Nixon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the man alone in the dark. It's late, the White House has emptied of its daytime noise, and Nixon is wandering the corridors talking to the portraits on the walls — addressing the dead, the framed, the men who got the love he never could. Stone holds on Anthony Hopkins's face through these passages: the pouched eyes, the jowls gone slick with sweat, the hands that clasp and re-clasp as if to hold something that keeps slipping. In the action-movie sense, nothing is happening. A president who once bent the country to his will now mostly watches it close in around him. That gap — between a man built to act and a man reduced to looking — is the whole film, and it happens to be the gap Gilles Deleuze spent two books mapping.

Deleuze cut cinema in two. In the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action resolves things and the editing keeps the chain pulling forward. In the time-image, action stops working. The protagonist can no longer respond adequately to what he sees, so he becomes a seer — a voyant, someone who endures and registers rather than fixes. Deleuze named the precise pivot between them the crisis of the action-image, and Nixon is three hours of one man falling through that pivot in real time. The early reels still trust the sensory-motor world: the young Quaker claws upward, wins, acts. By Watergate the levers no longer connect to anything. He pulls them and the tapes keep turning, recording his own undoing. The most powerful man alive, and the film's verb for him is watches.

Watch what the close-ups do. Deleuze called the close-up the affection-image — a feeling caught on the face after perception and before any action discharges it, intensity with nowhere to go. Richardson shoots Hopkins's physiognomy almost clinically: the sweat, the re-clasped hands, the eyes. These aren't reaction shots in a chain. They're the face held as its own event, the organ through which a man feels his power leaking out of him. The body becomes evidence against itself.

Now the structure, because the form is the argument. The film refuses a timeline. The editors — Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan, carrying over the hyperkinetic cutting of Natural Born Killers — bind the boyhood humiliations of Yorba Linda to the midnight paranoia of the besieged White House by association, not cause. Deleuze has an exact name for this. Not the recollection-image (the dated flashback, a former present neatly retrieved — though the sepia, family-album warmth of the California scenes flirts with that), but sheets of past: the past as an order of coexisting regions you move through non-linearly, all of it present at once, pressing on the now. Nixon doesn't remember his dead brothers in a tidy cutaway; he sits with their phantom presence. The whole biography becomes a single block of time the man is sinking through under terminal pressure. This is Welles's invention, and the lineage is direct: Citizen Kane built the biography as archaeological dig, circling an elusive center through contradictory witnesses, and it's Deleuze's own prime example of the sheets-of-past. Stone applies the template to a president and adds the thing Welles couldn't: the tapes, the actual recordings, history that documented itself.

What is this ordered world that the film keeps reconstructing with such fidelity — the Oval Office, the Lincoln Sitting Room — only to deform with expressionist staging, the walls pressing in, the ceilings looming, Nixon dwarfed by architecture meant to crown him? Deleuze would call it a crystal in decomposition: an aristocratic, ordered world rotting from inside, its grandeur and its rot the same image. American power filmed as a structure already going soft at the core, the seat of authority become a cage.

And the gauges. Nixon mixes 35mm color, 16mm, Super 8, black-and-white, and simulated archival footage inside single sequences — not to fake the period but, the dossier is explicit, to foreground the artificiality of its own reconstruction. This is Deleuze's powers of the false. Cinema's old contract was that the documentary image doesn't lie; Stone breaks it on purpose, letting fantasy, newsreel, and surveillance-grade texture sit at the same level of reality so that no frame can claim to be the true one. From Kane he also inherits falsifying narration — the non-linear pile-up of mutually contradicting witnesses, no version sovereign. The film isn't reporting what happened. It's forging a Nixon truer than the record, and telling you it's forging.

The debts run thick and specific. Patton gave the Shakespearean five-act arc of the great American overreacher undone by his own gifts. The Conformist taught color-as-politics — Storaro's amber comfort against icy institutional blue, exactly Richardson's warm Yorba Linda versus the cold corridors. The Conversation and All the President's Men supplied the grammar of contaminated institutional space: Murch's tape-hiss paranoia, Willis's low-ceiling shadow. Z licensed the mixed documentary-and-drama register Stone then radicalizes.

What Nixon did to film: it smuggled the European time-image — Welles's depth, the modernists' fractured memory — into the middle of a $44-million Hollywood biopic, and made the form of memory itself the subject of a national story. It argued that the truth of a powerful man isn't in the chronology of his deeds but in the simultaneous weight of everything he can't stop reliving. Watch it again and notice how rarely Nixon gets to do anything in the last hour. He listens to himself on tape. That's the time-image: a man who has become his own audience, and can't change the ending he's hearing.