Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the glass. Somewhere in Love Is the Devil a man's face swells and slides across the bottom of a tumbler — a nose blooming out of scale, an eye stretched long — and you catch yourself looking at a Francis Bacon painting the film is legally forbidden to show you. The Bacon estate refused to license a single canvas. John Maybury took the ban and turned it into a method. If you cannot photograph the art, photograph the world the way the art already sees it.

That refusal is the whole key, and Deleuze happens to have a name for what Maybury did. He separates an ordinary description, which points at a thing sitting out there independent of the image, from what he calls a crystalline description: an image that stands in for its object, replaces it, creates and erases it in the same gesture. Think about how a normal biopic works. Its shots are captions to a life we assume exists somewhere off-screen; when it wants the paintings, it cuts to the paintings. Maybury has no paintings to cut to. There is no canvas on the wall. So the smear through the ashtray, the flesh pinned in a pool of light against engulfing black, the mouth crowded with teeth — these do not illustrate Bacon's work. They take its place. The film composes the very thing it is not allowed to reproduce, and then leaves you unable to say where 'Bacon's vision' ends and 'the film's vision' begins. Name the lens and the optical tricks stop looking like showing-off. They become the only honest way to film a painter whose real subject was the meat under the face.

Stay on the face a moment, because Deleuze would send us straight to the close-up, the affection-image. He notes that a filmed face can work two ways. It can reflect — a smooth contour holding one steady quality, wonder or calm — or it can be a face of features, worked over from inside by small intensities that push it toward something it can't yet discharge. Maybury shoots almost nothing but the second kind. Jaws distended through curved glass, skin crowding the lens, eyes and teeth in extreme close-up until, as the dossier puts it, the human face becomes 'the unstable, meat-like object Bacon painted.' The face here is never a window onto a settled feeling. It is a surface under pressure.

And underneath the Soho wit, a slower pressure. Watch George Dyer, the East End burglar who fell through the skylight into Bacon's bed, being — the film's phrase — 'slowly unmade.' Deleuze calls this register the impulse-image, and its signature is a line of slope: beneath the manners and the epigrams runs a world of raw drives, appetite and compulsion and dependency, dragging a body down an irreversible incline toward exhaustion and death. Drink, pills, humiliation. The recurring shot of Dyer on the toilet — one of Bacon's own compositional subjects, staged as living tableau rather than copied as canvas — is exactly this: the private drive erupting through the social skin. The clubs and the studio are the derived milieu; the originary world of drives is what keeps showing through them.

The milieu itself is dying in a particular way. The Colony Room, Muriel Belcher's smoke-filled monarchy, is 'cruelty disguised as conviviality' — an ordered, aristocratic little kingdom rotting from within. Deleuze has a name for that too: crystal-decomposition, the closed world that curdles as you watch it. Tilda Swinton presides over a court that feeds on its own.

None of this is told as action. The film opens already in the shadow of Dyer's death and circles back through the affair toward a catastrophe we're never allowed to forget is coming. Nobody acts to change a situation; they endure it. This is Deleuze's time-image in its plainest form — pure optical situations, a watcher rather than an agent — and the editing enforces it, breaking chronology with nightmare inserts and the repeated image of Dyer falling, so the affair arrives less as a sequence of events than as a memory-field collapsing toward its known end.

Maybury did not invent this out of nothing, and the lineage matters because film is an argument films have with each other. He learned the painter-film from Derek Jarman directly — Caravaggio's model of dramatizing an artist through tableaux vivants instead of showing him paint, and The Last of England's degraded associative montage, which Maybury cut inside Jarman's own unit. The warping optics and dissolving identities come out of Roeg and Cammell's Performance; the achronological love-as-foreknown-disaster out of Roeg's Bad Timing; the fish-eyed interior that externalizes a disturbed mind out of Polanski's Repulsion. What Maybury added, and what makes this a late peak of the British queer avant-garde, is the discovery that a biopic can be truer to its subject by refusing to show the work at all.

So watch it again, and notice how seldom you are allowed to see straight. Every time the image bends, ask what it is standing in for. The answer is always the same thing: a painting that isn't there, and never was, and had to be conjured out of skin.