite Duras: a voice cut loose from any mouth, so that what you hear and what you see stop telling the same story. Geneviève Bujold makes it flesh by keeping the on-air voice and the private voice in different keys and never signalling the join. Over that, Teddy Pendergrass runs nearly wall to wall, smooth and certain and anchored to no jukebox we're ever shown. The songs know exactly how love goes. The people don't. Deleuze noticed that when characters can no longer act, movement often passes to the world around them, the way a musical lets the dance take over the dancer. Nobody dances in Choose Me. The music moves and the people sit still, and the distance between the two is the film's actual emotional measurement.

Which leaves Nancy, listening for a living. Deleuze's word for a character who has become a watcher instead of an agent is voyant, a seer. Nancy is its acoustic version. She can name every dynamic of desire with total fluency and cannot conduct one. She takes confessions all night and acts on nothing. Mia Goldman's cutting holds scenes past the point where the information has landed, until a conversation goes strange, then leaves at an angle instead of on a resolution. That held surplus is what Deleuze called dead time, and here it has a specifically 1984 cause. The therapeutic turn had handed Americans a complete vocabulary for feeling. You can know too much about love to move.

The debts run back past Altman. Sirk's Written on the Wind gave each character a fixed color in costume and décor so the emotion was legible before a line was spoken, and Jan Kiesser translates that grammar into the lounge's magenta-and-cyan practicals, where light doesn't fall on the actors so much as stain them. Some Came Running made commercial neon an expressionist source and paired it with color-coded costume for a woman whose surface reads as tawdry, the exact pairing Rudolph gives Lesley Ann Warren's Eve. Petulia supplied the associative cut, fragments joined by rhyme with pop music riding across the splice. In a Lonely Place supplied the shape: noir with the crime demoted to pretext, so that two people concealing their real selves across a few recurring rooms become the subject.

Forward, the colored night entered the American vocabulary ahead of Blue Velvet and Manhunter, and the interlocking-strangers roundelay ran on through Short Cuts and Magnolia. The stranger legacy is smaller. A record label part-owned the production company, the kind of arrangement that normally yields a soundtrack album with a movie attached. Rudolph turned the invoice into the film's second voice: a continuous fantasy of what love is supposed to sound like, playing over people who can't manage any of it.

Watch it again for the reflections, and for who shares a frame with whom. Rudolph rations the balanced two-shot so tightly that when two people finally occupy one, the film treats it as an event. The question he leaves open is the good one. If a performed self is the only self anyone here is offering, what would an honest one even look like?