Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Death Becomes Her
1992 · Robert Zemeckis · Death Becomes Her on Sightlines
Madeline Ashton falls down the staircase and gets up with her head on backwards. Not severed. Turned, a clean half-revolution, so that her face grimaces up over the ridge of her own spine while the rest of her stands there in couture. Ernest watches with a drink in his hand. The light in the room stays warm and even and flattering. Nobody adjusts their performance to account for the repeal of anatomy. That's the joke. The film is serious about it.
Deleuze had a category for movies that run on appetite instead of on plans: the impulse-image. In an action movie, someone sizes up a situation and does something about it. In an impulse film nobody really decides anything, they're pulled — a drive works them like a hand in a puppet. Deleuze took the type from Stroheim and Buñuel and from the naturalist novel behind both, and he noticed these films always have two floors. There's the derived milieu, the furnished social surface where people have careers and dinner parties, and under it an originary world, a raw place of pure hunger that the surface is barely covering.
Zemeckis builds both floors and puts a staircase between them. The derived milieu is Beverly Hills: cosmetic surgery, premieres, Madeline's mansion, the mortuary where Ernest paints the dead. The originary world is Lisle von Rhoman's candlelit palace, where the ageless keep their bodies and lose everything else, and where Rossellini hands over the potion with the calm of someone who has done this many times. The potion is a fetish in the precise sense Deleuze means: a small charged object the drive organizes itself around, the thing you would step over a body to reach. Both women drink it. Neither reads the terms.
What should follow is Deleuze's line of slope — the irreversible downhill run every naturalist film takes toward exhaustion and the grave. Flesh fails, appetite doesn't, and the picture ends in the dirt. Death Becomes Her starts down that slope and then does something nobody had done with it. It removes the bottom. The women have bought off the one event that would end the descent, so the degradation continues with nothing to arrive at: cracked skin, spray paint, a body that keeps opening and has to be patched. Deleuze's naturalism ends in death. This one ends in an eternity of touch-up appointments, which is funnier and considerably worse.
The second thing the film breaks is the murder plot. A shotgun goes off at close range and leaves a clean hole straight through Helen's torso, and the gag is that you can see the room through her — a wall, the far side of the house, framed by the woman it just passed through. Stay on that composition a moment, because it is a precise piece of film history. Deleuze called the working engine of classical cinema the sensory-motor circuit: perceive, act, change the situation. The crisis of the action-image is what happens when the circuit fires and nothing downstream moves. Postwar European cinema reached it through rubble and boredom. Zemeckis reaches it through a shotgun. This is the most decisive act available to an American movie, cleanly executed, at the climax of a rivalry two decades old, and it accomplishes nothing whatsoever. The rest of the film has to invent a new dramatic problem, and the one it finds is maintenance. Not survival. Upkeep.
That is why the lens pays for itself here. Watch the film as a farce about two vain women and it's a good one with a rude streak. Watch it as an action-image that fires and fails to catch, and the third act stops looking shapeless and starts looking like an argument: once you cannot die, plot itself becomes a cosmetic problem.
The reversed head is what Deleuze called a gest — not a gesture that advances anything, but a posture that exposes a relation. Madeline with her face on the wrong side of her own body, still fighting for the last word, is the entire economy of stardom in one shape. The face is the asset, the body is the liability, and she and Helen have spent their lives on the first and are now being billed for the second. Streep and Hawn play the indignity absolutely straight, which is the only reason it lands. Blasé is the key. The horror of the joke lives in how fast both women get used to it.
Around them Lisle's world is rotting in the way Deleuze described as crystal-decomposition: an ordered, aristocratic enclosure that keeps its furniture immaculate while the people inside come apart. Mirrors, thresholds, candlelight, everyone beautiful and nobody alive. The film knows whose house this is. It descends from Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood's first great act of self-laceration about the star nobody would tell the time to, and from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which added a second woman so the decay would have someone to talk to. Zemeckis keeps the gothic staging and trades the pity for glitter, which is the Beetlejuice move: macabre bodies played as camp instead of fright.
Then there is what was actually happening on set, and this is where the film changed the medium. Bazin's account of why photographs grip us traced them back to embalming — the mummy complex, the old urge to save a body from time by making an image of it. A photograph, for Bazin, carried some of the being of the thing that stood in front of the lens. Death Becomes Her is a comedy about a brilliant plastic surgeon turned mortician, whose job is making dead flesh look alive with paint, and it was made with the technology that quietly voided Bazin's guarantee. ILM had built the water pseudopod for The Abyss and the T-1000 for Terminator 2; the pipeline that made liquid metal flow was turned on living skin. To open the hole in Helen they isolated the actress from her own midsection and rebuilt the room behind her. The image composes a body and then replaces it — crystalline description — and with that, an ordinary photograph of a person in ordinary domestic light stops being evidence of anything. The powers of the false enter through a farce.
Zemeckis had rehearsed the method on Who Framed Roger Rabbit: composite the impossible into Dean Cundey's photography with the light and the eyelines matched so exactly that you stop policing the seam. Here the impossible thing is a person. The Oscar for Visual Effects went to a picture with no spaceship in it. What followed — the invisible digital double, effects working as a service to character instead of as spectacle — is the era we have been living in ever since.
It cost something, and Streep has said so: long static days, marks and eyelines dictated by machinery rather than by a scene partner. She held still for the apparatus that would reshape her afterward. Her character does the same thing for the same reason.
So here are better eyes for the rewatch. Watch the camera at each gag. Cundey's camera is mobile and warm all through the comedy, and then, right as a body is about to become impossible, it locks off and holds. That stillness is the stable plate the effect requires. It is also the film's subject surfacing in the grammar: the moment the flesh stops being real, the picture stops breathing. Ernest, who finally refuses the vial and chooses to get old, is the only one the camera never has to hold still for.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Nobody in the film reasons their way anywhere; Madeline and Helen are pulled by vanity across decades, and the dossier's own account of the dramatic mode is 'the collision between the characters' vanity and the literal disintegration of their flesh.'
- originary-world — Lisle von Rhoman's candlelit palace of the ageless, where Rossellini presides as 'the film's presiding spirit of temptation' and sells the potion — a savage world of pure appetite under the social surface.
- derived-milieu — The 'hermetic world of luxury, cosmetic medicine, and decayed glamour' — Madeline's mansion, premieres, the mortuary where Ernest paints corpses — the furnished Beverly Hills surface the originary world shows through.
- fetish — The eternal-youth elixir itself: a single small object both women organize their lives and their murder plots around, handed over in Lisle's palace.
- entropy / degradation — The actresses are 'progressively wrecked — cracked, holed, spray-painted' as the film proceeds; the practical makeup of peeling skin and spray-painted corpse flesh — but the potion removes the terminus, so the slope runs without ever reaching death.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The shotgun blast that leaves a clean hole through Helen's torso with the room visible on the other side: the most decisive act in the film changes nothing, and the murder story converts into 'a black comedy of maintenance — the horror of a body that keeps breaking but will not stop.'
- the-gest — Madeline's head twisted fully backward on a broken neck, her face grimacing over her own spine while she keeps arguing — and the blasé reaction the editing holds on afterward, a posture that exposes the whole face-as-asset economy of stardom.
- crystal-decomposition — Lisle's enclosed palace of the immaculate ageless, the staging built on mirrors and thresholds, the 'décor of perfection literally contradicted by the ruined figures moving through it' — an ordered aristocratic world rotting inside intact furniture, inherited from Sunset Boulevard and Baby Jane.
- puissances du faux — The film is 'one of the first pictures to fold seamless digital compositing into the bodies of live actors in an ostensibly realistic contemporary comedy' — impossible images that had to read as unremarkable in naturalistic domestic light, which ends the photograph's standing as evidence of a body.
- crystalline-description — The torso wound: isolating the actress from her own midsection and rebuilding the background plate through the newly opened space — the image composes a body and then substitutes itself for it.