Justin Chang, film critic for The New Yorker, recently dismissed A House of Dynamite,^[1] director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest political thriller, as “a major misfire from a great filmmaker.” He faults Bigelow for her emphasis on “ordinariness,” calling the film “repetitive by design” and complaining that “every time the plot hits the reset button, the tension flatlines.” For him, A House of Dynamite represents “a decisive break with Bigelow’s recent work,” suggesting that “the control-room thriller may be approaching its limitations, with clichés, evasions, and stagy tricks as formulaic as those of any blockbuster.”^[2]

There is, to be sure, something deeply “ordinary” and “formulaic” about the film, even as it sustains—and skillfully orchestrates—the tension of a nuclear attack on the United States. Bigelow trains her lens on dozens of technicians, military personnel, and bureaucrats, each absorbed in carrying out procedures that, as several characters remind us, have been rehearsed hundreds of times before. Confirming a missile’s coordinates, tracing its trajectory, activating defense systems, confirming chains of command: nothing here is spontaneous; everything unfolds according to technocratic protocol. Yet Bigelow is no stranger to the dialectics of technique. A former Maoist who once wrote an essay paraphrasing On Contradiction, studied under Susan Sontag, and speaks fluently about the dialectical logic of her cinematic craft, she knows precisely what she’s doing.^[3] The “stagy tricks,” then, demand a closer look. What follows is an attempt to explain this apotheosis of procedural rationality—and the director’s formal choices—within a historicization of her work.

The Ambiguous Class

Readers might be surprised to learn that Bigelow also directed Point Break (1991), the exuberant, surf-soaked thriller starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Yet between these two seemingly disparate films lies a thread of continuity.

As I have argued elsewhere by drawing on Lucien Goldmann, Fredric Jameson, and psychoanalytic theory, Bigelow’s filmography—considered as a historical totality—expresses the worldview of the professional-managerial class (PMC).^[4] This is a class without direct control over the means of production, mediating between capital and labor while standing in tension with both because its role is to reproduce that very relation. Its formation depends on a certain level of capitalist development, for the PMC is a non-productive class. It encompasses social groups such as independent professionals, military officers, and cultural producers, who developed a distinctive worldview as agents of modernization—one built around technical competence, autonomy, meritocracy, and ethical rigor. Numerous in the United States since its consolidation there in the early twentieth century, the PMC became the carrier of the progressive ideology. In the 1960s, it was this same class that forged, from within the universities, the New Left—famous for its protests against the Vietnam War and its radicalization through engagement with the Black liberation movement, with figures such as Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse among its leading intellectuals.

There are detectable patterns in Bigelow’s filmography, two of which I will highlight here. In her early films, such as Near Dark (1987) and Point Break (1991), there is a marginal, nonconformist community that attracts a member of the PMC—in the first case, a gang of vampires living with alternative interpersonal relations and temporalities, and in the second, a group of surfers funding their “endless summer” through bank robberies. In the dynamics of these films, the ending is always tragic: the PMC member inevitably corrupts or destroys the marginal community that fascinated them. In her later films, such as the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), marginal communities disappear completely. The PMC protagonists appear as obsessive technocrats with narcissistic tendencies. There is thus a trajectory—from early films with Marcusean marginal communities and ambiguous PMC protagonists to later films without marginal communities and with narcissistic PMC protagonists. Among the latter is the bomb-disposal technician from The Hurt Locker, Sergeant James, who, after serving in the Iraq War, voluntarily returns to the conflict zone despite having a young child at home. James confesses that what he loves most in life is not his son, but war itself.

In form, this trajectory manifests as a shift from a synthetic dialectic to a negative dialectic, a tension between concept and object that resists premature synthesis and emphasizes non-identity and structurally-revealed absence instead. Take Point Break as an example: the FBI agent (a PMC member) who has infiltrated the surf gang allows the fugitive surfer to ride one last, long-awaited giant wave toward certain death, while the agent himself appears to become a surfer and seems disillusioned with the FBI. The agent emerges as a highly imperfect heir to the surf counterculture he helped destroy.

There is a synthesis here, even if partial and marked by a tragic sense. In Bigelow’s later films, beginning with The Hurt Locker, the marginal community is absent, which leaves a formal scar. Instead of synthesis, there is now a negative dialectic. The absence of these communities leaves remainders in the Adornian sense: in Zero Dark Thirty (an ambiguous film widely criticized for its graphic torture scenes), CIA agent Maya obsessively pursues Bin Laden and ultimately triumphs. Yet the final image is of her solitary weeping aboard a military plane. Indeed, the trajectory of Bigelow’s formal structures mirrors that of the PMC itself: from the New Left and flirtation with radicalism to co-optation by the neoliberalism it both shaped and executed in its roles within the state and corporate apparatus.

The PMC Loses Its Agency

Enter A House of Dynamite: a nuclear missile launch of unknown origin forces into view the US national-security PMC—technicians, military personnel, bureaucrats, and disaster-management teams—who collectively struggle to defuse the threat until the action reaches the highest echelons of power. As in all late Bigelow films, there is no trace of a Marcusean, nonconformist community, and the negative dialectic persists, since the lack of a clearly defined author of the attack is a structural absence that allows the director to shape the film’s form. Rather than the enemy or the attack’s outcomes, the film emphasizes the procedures, protocols, and technical virtuosity of the professional-managerial class. Yet it also emphasizes—above all—their failure: although the tragedy of the PMC runs throughout Bigelow’s filmography, this is the first time they fail utterly and disastrously by proving incapable of preventing a nuclear attack on the United States. This failure underscores the profound absence at the heart of the film: that which could truly avert global war, namely a critical, internationalist mass movement and old-fashioned internationalist class consciousness. Within the film, the only institutions we see are the state and, in fleeting glimpses, families. There is nothing in between. Thus, the disappearance of alternative communities and the tragedy of the PMC that define Bigelow’s work reach their logical conclusion: nuclear holocaust.

This connects directly to the “repetitive by design” critique voiced by Chang. Yet it is precisely this repetition that allows Bigelow to explore one of her signature formal traits: immersion and the intensive use of subjective cameras. In Point Break, the immersive sequences serve, among other things, to embody the surfers’ spirit of freedom and harmony with nature—a kind of “oceanic feeling” that abolishes the “discontent” with civilization.^[5] In A House of Dynamite, immersion exposes the compulsive traits of the PMC as never before. The missile-disarmament procedures take no more than about eighteen minutes, and the Rashomon-like perspective allows these minutes to be experienced immersively by the audience, in real time. Each reset of the narrative is shaped by the hierarchy of the US power structure. This enables emergent patterns. There is no clear protagonist in the film—in fact, more explicitly than in her previous films, the central figure is the collective PMC subject, represented exhaustively through its ethos: the technocratic protocolization of procedures and the helplessness that ensues when these procedures fail even when the PMC “does everything right,” traits reflected across all the characters.

This formal strategy is not symmetrical, with each successive perspective ascending a step on the hierarchical ladder (which we might describe as levels of monitoring, execution, and political decision). Instead, it reveals that the higher the rung, the greater the degree of disorientation. Events unfold toward a bifurcation at the intermediate level, between the raw militarism of the general advocating the collective bombardment of “all enemies” and the naïve Habermasianism of the deputy secretary of defense, who hopes to “convince” the Russians and his own president not to bomb one another, without any material guarantees but only some form of “communicative rationality.” At the decisive moment, at the highest level—after a key official commits suicide, the president seeks guidance from his wife, who is in a nature reserve in Kenya, but loses contact.

In the end, a PMC representative, a young lieutenant with the affect of a waiter, guides the president to choose from a menu of atrocities between a retaliation (or carnage) that is “rare, medium, or well done” and prepared with the “time and expertise” of the PMC. It is suggested that the lieutenant will steer the president toward the final option. A tragic choice between “surrender and suicide” is left to a Black American president, who knows well what catastrophe entails but is entangled in the usual power structures (perhaps an index of neoliberal containment of the George Floyd rebellion?) and understands that the US populace, historically educated in exceptionalism, will not accept the first option.

Thus, the formal choices—the absence of a clear author of the attack, the Rashomon-like structure—are in fact major strengths of the film. They allow the director to focus on the central contradiction: the impotence of the PMC’s “tedious” technocratic-procedural virtuosity in preventing systemic collapse. Without this form in its relation to the content, the film would slip into banality. Clearly defined heroes and villains would invite easy identification and a traditionally comforting or spectacular resolution. The film’s structure, as in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, is configured as a negative dialectic, marked by absences—notably of nonconformist communities—and remainders, structurally homologous to the social reality of a late capitalism without opposition.

The final scene of Major Gonzalez vomiting—a convulsive gesture signaling a loss of agency, and all the more telling coming from the very officer who had earlier enforced dietary discipline by reprimanding colleagues for eating chips at their desks—is a heightened reenactment of the obsessive CIA agent’s solitary tear in Zero Dark Thirty. It is a symptom of the limits of the concept, here the systematization of the PMC’s technocratic protocols. It is a bold choice for a film within the culture industry, to conclude without clear resolution with a scene of vomiting from a character without charisma. Yet is this not, in fact, the appropriate response to the absence of a nonconformist organization capable of averting an apocalyptic scenario served à la carte?

A Critical Apotheosis

Based on the trajectory of the director’s work, I predicted that A House of Dynamite would represent the “apotheosis of the PMC” and lose critical force compared to Bigelow’s earlier films. Indeed, the “apotheosis” occurs but in a critical register: in the exhaustive exposure of the technocratic-procedural fetishization of the PMC and its ultimate failure, the culmination of a tragedy that has been developing since her earliest films. Bigelow’s filmography, even in its ambiguities and contradictions, deserves close study, for it aesthetically records fundamental aspects of capitalist dynamics over the past fifty years, sedimented in the dialectic of form and content crafted by a filmmaker of profound historical sensibility. As a key dialogue between a belligerent general and the president facing a tragic decision in this latest film enunciates, the present is marked by the convergence of “reality” and “insanity.”

In times of the United States’ hegemonic decline, the return of great power competition, and the absence of nonconformist movements, Bigelow’s film reminds us that the techno-fixes offered by the virtuous professional-managerial class are insufficient to save us from nuclear apocalypse. By bringing the PMC’s allegorical tragic arc in Bigelow’s work to its conclusion—from the New Left to its collapse as the mediating class of the neoliberal order—the film may gesture toward the possibility of renewed consciousness, a moment when this class might finally confront its limits and realign politically. Or, in a more tragic key, it may foreshadow the PMC’s dissolution under the very precarization it helped engineer, which would clear the ground for a more direct confrontation between labor and capital. These, however, are riddles only history will resolve.

1. This is a translated and lightly modified version of review originally published in Portuguese in Blog da Boitempo, November 6, 2025, https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2025/11/06/garcons-do-apocalipse-o-destino-tragico-da-classe-profissional-gerencial-em-casa-de-dinamite/. The author thanks Sam Dibella for the comments.

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2. Justin Chang, “’A House of Dynamite’ is a Major Misfire from a Great Filmmaker,” The New Yorker, October 14, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-current-cinema/a-house-of-dynamite-is-a-major-misfire-from-a-great-filmmaker.

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3. See: Daniel Cunha, “From Rebellious Bikers to the Crying Spy: The Tragedy of the Professional-Managerial Class in Kathryn Bigelow’s Cinema,” https://www.academia.edu/143479916/From_Rebellious_Bikers_to_the_Crying_Spy_The_Tragedy_of_the_Professional_Managerial_Class_in_Kathryn_Bigelow_s_Cinema. Originally published in Portuguese in Sinal de Menos 17 (2025): 162-202, https://sinaldemenos.net/2025/10/12/sinal-de-menos-17/.

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4. Ibid.

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5. See: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (London: Hogarth, 1930).

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