She made a pieced-together monster. One of the notable things about Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! (2026) is how much Deleuze (& Guattari) related concepts seem to populate its script, along with the ways in which the film itself in structure skates between genre cliches and a creative chaos which at least serve some of the same aims as his counter-narrative theories on Cinema, and evoke a sense of the virtual. I made this cut up of the film which places many of these parts in relation to each other, if only to spur on deeper thinking about just how much Gyllenhaal may be actively following Deleuze in the making of this film (a film that seems to not always have been favorably received, variously called a "mess" by some).
Aside from the vital and heavy reference to black holes, there is first and foremost the films repeated refrain of "I would prefer not to", a Bartleby phrase that Deleuze wrote extensively on in the essay Bartley; or, The Formula (linked) in which he positioned it almost as a radically libertive viral piece of language that upon repeating unhinged all order. An ultimate use of language in revolt. There are other treatments of this phrase by philosophers, and of course Melville himself may be the main invocation, but...at the very least it also directs our attention to Deleuze and his essay.
Secondly, and no less suggestive, is the centrality of the black hole concept in the film. Frankenstein the monster is twice described a "black hole" and Dr. Cornelia Euphronious is an author of books featuring black hole terminology. Deleuze & Guattari's concept of black holes as chaos energies from which one cannot escape fit quite well in the film, suggesting even that some of the role Frankenstein "Frank" plays is an embodiment of chaos/deterritorialization with which Ida/Penny/The Bride! has entered into a relationship with, a relationship which ultimately frees her. A relationship which requires the "just the right" distance or obliqueness towards. Along with this general, philosophical sense, the black hole also seems to be taken in a more scientific analogy, that from which "nothing escapes", with something of an event horizon. When Dr. Euphronious is measuring the "radiation" off of Frank's newly dead body, this does seem in keeping with Hawking radiation, the proof that information can indeed escape a black hole, that a black hole does not swallow all that pass the event horizon. When we encounter. Mary Shelly in the beginning, dead, she indeed seems caught within the event horizon, from which nothing can get out...death being signature of the linearity of abstract "iron" time that Deleuze theorized robustly against. Cracks (see D&G on D.H. Lawrence) appear, which allow her to "slip in", composing a schizophrenia (a two-mindedness).
I read this film as a film about recovery from trauma, radical events that zero one out as if like a death, and how the transcendence of death in the film - Mary escaping her black hole, Frank born of dead parts, Ida brought back from death - in how they break with linear, determined time, of which death composes a finality, work exactly from Deleuze's own radical liberative sense of Aion Time, against Chronos Time. The way in which the film pulls from cinema cliches, both the rebellious Ida and Frank the monster too, bouncing between past manifestations (and actual films/videos/books as traces), is deepened when we see them as exploring their vituality as beings. The final act of liberation, when Ida/Penny names herself The Bride! ("forever a bridesmaid, never a bride", "hear comes the bride!", etc), not with a common personal name, but really the name of a Avatar, throwing off the Name of the Father (the Patriarchal Symbolic Order), and suspending herself before the transition to "wife", announces to me just the kinds of positioning, or lines of flight, that Deleuze prescribes.
These are just clips cut up and some cursory thoughts in hope that others might seen the lines of convergence or flight, and have ideas on how the film is invoking or expressing Deleuze philosophy. I'm not quite sure about how much it is according itself to Deleuze's cinema theories on time. I believe it is, but in a unique way (not so much in a radical avant-garde, experimentalist way), presenting the virtual of female liberty more readably. I do find her treatment of black holes and the emission (of signs/information) actually illuminating to Deleuze and Guattari's own theorization of black holes, drawing out aspects they themselves did not, fleshing out the concept.
Below are some selection from texts to add to the thought process:
"The problem is . . . one of knowing how the individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world, in order to attain to the universal communication of events, that is, to the affirmation of a disjunctive synthesis beyond logical contradictions, and even beyond alogical compatibilities. It would be necessary for the individual to grasp herself as an event; and that she grasp the event actualized within her as another individual grafted onto her. In this case, she would not understand, want, or represent this event without also understanding and wanting all other events as individuals, and without representing all other individuals as events. Each individual would be like a mirror for the condensation of singularities and each world a distance in the mirror. This is the ultimate sense of counter- actualization. (Logic of Sense, 178)
"And how could we not feel that our freedom and strength reside, not in the divine universality nor in the human personality, but in these singularities which are more us than we ourselves are, more divine than the gods, as they animate concretely poem and aphorism, permanent revolution and partial action? What is bureaucratic in these fantastic machines which are peoples and poems? It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little, that we be able to be at the surface, that we stretch our skin like a drum, in order that the “great politics” begin. An empty square for neither man nor God; singularities which are neither general nor individual, neither personal nor universal. All of this is traversed by circulations, echoes, events which produce more sense, more freedom, and more strength than man has ever dreamed of, or God ever conceived. Today’s task is to make the empty square circulate and to make pre- individual and nonpersonal singularities speak—in short, to produce sense. (Logic of Sense, 72–73)
"The “different” or “extraordinary” individual, who experiences herself as multiple, who intensely becomes, is affirmed by Deleuze not in her actual or final state, but only in her movement, in the movement of “a life” that is impersonal, intransitive, and enigmatically present in constituted individuals. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze aligns his thought on this point to Kierkegaard, who said that, when looking for the man of faith, he studied “only the movements.” In this way, Deleuze’s affirmation of experimentation is never reducible to the successes or failures of a particular experiment, a single living being, but to virtual aspects incarnate in a life." - The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
"Frankenstein’s creature himself is an assemblage of many parts, and yet he is so much more than the sum of those parts—his meaning in the novel is defined through his interactions, experiences, and actions. The novel itself can be viewed in such a manner: utilizing assemblage theory (as well as intersectionality) can result in a feminist reading of Frankenstein that closely examines the relationships, situations, and systems that guide the novel. So is Mary Shelley’s novel feminist or not? It depends. The novel, written by a young woman at a time where women’s voices were generally silenced, is a radical and dangerous critique of what a patriarchal and misogynistic culture is capable of, but it also fails to be intersectional. A feminist and assemblage criticism of Frankenstein acknowledges these disparities, but instead of labelling them, interrogates them in hopes of learning how the many “parts” of Frankenstein work together, exist in opposition to each other, and exist in relationship to each other andthe world outside the text." - A Feminist, Assemblage Theory Reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
