Dinner in America · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera sits at the head of the dinner table, square to it. Wood paneling, floral wallpaper, a casserole, faces lined up like a school photograph. Nobody moves much. Someone says something poisonous in a pleasant voice and the composition just holds, dead center, as though the frame were a little proscenium built for this exact humiliation. Adam Rehmeier films the American family meal like that again and again. The title tells you it's the film's basic unit.

Deleuze has a name for a shot built that way: a closed set. A frame stuffed with information and treated as a system you're meant to read, not a window you look through. What matters about a closed set is what it does to the people inside it. They stop registering as people in a room and start registering as parts of an arrangement. That's the cruelty, and it's also the comedy, and Rehmeier gets both out of the same lens.

Now put a fugitive arsonist in one of those chairs.

Deleuze's impulse-image is his name for cinema that finds, underneath any recognizable social setting, a rawer world of pure drives: appetite, compulsion, rot. He took it from Stroheim and Buñuel. The setting you can name (he calls it the derived milieu) turns out to be a crust over what he calls an originary world, where nothing operates but hunger and its satisfactions. A dinner table is the ideal place to stage that, because eating is the one ritual where the social and the appetitive have to share a room. Simon arrives at these tables as almost nothing but drive: pills, fire, an appetite for humiliating the people who hand out humiliation. His actions in the first act aren't decisions. They're symptoms.

And impulse-images come with a built-in slope. Deleuze insists on it. The drive has a direction, and the direction is down, toward exhaustion and ruin. This is why Badlands is the film's deepest debt, deeper than the punk records. Malick's affectless kids drift across flat American nowhere narrating their violence in a calm, naive voice that refuses to frame it morally, and the drift only goes one way. Dinner in America inherits that slope. It inherits the shape of the trip too: Deleuze's line of the universe, a zig-zag that strings disconnected places together instead of building toward a destination. Simon and Patty's journey runs house to house, table to table, backyard to car. The map is a scribble. Nothing about the exurb changes.

Then, in a bedroom, they write a song.

The "Watermelon" sequence is where the film changes image-type, and that's the thing worth naming, because it's easy to mistake for a change of genre. The cutting slows. The camera stops dicing reactions into coverage and simply holds, which is a small Bazinian wager: trust that a performance built in real time will out-earn one assembled at the edit. What fills those held shots is what Deleuze calls the affection-image, and specifically its intensive kind, the potisign. Not a face frozen in one expression but a face with micro-movements running across it, pressure accumulating toward a threshold. You watch Patty cross over into believing something about herself while it's happening. Emily Skeggs plays sincerity as a strength rather than a deficit, and the shot runs long enough for you to see the switch throw.

That's the whole trick of the film, in one sequence. Nobody gets cured of anything. The drive acquires a face.

Which brings the dinner tables back under a different name. Deleuze, late, writing about a cinema of bodies, describes the gest: a posture or attitude that exposes an entire social relation without anyone having to explain it. Nobody at that table is just eating dinner. They're performing one, holding a shape made of enforced pleasantries and scripted normalcy. Shooting the shape frontally and symmetrically from the head of the table is what makes it legible as a pose instead of as life. Todd Solondz found this recipe in Welcome to the Dollhouse: flat deadpan compositions, comedy extracted from humiliation, and no contempt whatsoever for the person being humiliated. Rehmeier takes the frame and the ethics together, which is the harder half of the debt.

Then there's the mechanism nobody has used quite this way. We know Simon is the masked singer Patty writes her fan letters to. Patty doesn't. Deleuze calls an image whose meaning lives in a relation the audience holds, rather than the characters, a relation-image: the spectator brought in as a third term, the one who completes the sense. Hitchcock built an entire cinema on it, and what he built was dread. We know what's under the table, the characters don't, the room fills with pressure. Rehmeier runs the same machine on tenderness. Every scene carries a second, warmer meaning we're holding on Patty's behalf until she's ready for it. Her fan letters are what Deleuze would call a mark, an object with a customary chain attached: a letter goes out to a stranger and nothing comes back, ever. A demark is the anomaly that snaps the chain and forces you to reinterpret. Here the demark is a person, sitting at the table, eating.

Simon is also a forger in Deleuze's sense, which has nothing to do with lying. The forger is someone whose shifting identities work as a creative power, making a truth rather than reporting one. Under the mask he gets to be someone worth writing letters to, and that self isn't less real for having been invented. What the two of them do together, working out a melody in a bedroom and putting it into the world, is what Deleuze calls fabulation: people the world has filed as disposable, caught in the act of legending themselves. The film takes the hardcore scene seriously as the ground for that, the way Suburbia and Repo Man did before it, where punk is the grammar and not the costume, and homemade tapes and basement shows count as real infrastructure for real lives.

Why does this matter beyond one cult movie? Because the usual way a film travels from cruelty to sincerity is to apologize. The transgression gets retroactively rewritten as a wound, and the character is reformed. Wild at Heart and True Romance got as far as letting lurid violence and earnest love occupy the same film without one canceling the other. Rehmeier goes one further and refuses the reform. Simon isn't redeemed. He's recognized. The drives stay exactly where they were, and what changes is that someone else is in the frame with them, at which point the slope stops being a slope. Whether that can hold, whether a love story can keep a genuine drive intact instead of quietly domesticating it, is a question the film asks and doesn't fully answer. It also does that structural work almost entirely through cutting rhythm and shot duration rather than plot, which is rarer and harder than it sounds.

What it seeded is too early to say. It premiered at Sundance in January 2020, weeks before the theatrical market vanished, and didn't reach an audience until 2022. It built its following backwards, through streaming and word of mouth, which is now a legitimate way for a film to enter the conversation. Its descendants, if it has them, are still arriving. What it has already done is close a loop open since 1973: it took the doomed-couple slope of Badlands and found the one thing capable of bending it.

So watch the frames. Early on they're symmetrical and airless and the two of them are trapped inside somebody else's composition. Then find the point where the palette warms and the framing goes loose. Nobody announces it. The movie just stops looking at them and starts looking with them.