Beau Is Afraid · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Beau stands inside his door and looks at the street he has to cross. The frame is centered, frontal, clean enough that you could take an inventory of it: signage, graffiti, bodies, product labels, the litter of a civic order that quit some time ago. The composition is not panicking. Everything inside it is. That gap is the whole film, and it is also the joke.

Ari Aster's invention here is small and consequential. He kept the camera manners he built for horror and took the horror away. Hereditary and Midsommar pointed a very composed, very patient camera at people being destroyed. Beau Is Afraid points the same camera at a man apologizing. The dread survives the genre removal. It just comes out funny, because the engine underneath was never fear. It was shame.

Deleuze gives you a way to describe what is happening in that gap that goes past "surreal."

Start with the ordinary case. In most movies a character sees a situation and does something, and what they do changes the situation. Perception, action, new situation. Deleuze called that machine the movement-image, and it is most of cinema. Beau perceives constantly. He acts almost never. Joaquin Phoenix builds the performance entirely out of reaction: flinching, apologizing, absorbing. Deleuze's word for this kind of character is voyant, a seer, someone who can only look and endure because no action available to him would be adequate to what he is seeing.

A seer alone gets you a static film, and this one is a three-hour picaresque. So here is the finer concept, the one that actually unlocks the movie. Deleuze noticed in the musical that when the dancer stops driving the dance, the dance keeps going and takes the dancer over. The figure goes still and the world supplies the motion. He called it the movement of world.

That is Aster's staging, precisely. Beau is placed as the passive object around which aggressive worlds arrange themselves. He does not cross the street; the street arrives. He does not escape the suburban house; the house tightens around him. The choreography of extras, props and architecture does the work a protagonist usually does.

This is worth arguing rather than assuming, because the standing complaint about the film is that Beau does nothing for three hours and is therefore badly written. Movement-of-world says the passivity is not a defect in the character, it is the load-bearing wall. It also explains the runtime, the film's other most-complained-about feature. If the world is doing the moving, the world needs room. Lucian Johnston's cutting holds scenes well past comfort for the same reason. You cannot feel a world move if you keep cutting away from it.

Four worlds, each a self-contained short with its own palette and rules: the overexposed city, the pastel surgical suburb, the storybook forest, the shadowed arena. The transitions between them run on dream logic. Deleuze's term is the irrational cut, a cut that does not join two spaces so much as install a gap between them and let the gap speak. The film is not confused about its geography. It is built out of the seams.

And the trip changes nothing, which is its own concept. Deleuze called this the balade, the trip or the stroll that transforms nothing, and read it as the symptom of a cinema where action has stopped resolving anything. Beau's odyssey is the quest with the transformation surgically removed. He gets home and is put on trial for the journey.

Two moments where the nightmare turns into an argument.

The forest. Beau watches a travelling troupe perform, and the performance blooms into hand-made animation by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña: an imagined life he might have had. Deleuze called this the Figure. When a character cannot perform an action, the action gets transposed into spectacle, staged instead of done. Beau cannot live a life, so a life is performed at him by strangers in a wood, in another medium entirely. And the virtual life comes out more vividly textured than the actual one he is standing in. That is the crystal-image, an actual and its virtual double locked in a circuit until you can no longer say which one is the real one. Everything the film does with ambiguity afterward runs downstream of this. It never commits to whether any of it is literal, dreamed, delusional or symbolic, and after the forest you stop expecting it to.

The finale is the Figure again at full scale: Beau's psyche staged as an amphitheater of judgment. What could not be acted has to be tried.

Meanwhile the frames stay oppressively legible. Pogorzelski composes for total readability and the design fills every inch with information. Deleuze's lectosign is an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be deciphered instead. This film runs a cruel version of it. Every frame is legible to us and illegible to him. He is the only thing in the shot that cannot read the shot. Add a sound design that keeps a menace off-screen and never lets you locate it, a threat with no address, and you get a man permanently half a second from being turned on.

The debts are specific. Aster's own 2011 short Beau is the literal seed; its anxious man crossing a lethal street becomes the apartment-district gauntlet, framed the same frontal way, a body under siege held dead center. The deadpan deep-staged tableaux and pallid grotesques come from Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor. The guilt architecture is Welles's The Trial. The idea that a psyche can be built as physical geography and toured on foot is Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. Gilliam's Brazil supplies paranoia expressed as set-dressing rather than plot. And 8½ is the permission slip: a procession through an author's own mind with no obligation to declare which parts happened.

Its own children are not written yet. What it put on the table is a demonstration. A reportedly $35 million feature can be made entirely out of time-image materials, a hero who cannot act and worlds that act for him and a real/dream question left open for three hours, and the result is a comedy. It also became trade shorthand for what the blank-check auteur bet costs. Both are true, and the second is why the first stays rarer than it should be.

Watch it again and stop waiting for Beau to do something. Watch what the room does while he doesn't. The question the film refuses to close is worth carrying out of the theater: is the world like this because Beau's guilt is projecting it, or is Beau's guilt the accurate response to a world that really is like this? Deleuze would not make you choose. Neither does Aster.