Vice · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

At its formal core, Vice is a work of montage — not the continuity splice that powers genre, but the argumentative cut that makes a case. Greig Fraser's cinematography shifts formats with rhetorical intent: contemporary sequences rendered in flat broadcast-television overexposure, the 1970s Ford-era passages in warmer filmic grain, handheld camera lurching through moments of political crisis. The grammar descends from Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), which pioneered rapid intercutting across newsreel, 16mm, and re-enacted footage as historical argument rather than narrative continuity — a debt McKay inherits and redirects from conspiracy toward institutional critique. Yet Vice complicates its own montage through the operations of powers of the false. The unreliable narrator — who, the film will eventually reveal, has his own stake in Cheney's story — breaks the fourth wall to explain the Unitary Executive Theory and the mechanics of executive power, not as exposition but as avowal: the film is making an argument, not reporting facts. Celebrity cameo asides and mid-scene genre ruptures function as Brechtian alienation devices, foregrounding the film's own constructedness. McKay mirrors Cheney himself, who assembled intelligence into a case for a war — practicing a kind of institutional forgery the film performs in return. What holds these modes together is a noosign: the screen as a brain thinking in public. The essayistic interruptions don't merely explain; they demand that the viewer complete a logical chain — from legal doctrine to detention to civilian casualties — making cognition itself the filmic event. The image becomes indistinguishable from the argument it houses.