Carlos · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Carlos stands in front of a mirror, alone, naked, and studies himself the way a man studies a monument. A weapon is somewhere in reach. He isn't planning an operation. He's admiring one — himself. Hold that image, because the whole of Assayas's five-and-a-half-hour film is folded inside it: the gun and the reflection, the act and the pose, arriving in the same breath.

For long stretches, Carlos is the purest example of what Deleuze called the action-image — cinema's default engine, the one the medium was built to run. A man perceives a situation and acts to change it; the situation shifts; he acts again; the cut serves the chain. Deleuze's 'large form' is this at geopolitical scale: an encompassing world (the Cold War's proxy market, the petro-states, the Palestinian armed struggle) presses down until a single act detonates it. The 1975 OPEC raid is that engine at full throttle. Assayas tightens his restless handheld grammar into something close to procedural real time — the camera pinned to bodies, weapons, and negotiation inside the headquarters and then the hijacked aircraft. You watch logistics, not melodrama. Will the operation hold? That is the only question, and it is enough.

But the mirror has already told you the action is never only action. Every move Carlos makes is also a posture. Late in his life Deleuze turned to a cinema of the body, where a stance or attitude — what he named the gest — exposes a hidden theatrical or social relation that no dialogue states out loud. Carlos doesn't fire a weapon so much as present himself firing it. He holds court. He poses. The mise-en-scène keeps catching him performing for an audience that is partly history and mostly himself. Terrorism, the film argues through his body, is theatre before it is politics — and Édgar Ramírez plays the man as a surface that knows it is being watched.

Watched from where, though? Carlos has no home. He is transit itself. Deleuze has a name for the trajectory that stitches disconnected places into one line — the vector, the line of the universe, a zig-zag threading airport to hotel to safe house to ministerial hall across a dozen cities and two decades. The hard ellipses in Luc Barnier's editing vault across months and borders and trust you to reassemble the map. Carlos doesn't cross borders so much as embody their porousness; he is the thing that passes through. This is Assayas's long-standing subject — bodies and ideologies in global circulation — scaled up to a fresco.

Then the engine begins to fail, and the film becomes something stranger and sadder. Deleuze located a hinge in film history he called the crisis of the action-image: the moment a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives, the sensory-motor link going slack. Carlos's whole second half is that crisis lived slowly. The market for freelance terror dries up. Sponsors drift away. He keeps acting into a world that has stopped answering. And his body registers the failure before he admits it — the athletic ideologue bloats into the paunchy, self-pitying relic of the Khartoum endgame. This is what Deleuze, drawing on naturalism, called the line of slope: an irreversible downward drift toward appetite and exhaustion. The body that was all gesture becomes a body that only hunger still moves.

What survives is the legend, and here the film turns its sharpest concept on its subject. Deleuze's powers of the false make truth and falsity undecidable as a creative principle, and its hero is the forger — the man who manufactures his own truth and shifts identities to suit. 'Carlos the Jackal' is a forgery, a brand, a self caught in the act of legending itself — fabulation, Deleuze's word for it. Assayas knows this, which is why the film openly flags its contested and dramatized episodes rather than pretending to deliver the real man. There may be no real man under the myth to deliver.

The post-punk needle drops — Wire, New Order, the Dead Kennedys, abrasive and anachronistic — are how Assayas keeps his own judgment in the frame. This is Deleuze's free indirect discourse: the author's vision fused with the character's, the soundtrack lending Carlos a charge of cool danger while quietly mocking his self-seriousness. The music admires and refuses him at once. It's a debt to Scorsese's Mean Streets, just as the terror-as-logistics handheld descends from The Battle of Algiers, and the clinical refusal of interiority — Carlos as network-node, never confessional portrait — comes straight from The Day of the Jackal.

The achievement is to take the political thriller, the genre of the decisive act, and run it long enough to watch the action-image die inside its own hero. Only at television length can you feel a man outlive his usefulness in real time. Carlos is, finally, the biography of a sensory-motor circuit winding down.

Watch it again, but watch his hands and his reflection instead of the headlines — and watch for the exact moment the acting stops working.