"Mutual gaze is arousing, and depending on the situation may lead to attack or withdrawal."

"Mutual gaze seems to many to have a special significance and is sometimes experienced as a special kind of intimacy, mutual access, and meeting of minds." (Argyle and Cook 1, 170)

1. The gaze can be a longing look between lovers, or unspoken rapprochement communicated with the depth of vision. Yet the gaze can also be a mere surface probing for what is pre-conceived, a superficial stare which confirms a stereotype.[1] The stereotype of the Irish terrorist is a commonplace of two genres: the thriller novel and the Hollywood action movie. As readers' eyes follow the author's words and the viewers' sight is focalized by the everpresent camera, the audience is seeing a generic cardboard cutout of a character, the Paddy or Sean or Gerry who is reduced to yet another cold, calculating IRA killer or crazed, bullet-spraying Provo murderer. The gaze is often mutual, however, and in Tom Clancy's Patriot Games and its movie adaptation, it reveals as much about hero Jack Ryan as it does about the terrorist Sean Miller. At first glance, the difference between the 'good guys' and the terrorist is delineated by the gaze in both the book and the movie: in Clancy's novel, Ryan can tell by looking at Miller that he is conscience-less, while in Phillip Noyce's movie version, Ryan can infer from Miller's look that Miller will come gunning for him and his family. In fact, Ryan's status as heterosexual family man and hero in the book - in opposition to Miller as atavistic, family-less villain - is undercut by the homoeroticism and inhumanity latent in Ryan's protracted look at his hated enemy by the end, thus problematizing, by contradistinction, the stereotype of the terrorist enemy. Conversely, in the film, Miller's gaze at Ryan is homoeroticized and so undercuts the stereotype of the Irish terrorist as 'hard man' (essentially, the silent, bare-knuckled, ultra-macho street tough - see Zwicker 26).
   
   
2. Irish terrorism is only discussed in either criminal or military terms - never political - in Clancy's thriller Patriot Games. Clancy's intent is to deromanticize terrorism and bolster FBI director William H. Webster's statement that terrorists are mere criminals and "cowardly marauders"[2] (Clancy i). Thus Clancy's novel is, to paraphrase Zwicker (after Said), "to the figure of 'the Irish terrorist' what eighteenth-century encyclopedias are to the Orientalist" (5). One character in the book does note that, "For all the madness of their actions, terrorists were rational by their own standards. However twisted their reasoning appeared to an outsider, it did have its own internal logic" (183). Yet Clancy never shows the reader an 'inside' view of the world of the PIRA or ULA (Ulster Liberation Army, Sean Miller's group), eschewing any details of the political or social context of Irish terrorism for vague observations about international terrorism. Such generalities include ill-fitting comparisons: Irish terrorists are a bane to Irish-Americans as the Mafia are to Italian-Americans (40), sectarian violence is "'like a Mafia war that everybody can play in'" (77), the IRA "vision of Ireland was of another Cuba" (182), and the Northern Ireland terrorist is compared to Libyan, Syrian, Lebanese and "other shadowy groups," all camped out in North Africa (182-3). When a British intelligence officer reflects on the Troubles, he reduces it to a "bloody quagmire [author's ital.]" and dismisses it as "not his brief" (61). O'Donnell, leader of the ULA, meditates briefly on "The Cause," but then simplifies it to a chain of "imperialist oppression, the way all Ireland was still enslaved to the decaying British Empire, which was, in turn, enslaved to the American one" (67). "'It's not easy trying to psychoanalyze the terrorist mind'[my emph.]" (76), one character says, and in keeping with that sentiment, "'the most famous Irishmen'" are described by Ryan as "the maniacs who leave bombs in parked cars, or assassins who kill people to make some sort of political point'" (39-40). Significantly, it is through Ryan's thoughts that the reader is introduced to the two most common epithets (the significance of which shall be explained) for Irish terrorists in the novel: 'bastard' (e.g. 5, 51, 209, 337, 353, 493) and 'animal' (or a more specific variation of such, e.g. 40, 108-9, 165, 492-3).
   
   
3. It is through the eyes, not the mind, however, that the ULA militants are most directly confronted in the book. Thus the best opportunity for characterizing the Irish terrorist arises through the gaze, or protracted look between characters. This stare, which - unlike in the movie - almost invariably takes place between just two characters (most often Ryan and Miller), leads to numerous meditations on the 'terrorist mind' and the type of person, or rather lack of person, that comprises a terrorist. Such soullessness is emphasized through comparison with the brief descriptions of Ryan's visual assessment of 'good guys' (or 'gals') in the book. Unlike in the movie, Sean Miller is never shown in the novel as "passionately hot" (21), i.e., prone to the hysterical outburst of uncontrolled violence of the stereotypical terrorist (e.g. The Crying Game), and every time Ryan locks eyes with Miller, he asserts that the terrorist is nothing but subhuman and heartless, thus re-establishing himself by contrast as 'good guy'. This sort of scopic evaluation shows the importance of the gaze in the novel as a window into the person's character. The gaze also "connotes power relations" (Johnson 429); at first Ryan wields the power, subjecting others to his analytical once-over. It is Ryan who gazes at his wife, thereby reaffirming his masculinity: "Caroline Ryan had . . . the world's prettiest blue eyes. Behind those eyes was a person with intelligence at least the equal of his own, someone he loved as much as a man could" (13); "her eyes looked deeply into his . . . Cathy blinked away a tear or two. They gave her blue eyes a gleam that made him happier than any man on earth" (162). In talking to the Queen, Ryan concludes to himself that Her Majesty has an "active brain behind those eyes, and an active wit as well" (40). Terrorists, in contradistinction, have "cold blue eyes" (59), or "a hardness around the eyes" (220), or, as with a traitor helping the terrorists, an inquiring gaze which cannot seem to unsettle CIA analyst Ryan's masculine self-identity: "there was interest behind those blue eyes . . . this man was trying to decide what Dr. John Patrick Ryan was made of. . . . Ryan was happy with what he was, and didn't need a bunch of amateur pshrinks, as he called them, to define his personality for him" (88, 90). Thus it is not so much a type but a stereotype of the Irish terrorist as "completely irrational," "atavistically prone to violence," and "calculatingly cold" (Zwicker 11, 21), which the gaze in Patriot Games attempts to confirm.
   
   
4. The initial visual confrontation between Ryan and Miller takes place, as with most of their meetings, in an institution which embodies law and order. The Old Bailey, where Ryan gives his evidence at Miller's trial after Ryan thwarted an attempted kidnapping of the Prince of Wales and his family, is the scene of "Ryan's first really good look at him" (99):

   his gaze shifted, and Ryan examined the man for the first time. What sort of person, Jack had wondered for weeks, could plan and execute such a crime? What was missing in him, or what terrible thing lived in him that most civilized people had the good fortune to lack? . . . Why are you different? What makes you what you are? Ryan wanted to ask, knowing that even if there were an answer the question would remain. Then he looked at Miller's eyes. He looked for . . . something, a spark of life, humanity - something that would say that this was indeed another human being. It could only have been two seconds, but for Ryan the moment seemed to linger into minutes as he looked into those pale grey eyes and saw . . . Nothing. Nothing at all. And Jack began to understand a little. (99)

   This passage introduces the constant question behind every instance of Ryan's gaze into Miller's eyes: what is the terrorist? The question is of course rhetorical: the terrorist is a what, not a who; a thing, not a person; an animal or bastard. Ryan realizes during this protracted look that what makes up the terrorist as stereotypified by Miller is not an is, but an isn't - a lack of humanity, the absence of a conscience. This passage also introduces the implicit hint of homoeroticism, as Ryan becomes lost in Miller's eyes like an entranced lover, the moment lingering.[3]
   
   
5. Ryan's testimony begins; at the end of it, the power he once wielded with his gaze is being reversed so that he feels powerless, intimidated by the constant stare of Miller:

   Jack allowed himself to look at Miller again. . . . A smile started to take shape at one corner of [Miller's] mouth. . . . It was a smile for Ryan alone . . . or maybe not me alone, Jack realized. Sean Miller's gray eyes didn't blink - he must have practiced that - as they bored in on him from thirty feet away. Ryan returned the stare. . . Ryan and Miller were all alone, testing each other's wills. What's behind those eyes? Jack wondered again. . . . There was strength in there, like something one might encounter in a predatory animal. But there was nothing to mute the strength. There was none of the softness of morality or conscience, only strength and will. . . . he looked at Ryan as a wolf might from behind the bars, without recognition of his humanity. He was a predator, looking at a . . . thing - and wondering how he might reach it. . . . He was thinking only about something named Ryan, something he could see just out of his reach. In the witness box, Jack's right hand flexed in his lap as though to grasp the pistol which lay in sight on the evidence table . . . (108)

6. Ryan defines Miller for himself as an animal, a caged wolf, who has no wife or daughter, and thus no conscience, nothing to mute his predatory rage. Miller essentially remains an "abstraction" for Ryan, who tries to put himself into the man's mind in order to understand him, control him and thus feel less afraid, but he can only think of Miller as a wounded wild animal "he'd never expected to meet" in the open or, worse yet, have to stare at (108). The animal analogy is clearly flawed, as Ryan undercuts it by suggesting that although Miller's humanity is unrecognizable to him, it exists, and that even though he may be a weasel and not a wolf, then again, "This wasn't an animal in a cage after all. . . . He could think and plan, as a human could [although animals can as well]." So just what is Miller or, more abstractly, the Irish terrorist? A 'thing,' a "robot" without a conscience, that "would not be restrained by any human impulses when he decided to move," suggesting perhaps that Miller would act on logic instead, but this is countered again by the notion of him as an animal seeking vengeance, terrifying because he is inhuman (108). The reader is still no closer to discovering anything about Miller or the 'terrorist mind,' and neither is Ryan, it seems, for whom a terrorist is now merely a terrifying 'other':

   Ryan was frightened in a way he'd never known before. It lasted several seconds before he reminded himself that Miller was surrounded by four cops, that the jury would find him guilty, that he would be sentenced to prison for the remainder of his natural life, and that prison life would change the person or thing that lived behind those pale gray eyes.
   And I used to be a Marine, Jack told himself. I'm not afraid of you. I can handle you, punk. I took you out once, didn't I? He smiled back at Sean Miller, just a slight curve at the corner of his own mouth. Not a wolf - a weasel. Nasty, but not that much to worry about, he told himself. Jack turned away as though from an exhibit in the zoo. He wondered if Miller had seen through his quiet bravado. . . .
   Jack stood up from the stool and turned to find the way out. As he did so, his eyes swept across Miller one last time, long enough to see that the look and the smile hadn't changed. (108-9; author's ital.)

7. The entire scene both foreshadows and mirrors the climactic face-off between Ryan and Miller at the end of the novel. More important, it shows that Ryan defines his masculinity largely through his roles as protector and agent of justice, and this hero identity is bolstered by the courtroom, the CIA, the prison, and other institutions of law and order. Throughout the book, the 'good guys' - police, Marines, Ryan's fighter pilot friend Robby, and the CIA - band together in fraternal machismo to catch the 'bad guys,' the ULA terrorists. The remembrance that he is protected from Miller by police and the justice system, and that prison will 'change' the terrorist, comforts Ryan. Ultimately, though, the two men face off against each other as the courtroom scene recedes. The American protagonist, recently knighted, is clearly anxious, disturbed by the smile that may be for him, or is also meant for his family, much as the ULA attacked not just the Prince of Wales, but his wife and daughter too. Ryan has clearly altered: he is "frightened in a way he'd never known before," entranced and repulsed by Miller's unblinking gaze and knowing smile, both of which are implicitly homoerotic, and Ryan's immediate reaction to those grey eyes which "bored in on him" like bullets is to pick up a simultaneously scopic and phallic weapon - a gun.
   
   
8. The gaze is a weapon, and "war technology has turned the weapon into a gaze" (Orr 79). This gaze in the courtroom certainly unnerves Ryan more than any other incident in the book. Ryan wonders if Miller is thinking about him while he is in his cell (117). Ryan learns about Miller's assisted escape from the TV news, where footage of him leaving the Old Bailey and getting into the police van (from which he was later sprung) is rerun: "Just before he was put in the police van, Miller turned to face the camera, and now weeks later his eyes stared again into those of John Patrick Ryan. . . . 'Oh, my God . . . ' Jack muttered" (177). The British institutions of justice (feminized, for they represent the Queen) have failed; will Ryan's masculinity falter? He voices his concern to his best friend Robby in the homosocial atmosphere of the Naval Academy: "'You ever see somebody that you're just automatically afraid of?' . . . [for Robby,] There was no man in the world he'd ever been afraid of" (197). Ryan fears for his own life and his family after Miller's escape, and confides in his wife that he is worried about the ULA because of "'that Miller bastard,'" who he knows wants to kill him "'because I saw his face, Cathy. I saw it, and I'm scared - not just for me,'" because these "'bastards kill people they don't even know. . . . They just don't care'" (209). Ryan cares about family; they are in part his conscience and humanity, and while Ryan's role as protector and father (his wife is expecting what they assume will be a boy) affirms his masculinity, that male strength is softened by feminine-associated morality. Even at this early stage in the book, Ryan is not wholly masculine, for his family is essentially feminized, that is, he is protecting women and as such is beholden to them; he cannot simply be the lone ranger, macho hero figure.[4] The bastard Miller, as an illegitimate, father- and family-less terrorist, has no one to love, no conscience, and so he doesn't care; he will kill anyone.
   
   
9. Thus, soon after Miller's breakout, Ryan turns to the ultimate apparatuses of the masculine (Uncle Sam), fraternal American state (CIA, the Marines), employing surveillance technology as a subsidiary extension of his gaze at the Irish terrorist in order to regain his masculine scopic power over the ULA and Miller.[5] After Ryan rejoins the CIA as an analyst, Clancy provides the reader with detailed passages concerning the deployment and analysis of surveillance and satellite photos of terrorist camps in North Africa (226-7). Clancy returns to this photoreconaissance in an attempt to both reassert and combine Ryan's power of the gaze and his heterosexuality, when Ryan points out one photo in which photointerpreters can not only make out that the person on the ground is female, but they "can also tell the size of her tits" (322). After further research by others, upon seeing a recent close-up picture of the French terrorist, Ryan thinks that "She didn't look dangerous - she looked like every man's fantasy," and "'Like we used to say in college, not the sort of girl you'd kick out of bed'" (335). Not only is this 'guy's talk' indicative of Ryan's heterosexuality, but his eye for the pretty girl in the photo mitigates his sensitive, 'good guy' conscience, further bolstering his masculine hero persona. "His conscience wondered what the French would do if they found that pretty girl, and how he'd feel about it if he found out. It would be better, he decided, if terrorists were ugly, but pretty or not, their victims were just as dead" (338). Thus Ryan's concern about the woman's eventual death is appeased when he recalls that she is not a female per se, but a terrorist - a cold, heartless killer (reiterated on 370).
   
   
10. It is a stereotypical commonplace of thrillers to see the Irish terrorist as primal, yet as the climax of the novel nears, Ryan not only maintains his simplistic, primitive view of terrorists as subhuman targets to be rid of, but becomes subhuman himself. Ryan's atavism and implicit homoerotic desire for Miller undermine Clancy's supposedly masculine hero who is regaining the gaze of power over his terrorist counterpart and so, by extension, Ryan's regression problematizes the stereotype with which he attempts to label Miller and his cohorts. Indeed, in the last twenty pages of the novel, soon after the siege on Ryan's house and second attempted kidnapping of the Prince of Wales and his family, the terrorists are an inchoate mass, unnamed and non-individualized, save in the two-page scene where Ryan and Miller face off. En route to that conclusion, terrorism is reduced to military terms (372-3 - a war which must be fought with international co-operation, echoing Webster's prefatory quote), Ryan states that he doesn't want to know terrorists' faces, as it is easier for his conscience if terrorists are killed as abstractions, not as humans (370), he tells the Prince that you could ask terrorists why they kill, "'but I doubt the answer would mean much of anything'" (495), and CIA analyst Ryan tells a priest that "'you really don't have to understand [terrorists]. You just have to know where to find them'" (347).
    
    
11. When Ryan does find them, after a harrowing escape from his house with the royals, refuge at the Naval Academy, and a military- and police-led boat chase and capture of the terrorists, he searches out Miller. Unlike the denouement of the movie, the pair do not duke it out; rather, Miller is trapped aboard a ship, Marines and police standing guard over him and his fellow captive terrorists, and Ryan attempts to regain his macho hero gaze through the use of the scopic and phallic weapon. Already Robby has foreshadowed victory for the 'good guys' when a "terrorist's eyes crossed almost comically on the business end of the Remington shotgun" he held to the man's face in Ryan's home (466). Now it is Ryan who has found Miller and subjects him to his physical, then technological gaze. Ryan stares at Miller "from twenty feet away" (492), closer than the distance from which Miller had stared at him in the Old Bailey, and the shift is complete, as Ryan's scopic power is regained, while Miller must behold the gaze:

    Miller saw something, a look that he had always reserved for his own use. I am Death, Ryan's face told him. I have come for you. It seemed to Ryan that his body was made of ice. His fingers flexed once around the butt of the pistol as he walked slowly to port, his eyes locked on Miller's face. He still looked like an animal to Jack, but he was no longer a predator on the loose. Jack reached him and kicked Miller's leg. He gestured with the pistol for him to stand, but didn't say a word. You don't talk to snakes. You kill snakes. (492)

    The gaze has not only shifted to Ryan here, so that it is Miller who is afraid for the first time, as Ryan had been in court, but Ryan has become as primal and cold-blooded as Miller, and less masculine, for he is implicitly shoving his homoerotic desire down Miller's throat. The language, of course, reflects Ryan's regaining of the powerful gaze - he has Miller at the mercy of his "'hate stare' . . . [which] is insulting partly because it implies the person stared at doesn't really count as a person at all" (Argyle and Cook 74) - and so the Irish terrorist is an animal again, a trapped predator, a snake specifically, and a "little bastard."

    . . . Jack pushed Miller back against the metal wall of the container, his forearm across the man's neck. He savored the feel of the man's throat on his wrist. This is the little bastard who nearly killed my family. Though he didn't know it, his face showed no emotion at all. Miller looked into his eyes and saw . . . nothing. For the first time in his life, Sean Miller knew fear. He saw his own death . . . he feared the eternity in hell that surely awaited him. Ryan saw the look in Miller's eyes, and knew it for what it was. Goodbye, Sean. I hope you like it there. . . . . . . He brought up the pistol and forced it into Miller's mouth as his eyes bored in on Sean's. . . . [Ryan is prevented from firing by Breckenridge; the gun wasn't cocked anyway] . . . The spell was broken. (492)

12. Ryan's gaze is even more base and soulless than Miller's was in the Old Bailey; in the courtroom, Ryan was unsettled by Miller's stare, but he could analyze it and try to decipher what was behind those eyes. Ryan's gaze at his prisoner here is known by Miller as a gaze of death, of vengeance, of his impending nothingness, as Ryan's eyes bore in on Sean like bullets. "Scopic power over the target is the source of fear and compliance; the gun as prosthetic vehicle both augments the human eye and materializes vision in physical assault and trauma," Feldman notes (41), and here the gun is also augmenting Ryan's manhood. As Ryan shoves the gun muzzle into Miller's mouth, the terrorist remains less humanized through the use of his last name as he is violated, but he is curiously personalized as "Sean" when Ryan's eyes penetrate the terrorist's. The gun as phallic and scopic symbol, as an extension of both Ryan's gaze and his heterosexuality, is shoved down a man's mouth - a violently homoerotic image. This image is the climax of accreting homoerotic images, from Ryan enjoying the feel of Miller's throat, to his intimate look of utter comprehension when he knows that Miller is thinking of hell and Ryan wishes him a good visit, and then, after Ryan is prevented from killing Miller, the breaking of the "spell." Ryan's oral rape of Miller with the gun is conflated with his physical gaze to homoerotically undermine the masculinity Ryan is attempting to assert in wreaking his revenge on the man who threatened his family.[6] Ironically, Ryan is not even human during this scene - he is made of ice and cannot feel his body again until after he has relaxed his hold on the gun - while his debasement of Miller causes Ryan to see the Irishman as "a human being," albeit one without a conscience.

    . . . What he saw now was something less monstrous than before. Fear had given Miller the humanity that he'd lacked before. He was no longer an animal, after all. He was a human being, an evil example of what could happen when a man lost something that all men needed. Miller's breath was coming in gasps as Ryan pulled the gun out of his mouth. . . . [Breckenridge says] . . . "'look what you did to him. I don't know what that is down there, but it's not a man, not anymore.'
    Jack nodded, as yet unable to speak. Miller was still on all fours, looking down at the deck, unable to meet Ryan's eyes. (492-3)

13. Miller as an animal, on all fours now, unable to look at Ryan, is precisely how he behaved before a policeman in jail after he was raped by another man: "he'd found Miller facedown on the floor of the cell, his pants gone, and the robber sodomizing him so brutally that the policeman had actually had sympathy for the terrorist. . . . [Sergeant Highland recollects this scene in the police van, and he thinks, but] Only for a brief few minutes had he been a victim, a human victim. Now he was an animal again" (164, 165). Clancy seems to be telling the reader that it is only when Miller is raped that he can be seen as more than an animal; but in raping Miller, Ryan becomes less than a man. "If the fantasy of masculinity . . . is the fantasy of a non-self-conscious selfhood endowed with absolute control of a gaze whose directionality is irreversible" (Edelman 50-1), then Ryan's masculinity is undercut by his own uncertainty about the scopic and phallic gaze which he has wielded against Miller. Ryan may anxiously try to reassure himself that he is a man with a heart and conscience, the hero who is neither primal nor debased, but such declarations seem false: "I've won. I've defeated him and I haven't destroyed myself doing it. . . . 'Sooner or later, civilization always wins over barbarism.' I just proved that, I think. I hope" (496; auth. ital.). It is small wonder, then, if the Prince of Wales' assurance to Jack that he is "'a good man'" and Jack's reply that the Prince is, too, and "'That's why we'll win'" (496) - why the civilized, masculine state will triumph over the barbaric, inhuman Irish terrorist - fade in the reader's mind while that image of Ryan shoving a gun down Miller's throat, ready to pull the trigger, lingers long after Clancy's novel is put down.
    
    
14. Patriot Games, the movie, differs from the book in the emphasis of certain plot points and, more importantly, in the function of the gaze. The storyline is reduced to a basic revenge plot, with Miller (Sean Bean) seeking retribution for his younger brother's death at the hands of Ryan (Harrison Ford).[7] Thus the movie puts itself in a bind, as it works its way towards a one-on-one showdown between the two, yet links them through their surrounding kin: Miller's surrogate, dysfunctional Irish terrorist family (he and his brother were raised by O'Donnell after their father was killed by Loyalists, the audience learns) versus Ryan's natural, functional American family. The gaze, then, is almost always a three-way look in the movie, for example between Ryan, Miller, and Miller's dead brother, or between Ryan, Miller, and Ryan's wife.[8] The movie's emphasis, too, on the effeminacy of the ULA, with a female terrorist playing a crucial role and the homosexual Dennis Cooley ruthlessly killed before the final mission at Ryan's house (in the book, he takes part in the siege), 'taints' Miller with a hyper-heterosexual anxiety about becoming feminized, a tension further fuelled by his apparent 'eyes only' obsession with Ryan. Thus Miller becomes the homoeroticized figure (whereas Ryan was in the book), and so undercuts the Irish terrorist as stereotypical 'hard man' for, although Miller is at times either hysterical or cold and calculating, his motivation is a homoerotic tension between an extreme homosocial love for his brother and an unnatural obsession with Ryan.
    
    
15. Miller's only moment of tenderness comes just before he and his younger brother Paddy pull on their masks to prepare for their attack on the Royal Family's car (the Royals are not named and it is unclear if it is an attempted murder or a kidnapping), and Miller looks intently at him, saying, "This won't be like anything you've ever done before, little brother," then smiles briefly at his sibling. Miller's only blood-relation is taken from him less than two minutes later, when Ryan interferes with the terrorists' plans, kills Paddy, and effects Miller's capture. The viewer is presented with a shot of Miller's dead brother, face down on the street in his black ski mask, only his right eye visible, wide open but lifeless. The second shot is of Sean Miller, still masked, staring at him and saying, "Paddy?" The same shot of the dead gaze of Paddy is shown again, and then Miller looks up at Ryan, who is training his gun on him, a fearful, panicked (which can be retrospectively read as anti-gay anxiety) look on his face as the scopic weapon keeps Miller in its sightline. This twelve-second scene, broken by the arrival of police and some brief shots of O'Donnell fleeing in a cab, employs the deft movement of the camera's gaze through edited point-of-view shots in order to establish a three-way gaze between killer-hero Ryan, dead novitiate terrorist Paddy, and his vengeance-seeking elder brother Miller. Miller's gaze at Ryan, which 'freeze[s] the flow of action in [a] moment [ . . .] of erotic contemplation" (Mulvey 419), is a "meeting of minds" (Argyle and Cook 170) which is never articulated by any of the characters (whereas Ryan talks about his fear of the terrorist's look in the novel), and in which not a word is passed between Miller and Ryan. However, the scene becomes the visual leitmotif of the movie, lingering in the viewer's memory as a constant reminder of the terrorist seeking revenge for his brother's death.[9]
    
    
16. In the secondary emphasis on Ryan's power over Miller through the pointing of his gun, the scene also establishes the stress in the film on the panoptic gaze of CIA surveillance, subsidiary to Ryan's gaze for Miller (as he searches for him across the globe before he can attack Ryan and his family in their homeland). Even though Ryan has the upper hand through his scopic weapon, the forty-second scene of Miller's arrest suggests that Ryan, as seen in his eyes, is far from being in control.[10] He looks frazzled, perhaps in shock from his shoulder wound, but most importantly, he blinks, a sign of weakness which Miller never reveals. In the next shot, Miller looks back at him, his mouth set, as if he's about to say something, but his gaze is more powerful than words, connoting hatred and vengeance, and then he blinks only as his stare is forced away from Ryan by police pinning him down. Miller's look turns to his dead brother, and he says "Help the boy" as the police take off Paddy's mask and blood drips in a stream from his mouth onto the ground. Paddy's eyes stare lifelessly at the road once more, and then the camera shifts back to a close-up of Ryan who, his gun now out of view, gulps, blinks, and averts his gaze from the brother to Miller, who is shown by the eye of the camera as about to say something again. Instead he remains mute, giving only a cold, constant stare, as his face is forced onto the ground so that he is looking at Ryan and the camera, and the viewer, just as his brother did, his right eye staring out from just above the concrete of the street. Thus his brother's look of death becomes Miller's look of death for Ryan, stating that he will act as Paddy's avenger. Finally, the camera cuts to Ryan, who seems dazed, his eyes hooded as he blinks, looks down somewhat, up slightly, and then abstractly away. It is significant that Ryan's fear increases as his gun is out of sight, and that Miller's gaze is only broken by a blink when he is pinned down by agents of law and order, representatives of the state constantly figured as masculine in the movie. That Miller never blinks is crucial, of course; it shows he is both fearless and the avenging figure of Death for Ryan, i.e., it shows his gaze is always more powerful than Ryan's. Such a deathly stare is important in the action film for connoting the unknowable evil of a villain: "John Malkovich in In The Line of Fire (1993) bases his performance as an assassin almost entirely on the 'coldness' of his confrontational gaze" (Dixon 49).[11]
    
    
17. In jail and court, the lawyers and police are all male, and Miller only stares off into the distance, never once speaking (he says more in the book, when he thanks Highland for taking him away from his sodomizer in prison) or blinking. This calm, steady gaze is paralleled by Ryan's eerie stare from the surrounding blue of the TV screen as a photo of him in Marine dress confronts O'Donnell on a news report shortly after the botched attack. This picture is shown again, yet dwarfed by a blown-up mugshot of Miller staring out at the viewer from the front page of a paper just before the trial at the Old Bailey. Miller's dominance of Ryan through the gaze recurs in court, where Miller is first shown staring resolutely ahead as Ryan's testimony commences; when it is finished, however, and as Ryan is escorted past the dock, Miller becomes the hysterical Irish terrorist, and the words which he twice deferred from saying to Ryan at the scene of his brother's death now erupt. Miller jumps forward, fighting off his guards' restraint, and snarls, "Bloody proud of yerself, aren't ya'? Stuck yer nose in where it doesn't belong and now ya've killed my baby brother!" The men's eyes lock, and as Miller is led away, Ryan looks towards him, and Miller holds back for an extra moment, long enough to protract his stare at his hated foe, then disappears around the corner of the stairs. Ryan looks back at his wife Cathy, an uneasy smile of reassurance crossing his face. This shot is the culmination of previous quick camera cuts which juxtaposed Miller's gaze at Ryan with Ryan's gaze at his wife: just before the trial, when Ryan learns he has been knighted, and he and his wife look proudly at "Lady Catherine" and "Sir Jack," this intimate gaze is immediately followed by the cold stare of Miller in the prisoner's dock; a look from Cathy in the backbenches to her husband on the stand is followed by one from Ryan towards Miller as he points to the terrorist during his testimony. The remainder of the movie is thus inevitably set into motion: Miller will get at Ryan through his family before he completes his revenge on Ryan himself, thus threatening the heterosexuality of Ryan as exemplified in his marriage and the impending birth of his son.[12]
    
    
18. Soon after Miller is broken out of custody by O'Donnell et al., and Miller's predatory, silent stare at police officer Highland predicts the victory of the ULA over the state - a triumph affirmed when the cold, calculating Irish terrorist shoots Highland dead with a dispassionate look - Miller confesses to O'Donnell that he cannot stop thinking about what happened to Paddy and so, by extension, he cannot forget Ryan. This is a reversal of Ryan's confession of fear to his wife in the book; here it is Miller who is articulating his haunted look, the look of his brother, a continuance of the deathly stare which Ryan brought about. And so Miller becomes the avenging terrorist, his homosocial love for his dead brother perverted into a homoerotic obsession with Ryan and a need to destroy Ryan's super-heteronormative life.
    
    
19. In case the viewer were to ever forget this 'avenging devil' gaze, Ryan reminds the audience after a failed attempt on his life outside the Naval Academy. Staring into the eyes of the expiring assassin, Ryan automatically asks, "Where's Sean Miller?" as though Miller's gaze is reflected through the dying vision of a terrorist associate. Ryan knows, through that look, that Miller is near, and so warns his wife, who receives the call and reacts just in time to narrowly save her and daughter Sally's life when Miller tries to shoot them down on the highway.
    
    
20. Only by holding a gun at Miller as police approached and pointing his finger at the accused in a hall of justice did Ryan bolster his gaze enough to repress Miller's evil look, and so Ryan turns to the state institution of the CIA, as the movie overwhelms the viewer with surveillance methods: a scene where cops arrest bomb-makers in Belfast with the help of a wire-thin, roving scope under the door, maps of North African terrorist camps, satellite photos, archival pictures of O'Donnell and others, and even a miniature camera placed in the fan in Dennis Cooley's bookshop (in the book, the bookshop was only bugged). Ryan is given carte blanche by his wife to fight back - "You get him, Jack. I don't care what you have to do. Just get him" - and it is through 'women'[13] (exposing Miller's latent effeminacy) that Ryan and the CIA attempt to retaliate.[14] Ryan makes no effort to understand the 'terrorist mind,' to analyze or probe; he only wants to strike back and protect his family. This is perhaps because the male hero "can never fully understand the male other he pursues with all of the vengeance and power contained in his apparatuses of surveillance" (Denzin 187). The effeminate Cooley is spied on, and Ryan recalls the red hair of Annette in a cab in London and again outside the Naval Academy, focussing on her as the weak link in the chain, noting that if they can find Annette, they can locate O'Donnell and the ULA. Thus the close-up of a surveillance photo of the camps which reveals "tits," in combination with a photo of Annette provided to Ryan by an IRA spokesman, verifies that the ULA are operating out of Camp 18 in the North African desert. Of course, just as Miller is trying to reach Ryan through his wife, so Ryan is attempting to get at Miller through Annette: "This is the girl you saw in the blink of an eye in a jeep as it passed doing 40?" asks Ryan's CIA superior, to which Ryan replies, "I'm after the man who tried to kill my family."[15] The image which clinches a CIA-authorized strike is the bald head of the foppish Cooley in a satellite photo.
    
    
21. Perhaps in anticipation of this effeminate weakness, and in an attempt to displace or repress his own attraction to Ryan, Miller coldly kills Cooley after he is disgusted by Cooley's inexpertise with a gun. The CIA raid on Camp 18 is a failure; Miller and the others have already left for the U.S. Once there, they attempt to use the surveillance technology of night vision to hunt out Ryan and his royal guests after the royals' secretary Geoffrey Watkins has cut the power to the house. This plan is thwarted once Ryan realizes Watkins is the traitor simply by staring into his eyes, a look which leads to Miller being represented through an associate again, when Ryan demands of Watkins as he gazes at him, "Where's Sean Miller?" Ryan then waits for just the right moment to turn on the generator, thus crudely shorting out the night vision goggles and exposing the primitive efforts of the Irish terrorists to out-surveillance the surveillers.
    
    
22. At this point, after Ryan has stymied him and his cohorts again, Miller, as in the courtroom, gives way to a homoerotic hysteria, a bloodlust for Ryan. The gun becomes ineffective scope and phallus as he kills Watkins while madly peppering the basement with bullets, then shoots from the clifftop at Ryan's motorboat speeding out to the ocean until O'Donnell reminds him that they want Lord Holmes alive (not realizing that Ryan has decoyed them and Cathy, Sally, and their guests are all hiding on shore). In the ensuing speedboat chase, Miller refuses to turn back after realizing Ryan's trickery, disobeying O'Donnell, then killing his father figure and Annette.[16] All this purposeless shooting of his scopic phallus defers Miller's ultimate goal: to confront Ryan, 'man to man,' and kill his homoerotic object of vengeance. At last, then, the gaze is now unmediated through another. It is only Ryan and Miller on the high seas, with Miller looking animalistically at his prey, while Ryan looks back, egging him on. However, after Miller jumps onto the boat and they grapple, the camera shows the viewer no gaze between them until Ryan pushes him onto the metal anchor, killing him. It is then that Miller finally looks afraid and, crucially, blinks. His mouth open slightly, he dies. The fatal mistake which Miller makes, of course, is to forgo his gun - abandoning his scopic phallus and so pitting his castrated self, alone and bereft of family (his brother and O'Donnell dead) against Ryan, who is fighting for his masculinity and his family - and engage with Ryan in hand-to-hand combat. While such a scene is often the preferred climax to action films, with all the elements of a homoerotic spectacle it implies - looks of "fear, or hatred, or aggression . . . minimize and displace the eroticism they each tend to involve, to disavow any explicit look at the male body" (Neale 18, see also Caldwell 134) - such is not the case with this ending to Patriot Games. Here, it is not the male bodies that are the focus, but Miller's eyes when he dies, finally showing fear and so Ryan's triumph of his heterosexuality.
    
    
23. In the final scene, order is restored and the viewer is presented with the interior of Ryan's house, mirroring the opening of the movie, yet this time it is a happy household, with a new member arriving soon. Ryan's wife receives a call about the baby and there is a three-way gaze between Ryan, wife, and daughter as they decide on whether or not to find out the sex of the baby, reminiscent of the tripartite look between Ryan, Miller, and Paddy at the start of the movie. In keeping with Ryan's assertion of his hyper-heterosexual masculinity in contrast with the defeated Miller's homoerotic hysteria, this parallel scene implies that Miller's ('bad') dead brother will be replaced by Sally's ('good') baby brother.
    
    
24. While Ryan's gaze at Miller in the book suggests that "surface appearance hides a spooky abnormality, a sense that he lacks some quality that the good guy has" (Zwicker 12), that quality is a conscience, a humanity, making Miller the inhuman terrorist. Yet this stereotype is problematized by the homoerotic insistence of Ryan's gaze and the inhumanity to which Ryan descends in his quest for revenge. Conversely, in the movie, it is Miller who constantly gazes at and pursues Ryan, hinting in his obsession at his lack of heterosexuality in comparison with Ryan's ultra-heteronormative model of family man and 'good guy' hero. To conclude reductively, then, in Clancy's book the Irish terrorist stereotype of the atavistic predator is undercut by Ryan's inhumanity and homoeroticism, whereas in the movie adaptation the Irish terrorist stereotype of 'hard man' is undercut by the obsessive homoerotic bloodlust shown by Miller and even mediated in absentia by associates of Miller (his dead brother, the assassin outside the academy, and Watkins). Miller makes Ryan less masculine in Clancy's book, while Miller is made less masculine by Ryan in the movie, as the violence of the Irish terrorist is perverted into sexual violence and sexual deviation from the superheterosexual norm established by Ryan. The mutual gaze between Ryan and Miller in Patriot Games superficially establishes a stereotype of the Irish terrorist, but then, when the excessive 'good guy' image of Ryan (established in contradistinction to the terrorist) is undercut by the homoeroticism of the look, the easy binary categorizations of the Irish terrorist as either atavistic, soulless animal or 'hard man' blur, shimmer, and fade from view.