Resurrecting the Rube:

Diegesis Formation and Contemporary Trauma in

Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006)

By
Michael J. Anderson
http://tativille.blogspot.com/2010/11/resurrecting-rube-diegesis-formation.html

Biography: Michael J. Anderson is a joint PhD candidate in the Film Studies and History
of Art departments at Yale University. Michael’s electronic publications include pieces
on Jacques Rivette’s Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and Michael Mann’s Collateral
(2004), both for Senses of Cinema. His current research focuses on the early works of
Howard Hawks
 In Cinemascope’s winter 2007 publication (no. 29), Christoph Huber and Mark
Peranson declare Tony Scott – whom they contend is “regularly dismissed by critics as an
action hack director” – “overdue” for reappraisal (Huber and Peranson). The occasion
for this reassessment, according to Huber and Peranson, is Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006), a
“surveillance-era, post-Hitchcock concoction” that the authors claim as the director’s
“masterpiece” (Huber and Peranson). The authors likewise reference the “Master of
Suspense” in the piece’s title, “World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo,” in order both
to emphasize the thematic affinities between Déjà Vu and its specific Hollywood
antecedent, and also to catalyze Scott’s and Déjà Vu’s entries into the canon, following
on Hitchcock’s famously belated inclusion. Indeed, Huber and Peranson’s decision to
title their Déjà Vu piece thusly actively courts the same controversy generated by Robin
Wood when he stated that Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) is the director’s
“masterpiece… and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema
has yet given us” (Wood 108). “World Out of Order” represents the next disparaged
frontier for 1960s-style auteurist criticism, though at a juncture long after its tacit
acceptance as a default classificatory system for film studies. The critical dismissals of
Tony Scott’s corpus suggest that select traditional binaries – art and commerce, high and
low, good taste and bad – have not disappeared, but instead have moved underground.
With Déjà Vu the old debates again become new.
None of the above meta-critique, however, is intended to foreclose against
legitimate criticism of Scott’s work, which includes potential claims that his films are
overly commercial, products of low culture (or in today’s parlance, geared toward the
“lowest common denominator”) and representative of bad taste – in a word, that his films
can be trashy. Rather, this recognition of Huber and Peranson’s auteurist project is meant
to perform a different set of tasks: first, to acknowledge the preceding interest in Déjà Vu
and its acceptance (in certain quarters) as superlative film art; second, to highlight this
essay’s engagement with a recognized object of film art, rather than with cultural detritus
– to respond to Déjà Vu is to engage with the extraordinary, not the ordinary; and third, to
provide an analogy in Hitchcock’s similar passage from exemplary auteur to a subject of
theoretical interest.
The subsequent analysis will not in fact consider how Déjà Vu relates to the
remainder of Scott’s body of work, as is Huber and Peranson’s primary topic, nor will it
confirm or reject their assertion that Déjà Vu is the director’s masterpiece, even if this last
claim seems wholly plausible. Rather, the following text will begin with a single
theoretical dimension of Scott’s film, its construction of diegesis, which occurs both on
the level of the film’s narrative and also in the figuration of a visual field of surveillance.

2
While the latter is presented within the former, and therefore relies upon the prior
construction of the narrative space of the film, clarity can be gained nevertheless from
discussing the surveillance space first. As such, Déjà Vu’s surveillance imagery, its film-
within-the-film or image-within-the-image (as it will be referred to hereafter), will be
analyzed at the outset, and thereafter, the contours of the narrative’s more classical
diegetic space will be located. For both, the texts of Noël Burch (“Narrative/Diegesis –
Thresholds, Limits”) and especially Thomas Elsaesser (“Discipline through Diegesis: The
Rube Film Between ‘Attraction’ and ‘Narrative Integration’”) will serve to clarify Scott’s
conceptualization of diegesis, as will a short comparison with Steven Spielberg’s
Minority Report (2002). Following these analyses, the implications of the film’s content,
as enacted in and through its diegesis, will be examined, with particular emphasis given
to its status as a contemporary “rube” film, using Elsaesser’s terminology; to its emphasis
on the previous decade’s surfeit of collectively-experienced American traumas; to the
role of the ethics of preemption in Scott’s film; and finally to the religious iconography
that coalesces at the film’s conclusion. As Déjà Vu’s tagline purposively asks: “What if
you could change the past?” The answer for Scott and screenwriters Bill Marsilii and
Terry Rossio, like for so many Americans in the early twenty-first century, begins with
the tragedies of Oklahoma City, September 11th, and Hurricane Katrina.

“A single trailing moment of now, in the past”

Déjà Vu opens with what Huber and Peranson call “a nine-minute bravura
sequence of dialogue-free ‘pure cinema,’” in which five hundred forty-three men, women
and children are killed in act of terrorism centering on a New Orleans ferry (Huber and
Peranson). Among the initial law enforcement respondents is Doug Carlin (Denzel
Washington), a locally based A.T.F. agent who begins his crime scene investigation as
the aforesaid “pure cinema” passage continues. From the first, Carlin’s investigatory
brilliance is unmistakable: he notices a thin fragment of plastic on the riverbank; he
climbs under the Crescent City Bridge to collect residue from the explosion; in
examining a woman’s corpse, he spots transparent adhesive on the victim’s lips. It is
Carlin who determines that the explosion was an act of terrorism – no doubt aided by his
experience with the Oklahoma City bombing – and Carlin again who will be entrusted
with the task of locating the perpetrator in the extant surveillance footage.
Carlin is assigned this task by F.B.I. Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer), who
stipulates that he needs “someone who can look at a crime scene exactly once.” As the
protagonist and the film’s spectators soon learn, Pryzwarra means this literally. Entering
into the investigation’s media-saturated operations center, Carlin is confronted with a

3
large, flat-screen monitor presenting multiple windows and a pair of multi-screen,
vertically-oriented television consoles flanking the larger panel to the right. A New
Orleans satellite map fills the largest segment of the big screen – the “Jumbotron” for
Huber and Peranson – and is soon replaced by footage of the ferry. Subsequently, Carlin
will be asked for another focal point to which he offers the address of the dead woman
Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton). With her location cued on the large monitor, the initial
satellite mapping is progressively replaced – in a single, simulated (craning) camera
movement – by closer and closer views of her French Quarter apartment. Ultimately, the
exterior view is displaced by an interior image featuring a mobile, partially recomposed
Claire, with streaks of light trailing her cyborgian facsimile (see Figure 1). Successively,
this holographic figural flux is replaced by a denser, more sculptural reconstruction that
ultimately seems to show the former corpse alive once again (see Figure 2).
Here, Scott’s image-within-the-image closely mirrors the satellite-imaging
technology of Google™ Earth, including its fluid replacement of cartographic, aerial
views with increasingly immersive images of the earth’s surface (see Figures 3 and 4).
Of course, Déjà Vu represents the extension of this technology from photographic stills
showing select cityscapes (and in some cases, its population) frozen in time, to moving
images of a targeted place at a particular time. Simply put, Scott has made the
photographic technology of Google Earth cinematic.
This specific time, Carlin has been assured, occurred four days, six hours in the
past. Indeed the technology that allows for this implicitly global surveillance (though, as
the dialogue soon dictates, the viewer may only see into the past within a limited radius
of their present location), codenamed the decisively meta-cinematic “Snow White,”
requires precisely this time delay due to the massive amount of digital data required for
this recreation; it takes this long to render a fluid space, which, while navigable, cannot
be stilled or reversed. It is for this reason that Carlin’s superlative abilities are needed: to
know where to look in the continuous flow of a past, four-plus days before, or as Dr.
Alexander Denny (Adam Goldberg) puts it, “a single trailing moment of now, in the
past.”

“Strictly one way”? Scott’s Two-way Mirror

Dr. Denny’s conception is particularly revealing as it captures the unique
construction of Déjà Vu’s image-within-the-image: namely that it is a space connoting
surveillance (for its locatable spatial coordinates and continuous image stream) and even
a televisual liveness, which nonetheless figures a time that has passed. This live quality
issues less from the image stream itself, though this is a property it shares with

4
surveillance, than from the reaction of the object of vision to the image’s spectator. (The
alternative, namely indications of liveness through content that is verifiably occurring in
the present, is of course foreclosed by the aforesaid time gap and particularly by the fact
that Claire died at the time of the terrorist act.) As Carlin, Denny, Pryzwarra and the rest
view Claire on the big screen, she glances back as if aware of their viewing act. Claire
even tells a friend over the phone that she feels as if she is being watched and then
repeats the same point in her diary. In the process, the viewer’s presumption of
“invulnerability” to use Noël Burch’s terminology, which is to say his or her insulation
from the act of being looked at, recedes (Burch 24). The spectator (or spectators: Carlin,
Denny, et al.) can no longer look at the image with impunity.
This sense of interchange between viewer and viewed is reinforced further by the
light that issues from the flat screen panel that frames Claire’s likeness. Significantly,
Scott does not project the aforesaid image from the rear of the space; there is no shaft or
stream of light transporting above the actors’ heads. They are not positioned amidst the
flow of images. Rather, the light from the screen reflects back and conspicuously paints
the performers throughout their viewing (see Figure 5). In fact, the degree to which light
reflects from the image, or conversely the degree to which we see the figures in the media
room reflected on the screen, is far greater than it ought to be, absent the process of
projection. Scott adds these reflections, or rather paints his viewers in sheets of light, to
connote the two-way process that Claire’s returned gaze makes explicit. The image does
not seem to be “strictly one way” in the terms of Scott’s visual rhetoric.
Pryzwarra, however, assures Carlin that it is. After finding nothing in their
navigation of the exterior to suggest that Claire’s comments could refer to somebody else,
Carlin asks if in reality it is possible for Claire to see them. Pryzwarra responds with the
above quotation, that it is “strictly one way,” which accordingly reaffirms cinema’s uni-
directionality (using the term “cinema” liberally enough to include television and
surveillance technology), while contradicting the imagery that distinguishes the scene. In
Pryzwarra’s and more traditional conceptions of cinema generally, the medium acts as a
two-way mirror in which the spectator occupies a position in the present – on the side of
the mirror through which the glass is transparent (and from which the past may be seen) –
whereas the object of vision analogically faces the reflective surface of the mirror, denied
a vantage of the future instance on the other side. The future, of course, is never visible,
whereas, as Déjà Vu makes explicit, we invariably see into the past via reflection,
whether it is light bouncing off a mirror or the reflection of a distant star.1
Carlin’s question therefore presents either an extreme form of naiveté, or an
equally radical skepticism,2 given that in both instances it was Carlin himself who

5
touched Claire’s dead body. His personal experience at least dictates that the likeness on
screen must be a representation of the past. Cinema’s act of resurrection consists in
allowing its spectators to see the past in the present, not in bringing the past to renewed
life.

Across the “Einstein-Rosen Bridge”

Carlin, however, remains unconvinced by Pryzwarra’s assurances and shines a
laser pointer clandestinely toward the flat screen. Its red shaft breaches the space,
becoming visible inside Claire’s apartment. As she notices the beam bouncing off a lamp
in the center of the room, Carlin and company lose their feed, and in the process, black
out a substantial portion of the city. Realizing that the image is something other than a
representation of the past, Carlin interrogates his law enforcement colleagues. It is
imperative that this result does not compel Carlin to question his prior experience at the
morgue; he loses no faith in his earlier perception, even though it now seems that he is
interacting with the dead.
This results in the Bureau agents’ eventual disclosure that the image-within-the-
image is in fact Claire’s room, four hours, six days in the past, brought near by an
enormous expenditure of energy (known as an “Einstein-Rosen Bridge”). In other words,
they are faced not with a past, perfectly reconstructed in cinema, but with the past itself,
though filtered through the flat surface of the screen in a manner that is not precisely
indicated in the film. (It is as though Scott and company are willing to say, evoking
Bazin, that the image “is the model” (Bazin 14).) The sensation of liveness that codes the
image as surveillance is therefore a genuine liveness, and as such actual surveillance,
though again in a manner that resembles more closely the two-way mirror than the
disembodied vision of closed-circuit television. As Thomas Elsaesser has argued for “the
media worlds we inhabit,” Déjà Vu permits at this juncture “different spaces to coexist
and different times to overlap” instead of relying on the “single diegesis of classical
cinema” (Elsaesser 216-217). The parallel reality is more than a representation within the
contours of the diegesis; it is a second possible world, a second diegetic reality whose
distinguishing feature is its setting four-plus days in the past. It is not so much that it
overlaps but that it exists in parallel to the world occupied by Carlin and his Bureau
colleagues. The Einstein-Rosen Bridge has made this second discrete world and parallel
diegesis accessible to a sight mediated only by the two-dimensionality of the screen. The
laser pointer shows that the space between the viewer and the viewed can be traversed; to
use Noël Carroll’s preface for the act of “seeing,” “[we] would know how to get to the
place in question if [we] wanted to” (Carroll 71).

6
 This sense of a co-existent, permeable and living image-within-the-image
distinguishes Déjà vu from contemporary Hollywood’s other recent ‘crime prevention
among multiple temporalities’ narrative, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. In the case
of the latter, two forms of film-within-the-film are embedded in the movie’s diegesis:
hallucinated fragments of the future that permit the picture’s preemptive policing, 3 and
holographic home movies to which protagonist John Anderton (Tom Cruise) responds.4
In each instance, the image-within-the-image does not correspond to an on-going second
temporality, but rather represents a fragment of the film diegesis’s past or future. With
the home movie, it is a matter of a straight-forward recorded past that is projected
holographically in the film’s mid-twenty-first century present. Anderton reacts to these
images by recounting the same words he presumably spoke off-camera during his initial
filming of the fragments. He relives this past virtually, rehearsing his original part. By
contrast, the so-called hallucinated fragments are moments that have yet to come into
being, and which the film’s homicide detectives must decipher in order to determine
where and when future crimes will occur. In other words, Spielberg provides glimpses of
the crime (to come) rather than its trace in the form of clues.
Spielberg, however, will complicate the status of these hallucinated images by
introducing the possibility of variations among multiple presentations of the same scene.5
As such, the hallucinated fragments theoretically are either visions of a future actuality or
pictorially indistinguishable alternative scenarios. Or, in each instance, pictorial-realist
approximations of a future that might occur. In neither case, however, does the image-
within-the-image represent a co-equal world in the same respect as does the embedded
diegesis in Déjà vu; that is, none of these depicted spaces continue to exist in the same
manner as does Déjà vu’s four-plus day past, its “single trailing moment of now.” Rather,
these are impregnable indexes and/or digital-age facsimiles of the film’s diegetic world.

Activating the “Goggle Rig”

Comparatively, Déjà vu’s image-within-the-image diegesis can be breached, as
happens during Carlin’s subsequent operation of the “goggle rig.” This object is made
necessary by the fact that the surveyed space is limited to a relatively small radius
surrounding the site of spectatorship. After identifying a suspect (Jim Caviezel’s Carroll
Oerstadt) who is in the process of leaving their immediate field of view, Carlin and his
associates employ the aforesaid technology, which allows for direct line-of-sight
surveillance with its operation. Carlin specifically utilizes the apparatus – a helmet
supporting a camera and two LCD viewfinders in the place of eyepieces (see Figure 6) –
as he takes the wheel of an SUV. Carlin affixes the object as he aligns himself with the

7
suspect. Within both of the LCD eyepieces, as on the screen back in media operations
center, the past, four-plus days earlier, is again made visible. Carlin lifts the right
viewfinder so as not to block his view of the congested midday highway, even as the
pursued suspect – apparent again in the viewfinders and on the large screen – drives
down the same, largely empty freeway, in the middle of the night. In straightforwardly
reflexive terms, Carlin has become the cameraman, shooting dailies they watch back in
the media room. He has become the conduit for their surveillance, which nonetheless
possesses the temporal gap of cinema. Carlin occupies the space in the present, which
naturally is the place of surveillance, while witnessing the events of the past.
Washington’s character can not only see into both diegetic realities, but effectively exists
in both at once – embodied in the present and as the (invisible) apparatus in the past.
Likewise, the “goggle rig” and its footage, similar to the image-within-the-image,
must be “activated”: in each case, the image is theoretically permeable and therefore
changeable, which conceptually distinguishes it from traditional narrative cinema
(Elsaesser 219). (In the case of the “goggle rig,” Oerstadt’s reciprocal gaze establishes
the image’s two-way interchange.) Of course, Carlin’s initial act with the laser pointer
precedes this revelation; he reacts to the on-screen object of vision, whom he again
knows to be dead, as though she can see him. In other words, he confuses the look into
the camera and thus the loss of the spectator’s invulnerability with the possibility of
actual vulnerability, of his being spotted by the dead.
His behavior, in other words, is that of the classic “rube” who confuses
representation for reality (211).6 Carlin is the proverbial (though, as Elsaesser also points
out, mythical) spectator who confuses the ontological status of persons and objects (213).
While modern “media-forms” and specifically video gaming and virtual reality permits
this “ontological confusion,” Carlin’s attempt to interact with the image transgresses the
norms of classical cinema and thus signals a suppression of what he knows to be real,
through his prior haptic engagement with Claire’s corpse (213, 219). In fact, that the
image responds to his gesture should undercut its status as documentary record, and
accordingly Carlin ought to understand it as a fictional world, rather than as the indexical
(unmediated) recreation of a past time that it claims for itself.
However, Carlin’s subsequent attempt to communicate with his past self across
the Einstein-Rosen Bridge confirms his faith in the factuality of the enframed image.
Carlin succeeds in sending the message, though with the unintended consequence of
changing how his deceased partner will be killed. Nevertheless, this achievement
ultimately prompts Carlin, with Dr. Denny’s assistance, to chance the journey himself,

8
though only after he and his colleagues have successfully solved the New Orleans
bombing.

“U Can Save Her”

Appearing in a hospital emergency room with a message – “revive me” – written
across his chest, a seizing Carlin has made it across the Einstein-Rossen Bridge, and in
the process, into the image-within-the-image’s parallel diegetic world. He is no longer
synonymous with the apparatus as he was during his use of the goggle rig, but is rather
within the world he was filming. He has, like Sherlock, Jr. decades before him, entered
the world annunciated by the screen. Unlike Buster Keaton’s protagonist, however, he
has penetrated a world in which his earlier self exists – though in a form perpetually four
days, six hours younger.
The possibility of this encounter, however, will have to wait as Carlin’s
immediate purpose is to save Claire from her fate. After locating the beautiful young
woman – blindfolded, bound and gagged – in Oerstadt’s bayou cabin, Carlin rushes
Claire back to her New Orleans flat, where he attempts to impress her with the situation’s
urgency. Nonetheless, Claire remains skeptical of both Carlin’s intentions and also his
identity as an ATF agent, which leads her to call his departmental colleague for a
description (a detail that occurs without explanation in the film’s earliest section).
Similarly, a phone call caught as Claire’s answering machine picks up becomes an
opportunity for Carlin – who had listened to the message during his earlier inspection of
the deceased’s apartment – to predict every word that the caller will say. In this way,
Scott explains a few of the more quixotic details that had been included in the film’s
earliest sequences, from the aforesaid phone calls to a message written by Carlin in
magnetic letters on Claire’s refrigerator – “U Can Save Her” – to the profusion of the
agent’s fingerprints throughout the space. The identity of his trace is revealed
retrospectively.
This strategy of interpreting previously-opaque details shortly becomes one of
narrative repetition as Scott re-screens much of the footage that opens Déjà Vu: a pack of
sailors rush onto the U.S.S. Nimitz, a teacher mouths the word “okay” as she counts her
students, a little girl drops her doll and yells “Mama,” a military band on the Mississippi
riverbank plays “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and so on. While some of the
stylistic ornamentation that accompanies the opening sequence, Huber and Peranson’s
“pure cinema,” remains – as for instance Scott’s utilization of slow-motion – other
techniques have been expelled: the initial use of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” as
a sound bridge, moving into and out of the diegetic space, for instance, has been replaced

9
by the song’s full integration into the film’s narrative world. In this shift, to be sure, the
different narrational registers of the two sequences becomes clear, with the earlier
passage highlighting the act of narrating the event from a position initially divorced of
any protagonist, while the latter emphasizes the storyteller’s total immersion within the
diegetic space – as well as the agency of Carlin, Claire and Oerstadt. In the incipient
passage, no human narrative agent within the diegetic world can be identified. The
effects of an action, withheld from our view, are highlighted, not its causes.
Indeed, this earlier emphasis on the act of narrating is made explicit in the
picture’s first shot: a rectangular viewfinder zeros in on a Louisiana landscape, zooming
in once the exact location has been chosen. The filmmakers, in other words, are in
control of the film’s narrative subject. Then again, the rhetoric of the narration does not
construe an unembellished documentation of events in this opening passage, but instead
encodes its recounting as an act or remembering. Connotations of memory proliferate:
this is in an idiom that favors de-accelerated motion and shuffles fragments of ambient
sound, live music and non-diegetic pop songs in order to imply a past recalled in vivid, if
isolated detail; an imagined, fictional spectator might have seen the girl drop her doll or
might have been listening to the song when the explosion occurred. Scott thus imparts a
sense of the subjective in this opening passage, though in a form that does not center on
an individual viewer but rather moves freely between various centers of interest, as if
adopting André Bazin’s “eye of God.”7 The filmmaker’s ubiquitous control is filtered
through a set of representational codes that read as subjective. Yet, it is a subjectivity
that does not belong to an individual spectator but to many synthesized viewers – it is
group memory.
The film’s memory-inflected opening meets its abrupt end with the explosion of
the military vessel: digitally-produced fire balls surge from the ship concurrent with the
sudden muting of the Beach Boys song (which had been playing on a local radio station
at the time of the disaster). With this, we see bodies flying from the watercraft, as if
replaying the notorious imagery of persons throwing themselves out of the upper floors
of the World Trade Center. Scott switches freely from positions above and below the
waterline, with audio points-of-view varying with the camera’s location. When Carlin
arrives moments later, the auditory point-of-view becomes his, initially cutting out most
of the ambient sound in favor of a mournful non-diegetic theme. However, as the ATF
agent slowly soaks in the scope of the tragedy and acclimates himself to his surroundings,
a more rapid tempo replaces the slower bars, thereby emphasizing his self-suturing into
the world around him. He is now prepared to commence with his investigation – and has

10
become an active agent within the diegesis. Still, it will remain for his travel back in time
for Carlin to truly remake the narrative world in which he is present.

Comfortably “Unobserved” in the Present

While still maintaining the opening sequence’s ubiquitous camera, the closing
segment refuses its identification with either collective recollection or individual response
(until its very final moments, where an analogy to Carlin’s earlier point-of-view is found
in the narrative’s sudden focalization through Claire’s subjectivity). Rather, Scott has
replaced the opening past-tense with the present. The director no longer assumes a
position after the explosion; instead, he narrates through his selective framings of Carlin,
Claire and Oerstadt as the first two attempt to stop the third in his act of terrorism. These
are added to a series of reused shots that likewise maintain the same selective disclosure
and withholding of ambient sound that contributes so strongly to the earlier scene’s
evocation of memory. The film’s trauma looms in the future rather than in the past; the
narrative occupies the same present tense that it has since Carlin commenced in earnest
with his investigation, though the ground has shifted to a time before rather than after the
event.
The legibility of this modification of tense is similarly discernable in Scott’s new
refusal to use the segment’s pop songs non-diegetically. Here, both “Don’t Worry Baby”
and “When the Saints Go Marching In” are fully locatable within the space of the
diegesis and are audible only when a camera and microphone is near a radio (as in the
case of the Beach Boys tune) or close to the riverbank where the military band performs
the second tune. In resisting the earlier technique, Scott increases the “diegetic effect”
that Burch argues is fundamental to the “general experience of the classical film” (Burch
16). It is not simply that we are observing these people in this setting unawares, but that
our spectatorship represents a duration as well. We watch a present as it unfolds.
Concurrently, none of Scott’s characters look into the camera during this closing,
classically-articulated passage. Rather than the two-way exchange that defines the
image-within-the-image’s diegesis, the final segment’s diegesis is strictly uni-directional
with the roles of viewer and viewed clearly separated. In fact, this is the relationship
between image and spectator that Déjà Vu maintains throughout, including those
passages that house the image-within-the-image. Whereas Carlin acts according to the
norms of the “rube,” following his misapprehension – or as the case may be, his
apprehension – of the meaning endowed in Claire’s look into the “camera,” Scott does
not challenge his Déjà Vu spectators similarly. Theirs is the traditional role of the
classical spectator, comfortably “unobserved” in their act of spectatorship (22).

11
 “Lord knows the [country] has seen its share of pain”
At the same time, Carlin is not “disciplined” for his naïve response to the
cinematic image (Elsaesser 213). If the conventional “rube” film trains its spectators to
inhabit an appropriately inactive relationship to the screen, through “a subtle process of
internalized self-censorship” that flatters its audience for not sharing the rube’s untutored
response, Déjà Vu reverses this schema in its tacit encouragement of Carlin’s suspension
of sophistication (213). To put it somewhat crudely, “a superior form of spectatorship”
would not get either Carlin or Déjà Vu anywhere. We as spectators encourage Carlin’s
ontological confusion in our shared desire to write the wrongs of history, to “prevent”
crime in Carlin’s words, rather than to simply solve it.
The crime presented in Déjà Vu once again is a composite of more familiar mass-
tragedies that have claimed large numbers of American innocents. The first of these,
annunciated in Carlin’s own professional history, the bombing’s modus operandi, and in
the identification of the bomber as a white male who speaks of “patriotism” (as opposed
to the more familiar Islamic villain of the post-9/11 world) is the domestic terrorism of
Oklahoma City. As such, Scott seeks to deflect questions of external state support and a
potential military response that inheres in acts like those conducted against the U.S. on
September 11, 2001, in favor of a crime whose recourse is necessarily prosecutorial. In
other words, a domestic bomber gets Scott the mass-victims of 9/11 without the messy
international political ramifications or potential cultural/racial discourse that typically
follows. Then again, 9/11 does resound in Déjà Vu in the experience of death shared by
many of the victims: once more, we see persons hurled from the burning ship, their
bodies on fire as they plunge into the surrounding water. In the annals of contemporary
American trauma, no event continues to figure as large as 9/11; to ignore it would be to
inadequately engage the subject.
Aside from 9/11, the responses of the local, state and national governments that
preside over New Orleans represents the most conspicuous of recent American tragedies.
This context is made explicit not only in the film’s New Orleans setting but in the
banners that refer to the spirit of the people after Katrina, contemporary footage of the
then still devastated Ninth Ward (where Oerstadt continues to reside), and in a closing
intertitle that proclaims the film to be “dedicated to the strength and enduring spirit of the
people of New Orleans.” Each of the above historical events rank as crimes – perhaps
even equal in Scott’s eyes – against segments of the American people, whose traumatic
memory we nonetheless all share.

12
 Nevertheless, Déjà Vu is about the prevention, not the prosecution of crimes. If
this situates Scott’s piece as a corollary to the logic of preemption, which resonates not
only with the Anglo-American response to 9/11 but also with the increasing presence of
surveillance (CCTV) technology in urban centers throughout the West (and particularly
on the British Isles, Scott’s homeland), Déjà Vu’s novel invention is metaphysical
certainty. To be able to know the future beyond all doubt is to foreclose against any of
the potential ethical dilemmas that are implicit in preemption. (Minority Report is, in this
regard, the film’s negative, in its promotion of epistemological uncertainty.) “Snow
White” indeed becomes the perfect tool for a world beset by terrorism: it is a means for
changing the past, for redirecting time’s flow around the events that would adversely
shape it otherwise. In this respect Déjà Vu submits itself to the criticism that it is an
abjuration of real world ethical concerns. Yet, the very impossibility of the process
through which Scott condones preemption indicates that this set of questions ultimately
exists outside the reality that Déjà Vu wishes to treat.
The reality that Déjà Vu does concern itself with is the emotional aftermath –
shared by all Americans – of Oklahoma City, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. Like the
picture’s opening, Scott’s film speaks to a collective memory and the desire to reverse the
past’s larger tragedies, which in the American context have been in greater supply over
the course of the past decade. Déjà Vu diagnoses a nation’s psychology and telegraphs
its collective fantasy life.

Romantic and Religious “Faith” in Déjà Vu

Then again, neither Carlin’s nor the film’s spectators’ stake in the picture’s
restorative fantasy is primarily public in nature. In each case, it is a desire to save Claire
that animates our interests. Of course, in Carlin’s case specifically, it is not simply
benevolence but a romantic desire that accounts finally for his willingness to endanger
himself in his attempt to travel back in time. In this respect, Carlin truly is the “rube”
who has fallen for the embalmed image on screen. We see her larger-than-life likeness in
close-up profile view and then dressing in the distance as Carlin stands facing the flat
panel. In reverse shot, Scott discloses his enraptured gaze, which the filmmaker pairs
with a romantic musical theme and the light dancing off the screen. Scott signifies
Carlin’s romantic desire rather directly, while inviting his spectator to share in this
economy of desire. He has made her “matter” to us in the same manner her father
attempted to make her matter to Carlin – by supplying pictures of the beautiful, deceased
woman. Our desire to see her alive once again, and with the film’s star, leads to our
affirmation of Carlin’s “ontological confusion.”

13
 Carlin’s reclamation of his dead love assures the film’s debt to Vertigo that Huber
and Peranson identify in their article. It also introduces a directly Christian iconography
to what had been an essentially theistic work. During the initial debates surrounding the
possibility of convening with the past via the picture’s “Snow White” technology, Carlin
raises the possibility that there may be something more out there. Dr. Denny understands
Carlin’s theological implication and adds that God’s mind “is already made up,” thereby
supervening further discussion on this basis. However, when Denny later agrees to aid
Carlin in his attempted time travel, he prefaces his assistance by admitting that he too
believes in God. In other words, he also holds out hope for the miraculous – in this case,
for the possibility that Carlin could travel back in time. As such, Carlin’s act is framed
less in the naïve terms outlined heretofore than as an act of faith – in the possibility that
the physical laws of the universe could be suspended, that a miracle could occur.
Carlin entreats Claire to have a similar faith when he saves her from Oerstadt. In
this case, she was not made aware of her kidnapper’s identity and thus would be justified
in doubting Carlin’s identity, as she initially does. Certainly, Carlin’s true story is far
more implausible than the alternative explanation that he is the kidnapper, which compels
him to demonstrate his superior knowledge of the situation – to perform miracles (as in
his perfect recounting of the phone conversation that Claire is having in the present). The
female lead, though initially skeptical, nevertheless does act in faith, particularly after she
hops onto the ship once Carlin insists that she go to the police. In decidedly Catholic
terms, the same terms as Hitchcock, she shows her belief through her works.
This faith is tested most severely when the pair finds themselves in the truck
carrying the explosive device. As Carlin puts it to Claire, “if we get out now, everybody
dies.” Claire reaffirms her trust and Carlin drives the vehicle off the side of the ferry,
deep into the waters below. Claire is able to escape, but Carlin dies in the now
underwater explosion. Unlike Oerstadt, Carlin shows himself to be willing to give up his
life to save others. As he tells Oerstadt elsewhere, this is the “price of freedom,” to
“sacrifice” one’s self, thus clarifying the film’s Christian allegory as it mirrors Christ’s
offering of his blameless life for mankind’s sins.
And like the film’s religious precedent, the guiltless Carlin’s sacrifice entails a
victory over death. With Claire wrapped under a blanket along the water’s edge, Carlin
suddenly emerges between a pair of nearby emergency vehicles, alive once more. This
resurrected Carlin, importantly, is not the Carlin of four days, six hours in the future but
is instead the Carlin of the present – that is, the Carlin of the past. Scott and his
screenwriters Marsilii and Rossio have discovered therefore a second means of
representing resurrection within the stipulative logic of the film’s science fiction

14
narrative, while identifying a solution for the problems posed by the coexistence of
Carlin’s past and present selves. This diegetic world can move forward with the same
number and identity of persons that had populated its mirrored past and future self. This
possible world can now be the real world – which it will be with the same Beach Boys hit
playing on the radio as Claire asks Carlin the same question he posed to her earlier:
“What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but they’d never
believe you?” Carlin responds that he’d “try,” before shrugging it off with a “nah” as he
experiences the eponymous déjà vu.

Conclusion
Ultimately, Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu represents a classical understanding of the
filmic diegesis, wherein a ubiquitous camera discloses its fictional subject in the non-
fictional actuality of post-Katrina New Orleans. Scott’s mise-en-scène presents its
content unaware of its apparatus, and thus makes its spectator “invulnerable,” which
according to theorist Noël Burch maximizes the “diegetic process” that is integral to the
experience of classical film narrative (Burch 24). In other words, the world created for
the screen is not made for interaction but rather to be viewed by a spectator whose gaze
will not be returned. In this way, Scott’s conception of his screen world coheres with
Burch’s analysis.
Nevertheless, nested within Déjà Vu is a less traditional understanding of film
space deriving from viewer-“activated” media such as virtual reality and gaming, to
follow on Elsaesser’s contemporary reframing of diegetic formation. That is, Déjà Vu
establishes another method of relating to diegetic spaces that leads the film’s protagonist
to immerse himself within the spatial coordinates of the depicted past. In this respect,
Scott’s picture converges with the same early film history – as instantiated by the “rube”
genre – which Elsaesser identifies as a precursor to new media conceits of diegetic spaces
that are manifest in the image-within-the-image. Moreover, the multiplicity of diegetic or
possible worlds in Déjà Vu likewise links to the theorist’s redefinition of the diegetic
experience. Hence Déjà Vu effectively acts out the unique diegetic production of new
media (as anticipated by early cinema) within the parameters of a more traditional, uni-
directional diegesis.
At the same time, it is essential to remember that Déjà Vu’s invention of
ontologically separable diegeses occurs within an “action hack” cinema that remains
every bit as critically disparaged in our time as was Hitchcock’s in his, or as was the
medium itself in the time of the “rube.” Even if the film’s form can be made palatable
(or useful) for its critics, as an exemplar of new narrative modes, this is not a cinema of

15
ideas or “thought” surely (Rosenbaum). Yet, what this criticism misses is Déjà Vu’s
contemporaneousness. To this end, the film’s adaptation of the “rube” trope exceeds its
historical pedagogical function, becoming further the enactment of a shared national
desire to rewrite its recent traumatic past. This invented history, a synthesis of Oklahoma
City, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, is made revisable through the film’s construction of an
enterable diegetic space, literally brought into proximity with the diegetic world that
houses it. Consequently, the naïve act of the “rube” is encouraged rather than “ridiculed”
(Elsaesser 213); it is the film’s means for saving the lives of the innocent, bringing the
dead back to life and securing love across this un-crossable boundary. It is the ultimate
act of faith.

Notes

1
André Bazin made the analogy of cinema to a mirror “that relays the presence of the person reflected in it
– but… with a delayed reaction” in “Theatre and Cinema – Part Two” (Bazin 97).
2
Déjà Vu does not, as might be expected, question the reliability of this earlier experience. At no instance
in the film are we given any indication that either Carlin or any of his colleagues’ doubt that he saw the
woman dead. Rather, her earlier death is stipulated as fact both in the film’s investigation and also in our
understanding of character motivation and psychology.
3
Minority Report’s future temporality is hallucinated, so to speak, by the film’s “Precogs” – a floating trio,
whom one character classifies as “more than” human. These Precogs have the ability to intuit future
murders at variable distances from the present, which are thus recorded and deciphered by the film’s
“Precrime” unit on a series of interactive, holographic screens. With this data, the film’s law enforcement
officers not only prevent homicides (specifically) from occurring, but prosecute those who would have been
guilty of the crimes.
4
Thomas Elsaesser, in fact, classifies Cruise’s Anderton as a “rube” inasmuch as he attempts “to ‘touch’
his missing son” (Elsaesser 219). For the author’s definition of the “rube,” see endnote 6.
5
Namely, Spielberg reveals that it is possible for one of the three Precogs to disagree with the other two –
as to how or if a murder will occur – thus creating one of the film’s eponymous “minority reports.” The
film indicates that these visual files can represent future actuality in spite of their minority status.
6
The “rube” film, according to Elsaesser, “emerged with the origins of the cinema itself, at the turn of the
century, first in Great Britain and the US, but similar films were also produced in other countries. They
often presented a film-within-the-film, that is, they showed a member of the cinema audience, who does not
seem to know that the film images are representations to be looked at rather than objects to be touched and
handled or scenes to be entered and immersed in. These so-called ‘rubes’ or simpletons usually climb up to
the stage and either attempt to grasp the images on the screen, or want to join the characters on the screen,
in order to interfere with an ongoing action or look behind the image to discover what is hidden or kept out
of sight. The best-known example of this genre is Uncle Josh at the Movies, made by Edwin S. Porter for
the Edison Company in 1902” (Elsaesser 211-212).
7
As Bazin puts it: “It is like the eye of God, in the proper sense of the word, if God could be satisfied with
a single eye” (Bazin 88).

16
 Works Cited

Bazin, Andre. Jean Renoir. Ed. François Truffaut. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.
---. What is Cinema?, Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005.
Burch, Noël. “Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits: Noël Burch Questions the
Centrality of Narrative to the Experience of Film.” Screen 23, 2. 16-33.
Carroll, Noël. “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image.” Film and Philosophy. Eds.
Cynthia Freeland and Tom Wartenberg. New York: Routledge, 1995. 68-85.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between ‘Attraction’
and ‘Narrative Integration.’” The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Ed. Wanda Strauven.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 205-223.
Huber, Christoph and Mark Peranson. “World Out of Order: Tony Scott’s Vertigo.”
Cinemascope 29. <http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs29/feat_peransonandhuber_scott.
html>.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Déjà Vu.” Chicago Reader. 17 November 2006. <http://www.
jonathanrosenbaum.com/?s=deja+vu >.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press,
1989.

Abstract: Long dismissed as an “action hack director,” Tony Scott has recently received
belated recognition as a significant auteur thanks to the publication of Christoph Huber
and Mark Peranson’s 2007 Cinemascope career overview (on the occasion of the release
of the director’s 2006 “masterpiece,” Déjà Vu). While Huber and Peranson’s
contribution is unmistakable, their assessment of the director’s 2006 career peak fails to
establish Déjà Vu’s substantial theoretical interest, to say nothing of its engagement with
contemporary American traumas. With regard to the former, it is the shape and nature of
diegetic construction in Déjà Vu that insures its interest: namely as a classically-
constructed Hollywood narrative that nonetheless houses a new media-inspired image-
within-the-image that encourages the two-way exchange typical of gaming and virtual
reality (for example) that had been excluded by traditional narrative film form’s uni-
directionality. In order to distinguish these two types of diegesis this essay consults Noël
Burch’s “Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits” for the film’s conventional diegetic
construction, and Thomas Elsaesser’s new media-inflected “Discipline through Diegesis:
The Rube Film Between ‘Attraction’ and ‘Narrative Integration’” for the image-within-
the-image.
This essay also postulates the presence of an Elsaesser “Rube” figure in Déjà Vu’s
protagonist, even if his “naïve” behavior serves to fulfill spectatorial desire (which is
quite opposite to the author’s original formulation); in the case of Scott’s film, the
purpose is to undo a fictionalized recent tragedy modeled on those of the mid-1990s
Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

17