Basquiat · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy stands in front of Guernica with his mother. A paper crown comes down onto his head. Nobody explains it. The film performs the anointing and moves on.

The crown turns up again later, on the canvases. So do the anatomical diagrams, the crossed-out words, the griot heads. And here is the fact that reorganizes the whole movie once you know it: not one of those canvases is a Basquiat. The estate refused permission. So Julian Schnabel, who was in those rooms in 1981 and had ridden the same Neo-Expressionist boom that lifted Basquiat off the sidewalk, painted the fakes himself with his assistants, in the dead man's idiom.

Deleuze would not have called that a production problem. He would have called it the powers of the false, his name for what happens when a film stops treating truth as something to be found and starts treating falsity as something to be made. The figure who takes over at that point is the forger: not a swindler in the plot but the creative principle itself, a maker of versions who never settles into one identity. Basquiat has forgers all the way down. Basquiat forges a persona — SAMO©, with the copyright symbol attached to graffiti. Schnabel forges Basquiat's hand. Bowie forges Warhol while wearing Warhol's actual wig and glasses, obtained from the Warhol holdings, a relic borrowed to authenticate an impersonation. Even the score is inside the loop: John Cale, who was in the Velvet Underground when Warhol put his name on the band, plays the Warhol scenes.

Why bother with the vocabulary? Because the ordinary description — the estate said no, so they used replicas — makes this sound like a compromise the film survived. It isn't. It's the film's engine.

Cinema's oldest promise is that the camera doesn't lie. Whatever is on the film was in front of the lens, and realist theory from Bazin onward built its ethics on exactly that transfer. Basquiat keeps the promise and produces a falsehood with it. Everything photographed was really there: real oilstick, real studio, real New York. Almost none of it is real. Deleuze has a term for images that build their object and then quietly take its place, crystalline description, and thirty years on that is what happened here. Most people who have seen a Basquiat painting in a movie have seen a Schnabel.

Then the film does something stranger. Gary Oldman plays Albert Milo, a successful painter modeled openly on the director, and Milo's studio, house and plate paintings are Schnabel's studio, house and actual plate paintings. Two kinds of picture hang in one movie. On Milo's walls, authentic work by the man holding the camera. On Basquiat's, counterfeits by the same wrist. The camera treats both the same way: warm, frontal, patient. This is close to what Deleuze means by the crystal-image, a place where the real thing and its double keep exchanging positions until you lose the ability to say which is which. Schnabel filmed himself as a character in the rise of the artist whose work he was faking, and left the conflict of interest in the frame. When Basquiat and Warhol paint together, the film stages the same asymmetry in miniature — silkscreen and Polaroid against oilstick and spray can, an apparatus for multiplying pictures meeting a hand, and the machine absorbs the hand more easily than the reverse.

The narration keeps the machinery running. René Ricard's voice-over speaks in art-critical prose, the register Ricard invented in the 1981 Artforum essay "The Radiant Child" that made Basquiat's name. Deleuze separates ordinary dialogue from the speech act: a voice that doesn't converse but legends, turning a life into a story while you watch. Ricard's voice is that. The film narrates Basquiat in the discourse that ate him, which you can read as critique or as symptom. It won't decide for you.

Underneath sits Deleuze's fabulation, people caught in the act of inventing themselves as legend. Basquiat takes Charlie Parker's life and death as an explicit template and paints it: CPRKR, Charles the First. He crowns a dead saxophonist. That habit connects to the hardest observation the film makes, and it makes it with blocking and no dialogue at all. Basquiat is composed as the only Black figure in white rooms, again and again — the gallery basement where a dealer installs him to produce on demand, the collector's table where he is seated as an ornament. Deleuze's phrase for the condition of modern political cinema is that the people are missing: the artist can't address a community that already exists, so the work has to invent one. Watch Basquiat put griot heads into those rooms and you are watching a man assemble the audience the room does not contain. Without that lens this is another lonely-genius story. With it, the loneliness is structural.

The biopic normally runs on cause and effect. A man wants, acts, the world changes. Michael Berenbaum's cutting refuses the engine. Scenes start late and stop before resolution. Years pass with no marker but a new address. The ascent arrives as a pile, a party and a dealer and a check and a better apartment, rather than a ladder of achievements. Deleuze calls this slackening weak links, causality loosened until events merely sit beside one another. The decline is done by subtraction: fewer people in the frame, longer holds, more silence. The death is not staged. That withholding is the most disciplined thing in the picture.

The grammar came from somewhere. Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise gave Schnabel the scene-as-single-tableau, the blackout, the leap across years, the deadpan hero who won't explain himself. Downtown 81 is the source text he restages, Basquiat wandering Lower Manhattan trying to sell one canvas. Ahearn's Wild Style taught him to hold on a painted wall after the actors leave it, which is why this camera stays on a surface, a smear, a struck-through word long past narrative need. Deleuze would call that a lectosign, the image that stops being immediately legible as action and asks instead to be read. Basquiat's surfaces are literally writing, and writing crossed out, so what you read is the erasure. Warhol's Chelsea Girls supplied the method of running film on a scene participant performing a heightened version of himself, a loop closed by casting Bowie, whose watching-from-outside surface Roeg had already made available in The Man Who Fell to Earth, along with the associative cutaway that becomes the sky. And Jarman's Caravaggio is the painter-director template entire: tableaux lit like canvases, cheerful anachronism, the dealer economy staged as still composition instead of drama.

The sky. A wave rolls across the space where the Manhattan skyline should be, and a surfer crosses it. The film was shot on 35mm in 1996, before the digital intermediate, so the effect is optical, done in a printer. No character sees it. It isn't a memory or a dream anyone is having, and the dialogue never touches it. Deleuze distinguishes two offscreens: the relative one, the next room you could walk into, and the absolute one, which has no location at all and points at something the film cannot put anywhere in space. The wave is the second kind. It is the only place in the movie where Basquiat gets out.

Schnabel had never worked in the industry and made this at forty-four, and he found the answer most artist biopics still miss. When you can't show the art, film the making of a version and let the version be visibly yours. Jon Kilik, who produced it, would go on to produce Schnabel's later films. What stays is the question the crown asks in the first minute and never answers: who gets to do the legending? Watch the walls. Nearly everything Basquiat paints on screen and everything Milo paints on screen came off the same brush, and only one of those walls admits it.