Atropia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the light. Hard, flat, dust-white — the kind of desert glare that reads as Iraq to a soldier who has never been there, and as California to everyone holding a call sheet. It falls on a village built to be shelled. Somewhere inside it a woman named Fayruz waits between staged attacks, and she has made the mistake of actually falling for the man cast as her enemy. One sun, two countries, one frame: that double exposure is the whole film, and it's also the fastest way into a stretch of Gilles Deleuze's thinking about what cinema does to the truth.

Deleuze called his richest figure the crystal-image. The idea is simpler than it sounds. Normally we trust that a film shows us something real and, separately, something imagined — the present event and its reflection. In a crystal-image those two exchange places until you can no longer say which is the original and which the mirror. Atropia is a crystal-image built out of plywood. The Army's mock village is a real place standing in for a place that doesn't exist; "Atropia" itself is an invented enemy nation, a country made entirely of paid people pretending. Every object on that set is, as the dossier puts it, "both a real thing and a theatrical sign" — the prop blood is blood and is a cue. When Gates stages an ambush so we feel its theatricality without losing the human stakes, she's polishing the crystal: the fake and the felt reflecting each other with no seam to pry them apart.

What cracks it is love. Deleuze noticed that some crystals have a fissure — a line running out of the sealed world toward something the totality can't contain. Fayruz and her insurgent are that crack. Their "unsimulated emotion" is precisely the thing the simulation has no script for, and the film's joke, which is also its ache, is that this leak of the real registers inside the apparatus as a malfunction. The rom-com's oldest engine — will the performance survive the feelings? — gets rewired to a readiness exercise, so a private tenderness becomes, absurdly, a matter of military consequence.

This is where Deleuze's phrase the powers of the false earns its place. Classical film theory, Bazin above all, built realism on a kind of contract: the camera doesn't lie, it records. Atropia lives on the opposite premise. The training "box" is a machine for manufacturing a useful, controlled falsehood — fail here so you don't fail abroad — and Gates treats that falsehood not as a lie to be exposed but as a productive force, the thing that makes people and feelings. Her actors are what Deleuze called forgers: Alia Shawkat plays an actress playing a role and quietly acting on her own performance within it, three layers at once; Callum Turner plays a soldier playing the enemy he is being drilled to kill. Nobody here has a stable identity to return to. The film keeps deliberately blurring when they're "in character," and that blur isn't sloppiness — it's the subject.

Gates is also doing something Deleuze reserved for political cinema, where, he said, "the people are missing." You cannot get more literally missing than a people the Army invented so it would have someone to fight. The role-players are caught in the act of legending — inventing an insurgency, a civilian life, a nation — and the satire lands because we watch fiction being manufactured as infrastructure. The desert set is a textbook any-space-whatever: not Iraq, not quite California, a lived-in-looking nowhere that has stopped being a real place and become a pure staging ground. And the film's boot-camp DNA gives us the gest, the drilled posture that exposes an institution — the body arranged by the machine, war rehearsed as choreography.

The lineage is exact. Atropia grows straight out of Gates's own short Shako Mako, which first found this world and its sympathetic-deadpan gaze on performers-inside-the-apparatus. Its romance-on-a-working-set belongs to Day for Night, where the film-within-the-film never stops showing you the labor of making. Its central conceit — war as something built and performed — is Wag the Dog carried into the training yard. Its flat bureaucratic absurdity is the deadpan of Catch-22 and the loudspeaker-staged camp of MAS*H, and its wager that the constructed training environment, not combat, is the real subject comes from Full Metal Jacket. What Gates adds to that inheritance is the crystal itself: earlier war satires showed the machine and mocked it. She makes the machine indistinguishable from the feelings that grow inside it, and lets the comedy and the heartbreak share a single body.

That's the significance. Deleuze's crystal-image and powers of the false are usually invoked for austere art films — Welles, Resnais, Robbe-Grillet. Atropia relocates them to a Sundance comedy about people whose job is to pretend, and shows they were never only for the austere. The next time you catch a film telling you it isn't lying, watch for the light that belongs to two countries at once. Then ask which sun you're standing under.