Modern Romance · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits at a bench in a post-production room with a strip of junk science fiction running through the machine, and he adds footsteps. Then breath. Then a little room tone. A minute ago the scene was nothing. Now it's tense. Robert Cole did that, he knows exactly how he did it, and he is extremely good at his job.

That is the whole film.

Robert (Albert Brooks) is a film editor, and the rest of Modern Romance is him running the same operation on his girlfriend. Mary goes to work. Mary takes a call. Mary drives home. None of it means anything. Robert adds footsteps.

Deleuze has a name for what happens at that bench. He calls it a crystalline description. Ordinarily a description points at something that was there first: the room existed before the camera walked in, and you could go check. A crystalline description composes its object and then stands in for it. There is nothing underneath Robert's sound work. The sound is the scene. And there is no affair underneath Robert's jealousy. The film is precise about this: his suspicion is never provoked by evidence, it's an appetite that manufactures its own occasions. The jealousy builds an unfaithful Mary and then puts her where the real one was standing.

Deleuze filed this under the powers of the false. Not lying. Lying is a smaller thing that needs a truth behind it to be a lie against. The powers of the false name a way of working in which true and false stop being usable categories and something gets made anyway. Deleuze usually found it in flamboyant places, in Welles' fakers and Robbe-Grillet's unresolvable rooms. Brooks found it in a guy on the clock at a Los Angeles post house.

Why bother with the vocabulary. The ordinary reading is that Robert is jealous, jealousy is a character flaw, and the film is a portrait of a flaw. The Deleuzian reading is more specific and worse: his pathology and his professional competence are the same skill. He is paid to manufacture conviction where there is nothing to be convinced of. He does it at work in the morning and to Mary at night, and he is better at it than anyone she knows. That's a joke about labor, not about a personality.

Cinema's oldest promise, the one Bazin spent a career defending, is that the thing was in front of the lens. Modern Romance opens the door of the room where that promise gets serviced. Then it refuses to use the instrument on us. Eric Saarinen's camera holds medium-wide and mostly static. No punch-in on a reaction, no comic angle, no lens editorializing about Robert. Lance Rubin's score stays out of exactly the moments a comedy would normally underline. The film shows a man forging feeling and then declines to forge any for itself. That's a moral position, and it was taken in the cutting room.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the action lands; continuity cutting exists to carry that circuit. In the time-image the circuit breaks, action stops resolving anything, and time shows up as itself. Modern Romance is what the break looks like when the man is hyperactive. Robert acts constantly. He breaks up, buys running shoes and a headset radio, jogs, quits within a block, calls, drives over, apologizes, buys, proposes. Not one action alters the situation. The film ends where it opened. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image and heard it first in postwar Italy, then in American directors including Cassavetes, whose Faces and Minnie and Moskowitz sit directly upstream of this picture. Brooks' addition to the crisis is speed. Paralysis is normally slow. His is frantic and gets nowhere.

The sporting-goods store is the specimen. Bob Einstein sells Robert running gear at his own unhurried pace and the scene plays near real time, long past the point where the gag has paid out. Deleuze's word for a stretch where nothing advances is dead time: the everyday held open, no longer in service to the plot. Here the humor migrates out of the dialogue and into the duration. You end up laughing at the clock.

Those debts are specific and worth naming. Elaine May's A New Leaf proved a comic lead could be actively monstrous so long as the camera stayed in the sustained wide two-shot and never cut to a reaction licensing you to laugh from safety. The Heartbreak Kid proved a scene could be held past its payout until embarrassment became the content, and that an ending could hand the protagonist his win and withhold the relief. Mikey and Nicky worked by overshooting tight material so behavior could drift and stall. Brooks builds the running store and the Quaalude night the same way: script plus deliberate slack, never loose enough to lose shape. From Cassavetes he takes the durational domestic scene where discomfort is the event, and changes one thing. Cassavetes went handheld and got inside it. Saarinen locks off. Cassavetes implicates you; Brooks strands you. And from his own Real Life he carries the reflexive trick of putting the recording apparatus on screen. It moves from the documentary crew to the editing bench and the looping stage, and gets much quieter.

Deleuze also had a category for films driven by appetite instead of decision, the impulse-image, where a naturalist world of drives keeps erupting through the social surface. Its markers are all over the Quaalude night: pills, records played at himself to induce a feeling he can't generate, calls placed to women, mementos thrown out and then retrieved from the trash. Those objects are fetishes in Deleuze's sense, torn-off pieces of a world charged with the drive. The behavior reads as symptom, not choice. The setting cooperates. Parking structures, beige apartments, restaurants with too much light, the sterile corridors of post-production: any-space-whatever, space that has stopped being a stage for action and only registers a mood. The romantic comedy's charming Los Angeles is withheld on purpose, so the relationship has to justify itself on behavior alone.

And here is the invention. In Deleuze the impulse-image runs downhill; naturalism ends in exhaustion or death and the line of slope points one way only. Brooks bends the slope into a circle. Robert doesn't bottom out. He wakes up, and the relationship resumes exactly where it began, and nothing is learned. That is the impulse-image with the death sentence removed, which is funnier and considerably worse.

Watch the bodies while you're at it: the jog abandoned in a block, the sales pitch endured standing up, the long night's slow disordering of an apartment until the room is a readout of a mind. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a relation a gest. Robert's is verbal. The no-win-situation incantation, repeated. It isn't communication. It's a stance he takes so he doesn't have to decide anything.

What the film did: it removed the romantic comedy's engine. That genre runs on obstacle and release. Brooks built one that loops, whose last beat is its first, and got it made at a studio in 1981, the year the comedy money went to Stripes and Arthur. It didn't sell. It became a touchstone anyway, for filmmakers who wanted audiences laughing at behavior they recognized in themselves and would rather not.

One thing to do on the rewatch. Keep a tally of every moment the film shows you Mary doing something wrong. There aren't any. Then notice that you were checking.