The Post · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The decision arrives as a voice on a crossed line. Katharine Graham, at home in her nightgown, lawyers and editors crowded around telephone extensions in offices across the city, and she says it — first haltingly, then not haltingly at all: let's go, let's publish. No gunfire, no chase down a corridor. A woman speaks, and a government cover-up that had held firm across four presidencies begins to crack. The strange thing is that Spielberg builds two hours toward this moment and it lands as genuine suspense, even though every adult watching already knows the Post survived. The question worth asking is why a film made entirely of phone calls and meetings generates the pressure of an action picture.

The answer is that it is an action picture, in a precise sense. Deleuze gave a name to cinema's oldest and most confident grammar: the action-image. A character perceives a situation, and acts to change it; the act resolves the situation; the editing exists to carry that chain forward. This is the movement-image at full power — the sensory-motor circuit, situation flowing into action. Most of film history runs on it. What makes The Post worth a Deleuzian look is that, in 2017, it rebuilds this machine deliberately, almost as an argument.

Look at the shape. Deleuze called the grand version the large form: a global situation that presses on everyone until a single decisive act transforms it. Here the encompassing situation — what Deleuze names the synsign, the milieu that calls forth action — is the whole apparatus of Washington power: the Nixon injunction, the imminent stock offering, the friendships Graham is supposed to police and doesn't. The film keeps widening to show you that pressure (boardrooms, Georgetown dinners, the courthouse) and then narrows to the one act that answers it. And the act is structured as a binomial, force against force: the press against the state, but also, more quietly, Graham against a roomful of dark suits who assume the choice is theirs.

That second duel is where the film does something finer than procedure. Graham is the interval made flesh — what Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, calls the centre of indetermination, the living hinge that hesitates between perceiving and acting. Streep plays the whole movie in that gap. Half-finished sentences, the deferential pause, the confidence arriving in increments rather than in a single beat. In a lesser newspaper film the editor decides and we watch him be right. Spielberg puts the entire weight of the action-image on a woman who has been trained never to act, so that the ordinary grammar of "perceive, then do" becomes, for her, a near-impossible passage. The suspense isn't whether the Post publishes. It's whether Graham can occupy the interval at all.

The staging keeps insisting on this. Kamiński composes in deep space, foreground decision and background labor held in the same shot — a debt the dossier traces straight to Citizen Kane, the press-baron framed against cavernous, ceilinged rooms. Deleuze would call this attention to the composed, information-dense frame, the closed set treated as a system you read. And repeatedly the system isolates Graham: at the edge of the men, or alone at the center of them. Her bearing in those rooms works almost as what Deleuze later called the gest — a posture that exposes a social relation without anyone naming it. Who stands, who sits, who is allowed to finish a sentence. The blocking argues the gender politics the dialogue is too tactful to state.

The editing, by Kahn and Broshar, is pure organic montage of the American kind — Griffith's convergent parallel cutting, scattered participants on crossed lines made to seem to rush toward one irreversible point. The old last-minute rescue, except what's being rescued is a principle. And the presses themselves become the film's symbol, the object that condenses its organizing idea: tons of churning hot-metal machinery that, once running, cannot be quietly switched off. Spielberg's implicit claim is that freedom of the press was once physical, embodied in iron you could feel through the floor.

Here is the significance, and it cuts against the film's classicism. Deleuze argued that the action-image fell into crisis after the Second World War — that the agent who could change his world gave way to the seer, the watcher who can only look and endure, and that this break gave us modern cinema. The Post arrives long after that break, in a century soaked in irony, surveillance, and the conviction that institutions don't act, they only leak. And it refuses the lesson. It rebuilds the sensory-motor link in good faith: perception still tips into act, the act still resolves, courage is still a thing a person does. Made in haste during the Trump presidency, that refusal is the whole point. The film descends from All the President's Men and His Girl Friday, and through Spielberg's own chamber-histories Lincoln and Bridge of Spies, but its real gamble is temporal: to insist, in 2017, that the action-image is not a relic.

Watch it again for the single frame where Graham stops perceiving and begins to act. The film has spent everything to earn that cut, and once you can see it, you'll see how much faith it takes to film.