Inside Out: LEAN ON PETE as Crystal- Image Personified

projected reflection:  anthropomorphism

Charley= figurative Reflection of violence // literal reflection of garish police light glare

Charley runs from us; into himself.

The escape that Haigh's LEAN ON PETE chronicles is action at its most explicit; emotion transformed into a perfectly reflecting physicalization.

The ride across Washington morphs into the seemingly endless miles walking through Wyoming.    The pivot from car to large scale walking is the concretized shift of direct psychological inquiry to an abstracted emotional experience.

Duration of film scenes align with the narrative course of what Charley experiences regarding hunger and loss of connection to the world. Both the forces of Starvation and loss of familial /human and ultimately even animal connection bring about a loss of self.  These forces are tracked through the passage of time and a simultaneous large-scale  geographical move across the country.
The time-movement image of this process is graphed with increasing visual abstraction: starting with projections (Charley's lack of self resulting in projecting relations upon newly met strangers (Buscemi, Sevigny),  reflections,  refractions and ultimately obscuration of the original image.

moving towards Abstraction: Impoverished Charley eyes his mirror reflection  as he vomits from filling mouth with gasoline to fuel truck to drive him and the horse to safety

further Abstraction: the loss of visual specificity in the image of the self
through time, through movement...hunger is reflected in this crystal-image

Unrecognizable: loss of visual self-recognition

Other filmic shifts felt within the course of the picture correspond to the heightening of the stakes that  perpetuate departures and escapes (movement-image) and patience (duration of time; the time-image).

Nothing is free of consequence. The evidence of every action is measured in increments of weight lost as hunger becomes starvation.  Measured in off handedly caught glimpses of Charley's haggard face reflected.  Subtle degrees of gauntness are increased in these second hand visual relics throughout the course of his journey.

The threat:   The "Specialness" of being a loser in life is fetishized by the movie.
How is that threat averted:  Charley is not compelling for the reason of his losses, though emotions do intensify as they accumulate.  Charley is kept at a distance from us; we only see virtual reflections of him projected...onto the humanized conversations with a horse who is not Human, and in the
actual reflections of him as he physically takes up less and less space.
His role as image/blank screen is foregrounded in this way.
We are denied the idea that Charley is knowable as a person.