The Equilibrium

Anton Corbjin’s A Most Wanted Man is an exploration of the spy genre with a postmodern bent, in which the usual tropes such as escapism, exoticism, and technological and political thrill are constantly interwoven into a kind of irony in narrative programs that plays on the subject’s ideas about spies and terrorism. In A Most Wanted Man, viewers are forced to think critically about aesthetic experience in order to find answers to the film’s implied questions; I will argue that a poetics arises from recursive imagery and gives weight to the film’s issues regarding a core, psychoanalytic-existential lack. This lack appears in the form of desire for control within a global power structure and addiction. Rather than giving physical violence any screen time, the film exploits alternative (or perhaps underlying) anxieties to deal with politics: ideology, sex, and addiction bloodlessly drop viewers into thriller territory, exposing the anxieties involved in what we might call ‘post-terrorism.’ Recursive filmic images of “arrest,” or brief lapses in the action which function to anchor NPs to one another, offer certain releases from A Most Wanted Man’s dystopia while simultaneously developing a poetics, through patterns, rhythms, and interweaving with NPs. Recursive images of alcohol and cigarettes will be the focus in this paper, because of their obvious recursive role in the film, but also because smoking is often a universal proxy to psychological issues. During a period of significance for the poetics of recursivity, we observe a shift in Gunther’s cynical, narcissistic, and self-destructive personality. I will then use this aspect of the recursive poetics to psychoanalyze the nature of subjectivity construction in film.