Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Lovely Bones
2009 · Peter Jackson · The Lovely Bones on Sightlines
A ship in a bottle, grown to the size of a barn, sailing through tall grass.
Susie Salmon stands in a field and looks at it. Down in the world she left, that object is a made thing kept in glass, small enough to hold in one hand. Up here it's the size of weather. She can't touch it. She can't sail it. She can't tell anybody it's there.
Stay with that image and you have the film: the reach of it, and the trouble with it.
The girl who can only watch
Susie is murdered in the first movement, and everything after is a fourteen-year-old watching. Deleuze has a name for that figure: the voyant, the seer. His argument runs roughly like this. For its first fifty years cinema mostly ran on what he called the sensory-motor circuit. Someone perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it; the action closes the loop, and the cut serves the loop. After the war that link snapped. You start getting characters who see something they cannot answer, who look and endure and wait. His claim is that once action stops absorbing time, time comes forward and is felt for itself. The film stops being about what happens next.
Jackson takes that condition and makes it literal. Susie isn't stalled by trauma or by politics. She's dead. He hands us the purest seer the medium allows, and then has to solve the problem he just created: what does a movie do with a protagonist who cannot, in principle, act?
The world moves instead
Deleuze noticed a reversal in musicals and dream sequences: the character goes still and the world starts moving. The dancer doesn't cross the set; the set carries the dancer. He called it the movement of world. The in-between works exactly this way. Susie mostly stands. The landscape does everything. Fields reorganize, gazebos arrive, lakes freeze over, and the sky changes color because she has changed, not because weather has. Everything she is barred from doing gets done by the terrain.
The rest of the construction follows. Lesnie's camera in 1973 Pennsylvania is patient and watchful, holding on faces in wood-panelled rooms; in the afterlife it comes untethered and roams. Eno's score, standing in for the Howard Shore symphonics you'd expect from Jackson, refuses themes and cues in favor of ambient washes. Deleuze would call these opsigns and sonsigns: images and sounds offered to be looked at and listened to, with no action available to discharge them. And the color up there stops being the color of anything. It absorbs the scene and becomes the feeling, which is what Deleuze meant by the color-image.
Best of all is what the afterlife is built out of. Deleuze's crystal is a point where an actual thing and its virtual double stop being distinguishable, and the crystal seed is the small object around which a whole environment grows. Susie's heaven is seeded by things out of her memory. The ship in the bottle. The dollhouse shapes. The film's own motif chain of miniatures and containers, lives held in small vessels. That makes the in-between more than a set; it's memory crystallizing outward at the scale of geography.
The thing that shouldn't have been rendered
Now the argument against the film, using the film's own best idea.
Deleuze splits the out-of-field in two. The relative kind is the next room, the space just past the frame edge, whatever the camera could pan to. The absolute kind isn't elsewhere in space at all. It doesn't exist somewhere; it insists, and its entire power is that it can't be located.
Death is the absolute out-of-field. It's why a held shot of an empty chair can flatten you.
Weta gave it a location.
Most reviewers balked at this in the language of taste: glossy, literal, too much. The structural version is sharper. Photoreality inherits a contract from photography. Bazin's claim was that the photographic image doesn't merely resemble its object, it bears witness to it, carries something of the thing's being across. Weta's 2009 compositing cashes that same check. It reads as documented. So a heaven rendered at the fidelity of Skull Island quits insisting and starts existing, and the absolute out-of-field is quietly converted into a relative one, with acreage and a skyline. Jackson's curse here is that he is extraordinarily good at building places.
His own Heavenly Creatures (1994) is the direct ancestor and the instructive contrast: the same braid of a real adolescent murder against a subjective fantasy rendered as spectacle. But the earlier film's fantasy is visibly made, so it stays inside the girls' heads. Photoreal reads as there. Same instinct, opposite ontology. King Kong (2005) is the other parent and the more candid one: it gave him a pipeline for building an entire immersive world wholesale, and he pointed that instrument at a dead girl's interior. Behind those sit A Matter of Life and Death (1946), which invented the two-register cross-cut between a stylized otherworld and the earth, What Dreams May Come (1998), which had already tried the bespoke painterly afterlife, and the posthumous narrator running from Sunset Boulevard (1950) through American Beauty (1999) into a candy-lit suburb where menace and reverie trade places.
What it costs the story
The frame reassures us that Susie survives, which drains the murder of ordinary suspense. Meanwhile the earthbound strands keep reaching for the action-image: the investigation, the pre-murder cross-cutting, Lindsey's break-in at Harvey's house, which is as tense as anything Jackson has staged. This is what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image, arriving here by construction rather than by history. The parents perceive a catastrophe that no act can answer, and the household comes apart. Grief is not a problem action solves. Olssen's cutting carries the strain, and Sarandon's boozy comedy lands crosswise. The tonal whiplash everyone complained about is the seam between a film that knows action is finished and a film still trying to use it.
And yet the strongest passages are the ones where Deleuze's other register is running hard. Tucci's George Harvey is a textbook impulse-image: not a villain with a plan but an appetite wearing a cardigan, fastidious, mild, catastrophically ordinary. Deleuze's naturalism works by revealing a derived milieu (the meticulous 1973 suburb, its costume and set dressing perfect) as the crust over an originary world of pure drive, and Jackson literalizes that too. There's a hole in the ground beneath the ordinary neighborhood, and a sinkhole waiting to take what's left. The dollhouses are the fetish: part-objects, tidy little interiors, the compulsive craft of a man who keeps lives in containers. Which makes containment the film's organizing symbol, and puts the killer's dollhouse and the girl's ship in a bottle on the same shelf.
Why it matters
This is a major filmmaker's high-risk experiment, and its failure is more useful than most successes. It's the clearest test case we have for a question the whole industry then walked straight into: does more computational realism always serve the story? Jackson proved that a pipeline capable of anything will render the one thing better left unrendered. The seer, the still watcher with a world moving around her, is a genuine invention at this scale, and nobody had the tools to attempt it before Weta. Twenty minutes of it are astonishing.
So here's the rewatch. Try it with the in-between as sound. Eno is the element critics consistently praised for suggesting the ineffable without illustrating it, and he's doing it underneath pictures that are busy illustrating. Listen to the score argue with the images. Then ask what this film would have been if heaven had stayed offscreen and only the music knew where she was.
Concepts in play
- voyant / the seer — Susie is murdered in the first movement and spends the entire film watching her family and her killer from the in-between, structurally incapable of acting on what she perceives.
- movement of world — Susie is largely still while the afterlife does the moving: fields reorganize, gazebos and frozen lakes appear, and the skies shift with her emotional state — mise-en-scène unstable by design.
- pure optical & sound situations — Lesnie's camera goes untethered and roaming in the in-between while Eno's ambient, textural washes replace thematic underscoring — images and sounds to be looked at and listened to, with no action available.
- out-of-field-absolute — Weta renders the afterlife as a fully built photoreal environment; reviewers found the heaven 'so richly rendered that it foreclosed the ambiguity' — the unlocatable beyond converted into an adjacent place with real estate.
- crystal-seed (formation) — The in-between crystallizes around objects carried over from the living world — ships in bottles made vast, the dollhouse and miniature motifs that the dossier ties to 'Susie's memory' and 'lives held in small containers.'
- affective color — Lesnie splits the palettes: warm grainy period naturalism below, supersaturated and hallucinatory above, where color stops describing the space and carries the feeling itself.
- impulse-image — Tucci's George Harvey, cast against his customary warmth — a portrait of predatory ordinariness, fastidious and mild, appetite beneath the neighborly surface.
- originary world — The meticulously reconstructed 1973 Norristown suburb is revealed as the crust over Harvey's underground hideout, with the sinkhole as its disposal end.
- fetish (part-object) — Harvey's dollhouses — the dollhouse-builder's tidy, controlled interiors staged as an index of his pathology.
- symbol — The recurring miniature-and-enclosure motif (dollhouses, ship in the bottle, sinkhole) condenses the film's organizing relation: the killer's craft, Susie's memory, and lives held in small containers.
- crisis of the action-image — The afterlife frame reassures us Susie persists and drains conventional suspense from the murder, while the parents, pulled apart by loss, face a catastrophe no act can resolve — the tonal whiplash reviewers located in the intercutting.