Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bones and All
2022 · Luca Guadagnino · Bones and All on Sightlines
A man materializes out of the dark, soft-voiced and courtly, with all the time in the world, and what he wants is to be kind to the girl. He already knows what she is, because he is one too. Mark Rylance plays Sully with no menace anywhere on the surface, and that is where the skin starts to crawl. Horror in Bones and All almost never arrives as a shock. It arrives as good manners.
Hold onto Sully. He is the clearest way into what kind of film this actually is, and it isn't quite the kind it gets sold as.
Gilles Deleuze built his two cinema books around two big machines. In one, somebody sees a situation and acts to change it; the situation gives way, and the film moves. That is the movement-image, the engine under most movies anyone has ever seen. In the other, acting stops working, characters become watchers, and you start to feel time going past on its own. Off to one side of both he put a third thing almost nobody quotes: the impulse-image. It belongs to what he called naturalism, and it runs on drives instead of decisions. Its signature is a world with two floors. Upstairs is the derived milieu, a real place with jobs and rules and furniture. Underneath is the originary world, which is not another location but the same one seen as pure appetite, where everything is food or not food yet. Drives come up through the floor.
Guadagnino's upstairs is the Reagan-era Midwest, filmed with a foreigner's attention on his first American shoot: gas stations, underpasses, cornfields, prairie dusk on 35mm. Arseni Khachaturan lights it like a stranger's photographs of somebody else's country. Ordinary America, thinly funded, mostly empty. The originary world is that same America with one rule removed. Once you know some of the people at the gas station are eaters, the gas station doesn't change. What changes is your sense of what it is the surface of.
In this register behavior stops being psychology and becomes symptom: an act that reads as the visible edge of a drive nobody chose and nobody governs. Russell's teenager doesn't decide anything. Her father decides for her, by leaving, having evidently managed something on her behalf for years. The hunger is inheritance and stigma, a condition passed down, and the film is a fable about anyone made monstrous by what they never chose.
This is where the lens earns its keep. The standard move on Bones and All is to solve the cannibalism — it stands for addiction, or poverty, or adolescence, or any inherited difference that gets a person treated as a monster. The film does invite that. But a metaphor is a code you crack once and then stop watching. Naturalism doesn't work that way. The drive is the literal content, and the social world is what's symptomatic of it. You don't translate the hunger into anything. It means the way an appetite means, which is by costing somebody something.
Deleuze's naturalism has one direction in it, a line of slope: once a drive has a world, the world goes down. Stroheim and Buñuel were his entropy machines. This film states its slope in a sentence — all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts — and the title states the terminus. Bones and all means nothing is left over. Most road movies promise the road as a cure: you drive, you become someone else. This thousand-mile odyssey is a fall taken slowly, across great distances, in beautiful light.
Which makes it, in Deleuze's other vocabulary, a voyage-balade, the trip that transforms nothing. He found the form in the postwar break, when characters stopped being able to act on what they could see and began travelling instead. He called that the crisis of the action-image: perception outruns response, causality slackens, plot becomes a series of encounters. American cinema found its own version in 1973, and Guadagnino takes the template directly. Badlands sent two young fugitives across a flat, sun-bleached Midwest with natural light and real landscape doing the work that moral judgment usually does. Malick's wager there was Bazin's — put the world in front of the lens, keep it whole, let it carry the meaning instead of the cutting. That wager comes with the geography.
It is why the landscapes feel like they are doing more than sitting behind the actors. Deleuze's term for such a place is any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped functioning as a stage for action and become a piece of pure feeling, emptied and available. Days of Heaven set the grammar, magic-hour wheat and available light and empty horizon shot as lyric, and Khachaturan reproduces it. Paris, Texas is the other debt, widescreen emptiness used as loneliness with spare roots music making silence expressive. Reznor and Ross, who built a reputation on industrial dread, answer that with fingerpicked guitar hushed almost to nothing. A horror film usually tells you what to feel through its sound. This one mostly declines.
There is a politics in this that never gets announced. Deleuze wrote about modern political cinema as the cinema where the people are missing — films made in places where a community able to speak for itself does not exist yet, so the film has to work through the gap. The eaters have no town, no church, no word for themselves anyone else uses, no elders except predators. They meet on the shoulder of a road and separate. Near Dark had already recast the vampire as a roaming American road family feeding across the heartland; Guadagnino inherits that architecture with the family taken back out. What is left is two teenagers trying to constitute a people out of a population of two, in a decade of poverty and abandonment.
His own invention is a transfer. The camera that lingered on sun-warmed skin in Call Me by Your Name, that filmed appetite as tenderness, gets pointed here at appetite that eats people, and it does not change its manners. Same tactile patience, same erotic attention, same conviction that wanting somebody is the most interesting thing a body does. That is the whole idea of the film, and it is why the romance never reads as relief from the horror. They are made of one substance. Sully comes from the other lineage, Mitchum's itinerant preacher in The Night of the Hunter, the sing-song courtesy stalking vulnerable prey across an Americana that trusts a soft voice. The two lines meeting is what charges the final stand: love and predation using identical gestures, and no reliable way to tell which is underway.
What it does to the genre is move horror out of event and into condition. No hunt, no cure, no institution that knows about eaters, no third act where someone explains the rules. The monster isn't concealed and revealed, it is inherited and lived with, and the running time goes to driving, waiting, sleeping, being broke. Guadagnino took a young-adult novel and slowed it into an elegy. Venice answered with the Silver Lion for direction and the Mastroianni prize for Taylor Russell, who plays a condition rather than a character with a secret. The larger achievement is that the film takes the most exhausted engine in contemporary genre cinema, monster as stand-in for the marginalized, and refuses to let it be a stand-in. The hunger stays real. It stays expensive. Nobody gets to be a metaphor and walk away clean.
So watch it again for the surfaces. The gas station at dusk, the underpass, the corn, an old man being kind: naturalism's top floor, filmed with real love and always a skin over something older. Then ask what the title is asking. To consume someone bones and all is either the worst thing one person can do to another or the only completely honest form of love, and the film gets all the way to the end without deciding.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Cannibalism given no curse, bite or explanation: a teenager who learns she is not alone in her appetite, and Rylance's Sully materializing out of the dark, gentle and courtly, as an older eater. Hunger filmed as drive, not decision.
- derived-milieu — Reagan-era Midwest shot on 35mm by Arseni Khachaturan — gas stations, underpasses, cornfields, prairie dusk — with the melancholy of a stranger's photographs of America.
- originary-world — The same backroad America seen as pure appetite: eaters recognizing their own kind inside ordinary places, so the Midwest reads as the skin over a world in which people are food.
- symptom — The father's abandonment as the management of a condition, and hunger presented as inheritance and stigma — a fable of anyone made monstrous by what they never chose, where behavior is the visible edge of an ungoverned drive.
- entropy / degradation — All roads lead back to their terrifying pasts: the thousand-mile odyssey as an irreversible descent toward a final stand, with the title naming the terminus — bones and all, nothing left over.
- voyage-balade-form — The Badlands template taken whole — fugitive young lovers driving a flat, sun-bleached Midwest, the spree that changes nothing, natural light and real landscape standing in for moral weather.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — A teenager cut loose by her father and a disenfranchised drifter who can perceive their condition but not act on it; the plot slackens from action into a chain of encounters along the backroads.
- espace quelconque — Emptied prairie and available-light horizons inherited from Days of Heaven, plus the widescreen loneliness of Paris, Texas, with Reznor and Ross's hushed fingerpicked guitar instead of horror scoring — landscape as feeling rather than a stage for action.
- people-are-missing — Eaters with no town, community or name of their own, meeting and separating on the road: Near Dark's roaming road-family architecture inherited with the family removed, leaving two outsiders in a decade of poverty and hardship.