Risky Business · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Everyone remembers the socks. Pink shirt, Wayfarers, a boy sliding across a hardwood floor to Bob Seger. Almost nobody remembers the room he slides across. It is enormous and it is blue. Reynaldo Villalobos lit the Goodson house the way you'd light a bank after hours: warm lamps stranded in fields of cold shadow, glass everywhere, furniture crowding the foreground so the figure sits deep in frame and reads small. Joel isn't throwing a party in that scene. He's alone in a house that doesn't need him, doing an impression of cool for nobody, and the camera catches him anyway.

Gilles Deleuze wrote two books about cinema in the mid-eighties, and their governing distinction is easy to state. In one kind of film, someone perceives a situation and acts, and the action settles it; movement organizes everything, and time is only how long the movement takes. In another kind, the perceiving outruns the acting. The character can only look and wait, and time shows up as itself. Risky Business has a plot that belongs completely to the first kind — problem, scheme, payoff — and a texture that keeps defecting to the second. The defection is where the movie lives.

Start with that house. Deleuze has a name for a space that has quit its job as a setting for action and become a feeling in its own right: the any-space-whatever, the espace quelconque. Not a symbolic space and not an expressive one. Just a place emptied of the function it was built for. Villalobos underlights the Goodson home and lights the emptiness rather than filling it, holds figures deep in large rooms, blocks the foreground with doorframes and furniture. A conventional teen comedy would have gone flat and high-key to keep the tone up. This one is dark, and the darkness isn't a gag. That single decision is why the film doesn't look like the imitators it spawned.

Now look at what fills the house. Deleuze's naturalism describes a visible social world, which he calls the derived milieu, that turns out to be a crust over an originary world of raw appetite and exchange. The North Shore house is a precise class artifact, full of breakable objects that matter more to Joel's parents than Joel does, and Brickman keeps staging him as their caretaker rather than as somebody who lives there. The crystal egg. The stereo. The Porsche 928, which is first the father's extension, then the instrument of transgression, then debt made physical when it goes into the lake. These are fetishes in Deleuze's sense: part-objects charged with a force out of all scale with their size. And when the brothel opens, Brickman's masterstroke is to stage the conversion as continuous with what the room already was, a display of assets. Nothing is violated. The originary world was the derived milieu the whole time.

Richard Chew, who cut One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Conversation, brought that patience into a comedy, and it produces what Deleuze calls dead time: temps mort, stretches that don't advance the action, where the everyday simply gets held. Chew lets scenes run past the point where the joke has landed and stays on Cruise's face while the situation curdles. The comic timing is duration, not assembly. The joke is how long Joel has to sit in the mess.

The two music sequences are the film's real invention, and they are the clearest pure optical and sound situations in eighties American cinema: moments where there is nothing to do but look and listen. On the L train at night, the image gives you silhouette and passing light and withholds nearly everything else. "In the Air Tonight" does the emotional work instead, and the gated-reverb break arrives where a cut would have. Tangerine Dream's contribution is structural. A sequencer arpeggio has no cadence. It can run under a scene indefinitely without building or resolving, which makes it the exact sonic form of a situation with no action available in it. Brickman knew where to get this. Sorcerer had proved a synth ostinato could carry long dialogue-free stretches, and Mean Streets had established the needle-drop as ambient interiority rather than energy. Furthest back is The Graduate, which ran a pre-existing pop score as a young man's interior monologue and shot affluent interiors through glass and water so the boy was always behind something. Brickman takes that grammar whole and moves it to Chicago.

Which returns us to the socks. Writing about musicals, Deleuze describes the moment a dancer stops being the source of his own movement and gets carried by a movement of world: the dance absorbs the dancer. Joel doesn't sing. He mimes a record made before he was born. The swagger is licensed, borrowed from somebody else's nostalgia, and his body is the thing it's played on. Cruise's achievement is to make the borrowing visible. This is a boy performing confidence, and the performance stays legible as performance. Deleuze would call that a gest, a posture that exposes a social relation instead of a private feeling. The Wayfarers and the loosened tie are the same device in costume. So is De Mornay's Lana, played as unsentimentally professional and in command of every transaction, her scenes with Joel blocked as negotiations over price and terms. That staging comes straight out of Klute, where Gordon Willis let faces sink into black in a lamp-lit apartment and the client/sex-worker two-hander ran like a business meeting.

The ground is unsteady from the start. Brickman opens on a dream, Joel wandering into a shower, the scene tilting toward anxiety, and doesn't mark it as unreal until it breaks. Deleuze's onirosign: a dream circuit anchored to nobody's remembered past, so you can't file it away as a flashback. And the voiceover narrates in wry retrospect, which means the film arrives already finished, already survived.

Then the third act closes the satire's hand. The Princeton admissions officer arrives on the brothel's opening night, and the same behavior reads correctly in both situations at once. Deleuze calls this an index of equivocity: an act that could belong to two different situations, so it goes ambiguous without changing at all. Joel's entrepreneurial competence is precisely what the interviewer is shopping for. Miles states the ethic out loud, in the line about saying what the fuck. Everything, including desire, is a market, and hustle and achievement turn out to be the same skill.

Brickman inherited this tonal architecture from Shampoo: a comedy about affluence where sex is a service economy and the last scene withholds relief. His own ending withheld it too. No Princeton, no resolved romance. Warner Bros. tested the picture, asked for satisfaction, and got it. That fight is the best-documented fact about the film and it is not a footnote. The released ending literalizes the satire instead of blunting it, since a movie about a boy rewarded for cynicism was revised by its studio to reward him more. Both versions deserve to be taken seriously. They are not the same film.

What it did to filmmaking: it made the licensed track a carrier of interiority rather than energy, a technique now so standard that Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and the entire prestige-television needle-drop economy run on it. It proved a teen picture could be formally ambitious and still return a multiple, and the Hughes cycle that followed took its Chicago suburb and left its coldness on the table. It saw the Reagan money film coming four years before Wall Street and played it as a comedy.

So watch the room instead of the socks. Watch how long Chew stays after the laugh. And notice that the house was already for sale before Joel ever thought of selling it.