Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Pariah
2011 · Dee Rees · Pariah on Sightlines
A girl changes her clothes on a bus.
It's late. She's coming from the club, she's going to her mother's house, and the bus is the only thing between them, so the bus is where the change has to happen. Dee Rees doesn't underline it. No music cue arrives to tell you this is the motif. It just recurs, shot with the flatness you'd give somebody brushing her teeth.
Almost everything Pariah knows is in that scene, and Deleuze happens to have the right word for it.
The word is gest, which he took from Brecht, and it means something narrower than gesture. A gest is a posture the body takes that makes the whole social arrangement around it visible without anyone explaining anything. Not a feeling expressed. A relation exposed. Alike on that bus is performing unpaid labor: the work of being differently legible to different audiences, on a schedule, in public, with her hands. The film's entire argument about code-switching arrives as something a seventeen-year-old does between stops.
Why reach for Deleuze here at all? Because the ready-made description — "a film about identity" — turns Rees's discovery into a topic. The interesting thing is not that Alike has two selves. Plenty of films have told you that. It's that Rees worked out where to put the camera so that the cost of having them registers as muscle work, in real time, in a moving vehicle. That's a craft solution, and it belongs to her.
Notice what the bus does to the plot. In Deleuze's account of classical cinema, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. That engine drives nearly every film you've seen. Alike's costume change is a flawless miniature of it: she registers that her stop is coming, she acts, she arrives correctly dressed. Situation handled. Handled again tomorrow, and the day after. The circuit runs at full power and produces nothing. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image — characters who can no longer act adequately on what they perceive — and he found it in postwar Rome and in Antonioni's Italy. Rees stages it on the B44 without a single line of dialogue about alienation.
She deepens it by taking away the opponent. The hard scenes in this film are collisions of love and fear, not of good people and bad ones. Melodrama needs force against force; remove the villain and no act can convert the situation, because the situation isn't a person. It's a demand for legibility issued by everyone who loves her.
This is where the lineage matters, because Rees didn't invent that refusal alone. Killer of Sheep is the model: the LA Rebellion's observational, plotless anti-melodrama, letting Black working-class life accrue meaning through mundane episodes instead of climaxes. Deleuze's term for what those episodes are made of is temps mort, dead time — the stretch where nothing advances and the film is nonetheless most alive. And the rooms Alike moves through are Spike Lee's rooms. Rees was his NYU mentee and his PA, and Pariah inherits from She's Gotta Have It the brownstone-Brooklyn mise-en-scène and the conviction that Black interiority should be staged in a domestic interior rather than a spectacle.
Then there is the light, which is the other reason this film survives. Bradford Young's debt here is to Gordon Willis on The Godfather — the Prince of Darkness, top-lit, underexposed. Willis used withheld light to make a face unreadable. Young inverts the purpose and keeps the grammar: he withholds light in order to render dark skin as a surface with density rather than a shortage of information. Around that, Brooklyn nights in saturated blues and pinks. Deleuze's colour-image is colour that absorbs a scene instead of describing it, and that's what these do — the club is a colour before it's a location. American independent film of the period reached for grit when it wanted truth, as though beauty were a lie told about poor people. Young found lushness. That decision gets made at the light meter, and it is a political decision.
Adepero Oduye's face carries the rest. Deleuze distinguishes the reflecting close-up, a face holding one steady quality, from the intensive one, where micro-movements accumulate toward a threshold. Alike's is the second kind all the way through, which is what the dossier means by transparency: you watch a want and a dread occupy the same features without either winning.
And she writes. The poetry is the spine, and Rees didn't take that from nowhere either — Marlon Riggs had made spoken verse the narrative armature of Black queer life in Tongues Untied, and Daughters of the Dust had already shown that a Black woman could be framed through lyric rather than through plot mechanics. Deleuze calls this fabulation: storytelling as the act by which a people that does not yet exist invents itself, subjects caught in the middle of legending themselves. It is not lying and it is not reporting. Alike's final poem doesn't announce a self she already had. Writing it is how the self arrives, which is exactly why that last line lands like a door opening instead of like a summary. Deleuze's harder phrase applies too: the people are missing. Modern political cinema can't address an audience that already exists; it works in the gap and helps constitute one. The Watermelon Woman had claimed the ground for a self-authored Black lesbian protagonist. Pariah built a house on it.
And because Rees was drawing on her own coming-out, the camera occupies a strange middle position — neither observing Alike from outside nor dissolving into her. Pasolini called that free indirect discourse, two visions sharing one image. It's why the film never feels like testimony and never feels like fiction about someone else.
What it did: it proved a first-person Black queer film could run on attention rather than on melodrama's machinery, and it proved that low light could be luxurious. You can see the consequences. Barry Jenkins has named the debt in Moonlight. Young went on to Selma and Arrival, carrying the same withheld light to much larger canvases.
Watch the bus scenes again. The film never tells you which Alike is the real one, and after a while you stop wanting it to, because you can see what the question costs to answer.
Concepts in play
- the gest — Alike changing clothes on the bus between the club and her mother's house — a recurring bodily attitude that exposes the whole social demand for legibility without a word of explanation
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — The costume-change motif treated as ordinary labor performed by a seventeen-year-old's hands; the everyday body carrying the film's duration rather than a plot doing so
- crisis of the action-image — The bus change is a complete perceive-and-act loop that resolves nothing and must repeat; Rees compounds it by refusing melodrama's easy villains, so the hardest scenes are collisions of love and fear with no force-against-force to convert
- temps mort — The Killer of Sheep / LA Rebellion inheritance — observational, plotless anti-melodrama where meaning accrues through mundane episodes instead of dramatic climaxes
- affective colour — Bradford Young's saturated blues and pinks absorbing Brooklyn nights, finding lushness where American independent film reaches for grit; the Gordon Willis underexposure grammar from The Godfather repurposed to render dark skin with deliberately withheld light
- icon of power (the intensive face) — Adepero Oduye's 'extraordinary transparency' — a threshold face in which want and dread accumulate together, since even the hardest scenes are played as collisions of love and fear rather than discharged into melodramatic action
- story-telling / legending — Alike's written verse threaded through the film and the closing recitation whose final line 'lands like a door opening' — the poem does not report a self, it is how the self arrives; inherited from Tongues Untied's use of spoken poetry as the spine of Black queer identity
- the people are missing — Pariah sitting at the headwaters of a current in Black American cinema, extending The Watermelon Woman's self-authored Black lesbian protagonist claiming screen space — a film addressed to an audience it helps bring into existence
- free indirect discourse (political) — Rees drawing partly on her own coming-out, so the camera neither observes Alike from outside nor collapses into her — two visions sharing one image