Vice · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

About halfway through Vice, the credits roll. Dick Cheney has decided not to run for president; he's out, fly-fishing, content, and the film closes itself down with names and crew and a warm orchestral major key. Then the phone rings. George W. Bush is on the line, and the movie restarts as if nothing happened. Most films end once. Vice ends twice, and the first ending is a lie — or rather a road not taken, dangled in front of you as though it were real. Hold onto that gesture. It's the key to everything McKay is doing.

Deleuze has a precise name for cinema that stops trying to tell the truth and instead runs on the gap between true and false: the powers of the false. The old contract of realist film — Bazin's faith that the camera testifies, that what we see happened — gets switched off. In its place comes the forger, Deleuze's word for a character (and a filmmaker) who doesn't discover the truth but manufactures it. Cheney is the forger made flesh. The film's whole thesis turns on the Unitary Executive Theory: Cheney didn't find a hidden presidential power, he authored one, forged a legal reality out of a sentence in the Constitution and made the country live inside it. The case for the Iraq War works the same way — a narration that produces its own object. So when the film forges a fake ending, it isn't being cute. The form has caught the disease of its subject. A man who falsifies reality for a living gets a movie that falsifies its own conclusion.

That false ending is also a textbook case of what Deleuze calls falsifying narration: two mutually exclusive versions held up as if both could be true. The Cheney who retires happy and the Cheney who becomes the most dangerous Vice President in American history are offered as co-real, separated by a single phone call. The point lands as a joke about biopic conventions and, underneath, as a thesis about contingency — none of it had to happen. The catastrophe flowed from one decision, and the film makes you feel the other branch close.

Notice who's telling you all this. The narrator, Kurt, turns out to be fictional, his connection to Cheney sprung on you as a twist. A documentary-feeling voice that was never reliable to begin with. This is the engine of McKay's noosign — Deleuze's image of a film that thinks rather than depicts, the screen working like a brain. Vice doesn't dramatize Cheney and trust you to draw conclusions; it interrupts itself constantly to reason out loud. Title cards define enhanced interrogation and executive power. Hank Corwin's editing — and Corwin cut JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon for Oliver Stone before this — splices archival news, political speech, dramatic reconstruction, and nature-documentary inserts into a single argumentative stream. The cut is the unit of thought. You can draw the lineage straight: Stone invented the political essay-montage, the rhetoric of mixed film stocks colliding as argument; McKay's own The Big Short added the explainer-aside and the Brechtian rupture; Vice fuses both and pushes them toward open absurdism.

Those nature-documentary inserts — the predatory animals dropped in to comment — are pure attraction-image. Deleuze, borrowing Eisenstein's "montage of attractions," means a shot that figures an idea rather than advancing the action. A hawk taking a fish is not something happening in the story. It's an editorial, a thought made visible. Same with the most famous scene in the film: Dick and Lynne Cheney plotting in Shakespearean blank verse, deadpan, a parody of the Macbeth collusion. That's what Deleuze calls a gest — a posture or attitude that exposes the theatrical, social relation underneath a scene instead of just playing it. The Cheneys' marriage is a power conspiracy, so the film hands them the meter of one and lets the artifice show. Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, the deliberate rupture that reminds you you're watching a construction.

And then there's Bale's face. Flattened voice, near-total stillness, an expression that reads as self-containment or as simple vacancy and never resolves into either. Deleuze would call this a qualisign — the immobile, reflecting face that holds a single quality without discharging it into action. Most of the movie's machinery is loud; Bale's Cheney is the quiet hole at the center, a man you cannot read, which is exactly the film's argument about him. The most consequential figure in modern American power is a blank, and the blankness is the point.

What did Vice do to film? It took the prestige biopic — the genre that promises to know its great man — and turned it inside out. The fragmented, no-single-narrator opacity goes back to Citizen Kane; the Brechtian political mockumentary to Bob Roberts; the essay-collage to Stone. Vice welds them into a biopic that openly admits it cannot find its subject and dramatizes the failure as form. It's a discourse-image: a film that poses a problem — how does a democracy let one opaque man rewire it? — and refuses to pretend it can resolve it. The risk is real. A film built on the powers of the false can be accused of forging too, and McKay knows it; that's why the fake ending implicates the filmmaker as much as Cheney. Watch it again for the seams. The movie is most honest exactly where it shows you it's lying.