All the President's Men · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start in the garage. Woodward stands in a column of concrete and the light refuses to arrive. Deep Throat is a voice, a cigarette, a shape the frame won't quite hand over. Pakula and his cinematographer Gordon Willis, the man the industry called the Prince of Darkness, built these scenes out of what they withheld: faces dropped into pools of black, a breath caught on the soundtrack, information given in pieces and never all at once. Watch the film and you notice it is mostly made of approach and refusal. A phone call starts, goes nowhere, ends. A door opens a crack and closes. This is not slack pacing. It is the film's argument about what knowing actually costs.

Deleuze gives us a precise way to name what Pakula is doing, and it begins by noticing what the film is NOT. The classical Hollywood image runs on a circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. Deleuze calls this the action-image, the sensory-motor link at full power, the hero who sees the threat and answers it. The detective story has a small, elegant version of this, what Deleuze calls the small form. Not a global situation crushing down toward one decisive act, but an act (a question, a knock, a glance) that discloses a hidden situation a piece at a time. All the President's Men is the small form in its purest laboratory state. Woodward and Bernstein never confront Nixon. They place calls, cross names off lists, read a phone book, knock on the doors of frightened bookkeepers. Each gesture is an index, Deleuze's word for a clue that points past itself toward a situation you cannot yet see, and most of these point at a lack: the lead that dissolves, the confirmation that half-arrives.

Here is where Pakula sits on a hinge, and where the film becomes stranger than its genre. Deleuze identifies a crisis in the action-image after the war: characters who perceive more than they can act on, situations too dispersed to be settled by a punch or a chase. The links go slack. Causality loosens. That is exactly the texture of the middle hour, the inconclusive scenes, the plot-behind-the-plot too large for two men at typewriters. The reporters are agents who keep being reduced to seers, people who can only watch and listen and endure. The most famous shot makes it literal: the camera cranes straight up through the domed reading room of the Library of Congress until the two men, bent over their request slips, become specks in an abstract pattern of stone. No dialogue. Just scale, the human shrunk to a point inside a geometry of information. Deleuze would call that ceiling an espace quelconque, an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped being a setting for action and become a pure affect of disconnection.

And the conspiracy itself? You never see it. Nixon appears only on television, in the corner of the newsroom, as broadcast. The thing the reporters chase lives entirely in what Deleuze calls the absolute out-of-field, not the adjacent room you could walk into but a beyond the frame cannot locate in space at all. The whole architecture of 1970s paranoia, Pakula's signature refined across Klute and The Parallax View, is built on this: the menace feels total because it is nowhere you can frame.

So what kind of image IS the investigation, if not the action-image? After Peirce, Deleuze would call it the relation-image, the mental-image, the cinema of Thirdness, where meaning lives not in any single shot but in the relations a knowing viewer holds across them. The detective film is its native home. A document means nothing alone. It means because of the chain it belongs to, what Deleuze calls a mark. And the film turns on demarks, anomalies that break the habitual chain and force interpretation: a name where it shouldn't be, a check that crosses a line it shouldn't cross. We are the third party, assembling. The film makes us do the reporters' work.

This is why the ending is radical. Goldman's screenplay stops before the resignation, before catharsis. The historical payoff arrives as a lectosign, Deleuze's readable image: the teletype hammers out convictions and sentences in cold type while the men keep working out of focus behind it. The image asks to be read, not watched. The clatter of keys, not an orchestra, is the film's last feeling, sound and image each going its own way, the way The Conversation had just taught Hollywood that institutional noise could be the score.

Place it in the line. Citizen Kane gave it both deep focus and the shape of investigation-as-narrative, a reporter sifting fragments of a powerful man's truth. Z gave it the political procedural, a real crime rebuilt from phone calls and partial witnesses instead of confrontation. Pakula and Willis fused these into something colder and more honest about uncertainty, and in doing so they wrote the grammar for the serious, research-driven political film that followed: the newsroom as protagonist, the truth assembled rather than seized.

What did it do to film as an art? It proved an American studio picture could locate suspense not in danger but in epistemology, in the agonizing distance between suspecting and proving. It took the detective's confidence and handed him the seer's patience instead. Watch it again and watch the light it refuses to give you. Everything the film knows, it knows by withholding.