The Right Stuff · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the rider. A man on a horse comes out of the Mojave heat-shimmer toward a thing that should not be there: a bullet-orange rocket plane slung under a bomber's belly. Chuck Yeager walks up to the future the way Ethan Edwards rode out of one in The Searchers, and that rhyme is almost the whole film in a single frame. Kaufman keeps returning to this horseback figure in the desert, approaching or departing, because he is making a Western about the end of Westerns — and, without knowing the vocabulary, a film about the engine that ran cinema for its first sixty years.

Deleuze called that engine the action-image: a man perceives a situation and acts to change it; the act resolves the situation; everything in the cutting serves that chain. The Right Stuff opens by running it at full power, in its grandest large-form version — a global situation bears down until one decisive act transforms it. The situation is the sound barrier, 'the demon that lives in the air,' the wall that has already killed pilots. Yeager climbs, the airframe shudders, and then the boom arrives on the ground before anyone understands what they heard. That sonic boom is a beautiful piece of pure cinema thinking: a force from beyond the frame that can't be placed in any visible spot in it — what Deleuze would call the out-of-field absolute, the sense of an outside the image can register but never show. Sound design does the metaphysics here. The barrier breaks, the situation is changed forever, and a man's body did it.

The desert itself is the second actor. Deschanel's anamorphic Mojave — adapting Freddie Young's Lawrence of Arabia grammar, the human figure shrunk almost to nothing against a bleached horizon — works as what Deleuze called a respiration-space: the film breathes between the vast encompassing milieu and the taut, single line of the flight that cuts through it. Big space, then the thin trajectory of one pilot against it, then big space again. Force against milieu, man against the air: the old binomial of the action film, staged as myth.

And Shepard barely moves. His Yeager is built almost entirely from withholding — a face that reflects and refuses to discharge. Deleuze had a name for that immobile reflecting face holding a single quality: the qualisign, the icon of pure quality. What quality? The one the title can't define and the film never will. The right stuff is the great withheld term, an object that condenses the whole film's organizing relation — its symbol — precisely by never being said out loud. You either have it or you don't, and the moment you ask what it is, you've shown you don't.

Then the film does the thing that makes it more than a handsome epic: it watches the action-image die. NASA arrives, and the heroic act stops being done and starts being shown. Where Yeager flew alone, the Mercury Seven are photographed in groups, in ceremonial configurations, their bodies arranged for press pools and television. Deleuze tracked a hinge where the image stops acting and starts figuring — action transposed into spectacle and discourse rather than carried out. He called it the reflection-image, the Figure. The astronauts' public postures — chests out, smiling on cue, enduring the medical humiliations — are pure gest: attitudes that expose a social and theatrical relation instead of accomplishing anything. The press conferences are a montage of attractions, staging that figures rather than acts, NASA's publicity apparatus turning pilots into brand names. The frame, so open in the desert, tightens into capsules, studios, sealed rooms. The film looks compressed because its subject is being compressed: the act swallowed by its own image.

This is why the climax is the most cited cut in the picture. Five editors cross-cut Yeager's near-fatal X-1A crash against Gordon Cooper's orbital flight — the lone rider's body in extremis against the media triumph. On its face this is organic American montage, the convergent parallel cut Griffith built the action film on. But Kaufman empties it of the usual function. There's no rescue, no resolution; the cross-cut argues instead that the mythic body and the televised spectacle are two faces of the same impossible aspiration, and that one is replacing the other in real time. The grammar of the action-image is used to stage the action-image's funeral. That's the film's quiet genius.

Place it in the lineage and the moves get sharper. Patton gave Kaufman the warrior as historical anachronism, sublime in private and unmanageable in public; Dr. Strangelove gave him aerospace bureaucracy as absurdist theater, which is exactly the register of the medical exams and the press handling; 2001 and Apocalypse Now taught him to treat flight acoustics as philosophy, not effects. Out of those debts he made something none of them quite did: a film that holds the heroic and the ironic in the same frame without letting either win.

What did it do to film as an art? It showed, with total formal control, the precise historical moment America's action-image curdled into media image — and it did so right as 1980s blockbuster cinema was learning to live entirely inside spectacle. Watch it again for the rider in the heat-shimmer. He's not just a cowboy. He's the last man whose deeds were larger than their broadcast, and the film knows the camera is what finally closed his frontier.