Moonrise Kingdom · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera slides sideways through the Bishop house as if the front wall had been lifted away. Room, hallway, room, stairs. On the floor a record player is working through Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, the piece that takes an orchestra apart and names it section by section: here are the woodwinds, here the brass, here the strings. The camera is doing the same thing to the family. Here is a mother, here a father, here a daughter at the window with binoculars. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is deep. Before Moonrise Kingdom has told you a single thing about its story, it has told you how to look at it.

Keep that shot. Most of what Anderson invents here is already inside it.

Deleuze begins his cinema books with the frame, which he calls the closed set: every shot is a group of things chosen and shut in together, and the frame is above all a system of information. Most movies work hard to make you forget this. The frame pretends to be a window onto something larger that happens to fall across it. Anderson does the reverse. A cutaway house is a frame that admits it is a frame; it has a front wall, and the wall has been taken off for you. Once you see the film as a series of declared sets — Camp Ivanhoe laid out like a diagram, the island introduced by survey map, a row of tents scanned by a lateral track — the symmetry stops being a tic and becomes a method. The compositions are frontal because a frontal image can be read all at once, the way a child reads an illustrated plate. The Super 16 grain and the khaki-ochre-faded-red palette do the rest, soaking each scene in a late-summer warmth that belongs to memory rather than to any actual September.

Which brings up the second thing the film does, and the stranger one. Deleuze has a name for an image that has lost its sensory-motor self-evidence and asks instead to be deciphered: the lectosign, the readable image. He finds it in postwar cinema, where the link between seeing and doing goes slack and the shot starts behaving like a page. Moonrise Kingdom is stuffed with pages. Hand-lettered maps, letters read aloud, invented field manuals, merit badges, fictional printed matter, overhead inserts of hands and objects dropped in like an atlas's plates. Deleuze also describes the mark: an object that carries meaning because of a customary chain, so that when you see it you expect what usually follows. Anderson's move is to manufacture the customs themselves. The Khaki Scout regalia belongs to no real organization, yet by the second reel a badge, a length of rope, a coonskin cap have accumulated enough invented habit to land like evidence.

And here is the trick nobody quite credits him for: he borrows the readable image from a cinema of drift and hands it to a plot that still runs like 1915. The engine is runaway-and-pursuit. Two children flee, several factions converge, a historic storm closes in, and the lines are cut in parallel toward a rescue at the last possible minute. Deleuze called this organic montage, the American form, and traced it to Griffith — separate strands alternated, tightened, resolved in one convergent act. The island is what he would call the encompasser: the milieu that surrounds the characters and calls the action out of them. The narrator surveys it with almanac dryness, gives you the geography and the weather, and then the weather does precisely what a large-form action situation is supposed to do. Pressure builds until somebody has to act, and the act changes the world around them. Two twelve-year-olds lashed together in a flood the film has been counting down to since its first reel is not a parody of that structure. It is that structure, performed with total conviction inside a dollhouse.

The seed of the whole thing is a piece of theatre. Sam and Suzy meet at a church staging of Britten's Noye's Fludde, Suzy in costume as a raven, and the climactic deluge arrives later as though the opera had been a weather report. Deleuze's crystal-image turns on exactly this exchange — an actual image and its virtual double, a performance and the life around it, circling until you cannot say which one is producing the other. He is most interested in the seed, the small crystallizing point from which a world takes shape. Anderson has said the film was built outward from that music, and you can watch the seed sitting inside the picture, in costume, singing about a flood that has not happened yet.

None of this would carry a gram of feeling if the faces failed. They don't, and the mechanism is counterintuitive: the flatter the delivery, the more work the close-up gets to do. Deleuze's affection-image is the face held after action stops and before it resumes, a feeling registered and not yet spent. When Weisblum lets a joke land dead and then simply holds on a twelve-year-old's face until real hurt surfaces, that is a qualisign in Deleuze's sense — a still, reflecting face expressing one pure quality with nothing added. Anderson cast two unknowns and asked them for absolute sincerity inside absolute artifice. That mismatch is the film's power supply. The adults are all rendered small: a quietly lonely sheriff, a wounded scoutmaster, two exhausted and estranged parents, and a woman who has been reduced to her job title, Social Services.

Bob Balaban stands in the frame in the weather he is describing. Deleuze would hear a speech-act rather than dialogue — a voice that legends a place instead of talking inside it. The debt is open: the racing omniscient voice-over of Jules and Jim, which tells you how a life ends before you have watched it happen. The others are just as legible. The 400 Blows supplies the tender, unsentimental camera that follows a boy fleeing adult authority without pitying him; Small Change supplies children treated as full moral agents rather than as darlings, which is the whole basis of Gilman and Hayward's non-precocious playing. The Red Balloon gives the nearly wordless storybook fable and the child's-eye chase through a designed townscape. The Night of the Hunter is the deep source: two children in flight across a flat, frankly fairy-tale Americana. And the compositional grammar is Ozu's — the low, static, dead-frontal symmetry of Good Morning, deadpan children included.

What did it do to filmmaking? It made the storybook apparatus — chapters, narrator, map, index — a vehicle for sincerity rather than irony, and it promoted production design from backdrop to narrative organ. The cutaway set used as a camera move is Anderson's own invention: a built cross-section that turns a lateral track into a page-turn. Two years later he ran the same system at feature scale in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Then it left the movies altogether and became the most imitated visual shorthand of the decade.

The standing objection is fair. A dollhouse can hold feeling at arm's length, and some viewers have never forgiven Anderson the glass. Watch the flood again with that in mind, and ask whether the box is keeping you out, or whether the box is the children's own answer to an adult world that has stopped making sense — built to their scale, labelled in their handwriting, and just barely strong enough to hold.