Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Erin Brockovich
2000 · Steven Soderbergh · Erin Brockovich on Sightlines
She is on the floor of a storage room in a bright dress and heels, working through cardboard boxes of someone else's paperwork. It's a pro bono real-estate file: deeds, surveys, a utility company buying up houses in a desert town. And in among the property documents, blood work.
That page is the whole movie. Not for what it says, but for where it is. Deleuze has a useful pair of terms for this, from his account of what he calls the relation-image — the kind of shot that means something only because of a connection the viewer supplies. A mark is an object that makes sense out of habit: you see a property file, you expect escrow. A demark is the thing that doesn't belong, and it forces you to interpret instead of recognize. Legal thrillers run on demarks. What's unusual about Soderbergh's is that his stays boring. It's paper. It never turns into a gun. The film's entire dramatic proposition is that a woman reading can be filmed as a woman doing.
Deleuze splits the American action film into two shapes, and the difference matters here. In the large form, a vast situation presses down — a town, a war, a company — until someone acts decisively enough to change it. Situation, action, new situation. In the small form it runs backwards: somebody does something small, and the act discloses a piece of a situation nobody could see whole. Action, situation, next action. Detective films live there.
Erin Brockovich needs the small form, and not as a stylistic preference. Its situation is underground. A hexavalent chromium plume beneath Hinkley is not available to a camera. Nobody in this film can stand somewhere and look at the problem. So the story can only be disclosed, in fragments, at the speed of one knock on one door: a set of medical records, a water board archive, a kitchen table, another kitchen table. Deleuze calls the resulting shape a vector, a "line of the universe": a zig-zag stitching together places with no natural connection. Erin's line runs out of a storefront office lit like a dentist's waiting room, onto flat sunstruck highway, into Hinkley living rooms, and back. Ed Lachman shoots the two ends as different worlds, beige fluorescence at one, heat and dust at the other, handheld and loosely framed at both. That alternation of open milieu and taut working line is what Deleuze names respiration-space. The film breathes between the desert and the office.
Then it flips. Scattered sick families become a class, the class becomes a case, and the shape turns into the old large form after all: Hinkley as the synsign, the encompassing situation that calls out for an act big enough to answer it, and PG&E as the opposing force in a straight binomial, one woman set against a utility. The two mark each other, which is Deleuze's imprint. Erin makes the case and the case remakes Erin, down to what she can no longer be at home.
Here's the part worth arguing over. By 2000 this shape was supposed to be finished. The hinge in Deleuze's whole account of cinema is the crisis of the action-image: sometime after the war, characters stopped being able to react adequately to what they perceived, and the films that noticed became modern, full of people who watch and endure rather than solve. Soderbergh knew that history intimately; he had spent the nineties making restless, commercially marginal work. His invention here is to keep the intact old skeleton and shoot it with the camera of the crisis. Small crew, available light, loose frames, his own hand on the camera much of the time. The grammar developed to register a world you cannot act on, aimed at a story about acting on the world. That collision is why the film doesn't play as a message picture even though it is one. Behind the handheld is Bazin's old wager, that the photographed real carries an authority staging can't counterfeit, and this film borrows that authority on behalf of a legal claim.
The crisis does get its pocket. The domestic line, with Aaron Eckhart's George holding the kids while Erin works, is a strand where nothing she does resolves anything. She can see exactly what the case is costing and can act only by continuing. The triumph arrives shadowed, and that shadow is where the twentieth century's other cinema leaks in.
Costume carries an argument the dialogue never has to make. Erin's short bright clothes in rooms coded beige are staged as a provocation, and the film keeps the provocation running long past the joke. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this a gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible instead of stating it. Her body in a law office exposes who is permitted to look like what, and where expertise is assumed to live. The push-up bra in the logline isn't a gimmick. It's the film's thesis about class, worn.
Then the face. Deleuze distinguishes a reflecting face, which holds one quality steadily and beautifully, from an intensive one, where small movements build across the features toward a threshold. Julia Roberts arrived with the most valuable reflecting face in American movies. Soderbergh breaks it into features — profane, abrasive, tender, worn down. The twenty million dollars bought the star face; the performance spends it on the other kind. Albert Finney's Masry gives her something to push against, and the picture's comedy lives in that friction.
One more concept the film quietly enacts: a class action is a legal machine for converting a scattered crowd into a single plaintiff, and Deleuze's word for a collective rendered as one affective unit is the dividual. Modern political cinema, in his account, begins from the fact that the people are missing. This is a Hollywood film about a people being assembled, signature by signature, at kitchen tables. Sentimental, maybe. Also how tort law actually works.
None of it comes from nowhere. Norma Rae supplies the template: one working-class woman, no institutional power, the film built around a performance rather than procedure. Silkwood supplies the handheld observation of a blue-collar woman finding contamination, and Streep's deglamorized, tactile model that Roberts answers directly. The China Syndrome codified the suppressed-document structure. A Civil Action, two years earlier, had already dramatized toxic groundwater litigation and left the opening for someone to run it through a character instead of a docket. And the strangest debt of all: Anne V. Coates, who cut Lawrence of Arabia, cut this. The match-cut clarity that once carried a lit match to a desert sunrise is spent here making chromium-6, medical clustering and class certification move without stalling. That inheritance is invisible, which is exactly the point.
What the film did: it proved the sensory-motor circuit still runs on clerical work, and that a mid-budget adult drama carried by a woman could be a popular hit. The industry needed both arguments made in numbers. Alongside Traffic, released the same year and nominated against it for Best Director, it turned Soderbergh from an interesting director into a working method.
One last thing to watch for. The real Erin Brockovich appears in her own film as a waitress, serving the movie star currently occupying her life. For a second the actual person and her image share a frame, and it isn't obvious which one is the copy. That is Deleuze's crystal-image, the point where a thing and its reflection change places. The film doesn't pursue it; it's a wink. But it leaves a question hanging over a picture otherwise built on documents and verifiable harm. What is a true story, once someone else can play it better than you can?
Watch it again for the paper. Watch her hands.
Concepts in play
- action-image-small-form — The investigation proceeds act-by-act rather than from a visible whole: medical records found inside a pro bono real-estate file, then door-to-door encounters with affected families, each small act disclosing another fragment of a contamination nobody can see (a chromium-6 plume under Hinkley).
- demark — Medical records describing clustered illnesses turning up inside a property file — an object that breaks its customary chain and forces interpretation instead of recognition. The film's entire plot is generated by one misfiled page.
- line of the universe — Erin's repeated trajectory stitching together unconnected spaces: the beige-fluorescent storefront law office, sun-flattened Southern California highway, the dusty desert town, Hinkley kitchens, the water board archive, and back.
- respiration-space — Lachman's photography alternates the open, heat-and-dust milieu of the desert exteriors with the tight, beige interiors of the law office — wide milieu-space against the taut line of the case.
- action-image-large-form — The second half assumes the classic SAS' arc: the encompassing situation of a poisoned town and a utility's cover-up, pressed until the assembled class action forces the powerful to answer, transforming the situation.
- the encompasser — Hinkley itself — the town, its groundwater, its clustered illnesses — functions as the milieu that calls forth the action and gives the case its scale.
- binomial — One uncredentialed woman set directly against Pacific Gas & Electric; secondarily, the productive friction of Roberts against Finney's gruff, skeptical Masry, which supplies the film's comic and emotional rhythm.
- empreinte — Erin and the case remake each other: the vocation transforms her, and the screenplay's second line tracks the price it exacts on her family and her relationship, so that the triumph is shadowed by loss.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Two ways: Soderbergh grafts the post-crisis camera (handheld, available light, small crew, director operating) onto an intact sensory-motor spine; and the domestic strand with George and the children is a line where Erin perceives the cost clearly and can do nothing that resolves it.
- the-gest — Erin's revealing, brightly colored costume staged as a running social provocation in professional rooms designed as institutional beige — a posture that exposes who is permitted to look like what, and where expertise is assumed to live.
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Roberts's established star face — the luminous romantic-comedy contour, a single reflected quality — is broken into an intensive, feature-driven face: profane, abrasive, tender, relentless, with the camera close but the compositions refusing to heroize her.
- dividual — Class-action mechanics and medical clustering convert scattered sick families into a single plaintiff; the film dramatizes a collective being assembled one kitchen-table signature at a time.
- hyalosign — The real Erin Brockovich's cameo as a waitress, appearing in the film that bears her name to serve the star playing her — the actual person and her image exchanging places in a single frame.