Body of Lies · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

You remember the view from above before you remember anything Ferris does on the ground. A street in Amman, crowded and sweating, DiCaprio threading through it on some errand of tradecraft — and then the cut upward, into the cold clean geometry of a drone-and-satellite feed, where the man you were just shadowing becomes a pale shape on a monitor in suburban Virginia. Ridley Scott keeps returning to that vertical cut. It is the film's organizing idea and its conscience at once: the same human being shown twice, once as a body in danger and once as information.

Start with what the film mostly is, because it earns its strangeness by departing from a norm. Body of Lies runs on what Deleuze called the action-image — the cinema in which a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the editing exists to serve that chain of perception and response. More precisely it runs on the large form: a global situation presses down until a decisive act transforms it. The encompassing situation here is a terror network detonating across Iraq and Jordan, and Deleuze has a name for that kind of milieu — the synsign, the encompasser, the whole environment that calls an agent forth and forces him to answer it. Ferris is that agent, fluent and physically committed, moving from city to city to stay ahead of events. The film also arranges its forces the old reliable way Deleuze calls the binomial: force against force. Ferris against the network, yes. But the live wire of the movie is a second binomial — Ferris on the ground against Hoffman in the sky, the man who shares the risk against the man who never does.

The drone gaze is where the film stops merely acting and starts thinking. Watch what that plunging overhead shot actually is. It is vision with no human standing inside it — acentered, bloodless, the world rendered as a surface to be scanned. Deleuze, following Bergson, reached for the limit-case of perception freed from any living center, the camera-eye as pure matter; in his vocabulary the engramme or gramme is exactly this, sight that belongs to no one. The surveillance feed is its everyday 2008 incarnation. And it shades into a related figure, the dicisign — the image in which the camera perceives a character who is himself perceiving, so that we feel the apparatus watching. The whole film is built on that doubling: Ferris perceives the street while the satellite perceives Ferris, and Scott cuts between the two until the feed becomes, as the editing makes literal, a third term collapsing the distance between watcher and watched.

Here is the quiet inversion. Hoffman, the man with the godlike eye, is the one who cannot act. He can only look. Crowe plays him soft and genial and monstrously detached, running statecraft from minivans and his kids' soccer games, and on his screens the violence on the ground arrives silent and remote. Deleuze would call that an opsign — a pure optical situation, an image you can only behold because no action is available to you from where you stand. Scott has lodged a pure optical situation, a seer, inside the engine of an action thriller. The bloodless abstraction from above is not just surveillance; it is the moral cost of seeing without sharing risk. The film argues this with its sound as much as its image: the chaotic full-spectrum roar of the field against the muffled electronic hush of the watchers.

And then the title. Body of Lies is an espionage film, and espionage in this tradition is the manufacture of appearances — the fabrication of a reality to flush out a truth. Deleuze gave the name powers of the false to art that makes truth and falsity undecidable as its very method, and the forger to the protagonist who creates truth rather than reports it. Ferris lives there. Trust, the film keeps insisting, is as dangerous as it is necessary; the unreliable surface is the medium of the work. That places the picture in the great paranoid lineage where the institution itself becomes the liar.

Which is the discourse it belongs to. From le Carre by way of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold it takes the disillusioned field agent betrayed by his own handlers, tradecraft rendered as chill realism rather than glamour. From The Battle of Algiers it inherits the handheld, documentary-grained staging of counterinsurgency in Arab streets — the immersive realism Scott and Alexander Witt adopt for Amman. From Three Days of the Condor it takes the operative who discovers the lethal duplicity of his own agency, with communication technology dramatized as the apparatus of betrayal. And it stands on Scott's own Black Hawk Down, where he and editor Pietro Scalia codified the sun-bleached, multi-camera combat chaos transposed here from Mogadishu to the war on terror. Munich, the same year, is its sibling in moral exhaustion.

Scott's specific invention is to have made the omniscient eye mundane. Earlier surveillance films treated the watching apparatus as menace or marvel. Body of Lies treats it as office furniture — a man deciding who lives between school runs — and lets the vertical cut do the judging. That is its durable contribution: it is the polished record of how popular cinema first learned to picture the drone, not as science fiction but as the new weather of power. Watch it again for the cut upward, and ask each time what the view from above can see, and what it has stopped being able to feel.