Bohemian Rhapsody · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the teeth. Freddie Mercury had four extra incisors and never fixed them, convinced the crowded mouth gave his voice its range. To play him, Rami Malek wore a set of custom prosthetics and had to relearn the simple act of closing his jaw around a vowel. That little fact is the whole film in miniature: an absence rebuilt, molded, fitted over a living actor until the seam almost disappears. Bohemian Rhapsody is a machine for resurrection, and Deleuze gives us a surprisingly exact way to say why it both thrills and evaporates.

The thrill is the easy part. This is the movement-image running at full throttle — what Deleuze called the action-image, the sensory-motor circuit where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. A band forms in a pub. Tension builds in a rehearsal room. A record executive sneers, and the next scene answers him with a hit. Every beat resolves into the next; nothing is endured, everything is overcome. Deleuze had a name for the grand version of this — the large form, where a whole encompassing situation (Queen fracturing, Mercury's life spiralling, the catalogue itself as a kind of destiny) presses and presses until one decisive act transforms it. Here the act is Live Aid. The film is built so that twenty minutes at Wembley can redeem two hours of damage. That is not a flaw in the screenplay; it is the action-image doing exactly what it was invented to do.

What keeps the circuit closed is organic montage — the American kind, the grammar of convergent parallel cutting and the last-minute reconciliation. Watch the structure: the songs arrive as chapter-markers, each one a milestone in a tidy chronology, and just before the climactic concert the estranged band patches its wounds so the rescue can land on time. This is pure D.W. Griffith logic transposed onto a jukebox. And it is inherited, very precisely. La Bamba taught the biopic to use a catalogue as narrative furniture; Walk the Line proved a broken timeline could be healed by a single live performance; Ray made prosthetic transformation the Oscar-bearing instrument of the form. Bohemian Rhapsody scales every one of those debts up to stadium size.

Now the part Deleuze sharpens. The film's two most charged objects — the teeth, the reconstructed Wembley — are not action at all. They are signs. Mercury's incisors function as what Deleuze called a mark: an object meaningful through a fixed chain of association, the thing you point to and say 'that is him.' The film leans on it the way a relic is leaned on. The stage is stranger. The production built a full-scale replica of Wembley at an aerodrome, populated it with thousands of extras and visual effects, and matched the 1985 set close to costume and gesture. On the soundtrack, Mercury's own recordings are blended with a soundalike singer and with Malek's voice in proportions the production never fully disclosed. Hold that thought: a present performance you cannot cleanly separate from the recorded past it imitates.

That is a crystal-image, the hyalosign — Deleuze's figure for a moment where the actual and the virtual, the present and its memory, become impossible to tell apart. The sound mix even stages it directly: it borrows the tonal quality of the original 1985 broadcast to summon your memory, then swells into fuller contemporary production for the emotional peak. You are watching Malek and remembering Mercury and hearing both at once, and the film will not let you sort which is which. For a few minutes the biopic stops narrating and starts to do something genuinely uncanny — it brings a dead man back by making his copy indiscernible from him. Call it the powers of the false put to tender use: the forgery aims not to deceive but to resurrect.

Which is why the film matters more than its modesty suggests, and also exactly where it stalls. By the 1980s Deleuze thought the action-image was in crisis — that cinema's great subject had become characters who can no longer act on what they see, who can only watch and endure. Bohemian Rhapsody refuses that crisis. It restores the old machine and runs it without irony, untroubled by the clichés it moves through, and a worldwide audience of over $900 million answered. It demonstrated that the perfected sensory-motor circuit still has enormous power to move a crowd — and it borrowed the means from Scorsese's The Last Waltz, whose multi-camera concert grammar, direct address cut against wide stage tableaux, is the formal ancestor of the Live Aid recreation.

So the honest reading is double. As drama it is weightless, because nothing is ever endured long enough to leave a mark; the circuit always closes. As an act of cinematic necromancy it is something rarer. The teeth, the stage, the layered voice all serve one ambition: to make the image of a person and the person himself impossible to separate. Watch it again for that. Skip past the rehearsal-room clichés and wait for the moment the crystal forms — when you genuinely cannot say whether you are seeing an actor, a recording, or the man, and the film, briefly, is more interesting than it knows.