The End of Violence · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits inside the Griffith Observatory at night. The building was made to look up — to aim its lens at the stars, at the cosmos, at everything beyond the city. Ray Bering has turned it around. He watches Los Angeles instead: freeways, parking lots, lit windows, all of it fed to him across a wall of monitors he runs for a covert federal program. The premise of that program is the film's title. Watch everything, and violence ends.

Stay on that image, because Wenders builds the film out of it, and it is the cleanest example I know of what Deleuze called the seer — the voyant. In the cinema of action, a character sees a situation and does something about it; perception exists to be discharged into a deed, and the cut carries us from problem to solution. Deleuze called that the movement-image, and it ran the medium for half a century. Then, in a strand of postwar cinema, the link snapped. A character perceives something he cannot act on, and the film simply holds him there, looking. That suspended state — eyes open, hands idle — Deleuze named a pure optical situation, an opsign. Ray Bering is that figure in its modern form. He has perfect vision and no power. He sees the whole city and can change nothing in it, and the horror that slowly enters Gabriel Byrne's face is the horror of a watcher who understands he is only watching.

What exactly is he watching? Here Wenders names his own invention. The surveillance feed is a kind of cinema with the soul removed — flat, overhead, anonymous, set against the composed widescreen frames so the gap between them is unmistakable. The dossier puts it exactly: the camera divorced from authorship and conscience. Deleuze had a term near this, the gramme or engramme: vision freed from any human center, the camera-eye as pure matter, the world recording itself with nobody home behind the lens. Most filmmakers reach for that acentered eye as a kind of liberation. Wenders reaches for it as a nightmare. The panoptic image is the time-image's patient watcher stripped of the one thing that made watching bearable — a person doing it, on purpose, for a reason.

This is why the film keeps asking to be read rather than simply seen. An image that no longer tells you what to do with it, that has to be scrutinized for meaning, Deleuze called a lectosign — a readable image. The whole surveillance premise is one, and the debt is exact: Antonioni's Blow-Up founded the device of a crime that exists only inside a captured image, an image you must enlarge and interrogate, so that looking becomes the plot. Coppola's The Conversation gave Wenders the rest of his template — the surveillance technician whose professional voyeurism turns into his moral undoing, the apparatus swung back on its operator. Ray Bering is Harry Caul moved into the digital dawn.

Now the part critics held against the film, which I think is the point. The intersections are loose; the strands — Mike's disappearance, Ray's isolation, the detective, Paige — promise a convergence the film keeps withholding. Deleuze would recognize this instantly as the crisis of the action-image: the moment the sensory-motor machine breaks down and you get a dispersive situation, many characters weakly linked, and weak links, slackened causality, ellipses where a thriller would supply a clean chain of cause and effect. The genre engine idles on purpose while the film thinks aloud. Wenders subordinates suspense to meditation, so what looks like a thriller that doesn't tighten is really an essay that won't pretend to resolve. Call it a discourse-image — an image staging a problem it honestly cannot solve. The film does not know how to end violence. It knows that the proposed cure is a camera, and it cannot decide whether that is salvation or the disease.

Mike Max carries the other half. The producer of violent pictures survives a botched abduction and walks out of his own life, down from the hills into the open-air world of the gardeners and day laborers — power recast as anonymity, a moral geography rendered as literal descent. His plot does not advance so much as dissolve into drift, the voyage that transforms nothing in the world but everything in the man. That dedramatized wandering is lifted straight from Antonioni's The Passenger, where a man abandons his identity and the thriller evaporates into landscape. And the landscape itself is doing work: Los Angeles as a luminous, depopulated nightscape, pools of artificial light and glassy interiors, what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever — a space emptied of its function as a setting, left to radiate solitude. It is Hopper, the painter Wenders has chased since Paris, Texas, holding still in neon.

Wenders even signs the lineage inside the cast. Samuel Fuller, one of the American directors the New German Cinema worshipped, plays Ray's father — the same device Wenders used in The American Friend, inscribing his cinephile debts directly into the credits. Fuller died in 1997; the gesture is a goodbye.

The film underperformed and was judged minor. But its single idea — that total surveillance would be sold to us as the end of violence — arrived a few years early. The Truman Show and Enemy of the State followed within a year; the security state followed within four. Wenders saw the watcher's tower turn from telescope to panopticon, and understood, before most, that the death of the authored image and the rise of the monitored one might be the same event.