Bullet Train · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two hired killers are riding the fastest train in Japan, and one of them will not stop talking about Thomas & Friends. Brian Tyree Henry plays Lemon without a wink. He is a working professional with a body count, and his frame of reference is a children's show about trains.

Hold onto that, because it tells you how the film thinks. Lemon is carrying a codebook and using it to sort the people around him. So is the movie. It introduces its assassins with chapter cards and nicknames, freezing each one into a type before they have done anything. Tangerine. Lemon. The Prince. Ladybug.

Why bring Deleuze to a Brad Pitt action comedy? Because he is the one critic who built a working grammar for what this film actually does, which is turn acts into clues. Reviews grade a picture like this on jokes and punches. Deleuze noticed something else: there are two ways to build an action movie, and Bullet Train is a near-laboratory specimen of the second one.

The first he calls the large form. A vast situation bears down — the town, the war, the drought — pressure accumulates, and someone finally acts in a way that changes it. Westerns run on this. The small form runs backwards. You begin with an act, and the act discloses a situation nobody showed you. Detective films live here. So does farce.

Ladybug's brief is one sentence: get on the train, take the briefcase, get off. His handler is a voice in his ear he never sees. Everything after is the world unfolding out of that single grab, and the film's pleasure is that the situation keeps growing behind him while he keeps trying to leave.

Deleuze gives the small form its own tools, and the sharpest of them names this film's entire engine. He calls it the index of equivocity: a gesture that could belong to two completely different situations, with no way to tell which until later. Everyone aboard is running an errand that turns out to be a move in someone else's plan. Lifting the briefcase is a theft and it is also bait. Boarding at Tokyo is a job and it is also a summons. Nothing changes on screen when the second meaning arrives. Only your reading of it changes.

Its partner is the index of lack: an act framed so that the piece you need in order to understand it has been cut out. This is where Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir's editing does the heavy lifting. She withholds, then re-cuts, re-screening a scene you already watched with the missing piece restored. The device comes straight from Ocean's Eleven, which codified the late flashback that exposes the trick hidden the first time, and from Go, which prototyped replaying one event through several criminals' points of view. Bullet Train borrows the mechanism and points it at fate instead of a heist.

Which raises the thing most people get wrong about Deleuze. This film is aggressively nonlinear and it contains no time-image at all.

The break he is famous for happens when action stops working: a character sees something and can do nothing about it, and time stops being the measure of movement and shows up bare. That is not this. These flashbacks are recollection-images — dated, locatable, each one a former present retrieved because the plot needs it. They serve the chain rather than snapping it. Nonlinearity here is a delivery system, not a rupture. Knowing that difference is most of what Deleuze is good for, and this movie teaches it by being a clean example of the side people mistake for the other.

Then the objects. Deleuze's relation-image is the mode where meaning lives in relations the audience holds rather than in anything a character knows, and the hyperlink structure is exactly that: we assemble the whole before they do. He breaks it into parts that could have been written for this production design. A mark is an object that means by habit — a venomous snake turns up in a compartment and you already know its job. A demark is the anomaly that breaks habit and forces interpretation, and the film keeps planting them: animated inserts, a children's mascot wandering loose through a splatter comedy. A symbol is the object that condenses the organizing relation, and this one names itself. A ladybug is a luck charm. Ladybug believes he has the worst luck alive. By the end every accident turns out to have been arranged, which is the film's real thesis: luck is design you have not been shown yet.

The train earns one more term. Deleuze calls the small form's path a vector, a zig-zag joining spaces that do not otherwise belong together. Usually that is a metaphor. Here it is rolling stock. Each carriage gets its own palette and its own props — quiet car, bar car, first class — and Jonathan Sela shoots the corridors as long narrow sightlines so a body's full arc stays inside the frame. Straight line outside, broken line inside.

The debts are easy to name and worth naming precisely. Pulp Fiction supplies the chaptered, out-of-order structure with hitmen who philosophize mid-job. Snatch supplies the freeze-frame introduction with nickname captions. Smokin' Aces supplies the gimmick-branded assassins converging on one confined target, tone swinging between splatter and farce. Kill Bill supplies the ironic Japanese needle-drop, reworked here as J-pop covers of Western songs — a translation of a translation.

That last one deserves a straight word. This Japan was built on soundstages near Los Angeles, and the cast is largely not Japanese, which drew real objections. The storybook artificiality that makes the film fun is the same artificiality people objected to. Both are true, and the movie does not resolve them.

Deleuze has a name for the register, too. He treated consciousness of clichés — characters who know they are moving through worn material — as a symptom that the action-image was dying. In postwar Europe that awareness dissolved the machine. Here it lubricates it. Ladybug quotes his therapist, Lemon has his cartoon, the pop songs snicker at the violence, and the machinery runs beautifully anyway. That is the honest history of what Tarantino did to the action film: irony got metabolized instead of proving fatal.

So what did Leitch actually invent? Not a shot. A condition. He came up through stunts, and with 87North he built the rigged, strikeable, section-by-section set as the precondition for choreography that can be repeated until it can be read. Ronaldsdóttir then cuts the fights to protect that legibility. This is a position, not a default. A lot of modern action had drifted toward impact without space, where you feel a hit and never learn where anyone is standing. Deleuze would say that is not an action-image at all, because the sensory-motor link needs a space you can read. Bullet Train is a very expensive argument that you should always know where everybody is.

Watch it again for the objects rather than the people. The film keeps telling you what is about to happen by showing you what is in the room. The only question it leaves open is who put it there — and whether a story in which every accident was arranged is about fate at all, or just about editing.