The Fantastic 4: First Steps · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A chrome figure stands on a board and doesn't move.

Everything else does. Stars slide past, dust streams, a planet swells up underneath her. Julia Garner plays the Silver Surfer — this version is Shalla-Bal, not Norrin Radd — with almost no expression, and because the character's whole body is rendered as a mirror, what you read on her isn't feeling so much as the room she's in, bent and handed back. Jess Hall shoots her in high key. No shadows to hide in.

Deleuze has a name for a shot built this way. Writing about musicals, he noticed that great dancers stop initiating movement at some point: the world takes over and the dancer is carried by it. He called this the movement of world. The figure goes still and the universe does the traveling. It's why the Surfer scenes feel unlike anything else in the picture. She isn't acting. She's being moved, by something that decided a long time ago.

Stay on her face another beat. In Deleuze's vocabulary the close-up is an affection-image: not a small picture of a person, but a face lifted out of the coordinates of space and action, holding a feeling that hasn't been spent yet. When the face reflects rather than works, he calls it a qualisign — one pure quality, wonder or dread or grief, expressed and never discharged. Garner gives you exactly one and never cashes it. That's the whole performance, and it's why the herald reads as frightening and sorry at the same time.

The rest of the film is the opposite of this, on purpose. Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben perceive a situation and act to change it, and their actions work. Deleuze's term for that machinery is the action-image, in its large form: a global situation presses down until a decisive act transforms it. Galactus is the pressure. He's also, in a very literal sense, what Deleuze calls the synsign or encompasser — the enveloping milieu that calls action out of people. Usually the encompasser is a climate: the Depression, the frontier, a city. Here somebody built it a face and made it the size of a solar system, and the film sets one family against it as force against force. Deleuze's word for that opposition is the binomial. The Fantastic Four have always been an odd fit for it, because they're a household rather than a champion, and the film knows this: the threat is answered by solidarity and sacrifice, not by a winner.

Deleuze thought this whole circuit broke after the war. Characters stopped being able to respond adequately to what they saw; they started watching instead of acting. Most of the cinema that gets called serious has lived on the far side of that break ever since. Superhero movies are the last large commercial reservoir of the intact action-image, which is part of why critics find them juvenile and audiences find them restful. First Steps doesn't apologize for this. Sincerity over quip, the ensemble pitched earnest, no character standing slightly outside the movie to let you know they've noticed it's a movie. That refusal is a formal position, and it costs something.

Here is the film's real invention, and it's a decision about the sky. Deleuze distinguishes two kinds of out-of-field. The relative kind is the space just past the edge of the frame, the next room, somewhere you could walk. The absolute kind is an outside that isn't anywhere in particular — the Open, the sense that the whole is larger than any set and can change. The shared-universe model had quietly converted every absolute out-of-field into a relative one. Whatever lay beyond the frame was another film, a corridor, a release date. Shakman walls this picture off in its own universe. He gives up the crossover and gets back an empty sky. Galactus can arrive as an outside rather than as a neighbor. Closing the set is what makes the beyond mean anything again.

That sealed world is also, strictly speaking, made of nothing. The production design — Googie curves, tailfins, atomic ornament, analog dials, H.E.R.B.I.E. rolling through the Baxter Building — isn't nostalgia for 1961. It's nostalgia for 1961's future, which never arrived and never existed. Deleuze, working through what he calls crystalline description, describes images that compose their own object and then stand in for it: the thing has no existence apart from the describing. Earth-828 has no original. Nothing here is a copy of anything. Every dial is an assertion. Which is exactly why the film's un-ironic tone is structural rather than a mood — a world with no referent is held together only by conviction, and the first flinch of a wink turns the whole set into pastiche.

One more move, easy to miss because it's an absence. The film skips the origin. Deleuze calls an object that means by its customary chain a mark: see this, expect that. First Steps treats the entire cosmic-ray accident as a mark and simply doesn't stage it. Sixty-plus years of comics already played the first act; the chain is in the audience. What the film buys with the recovered time is a marriage, a pregnancy, and a newborn, which is where its actual drama lives. Structurally this is Griffith — parallel montage alternating the enormous and the domestic, converging on a rescue — with a world-eater in the large slot and Franklin Richards in the small one. The Galactus bargain is the terror of new parenthood given a body: an overwhelming thing that comes whether or not you're ready.

Its debts are specific. Metropolis supplies the idiom of a monumental machine-age built world. Forbidden Planet supplies the clean Space Age hardware language the props quote directly. 2001 supplies both the large-format photography of pristine mid-century interiors and the harder tonal lesson: stage cosmic transcendence as awe, not menace, the register the Surfer material reaches for. The Iron Giant supplies atomic dread filtered through sincere Americana. The Incredibles supplies the superpowered family as domestic melodrama in Googie, down to Giacchino's retro-orchestral scoring. Sky Captain supplies the method itself, the proof that a feature can sustain one controlling invented aesthetic without irony. What First Steps sends forward is harder to name this soon, but the argument it puts back on the table is clear enough: a franchise film can be a coherent designed object, and coherence may require closing the door.

So watch the Surfer again and notice she never moves. Then watch the sky, which is empty, and ask whether the old machinery of action can run at all now without a world sealed shut around it.