Little Miss Sunshine · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the van. The yellow VW Microbus has a broken clutch, so to get it moving the whole family has to run alongside, throw their shoulders into it, and leap in once it catches. They do this over and over for two hours of screen time. It is the funniest thing in the movie and also the truest, because it is a picture of people who cannot make the world respond to them on their own terms, and who keep going anyway. Hold onto that image. It tells you what kind of film this is underneath the comedy.

On paper, Little Miss Sunshine is a textbook movement-image. There is a goal (get Olive to the pageant), a clock (the deadline), and a road that converts the family's intentions into miles. Deleuze called this the sensory-motor circuit: a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the editing chains those actions toward a resolution. The road movie is one of its purest genres. But watch what the film actually does with the form. Every act the Hoovers attempt fails to land. Richard's book deal evaporates by phone from a gas station. Frank, the suicidal Proust scholar, runs into the very ex-student and rival who unmade him, in a convenience store, by chance. Dwayne, who has taken a Nietzschean vow of silence to qualify for flight school, discovers on the shoulder of the highway that he is color-blind and can never fly. Grandpa simply dies in a motel, and the family has to smuggle his body out a window to make the deadline. This is what Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image: characters who perceive their situation perfectly well and can no longer react to it adequately. The sensory-motor link goes slack. Action stops resolving anything.

The road itself gives the crisis its shape. Deleuze (borrowing the diagnosis from postwar cinema) described the voyage-balade — the trip or stroll that used to drive the plot but now transforms nothing. The Hoovers travel six hundred miles and arrive at exactly the disaster they set out toward. Olive does not win; she was never going to. The journey doesn't fix the family or deliver the prize. What it does instead is hold them in proximity long enough that something other than achievement can happen. Note, too, how loosely the group is bonded — six incompatible people, each sealed in a private failure, barely speaking. That's a dispersive situation, an ensemble linked by weak connective tissue rather than a shared mission, the Altman-esque polyphony the film inherits and compresses into one vehicle.

What are they all failing at, specifically? The same thing. Richard's 'Nine Steps' program splits the universe into winners and losers, and every Hoover has internalized some version of that binary. The film knows this is a cliché — it is built to expose it as one. Deleuze called this a consciousness of clichés: the film moving knowingly through the dead images its culture lives by, the motivational poster, the self-help mantra, the pageant's grotesque little beauty queens in spray-tan and lipstick. The winner/loser ideology is the plot behind the plot, the thing the surface story is quietly indicting the whole time.

Which brings us back onto the stage. Olive performs the burlesque routine her grandfather taught her — Rick James's 'Super Freak,' a child doing a stripper's bumps and grinds before a horrified pageant crowd. It is excruciating. Then Richard, the winner/loser man, climbs onto the stage and starts dancing with her. Then all of them do. This is the film's masterstroke, and Deleuze gives us the precise word for it: the gest. Not an action that changes a situation, but a posture, an attitude, that exposes a social relation and turns it inside out. The family cannot win the pageant's game, so they refuse its terms bodily, with their clumsy, defiant, ridiculous dancing. The meaning isn't spoken; it's carried entirely by bodies that have stopped trying to succeed and started, finally, to be together. This is cinema of the body — duration and relation registered as physical attitude rather than as plot.

The film descends from a real lineage and you can feel each debt. From Five Easy Pieces and Paper Moon, the journey that forces estranged relatives into one frame and lets a child be the moral center. From Harold and Maude, the tightrope between death-obsessed deadpan and earnest life-affirmation, carried by a single song cycle (here DeVotchKa's wistful accordion). From Election, the satire of America's winner/loser religion. From The Royal Tenenbaums, the ensemble of failed prodigies in deliberate group compositions — which Suhrstedt's camera keeps doing, holding the whole family in one shot so their collective dysfunction stays legible. Sunshine takes the Tenenbaum register and roughs it up, trades the dollhouse for a dying bus.

Its significance is quiet but real. It helped fix the template for the bittersweet indie dramedy of its decade, and it did so by smuggling a genuinely anti-American argument inside the most American of forms. The road movie usually promises that movement equals transformation, that effort earns the prize. Sunshine keeps the form and voids the promise, and then finds, in the wreckage of winning, something better than winning. Watch it again for the dance. But watch the push-starts first. They're the same gesture.