Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Moneyball
2011 · Bennett Miller · Moneyball on Sightlines
A man walks a concrete corridor under a ballpark. Above him a crowd is reacting to something, and he will not go look at it. He built the thing that's happening up there. He can't be in the room with it.
That's Billy Beane for most of Moneyball, and it's the strangest decision in the movie: a sports film that keeps its hero away from the sport. Bennett Miller and Wally Pfister shoot the ballpark as tunnels, offices, a weight room. The game arrives as sound — radio play-by-play, crowd noise, the flattened audio of a television feed — while the camera stays with the man not watching.
Deleuze gives you a way to say what that's for.
Start with an argument he takes from Bergson, before cinema even enters the book. Two sciences of motion. The older one thinks in privileged instants: the pose, the peak, the moment worth carving into marble, from which the rest of the movement gets inferred. The newer one thinks in the any-instant-whatever: motion sampled at equal intervals, every tick weighted the same, no instant more important than its neighbours. Film is born on the second side. Twenty-four ordinary instants a second.
Moneyball is a two-hour argument between those two sciences, staged around a table of aging scouts. The scouts read privileged instants. They talk about a player's body, his swing, the intangible look of a ballplayer, and extrapolate a career from the pose. Peter Brand's laptop reads any-instants-whatever: on-base percentage, expected runs, every unremarkable plate appearance across a 162-game season counted exactly as much as the famous one. The film knows this is what the fight is about, and its own form picks a side. Christopher Tellefsen's editing gives you the grind, compressing the season into rhythm, and when the twenty-game streak comes it arrives as accelerating cuts rather than one carved moment.
Why bother with the vocabulary? Because without it you say the film is "restrained" and stop there. With it you can say what the restraint is doing. The movie holds the same position about images that its hero holds about players: highlights are an overvalued asset.
That isn't only theory here, it's the man's biography. Miller and Tellefsen cut repeatedly back to Beane's own playing career — the recollection-image, Deleuze's name for the dated flashback, a former present we're sent to visit. Beane was the heralded prospect whose measurables never converted. He was a privileged instant. He was precisely the pose the scouts love, and he didn't produce. The film never has him explain his epistemology. It cuts, and you assemble it.
Now the genre. Deleuze's action-image is the engine of classical cinema: a character perceives a situation, acts, and the act transforms the situation. Baseball movies are one of its last intact temples, the swing that redeems the season, the mythology The Natural runs on. What breaks in Moneyball is the link between perceiving and acting. Beane sees his situation with total clarity and has no money, no bat, no place on the field. This is the crisis of the action-image, which Deleuze diagnosed in postwar Europe, where the answer was drift and the aimless trip. American cinema found a different answer: the procedure. Work became the last available form of action, and that's the tradition Moneyball comes out of. All the President's Men built suspense from phone calls and paperwork and made the investigation itself the plot. The Insider gave the corporate room its telephone audio and its interior pressure. The Social Network handed Sorkin the grammar for staging non-physical work as combat.
So action gets relocated into speech and arithmetic. Deleuze calls that the reflection-image: action transposed into figure and discourse instead of performed. The most consequential physical event in Moneyball is a man on a phone in a weight room, among barbells, saying a sentence that moves a human being between cities.
Back in the corridor: Deleuze's pure optical and sound situations, the moments when a character can only look or listen because nothing else is on offer. Beane's superstition converts the genre's whole climactic apparatus into sound. It's also the action-image's small form working by an index of lack, a gesture that implies a situation we aren't shown. We get a face, a corridor, a roar through concrete, and we infer the play. Those tunnels and fluorescent offices are any-spaces-whatever, spaces emptied of the action they were built to serve. Pfister shoots them in institutional green and grey, which is the honest colour of the job.
Pitt holds all of it in the body. He's always in motion, tossing a ball, chewing, pacing, while everyone he argues with sits still. Deleuze's gest is a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a private feeling, and this is one: a man whose job has taken his body out of the only work he was ever trained for, and whose body hasn't accepted the news.
Then the ending refuses to be one. The A's take the streak, lose in the playoffs, and Beane turns down a record salary from Boston. The climax has been displaced twice, first from the competitive to the epistemic, since the method wins even though the season doesn't, and then onto the father and the daughter, the film closing on her recording of "The Show." A studio sports picture that ends on a song instead of a trophy is doing something to narrative the genre had not licensed.
The craft debts are specific. Zaillian had already turned a ledger into dramatic architecture once, on Schindler's List; a spreadsheet is the same problem solved a second time. Miller carried his own Capote method forward whole, muted design, performance built from behaviour, a flat refusal of uplift. Broadcast News is the ancestor for competence and its cost played wry instead of heroic. Forward, the film stands at the head of the early-2010s institutional dramas that The Big Short would later join, and it put a word into general use for the data-driven overturning of any craft that trusted its eyes.
One ghost worth knowing. Soderbergh had this project first, with a hybrid design folding documentary interview footage of the real players into the drama, and Sony shut it down days before shooting. Something survived: the archival and broadcast-style material that gives the finished film its documentary grain. Which leaves a live question hanging over a movie about measurement. What would the version have looked like that let the actual men speak, and would it have been better, or only braver?
Watch it again for where the camera is whenever the crowd makes noise. That's the entire argument.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — Sabermetrics as the film stages it: on-base percentage and expected runs derived from every ordinary plate appearance across a 162-game schedule, with Tellefsen's montage compressing the grind rather than isolating a decisive play.
- privileged-instants — The veteran scouts reading a player's 'body,' 'swing,' and intangibles — extrapolating a career from a pose — against Brand's laptop and printouts.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — A sports drama with almost no on-field heroics: Beane perceives his situation clearly but has one of baseball's smallest payrolls and no position on the field; the film withholds triumph, winning the streak and losing the playoffs.
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — The interwoven flashbacks to Beane's own failed playing career — a heralded prospect whose measurables never translated — used to explain his distrust of scouting orthodoxy without speechifying.
- pure optical & sound situations — Beane pacing empty corridors and listening to the radio, unable to watch; crowd noise, play-by-play and televised broadcast audio standing in for images of the game.
- index-of-lack — The game arrives 'as sound before spectacle' — the mix gives the swell of stadium sound at decisive moments while the camera holds on a man in a tunnel, so the play is inferred rather than shown.
- espace quelconque — Stadium tunnels, cramped offices, clubhouses and a spartan weight room in fluorescent greens and greys — connective spaces emptied of the action they were built to serve.
- the Figure — Trades executed by phone in the weight room, and Miller's staging of key scenes as chamber pieces of argument: the film's consequential acts occur as speech, not event.
- the-gest — Pitt blocked in constant motion — tossing a ball, chewing, pacing — against static, skeptical interlocutors, temperament reading through physical behaviour.