The American Friend · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the Polaroids. Ripley keeps shooting himself — flat little instant photographs that develop in his hand, pile up on the pool table of his half-furnished Hamburg mansion, and prove nothing except that someone was there. "I know less and less about who I am or who anybody else is," he murmurs into a tape recorder, a cowboy hat marooned in northern Germany. This is a thriller, supposedly. A man is hired to kill, hires another man, paintings are forged, bodies fall on trains. But the engine that should drive all that — a person who sees a situation and acts to master it — has quietly seized up. Wenders made a crime film in which almost no one can act, and that paralysis is the subject.

Deleuze had a name for this exact failure: the crisis of the action-image. In the classic movement-image, perception flows into action; a character takes in the world and discharges what he takes in by changing it, and the cuts carry us along the chain. Watch what Wenders does to that chain. Jonathan Zimmermann is a Hamburg picture framer dying of a blood disease, and dying men do not act — they wait, they're examined, they read their own test results like sentences in a language they're losing. When he is finally maneuvered into killing, the famous set piece — the botched murder aboard the train — generates its suspense not from competence but from its absence. He fumbles. He's too close to the body. Wenders and his editor Peter Przygodda let the scene run long, patient about the geography, patient about Jonathan's physical panic, so that what we feel is duration, not propulsion. The thriller's whole grammar of decisive action curdles into dead time — temps mort, Deleuze's stretches where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held.

And because no one can act, everyone is reduced to looking. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns — moments where a character (and we, with him) can only register what's in front of us, with no motor response available. Jonathan becomes a seer rather than an agent: a watcher of his own decline, of Ripley, of a plot he can't see the edges of. Robby Müller shoots him for it. After the austere monochrome of Wenders's road movies, the color here is psychological weather — sodium yellows, arterial reds, sickly greens — and Müller composes restlessly through glass, reflections, frames within frames, so the men are perpetually mediated, observed through the apparatus of pictures. The image keeps reminding you it is an image. That self-consciousness is the dicisign: we feel the camera's presence, a perception of someone perceiving.

Now give Ripley his proper name. He is le faussaire, the forger — and forgery is not just his job, it is the film's logic. Deleuze took the powers of the false to mean the moment cinema stops pretending to deliver truth and instead makes truth and falsity genuinely undecidable, as a creative principle. Ripley deals in paintings by Derwatt, an artist supposed to be dead, whose canvases are still being produced — and Wenders casts the real director Nicholas Ray as that 'dead' painter who survives, a fake who outlives his own death. The whole film runs on this: forged art, false identities, a friendship built on lies that becomes, against everyone's intention, real. There is no stable ground to recover behind the deception. The forger doesn't conceal the truth; he generates a world where the question stops applying. Ripley's Polaroids are the small change of this — evidence manufactured by a man who has lost the thing it's supposed to evidence.

The sound completes the disconnection. Knieper's score withdraws, leaving traffic, machinery, the clatter of trains, and over that the men speak past each other across German, English, French. The friendship is built on what cannot be said. This is the multilingual soundtrack as audiovisual disjunction — speech that no longer locks the image down, voices that fail to meet. And the spaces they cross are Wenders's native any-space-whatever: stations, airports, motorways, harborsides, the in-between non-places that no longer host an action but only absorb a drift.

Place this in the discourse. Wenders inherits the Highsmith template from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train — the ordinary man contaminated into a murder pact — and the poisoned-domestic-interior of Shadow of a Doubt, with Jonathan's warm cluttered flat as the moral stake. But where Clément's Plein soleil gave us Ripley as suntanned sociopathic charm, Wenders deliberately answers with Hopper's shambling melancholy. He casts his ancestors into the film itself: Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray on screen, the American B-thriller imported bodily into a German art film. The cinephilia isn't decoration — it's the theme. This is a movie about the colonization of the German imagination by American images, made by a director who can only love and mourn those images at once, half-aware he is moving among borrowed clichés.

What it did, finally, was show that you could take the most motor-driven genre there is — the contract-killer thriller — and hollow out its engine until what's left is a dying man, a lonely forger, and the strange tenderness that grows in the space where action used to be. Watch it again for the waiting. The kill is the least of it.