Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Big Fish
2003 · Tim Burton · Big Fish on Sightlines
The witch has a glass eye. Look into it and you see the way you're going to die. Young Edward Bloom looks. The film never tells us what he saw, and afterward he behaves like a man who knows how his story ends and has decided that since the ending is settled, the middle had better be worth hearing.
That eye is the whole movie sitting in one prop. It's a solid object you can hold, and it's an image of something that hasn't happened yet. Deleuze had a name for pictures that work this way: the crystal-image. Not a metaphor for memory. A thing cinema can actually do. In a crystal-image the actual (what the camera is pointed at, now) and the virtual (memory, dream, the version of you that hasn't arrived) fold so close together that you can't pull them apart and say which one is real. Mirrors do it. Glass does it. A glass eye with your death in it does it about as plainly as an image can.
Everything in the film comes out of that fold, including the light. Philippe Rousselot shot the bedside present cool and naturalistic, and the tall tales warm and saturated and golden: deep greens, a field of yellow daffodils, sunlit small-town Americana rendered as memory rather than as a place. That gold does the work Deleuze assigned to affective colour, where a colour stops describing a scene and absorbs it, feeling and all. You always know which register you're in. You are never told which one is true.
Will is a journalist, and journalists want one particular kind of image. Deleuze called it the recollection-image: the dated flashback, the one that says this happened, on this day, here it is, go check. Will has come home to build his father's biography out of those, and his father doesn't stock them. Edward's past isn't a filing cabinet. It's a country he wanders around in, telling the same regions out of order, in no fixed year, to anyone who'll sit still. Deleuze called that shape sheets of past: the past as an order you move through rather than a tape you rewind. Chris Lebenzon's cutting has to keep both shapes running at once, which is why the transitions feel like a man starting a story and another man refusing to hear it.
Here is where the Deleuzian lens earns its keep, because the ordinary reading of this film (learn to love your dad's exaggerations) is smaller than what the film is up to. Deleuze's claim in the powers of the false isn't that fiction is lovable. It's that undecidability can be productive, that you can build a cinema on images where true and false have stopped being separable and get something out of it that accurate images cannot give you. His figure for this was the forger, le faussaire, who is not a liar. A liar knows the truth and hides it. A forger makes a thing that then has to be dealt with. Edward Bloom is a traveling salesman. That is a forger's day job.
Watch what the film refuses to do with him. It never debunks. The stories are literally impossible, they are told as though they happened, and the movie holds both facts at once without blinking. That's falsifying narration: versions that can't both be true, both kept. Then the coda goes further and reveals that the fantastical figures had real counterparts. That should settle things. It doesn't, and this is the sly part. Once you've seen Karl the giant, you can't meet the real man underneath and see the real one first. The tale composed its object and then took its place. Deleuze's term for this is crystalline description, and here it works as the last joke of a life. Edward didn't falsify the facts. He outran them.
The craft decision underneath all of it is the one worth arguing about. Cinema's oldest contract, the one Bazin built his realism on, is that the camera had to be pointed at something. Films don't lie, or at least the photograph doesn't. In 2003, with digital imagery finally able to conjure anything at all, Burton mostly declined. Karl was Matthew McGrory, a genuinely very tall man, scaled by forced perspective and staging rather than compositing; the digital work went to the fish and to things nobody could build. So the impossible in this film was, to a surprising degree, actually there on the day. A computer-generated giant would have made Edward a liar. A photographed giant makes him a forger, which is a different creature, and it is Deleuze's creature. The debt runs straight back to Freaks, which put the marvelous outsider in front of a lens as a real body. Burton inherits an epistemology there, not just some circus iconography.
The rest of the family shows up too. Citizen Kane supplies the dead man reconstructed out of other people's partial tellings, though Kane keeps the reporter's premise that a solution exists somewhere; Big Fish drops the solution and keeps the search. Forrest Gump supplies the proven American shape, one folksy life threaded through improbable set-pieces, which is what John August externalized from Wallace's looser novel. Amarcord supplies small-town memory staged as grotesque spectacle rather than as record. The Wizard of Oz supplies the whole apparatus of a drab frame-world opening onto a saturated one with the same faces doubled across both, which is why Helena Bonham Carter gets to be Jenny and the Witch. And 8½ supplies the ending: Fellini's circus parade, the entire cast assembling as ring performers, becomes the riverbank procession where every tall-tale figure turns out to see Edward off.
What the film did to storytelling is in that riverbank scene. Will doesn't concede the argument. He takes over the telling and invents his father's death himself, in his father's idiom. Deleuze called this fabulation, catching people in the act of legending themselves. He meant it politically, for peoples who don't yet exist and have to story themselves into being, and Big Fish shrinks it down to one family in one hospital room. Make of the shrinkage what you like. The mechanism is intact: a fiction spoken out loud does something no accurate sentence available to Will could have done. It is the only language his father can be said goodbye in.
The film's standing has long outrun its box office, and its most literal descendant is a Broadway musical, a form that never pretended to photograph anything in the first place. Fair enough. What Burton did here was take the unreliable narrator, which usually operates as a trap sprung on an audience, and turn it into an inheritance.
Watch it again for the temperature of the light, and for what the camera was actually pointed at. Then ask the question the film leaves open. Does it ever ask you to believe Edward, or only to tell him back?
Concepts in play
- puissances du faux — The engine is an unreliable narrator whose unreliability is the point: Edward's tales are literally impossible, and the film's drama is never about debunking them but about what the telling produces.
- le faussaire — Edward Bloom, traveling salesman, serially remaking himself across a lifetime of adventures (the giant, the witch, the werewolf ringmaster), played by two actors the audience must accept as one continuous person.
- falsifying-narration — The film alternates a realist bedside frame with impossible interior tales and never adjudicates between them; the coda revealing real counterparts confirms embroidery on fact without settling which version stands.
- crystalline-description — Karl the giant (Matthew McGrory) so fully occupies the story that the coda's real counterpart can only be seen through the tale — the description has composed its object and replaced it.
- hyalosign — The witch's glass eye, an object you hold in your hand that contains an image of a death that hasn't happened: actual and virtual folded into one prop.
- order of time / coexistence — Edward's life comes in nested, non-chronological tales repeated at will rather than in dated sequence; Lebenzon's cutting braids the naturalistic present with them continuously.
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — Will, a journalist, returns home to assemble a verifiable dated biography from his father's past — precisely the kind of image Edward refuses to supply.
- story-telling / legending — In the finale Will invents Edward's death as a grand return to the river, taking over his father's idiom; the closing riverbank procession gathers every tall-tale figure.
- affective colour — Rousselot's warm saturated gold for the tall tales — deep greens, the field of yellow daffodils — against the cooler naturalistic bedside present, the film's core visual grammar.