David Byrne's American Utopia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits alone at a desk, barefoot, holding a plastic model of a brain. He turns it in his hands and points to where the connections are. Infants have far more of them than adults, he says; we spend our lives losing the ones we don't use. Then he sets the brain down, and over the next hundred minutes eleven other people walk into the empty gray box around him, one and two at a time, each carrying the instrument they play.

The show is that brain. Not as a metaphor laid over it, but as its working plan. Twelve players, no cables, no risers, no amplifiers, no fixed positions. Every guitar transmits, the keyboards are portable, and the six percussionists carry their drums in marching harnesses. Anyone can stand anywhere. So the only thing organizing the stage at any given moment is which people are currently attending to which other people, and Annie-B Parson's choreography spends the evening making those links and cutting them. Ranks form. A wheel turns. The company scatters through the chain curtain and is gone.

Deleuze, late in his second cinema book, describes films whose architecture is not a story but a brain: the screen as a cortex, where what matters is which connections get made, how they relay, and which ones die off. He meant Resnais and Kubrick, films built as topologies rather than chains of cause and effect. Cinema of the brain is an odd label to hang on a Broadway musical, so it's worth saying what it buys. Without it, this is a good concert with talking in between. With it, the monologue and the staging turn out to be one statement made twice, once in words and once in bodies, and the wireless rig stops being a convenience. It's the thesis in hardware. Byrne wanted everything off that stage that was not a human being, and what's left when the cables go is a room where connection has to be chosen, continuously, by everyone in it.

Then Kuras's camera goes to the ceiling. The fixed overhead position looking straight down turns the same choreography into flat geometry: bodies as marks on a lit plane, lines assembling and dissolving. It is Busby Berkeley's shot, quoted nearly openly, the "By a Waterfall" kaleidoscope from Footlight Parade with barefoot percussionists where the chorines were. Deleuze loved the musical for a precise reason: in it, a dancer's private movement spills over into a movement of world, so that the dancer stops driving the dance and the dance begins carrying the dancer. Berkeley is his limit case, where individuals become elements in a pattern that moves them. From overhead you can't tell who is leading. Often you can't tell which one is Byrne. What you see instead is what Deleuze calls a dividual, a collective that reads as one feeling body without any member being reduced to a part of it. Identical gray Kenzo suits, bare feet, nobody anchored to a mark. The concert hierarchy of frontman-plus-backline is deleted, and the only currency of status left is attention, which the choreography keeps passing around.

The box they move in deserves its own name. Deleuze calls a space that has stopped functioning as a setting an any-space-whatever: a place drained of its coordinates, whose parts could be joined in any order, so anything might connect to anything. Postwar cinema found these in bomb sites and hotel corridors, and they usually register as loss, the world after the action has drained out of it. Byrne's designers built one on purpose: gray floor, gray walls, a chain curtain on three sides that is neither wall nor void, catching light like a scrim and swallowing any performer who exits at any point on the perimeter. Same structure, opposite mood. The emptiness modern cinema found as damage gets rebuilt here as a condition for company.

All of this has parents. Stop Making Sense is the one it argues with. Demme's opening accretion, one man with a boombox and then a bassist and then the band assembling in front of us, is reproduced beat for beat and inverted at every point: one big suit becomes twelve identical small ones, and Demme's withheld audience, kept out so the film could be a sealed system with the viewer as its only witness, is deliberately let back in. Lee and editor Adam Gough cut to the house and let it rise to its feet. That isn't sentiment, it's the argument. The subject is being among others, so you have to see others. Lee had the technique already: cutting a stage performer against specific, individuated faces in The Original Kings of Comedy, putting a handheld operator inside a fixed Broadway staging on Passing Strange. And Byrne invented the deadpan lecturer-to-camera himself, in True Stories, thirty-four years earlier.

And then, during "Hell You Talmbout," Lee does the one thing he has refused to do all film.

Janelle Monáe's chant names Black Americans killed by police and racist violence and demands the room say the names back. On Broadway in early 2020, an audience heard a list. Into the film Lee cuts photographic portraits of the named dead, images that exist nowhere in the stage show. Deleuze has a term for that kind of join: the irrational cut, or interstice, a cut that connects nothing by continuity but holds two images apart and makes the gap itself do the work. Those photographs cannot be in the Hudson Theatre. That is why they land. Lee did not alter the performance; he altered what the performance is a document of. He had proved the device on 4 Little Girls, with the same cinematographer, where holding on the photograph of a murdered child is an argument rather than an illustration.

It's also where the film's two authors become one voice. What Deleuze calls free indirect discourse in political cinema is the point at which the filmmaker's vision and the performer's stop being separable: the camera neither observes him nor ventriloquizes him, it speaks alongside him. Byrne had fixed this show through a tour and a full Broadway run before a camera ever arrived. Lee touches nothing until here, and here he speaks. A capture looks neutral right up to the moment neutrality becomes a position.

Which is what the evening is for. Deleuze's late claim about political film is that it can no longer address a people who already exist and know themselves. The people are missing, and the job becomes inventing one. Watch how literally this show takes that. Byrne introduces his company by country of origin, notes that most of them are not American, adds that he was born in Scotland and is a naturalized immigrant himself. He reports how few eligible Americans bother to vote locally. He tells about a Detroit high-school choir whose "Everybody's Coming to My House" sounded more welcoming than his own, which is a small exact admission that the song was never his property. The title is a bid, not a description. And fabulation, Deleuze's word for a group caught in the act of legending itself, telling the story that will make it a people, is what a chant of names is. Nobody in that theatre knew all of them. Saying them together is the act that makes a we. None of this dissolves the standing objection, that a white artist's assembly of global rhythm and Black protest song wants harder interrogation than the show gives itself. It sharpens it. A people invented is a people somebody is inventing, and who holds the pen is what the Detroit anecdote concedes and what Lee's portraits press on.

Two things it did. With Hamilton three months earlier, it made the filmed stage capture a first-class release rather than a souvenir, and on the harder terms: a director with a signature, using it. And it hardened a line running from Demme through Homecoming to Summer of Soul, in which a concert film is a way of claiming who a country contains. It was shot before mid-February 2020 and reached HBO that October, three weeks out from an election, after a summer in the streets. Every shot of a full unmasked house is now elegy, and the chant plays as prophecy. Nobody planned that.

Watch the floor next time. Watch which player is looking at which, and how fast it changes. That's the film's real subject, and it leaves a question it doesn't answer: what does attention cost, and what becomes of the connections you stop paying it to?