Thrilling Objects: The Scales of Corruption

in Political Thrillers
Brian Daniel Willems, University of Split
(bwillems@ffst.hr)

Abstract:
Political thrillers often encourage the feeling that a mere individual has the power
to make a difference on a large scale. Caught up in a chain of events they wished
they had never uncovered, a protagonist can occupy a position in which their
actions have far-reaching consequences, with the rookie CIA analyst accidentally
bringing down a whole corrupt political system being only one example. Much of
the critical attention these films have garnered falls under the rubric of detective
work in that the protagonist is seen as exposing a web of corruption which would
otherwise have gone on unnoticed. However, this paper is focused on how the scale
of the individual comes into contact with other, larger scales of events. Points of
contact between scales are important because they are where change can take place,
thus allowing an individual to influence the supra-individual.

Keywords: Politics, thriller, Harman, Bryant, scale

Jacqueline Black: Ain’t nobody here but two people in green.

Robert Scott: It goes beyond that.
Jacqueline Black: Nothing goes beyond that.

– Spartan (David Mamet, 2004)

Political thrillers often encourage the feeling that a mere individual has
the power to make a difference on a large scale. Caught up in a chain of
events they wished they had never uncovered, a protagonist’s actions can

Film-Philosophy 21.1 (2017): 78–94

DOI: 10.3366/film.2017.0032
f Brian Daniel Willems. This article is published as Open Access under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://
www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use,
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 The Scales of Corruption in Political Thrillers

have far-reaching consequences, with the rookie CIA analyst accidentally

bringing down a whole corrupt political system being only one example.
Much of the critical attention these films have garnered falls under the
rubric of detective work, in that the protagonist is seen as exposing a web
of corruption which would otherwise have gone on unnoticed. Frederic
Jameson sees such work as a ‘cognitive mapping’ of social space (Jameson,
1995, pp. 49–50) and Barbara Johnson likens the process to literary
analysis (Johnson, 1980, p. 130). While Jameson’s work is taken up below,
this essay is focused on how the scale of the individual comes into contact
with other, larger scales of events. Points of contact between scales are
important because they are where change can take place, thus allowing
an individual to influence the supra-individual.
In order to show the interlocking of various scales, political thrillers
featuring a conservative, rigid hierarchy have been initially chosen. A
simplified vertical chain of command is preferable for drawing out
the structure of how objects function in such movies. Films such as Phillip
Noyce’s Patriot Games (1992) and Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide (1995) fit
into this category. While such films were produced shortly after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that they were unable
to shake off a Cold War view of the world, a project explicitly begun in
the early 1950s when the US State Department began underwriting
Hollywood films which they saw as ‘politically useful’ (Cull, 2008, p. 58).
As Phillip Gianos puts it regarding post-Cold War films like Crimson Tide,
‘In such films the precarious-balance theme of many cold war films is
maintained despite fundamentally different political circumstances, for
despite those different circumstances the result may still be war’ (Gianos,
1998, p. 158). Even films produced post 9/11, such as the Jason Bourne
and later Jack Ryan films, are firmly lodged in a strict chain of command.
This may be because they are based on Cold War novels and fail to fully
update their structure to reflect the context of their production and
setting.
These films clearly lay out the structures of scale, and thus the objects
which connect one scale to another are easily seen. However, they are only
used to set up the main reading of this article, of David Mamet’s Spartan
(2004), in which the sense of scale is spread out in multiple directions. In
Mamet’s film, scale is four dimensional, meaning that objects do not just
connect one scale with another, but multiple scales in multiple ways. Yet
Spartan is also a film about the military and thus indicates a potential
revolutionary role for the armed forces in a post-9/11 world. Spartan,
mirroring some aspects of Fredric Jameson’s thought in An American
Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, shows that the military can
provide an alternative structure within the same space as the state. For

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Jameson, universal (American) conscription is one way to achieve health

care, employment and free time for all (Jameson, 2016, pp. 26–29). The
army can do this because it is removed from the strictures of the state,
although functioning within it. Spartan reflects the dual-power of army
and state, although in a different manner. Rather than focusing on
health care and employment, Mamet’s film shows how the military,
because it exists as a power-within-a-power, can transform the state rather
than just exist alongside it. Thus Spartan reflects Slavoj Žižek’s criticism of
Jameson’s essay, that ‘perhaps this last taboo should also fall, and the big
task that lies ahead is how to rethink the state ’ (Žižek, 2016, p. 306).
In other words, Spartan shows how objects in political thrillers can be
about more than just connecting one scale to another, they can be about
changing scales themselves. This does not come about through one scale
coming into contact with another, but with a single scale changing itself
through the repetition of a single object within that scale.
Yet overall, the points of contact between scales take on many shapes
and forms in political thrillers: in The Devil’s Own (Alan J. Pakula, 1997) a
duffel bag full of money connects a Irish-American cop with the struggles
of the IRA; in The Bourne Legacy (Tony Gilroy, 2012) trying to locate
a resupply of body and mind-enhancing ‘chems’ brings an agent into
conflict with the entire CIA; in Spartan the color of a uniform uncovers
a corrupt US president; and in Crimson Tide an interrupted message
problematizes the concept of Standard Operating Procedure in the
US Navy. In these examples a number of different objects – a bag full of
money, chems, a colour and an interruption – function as points of
contact between an individual and a larger-than-individual scale on which
corruption is taking place. However, what is of interest in these objects is
not what they are but rather what they do; this is because the same object
does not have the same effect in two different films, so there is nothing
ontologically particular about the objects themselves (Bryant, 2014,
p. 38). Instead, focus lies on the way that a single object functions on
two different scales at the same time; when this happen a potential for
change can occur.
Objects which have the potential to affect change are termed ‘thrilling
objects ’ in this article. ‘Thrill’ comes from Middle English, and it
originally meant ‘to pierce ’ or ‘penetrate. ’ This stress on puncturing
through characterises objects in political thrillers. These objects penetrate
because they have a foothold in more than one world at once. What this
means is that one function of an object is visible on scale A, but invisible
on scale B, while another function of the same object is visible on scale B
but invisible on scale A. Thus thrilling objects must at least be objects
featuring at least two functions which exist on mutually exclusive scales.

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For example, the duffel bag full of money in The Devil’s Own is used
for buying surface-to-air missiles in the US to be transported to Belfast
for use by the IRA. Thus the bag functions as a ‘revolt supporter’ for
IRA commander Rory Devaney (Brad Pitt), while it functions as a mere
‘wealth generator’ for the seller of the arms in the US. In this sense the
film fits into portrayals of the IRA in films of the 1990s, which, compared
to similar films of the 70s and 80s like The Outsider (Tony Luraschi,
1980) and The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980), tended
to sensationalize the issue, folding Irish protagonists into American
concerns, although this instance is even more sensational since the IRA
commander is also played by an American actor.
However, in The Devil’s Own, gathering the functions of revolt supporter
and wealth generator together in one object gives the duffel bag the
potential to thrill. Such gathering is one of the political potentials that
cinema has at a whole. Film narrative can gather together different classes
or ranks of society and make them visible in the same moment of time.
The intense conventional editing of Hollywood thrillers is one vehicle
for gathering disparate times together, functioning as a film chronotope.
In a documentary setting film has a slightly different function, making
visible different classes and ranks which co-exist in time but are often
separated by the space of class difference. As Jacques Rancière puts it in
Figures of History, this can be seen in a moment of Chris Marker’s The Last
Bolshevik (1992), when a monarch and his subjects appear together in a
documentary film of a parade. In such scenes, cinema ‘makes those ranks
liable to share the same image, an image of the same ontological tenor. It
does so because, for the image to exist, those disparate ranks had to have
something in common already: that they belonged to the same period
of time’ (Rancière, 2014, pp. 12–13). While for Rancière the recording of
the time of history gathers these different ranks together, in political
thrillers the thrilling object does so. In The Devil’s Own the bag functions
as the same period of time for two different types of contact with two
different worlds; in this sense it forms a meeting point between one world
and another.
The reason that such an object is not just a point of contact but can also
engender change is that the functions of the duffel bag are not exhausted
by generating wealth and enabling revolt. There are other things the bag
can do, although these other things do not concern either Rory or the arms
dealer. Yet they do become manifest; and when they do, they affect
both worlds connected to the object. Rory is staying at the home of
Tom O’Meara (Harrison Ford), an Irish-American cop who has no idea
of his lodger’s political involvement. Tom finds the duffel bag and
confronts Rory about the situation. In this scene the bag exhibits a

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function not seen up to this point – a sympathy generator – because it

causes the law-abiding policeman to come closer to understanding the
situation of the law-breaking IRA operative, although, as Gerardine Meaney
argues, the film is more about the way Hollywood organizes relations to
other nations rather than being about the Troubles in any specific sense
(Meaney, 2004, p. 80). This new function then causes a change in both Rory
and Tom, since sympathy was not something they were doing before, but
because of the bag, it is something that they are doing now.
However, the way that this new function arises is not that Rory learned
about it, mastered it and then used it to gain Tom’s sympathy. Instead,
the new function of sympathy somehow ‘ just happened’ when Tom
confronted Rory about the bag. The just happens takes place because
objects always have more functions than can ever be known or used, and
thus these functions are ‘ already there’ although they may not be visible at
the time. An illustration of why this is so is, as Graham Harman argues,
that a description of all the qualities of an object could not replace that
object in reality; this is why a paraphrase is never as good as the original
(Harman, 2012, pp. 9–10). There is always something missing in a
paraphrase, and this something represents qualities of an object which
remains unknown. In other words, there is always something about
an object that ‘withdraws’ from us, and from other objects (Harman, 2011,
19), something which can never be totally captured by knowledge or
use (Willems, 2015, p. 62). On the one hand, the withdrawn nature of
objects is why qualities can exist on a different scale. On the other hand,
it also creates what could be called some ‘wiggle room’ for one scale to
cut off its connection to an object, thus stopping its influence from going
any farther. Harman describes this wiggle room as ‘weird’ because, since
objects can never be absolutely described, they can always hold some kind
of surprise for us, and other objects, in reserve (Harman, 2012, p. 252).
This surprising aspect of objects is the mechanism for causing change on
different scales. However, while Harman describes these objects as being
weird, here they are thrilling. And cinema is a natural place not only
to look for ontological commonality (Rancière, 2014) but also for this
withdrawn nature of objects for, as John Mullarkey says, “cinema has only
an inessential essence, an insubstantial substance, and its processes are
revealed through the manner in which the various theories of ‘what film
is’ must fail as a result” (Mullarkey, 2009, p. 156) These ‘ failures’ are
similar to the ways that objects withdraw from paraphrase; it is this
withdrawal which makes objects thrilling.
However, this reading of The Devil’s Own has so far focused on the
thrilling aspect of an object, but it has paid little attention to the scalar
element of the argument. Rather than invoking the psychological aspect of

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the thrill, as outlined by Michael Balint (1959), the duffel bag is thrilling
because it pierces from one ‘rank’ into another. This is seen in The Devil’s
Own when Tom gains a sense of sympathy for Rory’s cause. A sense
of scale is involved because Tom moves from having a relationship with
Rory to having a relationship to his politics; thus he moves from the scale
of the personal to the scale of the social. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic
Fredric Jameson sees only one ‘ level’ of scale pertinent to political
thrillers, that of moving between the individual and the social. While
traditional thrillers tend to stay on what is below called ‘the personal’
scale, meaning ‘an individual detective confronts a crime of an individual
nature ’ (Jameson, 1995, p. 37), the social scale is engaged when, as
in Vadim Abdrashintov’s The Train has Stopped (1981), the population of
an entire town works together to cover up a train accident. What is
important for Jameson is that when an individual is confronted with a
social conspiracy, the individual needs recourse to the social herself;
in such a situation ‘the detective will need a supplementary motivation
of a political type’ (Jameson, 1995, p. 37). This ‘socialisation ’ of the
detective happens:

not by the multiplication and refraction of this actantial function in a host

of separate characters or individuals, but rather by the socialization of the
status of this character, who can most often be identified as occupying the
space and position of the intellectual as such: that unhappy consciousness,
forever suspended between the classes, yet unable to disengage from class
realities and functions, and from class guilt […]. (Jameson, 1995, p. 38)

The intellectualization of the protagonist, rather than a multiplication

of individuals involved, is what happens to Tom in The Devil’s Own.
The generation of sympathy is an intellectual change which brings Tom
in touch with issues of the IRA, however mis- and under-represented in
the film (Meaney, 2004, pp. 84–5). Intellectualization is socialisation for
Jameson because such feelings bring an individual into contact with others
although while still remaining firmly lodged in the individual scale. In this
sense, The Devil’s Own posits a change in the relationship of scales from
the individual-social to the social-social.
In other words, the size functions of one world are brought in line
with those of another. This is what happens between Tom and Rory: Tom
is functioning on the level of the individual while Rory is on the level of
the social. For there to be an understanding between the two, Tom needs
to be intellectualised up to the level of the social, which is where Rory’s
motivations lie. While this functions as one response to the challenges of
scale, this essay focuses on another: the role of objects when an individual

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does not scale up, but in instead ‘thrills’ another level of scale through the
creation of a new world.
Another way to approach this difference is through a different aspect
of Jameson’s thought. The aim of Jameson’s development of scale is a
delineation of the idea of ‘cognitive mapping,’ in which ‘ the social can be
mapped…by following across a map insurance red lines and the electrified
borders of private police and surveillance forces’ (Jameson, 1995, p. 2).
However, the way that this takes place is relatively undeveloped
throughout The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle
have responded to the challenge of developing this concept more fully
in their Cartographies of the Absolute, the title of which was taken from
Jameson (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015, pp. 6–7). Cognitive mapping is the
admittedly impossible task ‘of depicting social space and class relations in
our epoch of late capitalism or postmodernity ’ (Toscano and Kinkle,
2015, p. 7). What is aesthetic (or ‘absolute ’) about this process is that
‘capitalism as a totality is devoid of an easily grasped command-and-
control-centre ’ (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015, p. 24), and thus the means of
representing it must remain indirect (Willems, 2015, pp. 13–15).
Prosopopoeia or ventriloquism feature as techniques through which the
social scale of capitalism ‘speaks’ through various figures in political
thrillers, yet this kind of penetration only works one-way, meaning
top-down, denying the possibility of a reformist or revolutionary subject
scaling-up from below (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015, p. 77).
Toscano and Kinkle do not attempt to synthesize the various attempts
at reversing this trend, meaning attempts at climbing the ladder of scale
they examine, but one technique they single out is when ‘capital has
been a theme or content […], an occasion truly to rethink and refunction
our available genres, styles, figures, and forms, to recast our methods
of inquiry in the arts as in the sciences of society’ (Toscano and Kinkle,
2015, p. 242). The film Spartan is taken up below as an example of taking
scale itself as the theme of inquiry, just as Toscano and Kinkle suggest.
However, when this happens, a slightly different strategy of thrilling
objects is suggested. When an object has a foothold in two worlds, this
can also work against penetrating scales, since such a foothold provides
an easy target for one scale to cut off the cognitive mapping Jameson
suggests. In Spartan, instead of featuring objects which have a foothold in
two worlds, new worlds emerge out of the repetition of single scale
functions themselves; in other words, the penetration between scales does
not come about because of an object which touches two different ones, but
rather because a new world is generated from the functions of objects
existing on just one scale. However, in the films leading up to Spartan in
this analysis, new worlds are created when two worlds come in contact

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with each other and a new function is created from this interaction
(Bryant, 2014, pp. 122–3). Thus in the example of The Devil’s Own, when
the bag functions as a generator of sympathy this is actually the creation
of a new world.
Yet the issue of scale has not yet been directly addressed because size
has so far played no role. Size is a question of more or less. This can be
more or less time, space, or both together (space-time). In the context
of thrilling objects, scale is pertinent when an object connects one world
with another and there are elements of size which differ between them.
For example, it takes the isotopes of high-level nuclear waste around
24,000 years to diminish to levels safe for humans. This scale of time is
alien to the human lifespan, since 24,000 years in the past would put us in
the Upper-Paleolithic period, a time too far removed in the past to cause
any sense of personal responsibility. However, such a scale is connected
to present-day humanity through an object – radiation poisoning, which
both functions in the human world (a disease is caused) and the world
of nuclear waste (radiation poisoning is continuously caused during
all 24,000 years). Timothy Morton has identified a number of features
of what he calls large-scale ‘hyperobjects, ’ such as ‘non-locality ’ (existing
in more than one place at the same time, like global warming) and
‘interobjectivity ’ (meaning that both humans and objects are included)
(Morton, 2013). The reason that scale is important in a study of political
thrillers is that when the human scale is connected with a supra-human
scale via thrilling objects then there is a) contact with functions of size
which are alien to human experience, and b) due to the withdrawn nature
of objects, there is a chance for a new world to develop. This ‘new world,’
such as the sympathy felt by Tom for the IRA in The Devil’s Own is due
to the ‘thrill’ that such objects provide.
Thrilling objects connect an individual with an almost infinite variety of
scales, but five have been singled out as being most prevalent in political
thrillers; these are ‘the person,’ ‘the boss,’ ‘the job,’ ‘the system,’ and ‘the
idea.’ Examples of penetrating objects are briefly outlined for each level,
then Mamet’s Spartan is examined in more detail as a counter-example.
The first scale is when both protagonist and antagonist are at
the individual level at the beginning of the film and do not change
throughout. In other words, there are no functions of size which are
exclusive to one of the scales. This level is called ‘the personal.’ In such
films, the story revolves around the protagonist specifically targeting a
single person, or vice-versa. Neither character is overtly intellectualised,
according to Jameson’s definition, meaning that neither is particularly
social. Thus they reflect a tendency that Michael Ryan and Douglas
Kellner see arising in political films of the 1970s, a dampening of the

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power of the individual to affect change on the scale of a corrupt system

(Ryan and Kellner, 1990, p. 241). Another 1990s IRA-related film starring
Harrison Ford can provide a good example of this level, Phillip Noyce’s
Patriot Games. In this film, Ford is ex-CIA operative John Ryan (from the
Cold War Tom Clancy novels), who stops an attempted kidnapping
in London. Sean Miller (Sean Bean), the brother of one of the men that
John kills, then seeks revenge. The fact that the kidnappers are a splinter
group of the IRA has little to do with a plot which revolves around one
man’s desire to kill another. John’s ignorance about the issues of the IRA
is never challenged, and Sean merely uses the flimsy excuse of going to
America to follow the Royals he originally tried to kidnap as another
attempt to get close to John and exact his revenge; thus terrorism becomes
‘merely a particular crazy variant of criminality’ (Meaney, 2004, p. 85).
In other words, the film stayed true to its tagline, which was ‘Not for
honor. Not for country. For his wife and child.’ Thus Patriot Games,
to an even greater extent than Clancy’s own ‘technico-military thrillers,’
‘glorifies the technological armor of the Superpowers, producing a sense
of improbability that grants the reader permission to take pleasure
in the tall-telling of a best-man-wins fight to the death’ (Delgado,
1995–1996, p. 126). In other words, the film works to marginalise any
aspects of the social which might lead to inter-scalar development. Thus,
despite its political backdrop, Patriot Games remains the personal story
between two individuals.
The second level of scale moves ‘one step’ up and the actions of the
protagonist affect the boss, although the structure of the system in which
the boss functions remains intact. This is because a new world is created
by an object connecting the protagonist and the boss, but the boss acts
as a kind of buffer between him or herself and the system they are a part
of. A prime example of this structure is found in Roger Donaldson’s
The Recruit (2003), in which young computer programmer James Clayton
(Colin Farrell) is recruited for the CIA by spy-trainer Walter Burke
(Al Pacino). During his training James and fellow recruit Layla Moore
(Bridget Moynahan) admit their attraction to each other but decide to wait
until they have graduated from ‘the farm’ and begun their real work as
operatives before acting on their feelings. Walter eventually convinces
James that Layla is stealing a computer program to sell to the highest
bidder, and James is tasked to get it back. However, it is all a set-up and
Walter uses James to get hold of the program himself in order to sell it and
fund his retirement.
In this film, Layla is a thrilling object because it is through her that
James, a mere recruit, can penetrate Walter’s boss-level scale. However,
the money Walter wants is not thrilling, because he cannot use it to

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influence the next level of scale, the job, meaning that Walter cannot not
buy off the CIA, and thus his illegal activity is discovered and the thrilling
stops. If the CIA could have been bought off, then the individual James
would have been able to uncover conspiracy at a greater-than-boss scale;
he would have been able to penetrate the scale of the job.
The Jason Bourne series of films, originally based on three Robert
Ludlum books (1980–1990), reschedule the Cold War novels into
quintessential contemporary examples of political thrillers which feature
corruption on the scale of the job. In The Bourne Legacy, Aaron Cross
(Jeremy Renner) is trying to survive the shutdown of his black-ops
program, Operation Outcome. Agents of this program take a daily dose of
‘chems’ which seem to enhance their physical and mental abilities.
The chems are the thrilling object in this film, for it not only connects
Aaron with his immediate superiors who give them to him, but in tracking
down the supply and manufacture of the drugs he comes into contact
with the corruption of the agency as a whole.
As with the earlier films in the Bourne series, he does this through
the help of a woman (a chemist), Dr Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz). Thus
the question of the gendering of thrilling objects comes to the fore, with
a number of female protagonists taking centre stage: Layla Moore from
The Recruit, Dr Marta Shearing here, and Laura Newton (Kristen Bell),
discussed below, from Spartan. As Klaus Dodds says, there would be
no thrilling without women in the Bourne movies: ‘Bourne would not
have circumvented elements of the national security state without the
intervention of women,’ a view which differs from the NSA itself, which
sees women as either secretaries or threats (Dodds, 2010, p. 27). If the
power to thrill is found in objects which can form connections on more
than one scale, then perhaps such power is connected not so much with
the women in these films but the feminine qualities they represent.
As Hélène Cixous defines it in her essay ‘La – The (Feminine),’ the
feminine can be described as that ‘with double libido, voyager of several
existences, ’ which ‘crosses several unconsciouses to transmit the secrets
and powers of a soul in another tongue.’ In addition, the feminine ‘excels
at marrying oppositions and taking pleasure in this as a single pleasure
with several hearths ’ (Cixous, 2003, p. 60), all of which indicate the
feminine nature of thrilling objects and their ability to take on the
qualities of multiple scales.
Unlike The Recruit, in The Bourne Legacy, the gendered object allows
the individual to penetrate above the level of the boss and reach that of
the job. However, the corruption of the agency still does not go any
further: the US government at large was not involved in the production
of the chems, that was a decision made on the agency-level. Thus

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The Bourne Legacy is also limited in the scales that are penetrated as ‘the
system ’ remains untouched.
While Patriot Games was taken as a film which remained on the
personal level of scale throughout, the preceding Jack Ryan film (also
directed by Noyce) Clear and Present Danger (1994), makes an attempt at
moving beyond the personal to reach the scale of the system, although it
ultimately fails. This attempt arises from the fact that the President of the
United States (Donald Moffat) is involved in a fraud, and thus the system
rallies to protect him. A friend of the President’s is killed because he stole
$650 million from a Columbian drug cartel. While money in The Recruit
only penetrated the level of the boss, in Clear and Present Danger it goes all
the way to the top since the President sees the government as having
the right to the $650 million in dirty money. When Jack (Harrison Ford)
discovers the fact that his mission to investigate the murder of the
President’s friend is really about recovering the drug money, he eventually
exposes the fraud and the system that meant to perpetrate it. However, the
ending of the film mitigates the reach of this exposure as it shows
Jack testifying in front of Congress, thus offering assurance that a larger
system than the President and his cabinet is in place (the legislative
system) to make sure that corruption can only spread so far.
In this sense, it is rather hard for both pre- and post-9/11 political
thrillers to envision corruption on a truly system-wide scale. Jack Ryan:
Shadow Recruit (Kenneth Branagh, 2014), ends with Jack (Chris Pine)
briefing the President at the end of the film, thus ensuring that the
corruption he has exposed has nothing to do with the system of which
he is a part. JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) ends with a similar scene to that
of Clear and Present Danger: the judicial system is shown to remain (at
least partially) uncorrupted in the trial of Clay Shaw. Although in Suspect
(Peter Yates, 1987) a judge (John Mahoney) preceding over a trial is seen
to be corrupt and is actually the murder whom the court is supposed to
be trying, the judicial system as a whole is left intact; once again scale is
reduced to the personal, in this case one corrupt judge. Although this
list is in no way exhaustive, it shows that portraying change on the scale of
the system is difficult. This is because of the way worlds are constructed:
since worlds are separated by objects which do not share functions, then
it is relatively easy to cut off any shared objects between worlds (such as
one corrupt judge) in order to leave the rest of the objects of that world
intact. This is what Levi Bryant calls the restriction of worlds, meaning the
way that one world may be embedded in another world and yet have no
new world evolve (Bryant, 2014, p. 231).
Another way of describing the difficulty of the scale of the system is that
the system is absolute, at least in the way that Toscano and Kinkle

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describe it. For them, the system of capitalism was impossible to describe
because it lacks an ‘easily grasped control-and-command-centre. ’ Thus
it is hard for thrilling objects to find the right target. For Bryant, this lack
of a centre comes from the structure of worlds, which are assemblages
of objects rather than a combination of centres and peripheries. Yet for
Harman this difficulty of description is true for all objects, and not just
worlds of objects; this difficulty arises from the problem with paraphrase:
all descriptions will be inadequate because no description can ever replace
an object. This is because description will never reach an object’s essence,
something that assemblage theory denies. The present of a withdrawn
essence is an advantage for thrilling objects because this dark surplus of
the object can become visible on new and different scales. Yet withdrawal
becomes a difficulty at the scale of the system because it leaves a lot of
wiggle room for systems to lop off the offending objects and remain in
business. What all these strains of thought do agree upon however is
that an approach to the level of system must be made indirectly. The way
that political thrillers envision this indirect approach is through a
penetration of the scale of the idea.
In Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide, Lt Commander Ron Hunter
(Denzel Washington) is a college-educated Navy officer assigned to be
the executive officer on a nuclear-class submarine commanded by the
down-to-earth Captain Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman). The submarine
is ordered to prepare for a possible nuclear launch when, in an updating
of Cold War cinema’s intricate game between the US and the Soviet
Union (Shaw, 2007, pp. 107–108), a coup in Russia puts an unknown
rogue group in control of ‘the button.’ However, the transmission carrying
the order for whether to launch or not is interrupted by an attack
from another submarine. Captain Ramsey says that Standard Operating
Procedure dictates that the last fully confirmed order stands, while
Lt Hunter argues that because of the gravity of nuclear war, the
prerogative is to get the submarine into receiving range and to read
the full message before launching the weapons. After a number of mutinies
and counter-mutinies, the submarine crew do as Lt Hunter recommends
and the message is finally received: do not launch; Lt Hunter is
proved right.
The truncated message acts as a thrilling object not because it connects
Lt Hunter and Capt Ramsey with either the ‘American or Russian ‘system,’
but rather because it connects them to the faulty nature of SOP. As seen in
the final courtroom scene of the film, a naval tribunal punishes neither
officer for their deeds, saying that both were right and wrong at the same
time. Instead, the court decides that what is at fault is procedure, and the
judge concludes by saying that the situation has given the tribunal a lot to

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think about for a long time after the two leave the courtroom. This is the
first example we have of an individual reaching the level of the system
through a thrilling object, although this is done indirectly, through the
idea. The reason that this is possible is because the object in question
(SOP) has points of contact with every world that makes up a system (the
military); each branch, each officer, each ensign must all follow SOP: thus
showing corruption on the level of SOP is something that the military
system cannot simply compartmentalize. In other words, in order to get
at the scale of the system, the scale of the idea is necessary. This is an
indirect approach to changes in scale which avoids the danger caused by
the wiggle room of withdrawn objects. Because of the indirect approach
of the system through the idea, there is no easy target to lop off which
obviously has a foothold in two worlds.
Yet political thrillers were not always prone to show corruption
on the scale of the idea. In the 1970s political thrillers changed from
being a ‘conservative genre that idealises government officials or
intelligence agents pitted against Evil Enemies in a Manichean duality of
Good vs. Evil’ to being concerned with uncovering conspiracies in these
same idealised systems (Kellner, 2010, p. 165). In the 1980s the genre
escaped the borders of a single country, usually referring to some kind
of ‘communist’ threat (Scott, 2011, pp. 146–7) by turning to ‘themes
of international terrorism, international economic collapse, cold war
intrigue and espionage, international blackmail and fanatical revolution’
(Palmer, 1993, p. 14), while in more contemporary films the increased
transparency of information is simply itself used as another layer of
the veil:

the modern state secret is not…silenced and tucked away; it is a constant

source of speculation, dramatization, and fictionalization. So-called
investigative journalism, the no less investigative spy thrillers and movies,
autobiographical accounts penned by traitors and former agents, and the
historiographic reconstructions of secret service affairs and conspiracies are
all part of a discourse enthralled by the political secret, a discourse that itself
is nothing but a secrecy effect. (Horn, 2013, p. 99)

It is when this effect becomes an issue that the scale of the idea can come
into play.
In this context, David Mamet’s Spartan is important because it takes
the issue of thrilling objects as an explicit theme. In addition, the film
provides an equally important strategy to that of penetrating the scale of
the system through that of the idea. In Spartan, a rigorous fidelity to the
personal can create new worlds which themselves have inter-scalar
properties. This is also done through the military, as in most of the other

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films discussed, but the military has a different function. Rather than being
focused on an anti-communist Cold War agenda in Mamet’s film the
military is turned inward, feeding on itself in a recursive loop.
Robert Scott (Val Kilmer) is an ex-Gunnery Sergeant assigned to find
the President’s daughter Laura Newton, who has gone missing. Eventually,
Robert discovers that the President’s team ‘got rid’ of Laura because her
wild behaviour was tarnishing their boss’ image. Spartan is therefore quite
a fascinating take on an alternative world that lives beyond the reach
and comprehension of normal existence (Scott, 2011, p. 151). Yet the
film falls into the same trap as Clear and Present Danger in that what
seems like endemic corruption to a system is actually limited to being
the personal corruption of the President. However, Spartan is different in
that scale itself becomes an issue in a number of key scenes; this results
in a strategy for inter-scalar penetration to arise completely out of
the personal level, rather than out of the collusion of two scales in a
single object.
There are three scenes in which scale becomes an issue which results
in supra-individual scales being rejected for the personal. In the first,
Robert’s colleague Curtis (Derek Luke) tries to convince Robert to
investigate what happened to Laura by invoking the scale of the idea,
pulling out a folded piece of paper containing the Rules of War, one
of which is that a Ranger never lies, thus trying to shame Robert into
finding out the truth. Robert does not bite and so Chris pulls out an object
which works on the personal scale, an earring of Laura’s which he found,
proving that she was kidnapped and did not die on a sailboat. It is this
object which the individual of Robert to the personal scale of Laura, rather
than any recourse to the idea.
In another scene, Robert discusses Laura’s actual fate with her caretaker
Nadya (Natalija Nogulich). However, When Nadya says that Robert needs
to find Laura because her parents are so uncaring that they would rather
sacrifice her life than risk a political career, Robert says that ‘they’ should
get her back, meaning someone on the level of the system. However,
Nadya disagrees, knowing that the President’s team is in on it and will not
help, saying that ‘They, there is no ’they,’ there is only you,’ thus stressing
that something needs to be done on the personal scale because the scale of
the system is corrupt.
This scene then segues into a discussion between Robert and Jacqueline
in which he tells her what is going on. Then the dialogue which forms
the citation at the beginning of this essay takes place. Jacqueline says ‘Ain’t
nobody here but two people in green.’ Robert replies with a statement
referring to a supra-individual scale, ‘It goes beyond that, ’ and Jacqueline
responds by keeping action on the personal scale when she says that

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‘Nothing goes beyond that.’ While Robert tries to shift responsibility for
action onto the system, Jacqueline keeps the focus on the personal. Thus
in all three scenes, there seems to be a discussion of scale which results
in an effort to keep things personal. The effect of this effort, however, is
change on a supra-personal scale, for corruption on the level of the boss is
eventually uncovered.
Thus the way that Spartan remains on the scale of the personal has
been delineated in the description of the three scenes: the earring, the
‘there’s no “they”’ said by Nadya, and the ‘ nothing goes beyond that’
of Jacqueline. The difference in Spartan is that remaining on the personal
scale produce new functions which then have an effect on other scales;
in other words, there are recurrent processes (DeLanda, 2011, p. 12) in
play. It is these processes which allow for the creation of new worlds,
rather than the thrill of just one object working alone.
As Manuel DeLanda puts it, recurrence means that ‘the solutions
obtained as outputs at any one instant were used as inputs for the
equations to get the solutions for the next time interval’ (DeLanda, 2011,
p. 17). In this sense functions which happen on the personal scale are
then used by objects on another. This is a different structure than
what was suggested for thrilling objects above. There it was suggested that
one object needed to have two different functions which were active on
two different scales. Here, an object needs to have a function which then
acts as input to another function on another scale. This is the lesson
of Spartan, that of inputs and outputs. As DeLanda says, ‘The objective
reality of emergent properties can be established by elucidating the
mechanisms that produce them at one scale and by showing that emergent
entities at that scale can become component parts of a whole at a larger
scale ’ (DeLanda, 2011, p. 12). In other words, the new functions created
by objects on the personal scale can then become objects themselves
which become part of a larger scale, so that there is ‘an embedding
of assemblages in a succession of micro- and macro-scales ’ (DeLanda,
2006, p. 17).
In DeLanda’s reading, an output from one scale becomes the input of
a new one. This means that thrilling objects are not just objects which
have functions on different scales but are also those functions themselves
when they are created as outputs of one object and then taken as an input
of another object on another scale (Bryant, 2014, p. 38). In Spartan effort
is made to restrict action to the personal scale. The output of the personal
action is simple: Laura is rescued. This is done for no other reason than
the personal: she is a woman who has been kidnapped and therefore
should be rescued. There is no ‘they’ in this equation; as Jacqueline Black
says, ‘nothing goes beyond’ the people involved. Yet the output of their

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actions, the rescue of Laura, becomes the input on another scale, the
corruption of the President.
The duffel bag in The Devil’s Own functions otherwise: it is not the
‘output’ of any action on the personal scale; rather it is an object with
functions on two scales at once (the individual and the social, in Jameson’s
terminology). The rescue of Laura is different. It is the result of actions
performed on the level of the personal. Thus it is an output. However, it
is intra-scalar because it also functions as an input on the scale of the
boss, for the President has to change his tune and say that the story
about Laura dying on the boat was just a cover so that the rescue could
be carried out in secret. What Spartan thus shows is that there are not
just thrilling object but thrilling functions and in fact, these functions,
meaning what object do, is actually a key part of the withdrawn nature of
what objects are.
At the time of this writing the CIA is undergoing a restructure which
centers on functions rather than objects: the division between operatives
and analysts is being replaces by a collection of new ‘mission centers’
(Brennan, 2015) in which the functions of operating and analyzing are
being distributed among different people rather than people being divided
along the lines of operation and analysis. In this sense the political thriller
has moved slightly ahead of the times, showing that it is the function of
objects which can thrill, although this function is a part of the withdrawn
nature of objects themselves.

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