The End of Violence · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Wim Wenders drains Los Angeles of its civic connective tissue and refills it with Hopper-lit pools of artificial light, glassy freeway corridors, and the hushed domesticity of a Mexican-American gardening crew whose world runs on parallel tracks to the entertainment industry they invisibly tend — making the city an any-space-whatever, a landscape so emptied of social relation that it can be repopulated by surveillance's abstract geometry. Mike Max (Bill Pullman), after his near-abduction, simply steps out of his own life and disappears into this margin; the moment he does, the thriller logic that should propel him evaporates. What remains are opsigns & sonsigns — wordless images of manual labor, early-morning light on palm fronds, the slow choreography of men raking a landscape they do not own. He has become a seer where he was once an agent, the sensory-motor drive of genre replaced by pure duration and looking. That looking is the film's deepest subject: high on the Griffith Observatory hill, Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne) sits inside a surveillance apparatus that converts all of Los Angeles into a relation-image — a vast network in which every monitored point is drawn into relation with every other, and the spectator, watching the watchers watch, is implicated in the same circuit. The lineage debt here is legible: Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) supplies the architecture — a surveillance technician whose professional voyeurism becomes indistinguishable from complicity — and Wenders extends it to the scale of a whole city's image-apparatus, asking whether cinema's own chronic looking is finally any different.