The Trial of the Chicago 7 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man is tied to his chair, a cloth knotted across his mouth. Bobby Seale, charged with conspiring alongside men he first met in that courtroom, asks to defend himself, and the court's answer is a gag. It is the most unbearable image in The Trial of the Chicago 7, and it tells you what kind of film this is. Sorkin builds everything on one premise: a courtroom is a machine for turning speech into consequence. Then he shows you the single body it will not let speak.

That conversion is the film's engine, and Deleuze gave it a name. He called the logic of classical cinema the movement-image — a character perceives a situation, acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation, with the cutting wired to serve that chain. Most of film history runs on it. Deleuze's large claim was that after the Second World War cinema lost its nerve: characters could no longer act adequately on what they saw, action stopped resolving anything, and a new time-image of pure watching and waiting took over. Here is why Sorkin repays the Deleuzian look. He is a movement-image filmmaker working seventy years after that crisis, and he does not apologize for it. He still believes a man can change his world by saying the right thing at the right moment.

The courtroom is why the belief holds. In Deleuze's grammar this is the large form of the action-image: an encompassing situation — call it 1968, Daley's police lines, Nixon's Justice Department wanting a scalp — bears down until a decisive act transforms it. Deleuze's word for that pressing milieu is the synsign, the encompasser; here the nation itself is on the bench. Inside it the film organizes everything as a binomial, force against force — prosecution against defense, street against state, Hayden's faith in the system against Hoffman's contempt for it. The trial is a perfect arena for this because, unlike a battlefield, its action is entirely verbal. The witness breaks or holds. The objection lands or is overruled. Sorkin has spent a career proving that argument can carry the sensory-motor charge older cinema reserved for the gunfight, and the cross-examination that snaps a witness through escalating pressure is grammar he invented in A Few Good Men and reruns here in every duel before the bench.

But speech that performs rather than simply acts begins to tip the action-image into something Deleuze called the reflection-image — action transposed into figure, spectacle, discourse. Watch Sacha Baron Cohen's Abbie Hoffman take the stand and turn testimony into a stand-up set. He isn't trying to win the case; he's staging it, treating the courtroom as theater, legending himself in the act. This is the film admitting its own deeper problem, the one it poses and cannot close: can the system be reformed from inside it, or only confronted from the street? That unresolved question is a discourse-image, a problem the film keeps alive rather than answering, voiced through the friction between Redmayne's Hayden and Strong's Rubin.

And the film never lets you sit inside a single present. Testimony keeps opening into flashback — Baumgarten's editing uses the act of speaking as a hinge into the convention week, then cuts back to puncture the official account. Each of these is a recollection-image, Deleuze's mnemosign: a dated return to a former present, the contested past summoned to be adjudicated. Sorkin built this deposition-frame in The Social Network — present-tense testimony intercut with the events under dispute — and here it does something sharper. The handheld, desaturated street footage and the warm, classical court coverage are cut against each other so the verbal account and the image of the violence keep colliding. The collision lands on us. We hold both versions at once, and that gap is the relation-image, the mental-image: meaning the viewer assembles as a knowing third, the dramatic irony that no one inside the frame can see.

Return now to Seale, bound and gagged. Deleuze would call this image a gest — a posture that exposes a whole social relation in one body. Every rhetorical machine in the film runs on the assumption that to be in the room is to be able to speak. Seale's body is the proof that the assumption was never universal. It is the one moment the film's own faith in speech-as-action curdles, and Sorkin stages it as the moral floor.

What does the film do with all this? It runs the oldest American montage logic, the organic-American form Griffith built — the opening cross-cut of factions converging, and a last-minute rescue rebuilt as the reading of the war dead, a convergent crescendo that resolves emotion the verdict alone never could. There is nothing formally new here, and that is the honest point. Its significance is contrarian. In a cinema long taught by Antonioni and after to distrust the resolving act, Sorkin reasserts the movement-image as a moral position — the wager that words still act, that a courtroom is not a tomb. 12 Angry Men and Judgment at Nuremberg handed him the chamber and the restaged trial-as-referendum; he extends them into the streaming present as a deliberate counter-current. The film's argument is its form. It bets that action can still resolve a situation. Watch it again for the seam where that bet almost breaks — the gag — and you will see a movement-image film honest enough to film its own limit.