Rocketman · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He comes down the corridor in horns. Orange sequins, devil wings, the Pinball Wizard costume — and he shoves through a door into a circle of folding chairs and tracksuits, sits down, and says he's an alcoholic. Watch that walk again, because it is the whole film compressed into one gesture. Almost every other musical biopic opens by promising to show you the real man behind the act. Rocketman opens by refusing to take the costume off. The man arrives already in disguise, and the disguise is the truth he has come to tell.

Deleuze has a precise name for what that refusal sets loose. He called it the powers of the false. By this he didn't mean lying. He meant something cinema had quietly agreed not to do: he meant images that stop measuring themselves against a real event and start producing their own truth instead. The biopic, more than any genre, lives under the opposite contract — the old realist faith, Bazin's faith, that the camera owes us what happened. Rocketman tears that contract up in its first minute and dares you to feel cheated. You don't, and the reason you don't is the most interesting thing about the film.

The finest version of this concept here is what Deleuze called fabulation — a subject caught in the act of legending himself. The group-therapy frame makes it literal. Elton is not remembering his life for us; he is telling it, composing it aloud to a room of skeptics in tracksuits who are present precisely so they can refuse to be dazzled. The recollection becomes a public act of self-invention. And the film backs this up at the level of sound: Egerton sings every number in his own voice, lower and rougher than John's, close to the records but never identical. That gap is deliberate. It marks the whole thing as interpretation, not impersonation — a forger making a truer Elton than reproduction could. This is what Deleuze meant by le faussaire, the forger who creates rather than copies. The slightly theatrical shimmer on the arrangements isn't a flaw in the karaoke; it's the film telling you, honestly, that it is making this up in order to get it right.

Once you grant the false its powers, the fantasy sequences stop being decoration and become argument. Take 'Crocodile Rock' at the Troubadour. As the song builds, the crowd lifts off the floor, the room swells into impossible grandeur, and Elton himself rises a few inches and hangs there, perfectly still, while the world levitates around him. Deleuze would call this the movement of the world: the figure goes quiet and the world takes over the motion, the way a dance can absorb the dancer until you can't tell who is moving whom. The mise-en-scène isn't documenting a great gig. It is staging the inside of a feeling. Lee Hall's script runs this as a strict rule — the more impossible the space, the more emotional pressure Elton is under — so that spatial unreality becomes a pressure gauge. The most fantastical imagery clusters around his lowest points, which is exactly where realist reconstruction would have the least to say.

And the costume-in-the-rehab-room? Deleuze would read it as a gest — a posture that exposes a relation rather than just illustrating a mood. The devil wings against the fluorescent white don't tell us Elton is sad; they make visible the whole contradiction the film is about, the performing body trapped inside the institutional one. The sound design works the same seam: a piano chord struck by a boy in his grandmother's sitting room cuts straight into full orchestration. The image composes its object and then replaces it — crystalline description, in Deleuze's phrase. The song stops being a record of something that happened and becomes the thing happening.

None of this is invented out of nothing, and the lineage matters. The confessional showman narrating his own dissolution to a spectral audience is Fosse's All That Jazz worn down to its bones, and behind Fosse stands 8½, Fellini restaging a life for an imagined crowd — fabulation's grandfather. The trick of prying songs loose from their original moment and reassigning them to new emotional weather is Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, the powers of the false applied to a back catalogue. The levitations and the stage-to-life dissolves carry the British charge of Ken Russell's Tommy. And the whole structural wager — letting a fantasy interpolation rupture the realist register to externalize a psyche — is Minnelli's closing ballet in An American in Paris, except Rocketman refuses to quarantine it in the last reel and lets it colonize the entire biography.

What the film did to its genre is worth saying plainly. Dexter Fletcher had just finished Bohemian Rhapsody, a film criticized for tidying its subject into a reassuring truth. Rocketman is the rebuttal. It argues that an openly false autobiography can be more faithful than a careful reconstruction, because it answers to the feeling rather than the record. That is a real claim about what biography on film is for. So here is the question it hands you on the way out: when a life is set to music, which is the document — the footage that swears it's true, or the lie that knows your face better than the truth did?