The American · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the back of his neck. Corbijn loves to film George Clooney from behind, a small figure walking into a wedge of stone street, the medieval walls converging above him like the sides of a vise. The town is beautiful. It is also a trap, and the film knows the difference is only a matter of where you happen to be standing. This is the first thing The American asks you to do: stop waiting for the chase. There isn't going to be one in the sense the trailer promised. What there is instead is a man, a town, and the slow tightening of sightlines.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for what happens when a movie does this. He called the ordinary thriller a movement-image: somebody perceives a threat and acts to change it, and the cuts hurry you from situation to action and back, the way a Bourne film does. The whole machine runs on the certainty that doing something will resolve the situation. Deleuze's word for that circuit — perceive, then act, then perceive the result — is the sensory-motor link. The shock of The American is that it builds an expert killer, a man whose entire being is sensory-motor competence, and then refuses to let the circuit close. He watches. He checks exits. He does his exercises, makes his coffee, files a piece of steel. Action, when it finally comes, is over in a second and changes nothing. Deleuze would say the film stages a crisis of the action-image — the moment cinema stopped trusting that a hero's deed could master his world.

When the link breaks, you get what Deleuze called a pure optical and sound situation: a character who can only look and listen because no useful action is available to him. Jack is lethal and helpless at once. He can assemble a rifle to a thousandth of an inch, and he cannot do the one thing he wants, which is to stop. So he becomes a seer — Deleuze's voyant, a watcher rather than an agent. Notice how much of Clooney's performance is just his eyes finding the geometry of a room. The film hands his watchfulness to us; the high overhead shots of the labyrinth turn the picturesque town into a field of pure exposure, where to be seen is to be finished. We aren't reading the plot. We're reading the angles.

Those streets are doing precise conceptual work, and Deleuze's term for them is the any-space-whatever — espace quelconque. It means a space that has stopped being a stage for action and become a pure affective fact, fragmented into sightlines and dead ends. Castel del Monte's stone corridors aren't a setting Jack moves through toward a goal; they are funnels, framings, the visible shape of his entrapment. Martin Ruhe shoots them frontally, balanced, photographic — Corbijn came to film from portrait and album-cover photography, and you feel a still-image sensibility insisting that a wall, held long enough, becomes a feeling. The composition that dwarfs a man inside old-town geometry is a debt to Bertolucci's The Conformist, where another assassin is pinned by European architecture; Corbijn relocates it to the Abruzzo and cools the palette to slate and winter.

The other thing the long takes give us is what Deleuze called temps mort — dead time, the stretches where nothing advances the story and the everyday is simply held. The repetition is the point: the coffee, the push-ups, the bench. Andrew Hulme cuts for duration, letting scenes run past where a thriller would leave, so that any small deviation from routine — a stranger's glance, a wrong reflection — spikes the tension. Suspense lives in stillness here. That is the contract Focus Features sold against and lost; the D CinemaScore is the sound of an audience trained on movement meeting a film made of waiting. The film even names its own ancestry, screening Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West on a café television — Leonean patience, the held wide before the draw, where the wait is the event.

And underneath the stillness runs a slope. Jack builds a weapon, and the film watches that fabrication with documentary love — lathe, file, drill press, the suppressor taking shape. The rifle is a fetish in the exact sense: a part-object charged with a compulsion the man can't name, and the craft that should free him is the thing that seals his fate. Deleuze would call this the impulse-image's line of slope, the irreversible downward grade toward death that naturalism hides beneath ordinary life. Clara, the priest, the dangled possibility of an ordinary morning — each is offered and foreclosed. The butterfly that gives Jack his nickname is the tell. It lands, it opens, and it is exactly what gets pinned.

The lineage runs clean from Melville. Le Samouraï gave Clooney the near-wordless professional built from gesture instead of dialogue; Le Cercle Rouge gave the wordless ritual of a man assembling tools in silence. Wenders' The American Friend and Antonioni's The Passenger supplied the watchful expatriate dissolving into foreign streets. What Corbijn added was the photographer's frame as a moral instrument: the conviction that you can shoot a thriller as a series of stilled portraits and let the architecture do the killing. Watch it again for the empty corridors before anyone walks into them. The dread is already there, in the stone, waiting for a body to expose.