Wanda · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Wanda earns the time-image almost by necessity: its protagonist cannot act, can only be acted upon, making her a seer rather than an agent in the Deleuzian sense — and Loden's formal choices enforce the condition relentlessly. Wanda doesn't decide to leave her marriage; she drifts from a divorce hearing she attends in hair curlers into a sequence of encounters that do things to her. Cinematographer Nicholas Proferes courts this passivity with opsigns & sonsigns — pure optical and sound situations that refuse to tip into motivation or consequence. Long, handheld takes hold Wanda eating alone in a diner, sitting in a dark movie theater, waiting beside a road; these durations are not dead time in the pejorative sense but Deleuzian substance, the interval where interiority might live and instead reveals a kind of vacancy. Proferes frames figures small within wide, unlovely horizontal stretches of slag heaps and strip mines — Pennsylvania coal country rendered as any-space-whatever, landscape so denuded of picturesque emphasis that it functions less as setting than as spatial correlative for Wanda's own disinheritance from any furnished selfhood. The crime plot borrowed from the outlaw-couple cycle then in vogue — made romantic and doomed by Bonnie and Clyde three years prior — is stripped bare: a bungled bank robbery Wanda wanders into as she wanders into everything else. The deepest craft debt is to De Sica's Umberto D. (1952), which pioneered this exact durational mode: a socially discarded figure whose waiting, eating, and doing nothing are permitted to be the film's entire substance, a rigor Loden absorbed and made hers.