D.E.B.S. · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The world's most wanted criminal comes home from a bad blind date and complains about it to her best friend.

That's Lucy Diamond, and it's the whole film in one beat. Nothing in the scene is doing spy business. There is a lair, and it obviously looks like a set, but Angela Robinson has furnished it like an apartment and staffed it with a confidant, Scud, who sits there and listens to her relationship problems. Everything D.E.B.S. does to the spy picture, it does by putting throw pillows in Ken Adam's cavern.

Deleuze has two words for that gag, and they're worth borrowing. In Cinema 1 he takes from the logician Peirce a distinction between a mark and a demark. A mark is an object that means something because of the chain it habitually belongs to: the briefcase opens, expect gadgets; the enormous console room appears, expect the scheme explained aloud. Genre runs on marks. Goldfinger built the exact ones this film uses — the pre-credits mission tag, the gadget briefing, the villain lecturing inside an architecturally absurd room. Robinson can only redecorate the lair because Adam's hard-edged original is the default every viewer walks in already carrying.

A demark is an object that breaks its chain and forces you to interpret rather than recognize. Lucy's bad date is a demark. So is the best friend, so is the anxiety about whether the girl likes her back. The dossier's phrase is exact: villainy staged as ordinary life. D.E.B.S. is built almost entirely out of demarks, which is why the parody feels affectionate instead of cruel — Austin Powers had already established that a spoof could keep its saturated primaries and its title-card typography perfectly straight and never actually wound the genre. Robinson isn't demolishing the marks. She needs them intact. The film lives in the gap between what the chain promises and what she puts there.

Here is where the lens earns its keep, because you could file this movie as a broad spoof with thin plot mechanics and stop. Deleuze lets you say something more useful: the thinness is structural. His movement-image is a circuit — a character perceives a situation, acts, and the action changes the situation. That circuit is the spy film's engine at full power. Robinson, who cut the feature herself (rare for a studio release, and it explains everything about the rhythm), refuses to let the engine turn over. Fights are established, punctuated, abandoned. The sound design systematically declines the low end that would make violence land. Props look like props. A $3.5 million picture arriving at the end of a decade of digitized Bond and xXx escalation converts its poverty into a position: the action machinery is worn as a costume, not run as a mechanism.

And the girl at the center is the perfect score. Amy Bradshaw aces a secret test, buried in the SAT, that measures innate capacity to lie, cheat, steal and kill — she is the ideal sensory-motor subject the genre exists to produce. What she does with that gift is fail to close the circuit. She perceives her target and cannot act on the perception. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image, and he found it in postwar Italy, in bombed streets, in people who could only look at what had happened to them. It turns out it also happens in a comedy, in a plaid skirt.

What rushes into the vacated space is the face. M. David Mullen shoots the comic material flat, frontal and wide, poster-bright; the scenes between Amy and Lucy tighten, warm and soften. That isn't just romance grammar. For Deleuze the close-up is the affection-image — a feeling registered and not discharged into action, precisely what's left over when the sensory-motor link goes slack. Two lighting schemes, two regimes of the image, ninety-one minutes. The spoof is shot as a joke. The love story is shot as though it were true.

Colour gets there before the dialogue does. The D.E.B.S. house in clean whites and pastels, Lucy's world in reds and blacks, and Amy's drift between them registers chromatically first. Deleuze's absorbent colour: colour that takes up the whole scene and its feeling instead of describing objects. You can watch her defect by palette.

Then the uniform, which is the film's most durable invention and its sharpest idea. Late Deleuze, on the cinema of the body, calls a gest a posture that exposes the social relation holding it in place. Frank Helmer's plaid skirt, blazer and knee socks fuse the Catholic schoolgirl, the sorority pledge and the pin-up into one silhouette that is at once an instrument of institutional discipline and an obviously eroticized costume. Clueless got there first with Mona May's yellow tartan; Robinson makes it paramilitary, which tightens the screw — the uniform that disciplines you is the uniform that's looking at you. Charlie's Angels supplied the squad-in-costume template and the whip-pan pop-graphic cutting, and Robinson keeps both while stripping out McG's leering camera. Same bodies, non-ogling coverage. That subtraction is what makes the double coding legible instead of merely served.

Narratively, the consequence is that the plot becomes scaffolding whose only job is to keep two people in proximity. The picture runs on a romantic comedy's clock wearing an action film's watch. Robinson's mock-instructional prologue — inherited from the opening cheer that explains the rules in Bring It On — invents an institution and a history in one breath so the film never has to defend them, and the enemies-to-lovers spine and colour-coded personality slots come straight from magical-girl anime, Sailor Moon R, where villain and heroine were already in love.

Which brings up the part Deleuze would have found most interesting. His formula for minor cinema is that the people are missing — not that there's no audience, but that the collective a film addresses doesn't yet exist as a public, so the film has to help invent it. The record here reads like a diagram of that. POWER UP's grant existed because lesbian filmmakers weren't being financed. The $20,000 short's proof of concept was literally that people showed up and cheered, at Sundance, at Outfest, in Dublin. The feature got 45 theaters and $97,446 in three weeks. Then its public assembled itself anyway, on rental shelves and LiveJournal and Tumblr, over a decade — while Robinson went to Herbie, to The L Word, to Professor Marston, and her producer Andrea Sperling carried the same line from Araki through But I'm a Cheerleader to Transparent. The film didn't reach its people. Its people arrived late and stayed.

So: modest movie, real achievement. It showed that a genre's exhausted machinery could be borrowed whole, treated with affection, and used as a delivery system for a story the machinery had no slot for.

Watch it again for the lighting. The instant the frame stops being wide and flat, the movie stops being a parody — and it never once tells you which register it means.