Uncut Gems · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film opens inside a rock. The camera travels into the smuggled Ethiopian opal and finds galaxies swimming in there, deep color, deeper time. Then a cut, and we are inside Howard Ratner instead: a colonoscopy, the same wet iridescence, the lens spelunking his gut. Years in the writing, and the Safdies key their whole picture to that rhyme. The gem and the body are the same cavern. Whatever Howard thinks he's chasing out in the Diamond District, its source is in there — primordial, glistening, and it is going to ruin him.

Deleuze had a name for movies built around a drive like this. He called it the impulse-image, and reserved it for a strange cinema he traced through Stroheim and Buñuel and the naturalism of Zola. It sits between feeling and action. A character no longer perceives a situation and acts to change it; he is gripped by an appetite that uses him. Howard is the purest specimen American film has produced. The dossier puts it plainly: he doesn't want money, he wants the feeling of the win. Every parlay, every reckless doubling-down, is what Deleuze would call a symptom — not a strategy but the visible twitch of a drive underneath. You can't out-argue it, because it isn't reasoning. It's hunger wearing a sales pitch.

The impulse-image always runs on two layers of world, and the Safdies give you both with unusual clarity. There is the derived milieu — the real, geographic, buzzer-locked Diamond District, shot on 35mm by Darius Khondji with long lenses that crowd Howard into his own vestibules and back offices. And beneath it, erupting through it, the originary world: the mine, Ethiopia, the opal's interior, the cosmos the camera found in the first shot. The derived milieu is the social surface. The originary world is the savage source, and the opal is the piece of it that has been torn loose and carried into Manhattan. That makes the gem a fetish in the exact sense — a part-object detached from its origin and charged with a force no appraisal can fix. Watch what it does to people. Kevin Garnett, playing himself, looks into it and goes somewhere mystical; his playoff body lights up. The stone organizes the whole economy of pawning and re-pawning around a value nobody can actually hold.

What the impulse-image bends toward, finally, is the line of slope: an irreversible descent toward exhaustion. Stroheim's Greed crawls down it; Howard sprints. And here is the Safdies' real invention. Historically this was a cinema of squalor and slow rot. They built it at the tempo of a panic attack. The achievement is in the cutting room as much as on set — Ronald Bronstein and Benny Safdie sustain over two hours of overlapping dialogue, scenes severed before they resolve, a continuous wall of talk the edit refuses to clarify. The current coarse tag for this is post-continuity, and it fits: continuity editing exists to let a perception settle into a decision, and this film won't grant the pause. The cut is the drive's metabolism. You are never allowed to stop moving because Howard can't.

It's worth saying why this isn't simply an action-image, the regime of the classic thriller where a man sizes up a situation and acts to transform it. Howard is in perpetual motion, situation and act firing without rest. But nothing he does changes the situation; each exit deepens the trap. That mismatch is the tell. The energy isn't directed outward at a problem to be solved — it loops back and feeds on itself. The sensory-motor circuit is running hot and producing nothing but more circuit.

The lineage is legible in the craft. Mean Streets gave the Safdies the doomed hustler scheming inside a tight ethnic enclave; After Hours gave them the structure where every attempt to get out tightens the noose; Dog Day Afternoon gave them the sweat-soaked single container and the shouted, overlapping real-time pressure the diamond store inherits. The King of Comedy is the closest precedent for the casting coup — DeNiro and Lewis dragged out of comfort into dramatic discomfort, the move the Safdies make by stripping the goodwill out of Adam Sandler's manic persona and leaving only the motor. And their own Good Time is the immediate prototype: the long-lens compression, the non-professional faces, Daniel Lopatin's synth score driving a single propulsive panic.

That score is where the film breathes, and where Deleuze's oldest idea slips in. Lopatin's shimmering arpeggios sit in cool counterpoint to the on-screen frenzy, watching Howard from a vast, indifferent distance. It is the opal's point of view. For a few seconds at a time the picture stops being Howard's body and becomes something like the plane of immanence — a non-human vision, the universe regarding matter without preference. The film opens and closes there, in the gem. Everything in between is appetite.

What Uncut Gems did to film as an art is small and exact. It proved naturalism's downward slope could be engineered as forward drive, that the cinema of rot could be made to feel like momentum. "Uncut Gems energy" entered the language because the Safdies turned dread into a duration you could schedule and survive. Next time, watch for the two moments the camera leaves Howard's body: the rock at the start, the rock at the end. Those are the only times the film lets you see the slope from outside. Howard never gets to.