Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Soul
2020 · Pete Docter · Soul on Sightlines
A seed drifts down through the air and lands in an open palm. A pizza crust. Light moving through the window of a subway car. These come near the end of Soul, offered quietly, with no argument attached, as the answer to the question the film has been chasing the whole way: what is a life for.
Hold onto that seed, because the interesting thing about Soul is the distance between it and the machinery that delivers you to it.
For most of its length this is a goal machine, and a very good one. Joe Gardner teaches middle-school band and wants to play jazz. He gets the audition at the Half Note, and then he's knocked out of his body. The rest is a fight to get back: a soul separated from its man, a clerical error somewhere upstairs, a bureaucracy of counselors and turnstiles standing between Joe and his own gig.
Deleuze had a name for that shape. He called it the movement-image, and its engine is simple: somebody perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. Perception runs into action the way a nerve runs into a muscle. He gave the name large form to the version where a whole encompassing world bears down on a man until he does the one decisive thing, and the encompassing world here is gorgeous. A New York of barbershops and tailor shops and a basement club lit at half power. Kemp Powers, co-directing and co-writing, made sure that the ordinary life being argued for was somebody's particular ordinary life, thick with a specific culture. The argument doesn't work otherwise. You can't defend ordinariness in general; you have to render it, shop by shop.
Then the film arrives at the spot where the machine is supposed to pay off, and puts a pizza crust there.
Deleuze's second great category came out of European cinema after the war, when the link between perceiving and acting stopped being believable. His term for what remains once action drops out is the pure optical situation: an image with nothing to do. You can only look at it. The character can only look at it. Time quits being the measure of movement and shows up as itself. That is exactly what the last movement of Soul is. The crust, the light, the seed are not steps toward anything. The plot is over; these are what lie on the far side of it. And the invention belongs to Docter and Powers specifically: they build a complete goal-driven plot in order to have something to switch off, and they do it in a film made for children.
Notice too that the cuts between those images join nothing. Crust, then light, then seed. No place links them, no cause. Deleuze, writing about Godard, called this the 'AND' — the cut that works across a gap instead of closing one. A list, not a chain. A life is not a chain; that's the film's whole position, and it's stated in the editing before it's stated in words.
Which is why 'the tyranny of Purpose' is the right phrase for what this movie is against. Purpose is the sensory-motor circuit wearing a motivational T-shirt. Perceive a lack, act, become. Soul runs on that circuit for two acts so it can argue with it in the third, and the argument is formal rather than verbal: here is what the shape you wanted feels like, and here is the other thing.
You can hear the two regimes before you can name them. The film hires two sound worlds. Jon Batiste plays Joe's piano, animated finger by finger, and jazz is time you count: a beat, a meter, a chorus that comes back around. The cosmic realms get Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, ambient and unpulsed, time you are simply inside. Two clocks for two planes of existence.
The planes look as different as they sound. New York has grain and shadow and that half-lit glow of a room below street level. The Great Before is a field of light with no corners in it. Deleuze had a category for that second thing. He called it lyrical abstraction, the cinema where light contends not with shadow but with white, and he found it in Dreyer and Bresson and named it the spiritual alternative. A family cartoon about souls reaches the same visual solution by an entirely different road. And 22, who has been inside that light for eons with nothing happening, is duration with the events removed. Deleuze called it dead time. Here it's scaled up to eternity and played for laughs.
Then there's the body. It's worth noticing what this film spends its money on. The premise is a man losing his body; the craft's obsession is hands, Batiste's performances animated one finger at a time, a posture at a keyboard rebuilt from nothing.
Nothing in animation is a recording. Bazin rested his case for cinema's realism on the photograph's automatic bond to whatever stood in front of the lens, and a drawing has no such bond, which is why his ontology never quite knew where to file a cartoon. Deleuze, in the few pages he gave animation, filed it with the movement-image: a figure caught permanently in the act of forming. Soul has to manufacture, frame by frame, the reality a camera merely receives, and then use that manufactured reality to persuade you that a pizza crust is enough. That it works at all is a strange and real achievement.
The lineage is unusually visible, and half of it is Docter arguing with himself. Monsters, Inc. gave him the rule-bound parallel dimension with its clerks and turnstiles, the blueprint for the You Seminar's soul-accounting. Inside Out gave him the method of turning an abstraction into a place you can walk through and populate with characters. Soul uses both and then insists that the walkable abstraction is not where a life is kept. Up gave him the wordless montage as the place in a family film where mortality gets told straight, and here that device migrates: in Up it summarizes a life near the beginning, in Soul it moves to the end and becomes the answer itself.
Further back, Here Comes Mr. Jordan supplies the machinery of a soul collected early by administrative error and sent back down. A Matter of Life and Death supplies the celestial civil service, the stairway, the clerical soul-counter, and above all the idea of giving each world its own palette, which is the direct ancestor of Docter's grain-versus-glow. Defending Your Life supplies the tone: the afterlife as a genial way-station where a finished life gets tallied. Watch what Soul does with that tally. Terry counts souls. The film's closing answer is a list that cannot be counted, delivered in a form that has no total.
There's a tension the film never resolves, and it may be the best thing about it: it needs the gig. The case against Purpose only lands because Joe's purpose was real, specific, and lovingly made. A film that actually disbelieved in ambition could not have animated those hands.
It was released into homes at the end of 2020, to an audience whose actions had been suspended for most of a year, who had been reduced against their will to looking out of windows. Deleuze's name for the figure who replaces the hero of the action-image is the seer: the one who watches and endures instead of acting. A film about learning to be one arrived in a winter that had made everybody one.
Watch it again and try this. Find the exact moment the film stops needing Joe to want something. It comes earlier than you remember. Everything after it is the movie quietly teaching you a different way to watch, and it never once tells you that's what it's doing.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The film runs a complete goal-driven plot (get back to the body, make the Half Note gig) and then puts a montage of pizza crust, subway light and a falling seed where the triumph belongs; the dossier's 'gentle argument against the tyranny of Purpose' is an argument against the sensory-motor circuit the film itself has been running.
- pure optical and sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The 'climactic quietness': a montage of small remembered things — pizza crust, subway light, a falling seed — images with nothing to do but be looked at, offered as the answer to everything.
- interstice / the 'AND' — Crust, then light, then seed: the closing montage joins its images across gaps with no spatial or causal link, a list rather than a chain — which is precisely the film's claim about what a life is.
- action-image, large form — An encompassing situation (death by accident, a soul separated from its body, a clerical error at the top) presses on Joe until he acts to reverse it; the plot mechanism inherited from Here Comes Mr. Jordan drives the whole first two acts.
- the encompasser — Joe's New York rendered with loving specificity — barbershops, tailor shops, the half-lit glow of a basement jazz club — as the particular milieu that calls him back and calls forth his action.
- lyrical abstraction — Two planes given two visual and sonic registers: the grain and shadow of New York against the luminous, cornerless fields of the Great Before, scored as ambient drift by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — 'two sound worlds for two planes of existence.'
- temps mort — 22 has spent eons in the You Seminar without anything happening — duration with the events taken out, held at cosmic scale and played comically.
- attitudes and postures / cinema of the body — Jon Batiste's piano performances animated finger by finger — the film lavishes its craft on the exact bodily posture the plot takes away from Joe, rebuilding a body at the keyboard from nothing.
- symbol — The falling seed in the closing montage: a single small object that condenses the film's organizing relation between a counted, purposeful life and an uncountable, savored one.