Gorky Park · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A body lies in the snow with no face. Someone has cut the faces and fingertips from all three corpses dug out of Gorky Park, precisely so that no one can ever say who they were. Start there, because the whole film is organized around that absence, and because it tells you what kind of thriller you are actually watching.

In Deleuze's grammar, a missing thing that points to a situation you can't yet see is an index of lack. The small-form detective story runs on these: a gesture, a stain, a gap, each of which whispers that there is a hidden situation behind it. The excised faces are the purest index imaginable — a void that announces a buried whole without naming it. And Renko's labor is to run the index backwards. He hands the skulls to a Soviet professor who rebuilds the faces in clay, bone by bone, until the dead acquire features again. Watch what that sequence is doing in Deleuze's terms. The affection-image is the face considered as pure quality, a feeling held before it discharges into any act — the thing the close-up was invented to capture. Here the film manufactures an affection-image out of a skull. It builds a face from nothing in order to make a feeling, and an identity, appear where the killers tried to abolish both. The procedural's documentary fascination with method — the real Gerasimov reconstruction technique, lit flat and patient — is also, quietly, a small essay on what a human face is for.

Around these faces the film lays down its great empty spaces. The opening park is a white field with dark figures dropped into it, and Ralf Bode's wintry, sodium-and-snow palette keeps draining color and warmth out of every interior. This is close to what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped being a stage for action and become a pure affective field, here the field of cold. It matters that the "Moscow" we are looking at is really Helsinki and Stockholm, a borrowed northern city standing in for a forbidden one. The film's setting is a displaced, slightly unreal space from the start, which only deepens the sense that we are inside an atmosphere rather than a map.

Now the harder claim, and the one that opens the film up. Gorky Park presents itself as a clean action-image: a detective perceives clues and acts to resolve the situation, the sensory-motor circuit that The Day of the Jackal had already perfected as step-by-step suspense. But the film keeps refusing to let action close the circuit. Renko's superiors would rather the case stay unsolved. The conspiracy runs, in the genre's favorite phrase, to the highest levels, and the staging hems him into bureaucratic corridors that visibly bound what he can do. This is exactly the condition Deleuze named the crisis of the action-image: the moment when a character can perceive his situation perfectly and still find no action available to transform it. The detective stops being an agent and becomes something closer to a witness — a watcher who endures. Chinatown had taught the thriller this ending a decade earlier, the honest man left standing powerless inside entrenched power, and Renko is its descendant. William Hurt's performance is the body of the crisis. He withholds; he plays intelligence as stillness; he watches more than he acts. Some viewers read that coolness as a flaw. Read through Deleuze it is the point — a protagonist whose chief activity is seeing, in a system designed to make seeing useless.

The institution that does the hemming is what Deleuze calls a synsign, an encompassing milieu that in a confident thriller would call forth the decisive act that masters it. The Soviet state here is all encompasser and no resolution. It presses on Renko, frames him, contains him, and gives him nothing to push against that will actually move. Even the lineage of paranoid surveillance — Gordon Willis's underlit framing of the lone watcher in Klute — arrives changed: the watcher is himself watched, perception turned back on the perceiver.

The craft debts are worth naming precisely, because film is a conversation and this film knows its interlocutors. From The Spy Who Came in from the Cold it takes the drained grey surface and the morally compromised lead; from Doctor Zhivago the surrogate-geography trick and the human figure isolated against snow; from The Day of the Jackal the conviction that methodical procedure is itself suspense; from The Conversation Hackman's interiorized technician, reborn as Hurt's cool Renko. What Gorky Park did with that inheritance was to smuggle the European art-cinema crisis — the breakdown of action, the hero who can only look — inside a glossy Orion studio thriller built for adults. Its realism is in the Bazinian line: it trusts the texture of method and weather over spectacle, and asks for patience rather than momentum.

That is the film's quiet significance. It takes the most action-bound figure in popular cinema, the detective, and converts him into a seer without telling you it has done so. The case gets solved; nothing is healed. You are left, as Renko is, looking at faces rebuilt over the skulls of people the system would have preferred to leave faceless — knowing exactly who they were, and how little that knowledge is permitted to change. Watch it again for the snow, and for what Hurt does with the spaces where another actor would have acted.