Lincoln · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch how Lincoln answers an emergency. The telegraph office is tense, a decision is needed now, and the President eases himself down and begins a story about Ethan Allen and a portrait of George Washington hung in an Englishman's outhouse. The men around him wait. The story wanders. Only at the end, maybe, does the point arrive, and sometimes it doesn't arrive at all and he simply stands and leaves. Spielberg builds a whole film out of that gesture: a man who, handed the largest situation American history can offer, keeps stepping into the gap between seeing and acting and refusing to close it on cue.

Deleuze has a name for that gap. He calls the living center of any action a centre of indetermination — the interval between a perception coming in and a movement going out, the hesitation where a self gets to decide. In most movies that interval is invisible; perception flows into action so smoothly we never feel the hinge. Day-Lewis's Lincoln makes the hinge the whole performance. The reedy voice (grounded, the dossier notes, in accounts of Lincoln's actual tenor), the stoop, the detour into anecdote: these stretch the interval until you can see it. He perceives the war, the count, the dying boys, and instead of discharging it into a decision he holds it, tells a joke, waits.

And yet make no mistake about the form. This is an action-image, and a classical one — Deleuze's large form, where a vast encompassing situation presses on a man until a single decisive act transforms it. The encompasser here is enormous: a nation at war, four million people in bondage, a lame-duck House. Deleuze calls that pressing situation the synsign, the milieu that calls forth the deed. The whole machine of the film bends toward one act, the roll-call on the Thirteenth Amendment, after which the situation is permanently other than it was. Spielberg even keeps the binomial, the force-against-force spine of the genre, but he relocates it. Not army against army (that war stays mostly offscreen, a muddy prologue) but vote against vote, conviction against patronage.

That relocation is the film's quiet radicalism, and it has a Deleuzian name too. When action stops being acted directly and gets transposed into speech, argument, spectacle — into a Figure — Deleuze calls it the reflection-image, the place where a cinema of deeds tips toward a cinema of discourse. Lincoln is almost entirely this. The emancipation of a people, the most consequential action of the century, is won not on a field but in lamplit rooms full of talk: bought with offices, argued through Stevens's swallowed insults, carried by a man's stories. Kushner the playwright and Spielberg the action director meet exactly here. The deed becomes the debate.

Which is why the climax is so strange and so satisfying. We know the amendment passes. We have always known. And still the roll-call is cut for real suspense, cross-cutting among the floor, the packed galleries, the tally sheets, the men who might flip. This is the convergent parallel montage Deleuze identified as the American school's great invention, Griffith's last-minute race, every thread drawing toward one point. Spielberg runs that century-old engine on a foregone conclusion and it works, because the suspense was never about the outcome. It is thirdness, a relation-image, where the tension lives not on the screen but in us, in what we already know and dread, the audience as the knowing third who holds the whole arc, including the theater box four months off.

Hold on the faces. Kamiński keeps placing Lincoln by windows, the cold outside light leaving his skin worn and half-translucent, and again and again carving speakers out of black interiors. These are affection-images in Deleuze's strict sense, and more precisely qualisigns: the face as an immobile quality of feeling registered before it discharges into anything. Weariness, patience, grief held still. The lighting is a direct debt to Gordon Willis's Godfather, power negotiated in underlit rooms, faces submerged to the eyes. Willis used the dark to hide a soul rotting. Kamiński uses it to find one fatigued past myth.

And the body. Day-Lewis builds Lincoln as posture, the stoop, the long hands, the gait of a man carrying weight, what Deleuze called the gest: the attitude that exposes a whole social relation without a word. This is the marble saint of Abe Lincoln in Illinois and the homespun oracle of Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln deliberately un-built. The oratory kept, Ford's faith in talk-as-suspense kept (it runs straight through Mr. Smith, 12 Angry Men, A Man for All Seasons), the reverence sanded off until what's left is a tired man telling stories to put off a decision he will, finally, make.

What Lincoln did to film was small and stubborn. In an era tilting toward digital weightlessness, Spielberg shot on celluloid, in the dark, and proved that the oldest grammar of the action-image — situation, suspense, the deed that changes the whole — could run on parliamentary procedure. He took the very crisis Deleuze said broke that grammar, a protagonist who watches more than he acts, and instead of letting it break he found the suspense inside the watching. Next time, track the hesitations, not the speeches. That is where the man, and the film, actually live.