The Assassin as the Ultimate Underground Artist: "The Day of the Jackal" [Fred Zinnemann, 1973, UK/France]

The Day of the Jackal demonstrates with chilling lucidity how the modern assassin can be considered an underground artist in extremis. The movie accomplishes this through three narrative abstractions. In the first place, in adapting Frederick Forsyth's novel, screenwriter Kenneth Ross and director Fred Zinnemann downplay the story's political and moral backdrop. Even though it features real political figures (French president Charles De Gaulle), real political organizations (the Organisation Armée Secrète [OAS]), and real political situations (the OAS's attempt to kill De Gaulle for his withdrawal of the French military and governmental power apparatus from Algeria), the movie never argues the moral superiority of any of the parties therein. Only from his or her own political convictions does the viewer assume that the OAS and its mercenary assassin, the Jackal (Edward Fox), are in the wrong for planning to kill De Gaulle -- if the viewer believes France's withdrawal from Algeria was politically correct then he/she won't believe the OAS and the Jackal morally justified in seeking De Gaulle's destruction. But, again, the film never explicitly makes this argument, and so the viewer has to fill in the blanks -- given another set of real political figures (Adolf Hitler), real political organizations (anti-Hitler factions within the Nazi party and German military), and real political situations (the failed plot to assassinate Hitler), the viewer would root for the assassin and the organization for which he works rather than root against them. In other words, The Day of the Jackal is far more concerned with the logistics and processes of assassination than its political or moral causes.

This abstraction works in tandem with another abstraction: the motives of the Jackal. A gun for hire, the Jackal does not plan to kill De Gaulle for political reasons, and the movie implies that such mercenarism affords the Jackal a professional objectivity that a politically-motivated assassin could never possess. The Jackal has become a consummate master -- perhaps the consummate master -- of his macabre profession precisely because he does not approach it as a means to a higher political end but instead as an end in itself. In order to carry out the OAS's assignment the Jackal must plan the assassination through the execution of various crafts: theft, forgery, disguise, sexual seduction, and, of course, marksmanship. The Jackal executes these crafts with care and finesse because without them the assassination could not be successfully carried out -- and since the Jackal lacks an ideology to support his mission, the assassination as a whole never assumes a greater status than the sum of its parts. The movie thus depicts the Jackal as a sort of renaissance artist who must devote considerable time and energy to several fields of artisanal if not artistic endeavor in order to manifest a larger, yet in no sense overriding, work of creation. And because it's far more concerned with logistics and processes than it is with the political or moral motivations behind those logistics and processes, The Day of the Jackal acts as a sort of portrait of an artist not in thrall to inspiration but in devotion to work -- and only in his element when at work.

This leads to the movie's third level of abstraction: the identity of the Jackal. Whereas other assassination movies explore the psychology of the assassin by delving into his social and cultural background (e.g., Targets [1968] and In the Line of Fire [1993]), The Day of the Jackal leaves the Jackal's background a total mystery. By refusing to elucidate the Jackal's psychological origins, the movie not only refuses to position the Jackal as "another" who is, unlike the viewer, beyond the bounds of morality, but it also heavily hints at the true raison d'être behind the Jackal's creative endeavors: anonymity. Since at least the Renaissance the West has glorified and championed the individual creator and his or her psychological "genius" over the anonymous or communal creator. However, the more the artist works in the realm of the Real -- that is, the more the artist creates something beyond the socially- and culturally-sanctioned limits of representation -- the more the artist must maintain his or her anonymity to continue his or her artistic production. This usually occurs when authorities charge the artist with trespassing into the territory of the Real by breaking taboos -- in challenging and/or defying censorship the artist becomes an outlaw. But even here the artist only commits his or her transgressions because the authorities have mistakenly confused representation for the Real -- once certain representations are recognized as such (i.e., as mere representations) the artist no longer challenges or defies censorship in the act of creating his or her representational art.

The Jackal, on the other hand, works exclusively in the realm of the Real -- he not only strives to destroy a political, social, and cultural symbol, but he also works to destroy the head of a very Real system of governmental control. The Jackal's work, therefore, must be performed anonymously and in secret, and with his artisanal talents and skills employed toward sustaining that anonymity and secrecy: he must assume false identities and appearances, appropriate the identities and appearances of others, and constantly evade the State's complex, ubiquitous surveillance network to achieve his goal. Thus the Jackal's absence of identity perfectly complements his lack of political motivation -- he works as an artist for the sheer sake of art and not toward any higher purpose nor toward any expression of a personal point of view. Indeed, the viewer might come to admire the Jackal for his professional anonymity as well as his professional ingenuity, for the assassin's ability to subsume any desire for creative vainglory or celebrity beneath the paramount importance of his artistic work as that work exists in the Real. Moreover, the viewer might also come to admire the Jackal as the ultimate underground artist, as one of the few members of society who seeks to directly affect the Real and to elude detection and official processing by what Louis Althusser called the Ideological State Apparatus. By living within yet slipping through various systems of control, the modern assassin resists the modern surveillance state as well as modernity's insistence that one identify oneself as an individual -- and that the artist create art -- solely on its (modernity's) terms.