Licorice Pizza · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two kids run toward each other across a dark parking lot, and the shot won't let them arrive. Anderson puts a long lens on them so the space compresses and their sprinting bodies hang in the frame, legs pumping, the distance refusing to close. It's the most thrilling thing in the movie and almost nothing happens. No declaration, no kiss we're shown, no problem solved. Just running. To understand why that lands so hard, it helps to borrow a distinction from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who watched thousands of films and noticed they came in two basic shapes.

The first he called the movement-image: a person sees a situation, acts on it, and the action changes things. Cause, effect, resolution — the engine of nearly every studio picture. The second he called the time-image, and it's what you get when that engine stalls. The character can no longer act their way out. They look, they wait, they endure, and time stops being the clock that measures their progress and becomes something you feel directly, like weather. Most of Licorice Pizza lives in that second mode, which is strange for a film this buoyant, and it's the source of the buoyancy.

Notice there's no goal. Deleuze named this the crisis of the action-image — characters caught in a world they can perceive vividly but can't organize into a single thing to do. Gary and Alana don't pursue an objective; they tumble sideways into a child-acting agency, a pinball arcade, a waterbed company, a producer's tantrum, a fuel-shortage night. Each adventure absorbs the film for a while and then drops it. Deleuze had a name for this drift too: the voyage / balade form, the trip or stroll that transforms nothing. The dossier's own lineage makes the debt plain — this is the structure of American Graffiti, of Ashby's Shampoo and The Last Detail, where California kids accumulate a night or a season of incident that never hardens into plot. Anderson inherits the whole grammar: a dispersive situation of loosely-linked people, and weak links between scenes, those abrupt between-scene cuts that catch the characters mid-stride and trust you to stitch the gaps.

What fills the space where plot used to be is dead time — Deleuze's temps mort, the stretches the everyday is simply held, nothing advancing. Scenes run long. The camera, handheld and watching from a slight remove, waits on the actors rather than cutting to convenience, a patience the film learned from Cassavetes holding a take through social discomfort. This is also where film theory's oldest argument applies. André Bazin believed the long take and deep focus kept faith with reality, preserving its ambiguity instead of carving it into a thesis. Anderson casts two non-actors — Haim slightly off the theatrical beat, Hoffman with that unearned confidence in his walk — precisely so the camera records presence rather than performance. You're watching people, not a screenplay being executed.

Which brings the body forward. Deleuze, late in his cinema books, described a cinema of the body: films that read attitude and posture, letting the everyday body carry duration where the plot won't. Hoffman's walk does more narrative work than any of Gary's schemes. The way he commands a room at fifteen, the way Alana's whole physical bearing keeps shifting between exasperation and longing — these postures are the story. And a posture that exposes a relation, Deleuze called a gest. The run is the film's great gest. Two people who can't say what they are to each other say it with their legs, in the dark, at full speed.

Here's Anderson's actual invention. The run is a burst of pure movement-image — sensory-motor action at full throttle — dropped into a film that has spent two hours refusing it. But the telephoto strips the action of its usual payoff. They run and run and the ground doesn't yield; the lens flattens their motion so it can't convert into arrival. It's the movement of the world turned inside out: the bodies move furiously while the space holds them in place, so the feeling isn't getting-there but the unbearable wanting itself, made physical. Anderson found a way to give the loose, driftless time-image a climax without betraying it — to make a film about nothing-resolving culminate in something that detonates.

That's why this small movie matters to the form. The crisis-of-the-action-image cinema — Antonioni's vacancies, the European art film's anomie — usually reads as alienation, people stranded in spaces too big for them. Anderson takes the identical structure and fills it with first love. He proves the time-image can be warm. The picaresque doesn't have to mean estrangement; the same slackened causality and porous, song-flooded soundscape that Altman used for ensemble irony in Nashville can be tuned, instead, to yearning. He keeps Ashby's refusal to resolve the age-and-status gap of Harold and Maude and discovers that the irresolution is the romance, not its failure.

So the question the film leaves open is the one its lens insists on. If the run never closes the distance, does the love arrive? Watch it again and you'll see Anderson never answers, because the wanting is the whole event. He hands you eyes for it: the next time a movie sprints toward a finish, notice whether anything is actually being solved — or whether, like here, the motion is the meaning.