Charlie Wilson's War · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch how people move in this film. They talk while walking — down a Capitol corridor, through an office, out of a hot tub in Las Vegas and straight into the next deal. Nichols keeps the camera at their shoulder and lets the talk do the traveling. Nobody in Charlie Wilson's War stops to think; thinking happens at a clip, out loud, in the hallway, and by the time a sentence ends a decision has been made. This is cinema in which perception flows instantly into action, and Deleuze had a name for that circuit running at full power: the action-image.

The movement-image — Deleuze's term for the classical cinema that runs from Griffith through the postwar studio film — works by a simple loop. A character perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it; the act reshapes the situation, which provokes the next act. Charlie Wilson's War is almost a textbook of this loop, and it's worth saying why that isn't a knock. Sorkin's screenplay makes talk itself the action. A congressman's offhand "double it" in a budget meeting is a deed; a profane tirade from a CIA man is a battle won. The film belongs to what Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image: a vast encompassing situation — the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the whole frozen geometry of the Cold War — presses on the characters until a decisive act transforms it. Deleuze called that encompassing milieu the synsign, the situation that calls forth the act it needs. Here the milieu is global, and the act is a covert arms pipeline assembled by three mismatched people in rooms.

The shape underneath is a binomial — force against force. Mujahideen against the Soviet gunship, Wilson's appropriations leverage against Agency inertia, Gust against the bureaucracy he despises. The pleasure of the caper is the pleasure of watching the right people apply exactly enough force at exactly the right joint.

Notice, too, how the film breathes. Deleuze describes a respiration-space in the large form: the image swings between the vast milieu and the taut thread of the action. Goldblatt shoots Washington warm and plush — the hot tub, Herring's Houston mansion, the offices lit for comedy — then cuts to the dust of a Pakistani refugee camp, the harsh light of the frontier. The contrast isn't decoration. It's the lung of the action-image: the enormous world that gives the small clever maneuver its weight.

And yet a Sorkin film is never only action. When deeds keep turning into speeches, the image starts to pose a discourse rather than simply act one out — what Deleuze places at the hinge of the action-image, where a scene figures an argument it cannot itself resolve. Charlie Wilson's War disguises its critique as entertainment. Under the wit sits a question the comedy can't answer: should this have happened, and who pays for it later?

Then the film does something the giddy first ninety minutes don't prepare you for. It brakes. The Soviets withdraw — triumph — and Wilson, who could conjure a billion dollars for weapons, cannot pry loose a single million to build schools in the country he helped win. Gust tells his parable of the Zen master, the one whose every verdict is "we'll see." This is the action-image failing on purpose. Deleuze called the great postwar mutation the crisis of the action-image: the moment a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives, when the act no longer closes the situation it opened. Wilson sees the coming catastrophe and can do nothing about it. The sensory-motor circuit that powered the whole film snaps, and what's left is a man who can only watch — for one beat, a Deleuzian seer, the agent demoted to spectator of his own consequences.

That single beat is the film's argument. Nichols, in his last feature, spends an hour and forty minutes celebrating American competence — the romance of skilled operators making things happen — precisely so the final helplessness lands as more than irony. The compression is the method: John Bloom's editing races through years of covert war as if to mirror the operation's own improvised momentum, then stops dead, so the gap between what action can win and what it cannot fund opens like a trapdoor.

The velocity is inherited. Hawks's overlapping screwball in His Girl Friday, where talk is speed and wit is character, is the deep root of the walk-and-talk; Sorkin's own A Few Good Men first made the rhetorical monologue a form of combat. The strategy of playing catastrophe as deadpan farce belongs to Dr. Strangelove — Kubrick's comic surface hiding a bitter case about institutional folly. And Nichols's own classicism, from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, is what makes it all possible: efface the camera, trust the actors, let meaning ride on behavior rather than flourish. What the film seeds is the modern competence-thriller's bad conscience — the post-9/11 cycle (Syriana, The Good Shepherd) that reexamined intervention, with this one alone smuggling its reckoning inside a comedy.

It did something small and durable to the political picture: it proved you could make an audience love an action, fully and without condescension, and then make that love the instrument of the indictment. Watch it again for the speed. Stay for the brake.