Brexit: The Uncivil War · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Picture the campaign director on the floor. Not behind a desk, not at a podium — flat on the carpet of an open-plan office, a wall of Post-its above him, his young team stepping around the body while he turns over a problem none of them can see yet. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Dominic Cummings as a man who does his real work lying down. That image is the whole of Toby Haynes's film and its provocation: Brexit: The Uncivil War decided that the protagonist of the 2016 referendum was not a politician but a method, and that the method lived inside one strange head.

Deleuze gives us a name for what happens when a film stops depicting a world and starts moving through a mind. He called the screen a brain. Critics watching twenty-first-century digital cinema sharpened that into the neuro-image — a film built like a database, externalizing thought as interface rather than acting it out in space. Brexit does this almost literally. Search bars, data points, and graphic overlays bloom across the frame to show Cummings modeling a few million persuadable voters; the invisible business of sentiment-harvesting and micro-targeting is made visible and kinetic. You are not watching a man have ideas. You are watching the inside of the targeting machine, the feed treated as a legitimate stage for drama. This is the lens that opens the film up: read it as character study and the Cummings worship grates, but read it as a film about a cognitive apparatus and the worship becomes the subject.

That is also why the surface reads the way Deleuze said Syberberg's projection-cinema reads. In the regime-syberberg the visual becomes an information-space, a thing to be deciphered rather than inhabited — and the dossier's dashboards, on-screen text, and archival inserts ask exactly that of us. The image loses its sensory-motor obviousness and becomes legible, a screen of screens.

Then there is the slogan. "Take Back Control" is not a fact Cummings discovers; it is one he forges. Deleuze's forger — le faussaire — is the figure who doesn't report a truth but manufactures one and makes it hold, and the film's whole climax is the manufacture of a winning phrase out of harvested feeling. This is the powers of the false as a creative principle, not a moral failing: persuasion that creates its own reality. And here the film implicates itself. By welding the camera to Cummings's point of view — his monologues, his certainty, his contempt for the politicians — Haynes commits what Deleuze called free-indirect discourse: author-vision and character-vision fuse until you can't pull them apart. The very thing that made the film watchable is the thing critics attacked. The camera speaks for its forger, and so half-becomes one.

The film knows this, and once it lets the cool drop. The most discussed sequence is a focus group where the clinical apparatus of market research cracks and a participant's anger and grief come straight through. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema works through a hard truth: the people are missing. There is no whole people to represent — only the absent, the modeled, the "left-behind" voters the campaign quantifies but cannot face. That scene is the missing people forcing their way into a film otherwise made of strategy. And the close-up that holds it is a pure affection-image: a feeling registered on a face, raw, not yet discharged into any action. For a minute the database stops computing and simply receives.

Structurally the film runs on the cut. Two war rooms, intercut so each move answers the other, braided with archive and data and accelerated toward the result — this is the convergent parallel montage of classical American cinema, the cross-cut race. The twist is that no last-minute rescue arrives for the side that assumed it would win. Which is the deepest Deleuzian point in the film, and it belongs to Rory Kinnear's Craig Oliver. Decent, measured, institutional, outpaced: Oliver embodies the crisis of the action-image, the man who perceives his situation clearly and can no longer act adequately upon it. The old sensory-motor politics — see the problem, make the speech, win the room — has stopped closing the circuit. Cummings wins because he has left that regime entirely, building affect out of data while Oliver is still looking for the room.

The craft debts are exact. The deposition-style framing device and the abrasive outsider-as-genius come straight from The Social Network — Graham builds his Cummings on Sorkin's Zuckerberg, free-indirect fusion and all. The War Room made the strategist a vérité protagonist and the whiteboard a stage; Brexit just moves the whiteboard to a hoodie-and-beanbag startup. All the President's Men supplies the procedural patience, tension drawn from method alone. And the whole license to dramatize barely-cooled history with a living man's face belongs to Peter Morgan — The Deal, The Queen, Frost/Nixon — the British instant-history docudrama staged as a contest of methods.

What did the film do to its art? It made the interface a dramatic protagonist, and treated a politics conducted through dashboards as something cinema could stage at the level of the image, not just the plot. Its real discovery, and its risk, is that to dramatize a forger you may have to forge a little yourself. Watch it again for the floor, and the focus group, and ask the question the film can't answer about itself: when the camera sees through the persuader, who exactly is being persuaded?