Rocketman · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Rocketman is structured as a confession that refuses to be honest in the conventional sense — Elton John, in full stage regalia, walks into a rehab group and begins to narrate his own life, and from that moment the film operates as a crystal-image: actual and virtual become indiscernible as the therapy room folds into the Pinner council house of the 1950s, which dissolves into a glitter-drenched stadium fantasy, which erupts back into memory. The past is not recalled but staged, and the film never anchors us in the real long enough to tell which layer we inhabit. This crystalline instability licenses the powers of the false: Rocketman's narrator is a showman who has spent a career constructing "Elton John" out of the raw material of Reginald Dwight, and his confessional biography is itself another construction — songs erupt from emotional states rather than being performed for diegetic audiences, decades collapse anachronistically, and fantasy sequences levitate performers off stadium floors. The film doesn't simulate the past; it stages emotional truth and lets chronological fidelity be damned. These strategies are given body through George Richmond's mise-en-scène, whose palette shifts from the warm amber of domestic childhood through the blown-out spectacle of concert halls to the cold institutional white of the rehabilitation setting — each register a visual argument about the person Reginald Dwight is being forced to become. The confessional-therapy frame itself is a direct craft debt to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), whose showman-protagonist narrates his own dissolution to a spectral audience while musical fantasy sequences erupt around him, establishing the very template Rocketman's rehabilitation group inherits.