Manhattan · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Chapter One. "He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion." Isaac says the line aloud, hears the vanity in it, and starts over. Too preachy. Again. The whole film is already folded into that first minute: a man dictating the version of himself he can bear to live inside, revising the draft in real time while Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue swells and Willis's silver skyline slides past. He isn't remembering New York. He's forging it.

Deleuze has a name for this figure — the forger, the protagonist of what he called the powers of the false. Cinema was born with a contract of truth: the camera records what was really there, so film supposedly cannot lie. The powers of the false are what happen when a film breaks that contract on purpose and makes the fabrication itself the subject. Isaac's voiceover does exactly this. It composes an object — a romantic, idealized Manhattan, a decent man wronged by shallow people — and then quietly replaces the real one. Every time he restarts the sentence, he's caught in the act of legending himself. The film's irony is that it lets us watch the forgery being drafted, so we trust the recording (Willis's real bridges, real streets) and distrust the narrator using them.

Why does this matter beyond a clever opening? Because it diagnoses the film's whole predicament, which Deleuze would call the crisis of the action-image. In the classical movement-image — the engine of Hollywood — a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action resolves the situation and the story closes. Isaac cannot do this. He perceives everything with dazzling accuracy. He names Yale's cowardice, Mary's affectation, the moral evasions of every educated New Yorker at Elaine's. And he acts on none of it, least of all on himself. He diagnoses hypocrisy with great wit while dating a seventeen-year-old and calling it love. The sensory-motor link that once ran from seeing to doing has gone slack. Watch the ending, which is built precisely as a broken action-image: Isaac finally runs, sprints the length of the city to reach Tracy — the last-minute rescue of a hundred American movies — and arrives too late, to be told she is leaving for London. The dash is pure movement; it resolves nothing. "You have to have a little faith in people," she says, and it lands as both blessing and verdict.

Around him the film organizes itself as what Deleuze called a dispersive situation moving through the voyage-balade — the stroll that transforms nothing. There is no plot in the muscular sense, only a small set of people whose couplings keep reshuffling: Isaac and Tracy, Isaac and Mary, Mary and Yale, Yale and his wife. They walk. They window-shop for culture. They talk their way into and out of trouble along the Upper East Side and under the planetarium's fake cosmos. Each of them is fluent in consciousness of clichés — Deleuze's term for characters who know the scripts they're performing and perform them anyway. Mary reciting her Academy of the Overrated, Isaac listing what makes life worth living into a tape recorder: these are people quoting the idea of a feeling instead of having one. The comedy and the sadness are the same thing. They can't stop editorializing their own lives.

And here Willis's camera does the philosophical work. He gives us the any-space-whatever — space drained of its function as a stage for action, become instead a field of pure mood. The scope frame strands figures at the far edges of enormous compositions; a doorway, a gallery wall, a darkened apartment opens a gulf of negative space between two people who are supposedly in love. In the planetarium the actors dissolve into rims of light against total black, wandering among model planets while their affair fails to ignite. That void is not a backdrop. It's the visible form of characters too dispersed to act — the emptiness the movement-image was invented to fill, left deliberately unfilled.

All of this arrives through a specific lineage of craft. Willis brought the underexposed, top-lit chiaroscuro of The Godfather — his willingness to let a face fall entirely into shadow — descending itself from Toland's deep-focus monochrome in Citizen Kane. Allen brought the first-person, self-narrating structure of Annie Hall and tightened its nervous sprawl into something composed, having first learned tonal gravity from the Bergman exercise of Interiors and the confessional artist-juggling-women shape of Fellini's 8½. What Manhattan did with that inheritance was prove an American comedy could hold moral seriousness and visual rigor at once — that you could shoot a New York relationship film in anamorphic black-and-white, score it to a dead composer's symphonic jazz, and make the gap between how people narrate themselves and how they behave into the actual drama.

Watch it again for the revisions. Every time a character reaches for the eloquent line, ask what act it's covering for. The film hands you Isaac's own gift — the ability to see everyone clearly — and then, gently, turns it on him. That's the better pair of eyes it leaves you with.