Syriana · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A white SUV crosses an empty stretch of desert road, hurrying. Inside it, Bob Barnes — the CIA man Clooney plays heavy, bearded, used up — has finally understood the shape of the thing he's inside, and he is racing to stop a death. He does not stop it. A force arrives from somewhere off-screen, somewhere the camera can't show you and he never sees, and the car and the man it was trying to reach are gone. Hold on that, because it's the whole film in one stroke: a competent agent who perceives the situation exactly and acts decisively, and whose action changes nothing, because the thing he's acting against has no body to hit back.

That reversal has a name. Deleuze called the engine of classical cinema the action-image: a character takes in a situation and acts to transform it, and the editing tightens the screws until the act lands — the last-minute rescue, the duel, the deal closed. Three Days of the Condor and the whole CIA-thriller line Syriana descends from run on exactly this circuit. Barnes is built to belong to it. But Deleuze also diagnosed the moment that circuit broke — the crisis of the action-image — when films filled up with people who could see clearly and still couldn't respond adequately, because what they faced had stopped being an opponent and become a system. Syriana is that crisis turned into architecture. Read it through the break and the film stops being 'confusing' and starts being precise.

The symptoms are textbook, and Gaghan stages them on purpose. A dispersive situation: four strands, a dozen weighted character actors, nobody's arc steering the whole. Weak links: no chapter cards, names and affiliations slipped in sideways, scenes joined by elliptical cuts that trust you to bridge the gap. Tim Squyres's editing withholds the very connective tissue a thriller usually hands you — and that withholding isn't coyness, it's the argument. The characters operate on partial information; so do you. Elswit's handheld, eavesdropping camera keeps you in medias res, never granted the establishing shot that would say here is the master view. You are denied the overview because, the film insists, there is no overview to be had.

What's really being condemned here is the idea of a plot in the old sense. Deleuze noticed that crisis-era cinema replaced the clean conspiracy — a villain you could name — with a condemnation of the plot: a diffuse plot-behind-the-plot, a logic with no author. Syriana's genuine subject isn't the merger or the assassination but the web that makes both inevitable: a layoff in an oilfield, a directive in Washington, a sermon in a worker camp, all converging. Nobody in the film commands it. Christopher Plummer's lawyer, Chris Cooper's oilman, the agency men — each is doing his job inside a machine larger than any of them. That phrase, doing his job, is the film's quiet horror.

So where does meaning live, if not in any character's choice? In you. This is the relation-image — what Deleuze called the mental-image, where the film is assembled less on the screen than in the head of a viewer who holds the incomplete threads in suspension and infers the connection the script refuses to spell out. Syriana makes the audience the knowing third party, the only place the network is ever whole. You could go further and call it a cinema of the brain: the film's structure is topological, probabilistic, a map of relays rather than a line — the world built like a thinking organ, every node firing into the next. The mosaic grammar comes straight from Nashville, which first cross-cut barely-connected lives into the portrait of a system instead of a hero, and from Traffic, Gaghan's own template, which refracted one intractable problem through separated strands. The dread-through-opacity — keeping you as lost as the investigator — is The Parallax View's method; the drab boardrooms and overheard fragments, power as paperwork, come from All the President's Men; the docudrama momentum from Z. Syriana takes that whole inheritance and removes the consolation each ancestor still offered: the journalist who breaks the story, the act that finally lands.

And there's a political edge to the emptiness. Deleuze said modern political cinema works through the conviction that the people are missing — that there is no unified subject left to represent, only fragments. Wasim, the laid-off Pakistani worker drifting toward a small boat and a tanker, is exactly that: a person the system has rendered surplus, with no people behind him to make him legible. His strand doesn't resolve a theme. It just arrives at the convergence, like everyone else, on time for the violence.

That off-screen strike matters more than its spectacle. The missile comes from an absolute out-of-field — not the next room over, but a space the image can't situate at all, the sense of a power beyond every frame. The action-image promised that the world could be changed by someone perceiving it and acting. Syriana keeps the perception and the act and amputates the result. Its real invention is to have made the network narrative carry that amputation as form: to build a thriller whose every technique — the cut, the camera, the withheld name — exists to show you a process with no center and no author, and to leave you holding the map nobody in the film can see. Watch it again knowing the action won't save anyone. It plays differently — colder, and far clearer.