Conspiracy Cinema and Beyond

Conspiracy Cinema and Beyond

The Paranoiac And the Conspiratorial

While paranoiac film and conspiracy cinema are often used as interchangeable terms, we might notice that some films are chiefly paranoid; others, more conspiratorial. From one perspective, The Day of the Jackal and The Parallax View have a lot in common (chiefly an assassination theme), just as Z and Illustrious Corpses do too. But if we keep in mind certain distinctions Gerard Genette makes in Narrative Discourse, we can better understand that not all conspiracy thrillers are paranoid films, and not all paranoid films need to be works of conspiracy. Often the two do go together, but they frequently have a different emphasis — leaning into the paranoiac, or opening up into the conspiratorial. In this sense, The Day of the Jackal and Z are conspiracy thrillers, The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses are paranoid dramas. This is where Genette's ideas of nonfocalized narrative can prove useful. Nonfocalised (or zero focalisation) allows for omniscience; internal focalisation limits perspective, usually to one only. Genette sees this evident in some of Henry James’s books, including The Ambassadors, but even more in What Masie Knew: “where we almost never leave the point of view of the little girl.” Genette is writing about literature, but the terms can be usefully applied to film, if we take from Genette no more than this aspect — zero focalisation indicates the film will move between different characters’ perspectives; restricted narration focuses on one character’s comprehension of events. The difference between The Parallax View and The Day of the Jackal isn’t chiefly that the former focuses on the investigation of a series of political assassinations, and the latter concentrates on someone attempting to kill De Gaulle. It rests much more on the paranoiac perspectival focalisation in The Parallax View; the zero focalisation used in The Day of the Jackal.

To explore this distinction — between the paranoiac and the conspiratorial; the narrow focalised viewpoint and the expanded one — our emphasis will be on the ‘golden era’ of conspiratorial/paranoiac cinema: the years between 1968 and 1980. As Guy Lodge proposed: “The golden age for the American conspiracy thriller, of course, was the 70s, when Hollywood capitalised on Watergate mania in one shadowy anti-government warning after another.” (Guardian) Madeline Lane-McKinley speaks of the “Long seventies conspiracy cinema [that] can be understood, in this sense, as this inscription of social totality onto narratives of defeat.” (Blind Field) If the ‘70s were the great period of this type of cinema, then the present moment might be the terrible one of its extension into our daily lives. A report notes “recent events, such as the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. Capitol riot, and several conspiracy theory-inspired mass shootings, have prompted widespread concern from scholars, journalists, and the mass public about increases in mass conspiracism.” But, as the report states, “Given the associations between conspiracy theories and many non-normative tendencies, lawmakers have called for policies to address these increases. However, little evidence has been provided to demonstrate that beliefs in conspiracy theories have, in fact, increased over time.” (‘Have beliefs in conspiracy Theories Increased Over Time?’) This indicates there have been paranoid people for many years, and that many events have lent themselves to being interpreted conspiratorially. What may have changed, however, is how politicians have used the conspiratorial to generate a complicity with those who might not feel they are benefiting from the present social and political climate. While politicians may traditionally be given to cover-ups, many today invoke conspiracies when political events do not go their way, as they claim the deep state manipulated information, data or votes.

To explore some of these aspects would be for another piece, even if sitting behind this one, perhaps even the impetus to write it rests on some of these questions. But if one of the biggest problems with the paranoid mind and the belief in conspiracy theories resides in the bagginess of the assumptions, the least we can do is try to tailor our argument to the modest demands of intellectual attire, and so many useful films and political events will nevertheless remain implicitly evident in the claim, rather than explicitly examined.

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote an article called ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, and saw that, though he was writing a year after Kennedy’s assassination, this was a mindset already deeply present in American political discourse. He starts by quoting Joseph McCarthy in 1951: “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” And then Hofstader quotes similar statements from others, in 1895 and 1855, and says “these quotations give the keynote of the style.” Conspiracy thinking has never been far from the American imagination, and this might explain why in the sixties and especially the seventies, so many American films absorbed the conspiratorial and the paranoiac. It wasn’t only the key assassinations in the States in the 1960s — the Kennedy Brothers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evans — it was also there more generally in the culture as a possible way of reading the political. When you include the Vietnam War, Watergate, Kent State and the various movements that were reacting to what they saw as oppression in the country (The Black Panthers, The Weathermen, The Symbionese Liberation Army and The United Freedom Front), there was plenty there to propose paranoiac thinking and conspiratorial actions. It isn’t that other countries don’t venture into paranoiac and conspiratorial cinema (and key examples will include Illustrious Corpses, Z and The Day of the Jackal), but the combination of power in the world, and money in its film industry, make it seem the US is the natural home of the paranoid style and conspiratorial narratives in films of the period.

Hofstader doesn’t differentiate between the paranoid and the conspiratorial, and often sees the paranoid mind creating conspiracies all the better to persuade people of dangers afoot. “Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War.” (‘The Paranoid Style…’) It becomes a useful tool to propose enemies within and without, and few succeeded in doing this more than Senator Joseph McCarthy in an era when Reds were potentially under every bed. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible allegorically explored this moment in time by depicting the Salem witchhunts of the 1690s. At least he got to write; many figures in Hollywood and Broadway were blacklisted, and other figures deemed of the left were executed. This didn’t mean that Julius Rosenberg was innocent (though many believed his wife happened to be), nor that McCarthy could be held responsible for their deaths. But their execution took place in the febrile atmosphere McCarthy, more than anyone, was responsible for creating. Though Truman and Eisenhower were the presidents between 1947 and 1955, it became defined as the McCarthyite era. Yet this was very different from the ‘70s one we are chiefly exploring, where paranoia no longer became a question of people undermining the government; it was more the feeling that the government was undermining the people.

To understand this aspect, we can start by looking at The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses and, by using a film from the US and a film from Italy, show that the paranoid style of filmmaking wasn’t restricted to what was going on in North America. Just as the United States had its various organisations of discontent (perhaps a better term than freedom fighter or terrorist, which are both value-laden), so much of Europe had theirs: The Red Army Faction, ETA, the IRA, and, in Italy, The Red Brigades. These movements had different agendas from each other (and were often much more organised and violent than those in the US), but they all shared, whether in Europe or the United States, a distrust of government and sought a different form of governance. Yet The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses aren’t at all products of these movements, even if they coincide with the suspicions of The Red Brigades, The Weathermen, and others would feel towards authority. A more opened out approach might have been able to incorporate the discontent, but the strength of both films rests on the focalising specificity; on how close they stay to their central characters who become increasingly at risk within the investigations they are pursuing. In The Parallax View, Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) is in Seattle the day a senator is killed, and in time others who were in the Space Needle tower die in circumstances that look very suspicious. When Frady’s ex-girlfriend insists these deaths are deliberate, and she will be next, he is still sceptical. But her death makes it increasingly hard to deny.

The film is a great example of the paranoid style in American cinema of the era and, like The Conversation, Chinatown and Taxi Driver, it rarely drifts from Frady’s perspective. We might wonder who is behind the various events, but the film refuses the cross-cutting expository revelations of the conspiracy thriller and remains chiefly focused on an investigation that almost inevitably leads to Frady’s own demise. As he determines to find out more, he signs up to an agency he hopes will allow him to reveal who is behind the killings. Instead, he becomes the latest patsy. Just as at the beginning of the film, there were two killers — one of whom does the deed, the other who can be held responsible for doing it and topples off the tower’s roof — so Frady at the end will be held responsible for murdering another presidential candidate as he is taken out, while the murderers will continue assassinating key figures. He hasn’t solved the mystery. Frady has augmented it. Near the beginning of the film, a Warren-style commission announces that the first senator’s death was down to a lone assassin, and at the end of it, the commission announces that Frady too acted alone, and there has been no conspiracy. The viewer knows otherwise, even if the film remains ambiguous, as it keeps from us the full implications of who and how many were involved in the senators’ deaths.

In the first commission report, the camera slowly moves in on the various men sitting on a raised platform in partial darkness. At the end of the film, the camera moves out at a similarly slow and steady pace, as we can say categorically that something is not right in American politics, but can’t quite name the culprits, even if we are in doubt about who the victims are. The film suggests that anyone who seeks out the truth may ultimately contribute to an even greater lie. The Parallax View is a work of both great pessimism and great precision, ruined only occasionally by failing to live up to its own formal exactitude. It isn’t that the film has an almost obligatory seventies chase sequence; it is that director Alan J. Pakula offers it in a predictable way that undermines the purity of the film’s aesthetic, and the specificity of its focalisation. After Frady goes to a now-dead sheriff’s house looking for information, Frady hears the deputy sheriff coming in and takes out a side door. Frady takes off, and the film cuts to the deputy on the phone looking out the window, and then shows him in chase. These shots are expected in a typical chase sequence but superfluous to The Parallax View, and it is as if the film has momentarily failed to understand its own integrity, so evidently on show in the scene moments earlier when the deputy arrives and we see him entering the house on the right hand side of the frame, while Frady is on the left, in another room, and in the background of the shot. When the phone rings and the deputy picks up, Frady knows another man is in the house and must leave. We are still with Frady, but we are also with the deputy, because he has entered the frame Frady is occupying. A crosscut here would have weakened the moment. Yet just after, this is what Pakula does when he offers a crosscutting car chase that would have been better learning from Hitchcock and Spielberg, from the dust-cropping sequence in North by Northwest and the ongoing harassment in Duel. In both films, the directors leave us wondering who is on the characters’ tails, and they generate paranoia by limiting the viewer’s purview.

Most of the way, this is precisely what Pakula does, and why it is a marvellous example of the paranoid style, evident in a sequence later in the film that could be deemed an exemplary method of filming an explosion, in a film that refuses zero focalisation. Frady is aware that a bomb will go off on the plane he is on, and manages to warn the crew without drawing attention to himself. The plane lands safely, and those on board are evacuated, as we see Frady and others leave the plane, then leave the frame, as we get a shot from behind a sign near the runway. But a moment later, we have an apparently empty shot as a voice is heard on the Tannoy, then we hear an explosion as the camera registers the event in its shakiness. It is everything the earlier chase sequence is not: a fine example capturing the paranoid style over the over-privileging of a typical cross-cutting chase sequence. It offers us a sense of offscreen space that exemplifies the tone of the film: the feeling that we will never have access to all the information. To show the plane blown to pieces from a dozen angles would have confirmed Frady’s suspicions, but it wouldn’t have found a form for them. It would have fallen into a standard Hollywood spectacle. Pakula instead contains it within the paranoid style by leaving it offscreen, just as events more generally remain murky and unknown. Someone economically minded might insist this is Pakula showing budgetary constraint, and much can be learnt by low-budget filmmakers in how to explode a plane without spending much money. But more importantly, it captures the film’s tone rather than simply saving a bit of cash. A similar scene in Speed or Die Another Day would make no sense. The films are based on spectacle and must deliver. The Parallax View is predicated on the limits of known forces and can use off-screen space to enhance the sense of a shadowy world.

If we are correct that the paranoiac drama relies on maximising focalisation, and minimising omniscience, the more a filmmaker can propose the offscreen, the more it can suggest that the character upon whom it focuses has limited knowledge, the more that paranoid type will be evident. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying a film needs mystery. Many do all the better to alleviate it through the course of the narrative. Numerous noirs untangle a complex situation, and if noir might seem the genre most given to paranoia, it rests partly on its interest in investigating the most complex of mysteries. Yet not all noirs use the paranoid style, and not all paranoiac dramas are noir thrillers. In a Sight and Sound article on the top noirs (including Double Indemnity, Laura, Gilda and The Big Sleep), paranoia isn’t mentioned once. But these are all classic examples from the 1940s and 1950s. A piece on Night Moves, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown and Klute would be more inclined to recognise the mistrustful, embodying it less in a femme fatale than in an atmosphere which transcends ready character manipulation. In Chinatown, it would seem Faye Dunaway is a femme fatale, but instead it is her father who is pulling the strings and Dunaway a mere marionette, someone who can be dispatched when John Huston no longer needs a daughter he has slept with, but a granddaughter with whom he can incestuously continue the family dynasty. If Chinatown brilliantly emphasises even more than Pakula’s film the singularity of point of view, as it stays almost exclusively with Jack Nicholson’s central character, it resists the paranoiac by exposing the mystery in classic noir style. The plot is convoluted but comprehensible, and a villain is revealed in all his hubristic force. But good doesn’t triumph over evil, and so the tone retains the distrustful, even if the plot is wrapped up. Whether the plot is revealed (Klute, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown) or remains murky (Night Moves, The Parallax View, The Conversation), what most of the 70s noirs share is a focalised perspective that leaves the viewer feeling the untoward and the unresolved. Things don’t wrap up; they envelop. When Frady becomes the latest patsy (the paranoiac equivalent of the noir Fall Guy), and the commission concludes that he acted alone, the film illustrates the gap between what the report claims and what we know. In a classic noir, there usually isn’t this gap. The reality of the story and the reality of the viewer’s perceptions of it conjoin. The Parallax View thus needs to find a form for this gap, and cross-cutting scenes that give the viewer a full understanding of the situation runs contrary to a work that wants us to remain, if not quite in the dark, at least aware of dark forces that cannot quite be comprehended. We know an organisation has killed off Frady and will no doubt kill others as well. But one doesn’t know fully the details of this force, nor how to counteract it. Our hero is dead, and the film concludes with a deeper inconclusiveness.

This might be a good way to describe the paranoiac drama: conclusive inconclusiveness. The film ends categorically, as all films must, but the broader problems remain in place. The central character investigates a problem but doesn’t solve it, and becomes the victim of an ongoing nefariousness. In Illustrious Corpses, Rogas (Lino Ventura) looks into the mysterious deaths of various judges and narrows it down to three possible candidates. A typical thriller might devote most of its time to discovering that it wasn’t one of these three, but a fourth who had a better reason still to murder the judges, and all the better to wrong-foot the viewer while still retaining clear narrative parameters. In Illustrious Corpses, the three initial suspects would have reason to feel harshly treated by the judges who locked them up, but halfway through, the film shifts its emphasis as one realises this is less the vengeance of one man than a broader determination to create a more authoritarian state. The judges are collateral damage to this desire, and we increasingly realise that Rogas’s life is in danger too, as he can usefully be bumped off for a wider aim. At the end of the film, he is, like Frady, dead, and his character equally traduced. In The Parallax View, the commission says Frady was a man who had an unhealthy obsession with the person he had been accused of killing. Illustrious Corpses ends with the police chief claiming Rogas was showing signs of mental instability, as he blames the murder of the communist party leader on Rogas, while we know an assassin took out both Rogas and the inspector. The police chief insists Rogas was seeing plots everywhere. He wasn’t wrong. One of them killed him. But that isn’t the narrative the chief and others wish to tell, and it is theirs that will hold up as tanks come out on the streets.

The viewer knows the truth but cannot do very much about it, and the film concludes, like The Parallax View, on conclusive inconclusiveness, and in the paranoid style. At various moments in the film, we increasingly sense the presence of the camera as a murderous device. When it tracks right and gets into position to take out one of the judges in a bank, we become aware of its presence all the more because the film refuses the counter shot that would reveal who is behind the deed. But we still wouldn’t assume at this stage that Rogas might be a victim of this lens. Before the end, we will, and when the camera observes Rogas and the communist leader in conversation at a museum, we aren’t likely to be surprised, though immensely shocked, when the ‘camera’ takes them out. The film has mainly focused on Rogas with only a few cutaways to other characters and the judges’ deaths. But the camera that initially seems to be following him as a typical focalising presence, becomes one that increasingly seems to be tracking him, having Rogas in its sight.

This gives the film itself an element of paranoia, with the viewer beginning to feel that nowhere is safe, if even the camera is implicated in the events it depicts. It is one thing to have a character uncover a conspiracy, and another to have a character die while trying to solve it. But in different ways, The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses make the form itself feel unreliable. When near the end of the former film, we are in the delegation centre where another presidential aspirant will be killed, it seems inevitable not because we believe Frady is incapable of intervening, but because the hushed form and observational style indicate that the world is a far more shadowy place than Frady or we can comprehend. In a typically and formally oblivious conspiracy thriller like Conspiracy Theory, the shots go into confirming certitude, not sowing doubt, and becomes the antithesis of a proper conspiracy film. In the Mel Gibson movie, not only does the film turn Gibson into a hero who uncovers dastardly deeds within an agency working corruptly inside the FBI, but it also gives him a fake death so Julia Roberts can emote at his graveside. In reality, he is working to destroy the rest of the dodgy operation before he announces to Roberts that he is alive and well. It has the plot of a conspiracy film, but it isn’t only in the optimism of its ending that it fails to do justice to the complexity of conspiracy, as one man and a woman can unravel dark forces. It is also in an atmosphere that plays up Gibson’s gulpy jokiness and Roberts’ need to feel hard done by. It is both seeking laughs and demanding tears, and these are surely affective responses contrary to the paranoiac. It is always looking for sure-footed emotions over wrong-footing the viewer with a story that cannot end well when the forces are so strong against isolated individuals, and where the camera might seem as fretful as the characters themselves, but shows that, like much else, it is finally on the side of power. While there are other films that we have noted brilliantly play up the paranoid style — including The Conversation and Night Moves — The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses might be the finest examples of the range involved in the conspiratorial, as we can never quite know how far the conspiracy stretches, how much of government is incorporated in the need to silence anyone who might endanger its continuation.

Liane Tanguy says “I have long taken for granted Fredric Jameson’s dictum that conspiracy theory constitutes the ‘poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age’ a ‘degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.’” (Symploke) Meanwhile, Temenuga Trifonov also mentions Jameson, and his claim that "the figuration of conspiracy an an [unconscious] attempt…to think a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves.” (SubStance) Neither The Parallax View nor Illustrious Corpses fall into the former fallacy, and they acknowledge the difficulty in encompassing the vastness of a conspiracy that may have limits, but the parameters are still far greater than any heroic figure can encompass. This is partly where Genette’s focalisation comes in, and why, though paranoiac dramas and conspiracy thrillers have a lot in common, they contrast strongly on this issue. The two films gain much of their power from limiting the perspective chiefly to their leading characters and the presence of the camera as a force that threatens to undermine them, as readily as reveal their actions. In contrast, Z and The Day of the Jackal are properly conspiratorial, rather than paranoiac. They constantly cross-cut to reveal the logistics of the conspiracy.

In Costa-Gavras’ Z, the purpose isn’t to play up the feeling of the untoward, but to examine the structural forces evident in a society that wants to undermine any actions deemed detrimental to an authoritarian state. The film opens with a florid speech by a military general — he speaks in metaphor about “infection from ideological mildew”, and insists that the state has to take control at every stage, at school, at university and in the people’s military service. To do otherwise would be to let rebellion flourish. At the same time, he speaks about a demonstration that is soon to take place, one he doesn’t wish to ban (the country is, after all, a democracy). But he doesn’t want to deny those who wish to protest against the demonstration either. This is where conspiracy comes in. By trying to give the impression of democracy, the generals want the speaker to speak, but also want protestors to have the opportunity to do him harm. Based on the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, the film shows the Deputy’s assassination by thugs hired by the military to do him in. It wouldn’t have been conspiratorial to ban Lambrakis from speaking. It would have been authoritarian. But the military wishes to prove the country isn’t beholden to the various isms the general condemns at the beginning: communism, imperialism, anarchism and socialism. No, this is a democracy, he insists, and as such it needs to conspire against The Deputy.

The film shows the logistical complexity of a social order based on hypocrisy, fear and deceit, and the various interests at work in maintaining the conspiracy. When it looks like a person will testify, the authorities hospitalise Nick, and then merely try to murder him. Others more perniciously wish emotionally to blackmail him. This might seem to be the lesser of two evils, yet, from a certain perspective, it is a fate worse than death as it undermines the societal fabric, the need to live in a just country. When his sister comes to visit him in the ward, she asks him if he wants to destroy her home, adding that Nick’s insistence on trying to tell the police what he knows will lead to her husband losing his job. The point is to stay quiet and get on with your life, even if freedom is suppressed and political figures are assassinated. When we see her at the hospital and visiting Nick’s workplace, she is dressed fancily enough for Nick to propose that some other idiot can buy her dresses if her husband cannot. The film implies that though she talks about security, she simply means material comforts, and this is what a nation must secure if it wants to keep the people on its side. Nick believes, however naively, that a functioning democracy isn’t just an economic model that improves the living standards of the population, but one that allows the moral standards to be maintained as well. The General wouldn’t disagree, but while we might find Nick naive, the general is hypocritical. Nick simply wants to see justice done. The General talks a lot about the problem of ideology, yet nobody practises it more than this man, whose detestation of anything left-wing means that minor and relatively innocuous political figures like the Deputy will be murdered.

It is as if the conspiratorial is what democratic states do to avoid authoritarianism, and from a certain perspective, we can see the point, even if it is one containing irony, a quality Z offers in plentiful form. This is especially so near the end, when the various military figures are accused of murder and told how best to avoid the press, only for them all to be confronted by the media, who have clearly been told this exit is where they will find the guilty. Costa-Gavras is in no doubt where he stands on the conspiracy, saying It had: ‘’Police complicity, the disappearance of key witnesses, corruption in government - all those kinds of things. There was the additional question of the way some men make culprits of others. Most important for me was that the Lambrakis affair had a conclusion. There was a trial which produced testimony and evidence.” (Cineaste) Yet while the conspiracy was exposed, it was followed by the military dictatorship, as if the undermining of the state led to its collapse into authoritarianism. The film ends with the fall of the government, but also the various figures involved in indicting the military, dying in mysterious circumstances. The military takes over the government, and only minor figures in the conspiracy are sentenced and given inadequate prison terms. Costa-Gavras said he made the film not just because of the conspiracy but also because of the coup. “I had been concerned about the Lambrakis murder ever since it occurred in 1963, but after the military coup of 1967, I wanted to do something concrete against the dictatorship.” (Cineaste) It was, then, the combination of the conspiratorial and the authoritarian that led to the film’s making. The director would no doubt be diametrically opposed to the notion that conspiracies are the price one pays to avoid authoritarian regimes, but someone in the military might just make such a claim, and that man might be The General here. As he says, “we must preserve the healthy parts of our society, and heal the infected parts.’’ Better to cut out the cancer than have it destroy the entire body. If the tumour becomes too large, the democratic patient will die, and an authoritarian will be forced to take over. If this seems metaphorically inept, it is only in keeping with the General’s insistence on overwrought language.

But this needn’t lessen the point: if we are forced to have conspiratorial shenanigans or oppression, better to go with the former so it can still look like a functioning democracy. This allows a number of people to be sacrificed to the greater good in underhanded operations, but Nick’s sister still gets to wear fancy dresses and believe she is living in a system based on aspiration, fairness and decency. Those involved in conspiratorial behaviour are doing what they can to keep the democratic system healthy, by taking out the deemed melanomas (hippies, free-thinkers, investigative journalists, meddlesome magistrates and the like). If the saying goes that tax is the price one pays to live in a democracy, the military right might be inclined to say that the price is subterranean activities that keep the skin of the state healthy. Sure, society will have a few sunspots and raised moles, but any hint of metastasis, forces will be deployed. One may not be able to go around bumping off in plain sight these dubious elements, but they can fall out of windows, die in car crashes, gas explosions, or drown — all of which happen to figures that were threatening to undermine the state in Z.

Many would be inclined to think this was hardly only a Greek problem, and one reason Costa-Gavras leaves the country unnamed isn’t chiefly to protect the Greek state. He has been happy to make clear it is based on Lambrakis. It is more the conspiratorial element would not be exclusive to his home nation. When he tried to get funding, he showed the director of the Yugoslavian cinema the script, and he said, ‘No, we cannot do this.’ The Italians and the French had the same attitude." (Cineaste) The interviewer asks whether it was too specifically political or generally political, Costa-Gavras replies, "both". He filmed in Algeria. That no one in Europe would cooperate might suggest to the paranoiac mind that all sorts of things are going on behind the scenes in other European countries. When the Cineaste interviewer mentions JFK, Costa-Gavras insists on parallels closer to home, in the country in which he was living. "The Ben Barka affair was very much in mind while doing this film, but not the Kennedy events," adding, too, that "in France, they thought of Ben Barka where so many witnesses died and disappeared. For instance, a reporter who shot pictures for Paris Match in front of the police station committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Later, it was revealed that the revolver was held in his right hand but that the photographer was left-handed." (Cineaste)

Are these the sort of everyday underhanded activities in countries that claim democratic status, and create in the general public conspiracy as complicity, with the public accepting what it doesn’t quite know as evidence of paranoid individuals over authoritarian subterranean actions? A person who muses over the fact that someone kills himself with his left hand, while he would usually use his right, is just a meddlesome nit-picker, someone looking for an excuse for their own paranoid fantasies, rather than a person expecting a state to function without killing off its truth-seeking citizens. Though Z is very good at the complex logistics that go into an assassination, which has to look like it is the work of the lowly disgruntled, it is just as effective and perhaps no less terrifying when showing Nick’s sister in the dresses she so likes to wear. This is petit bourgeois complacency allied to modest material prosperity. Roland Barthes says, "We know what petit-bourgeois reality is: it is not even what is seen, it is what is counted; now this reality, the narrowest any society has been able to define, has its philosophy all the same: it is ‘good sense’, the famous good sense of the ‘little people’." (The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies). The sister knows what is best for herself, her family and everybody else, and this is why she visits Nick both at his workplace and at the hospital: to knock some good common sense into him.

This doesn’t mean that everyone should be awash in conspiracy theories and enveloped in paranoiac thinking. There are enough people who believe the Earth is flat, the moon landing never took place and that 9/11 was an inside job. Certainly, some notions that start conspiratorially ,and might seem nonsense, as they fly in the face of initial claims, can seem more plausible as the evidence piles up, with the Wuhan lab leak theory a recent example. How Covid 19 started remains moot, but many are now willing at least to acknowledge that it came from the lab, over a wet market, is possible. However, whatever the claim, what matters is its substantiation. People were happy mouthing off that it came from a lab long before building the evidence for such a theory, and there were those, even when it was amassed and seemed circumstantially possible, who insisted it was nonsense. There is the risk that people from opposed positions end up denying evidence because what matters more is the assertiveness of their claim. We might be reminded of John Maynard Keynes, who was once challenged for altering his position on some economic issue and said. We might be reminded of John Maynard Keynes, who was once challenged for altering his position on some economic issue and said. "’When my information changes,’ ‘I change my mind. What do you do?’" The important thing isn’t to insist on the conspiratorial, nor to deny it, but to find evidence for its likelihood or implausibility. Nick’s sister is the type of figure who wants common sense to prevail, even if Nick has plenty of evidence that it shouldn’t. Equally, when James Meek in the London Review of Books speaks of a friend at the BBC who was in conversation with someone over the dangers of 5G, the acquaintance claimed that ‘‘every time a new kind of electromagnetic energy is invented, it causes a new kind of disease, like the invention of radar caused Spanish flu." When the journalist said the Spanish flu was in 1918, while radar wasn’t invented until the 1930s, the acquaintance responds by saying, ‘‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’’ In such an instance, evidence of a conspiracy is secondary to what Meek calls the conspiratorial mind, and what we are calling in filmic terms the paranoiac style. What matters in paranoid cinema isn’t the complexity of the conspiracy, but chiefly the feelings generated out of the untoward. There are conspiracies at play in both The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses. But what they emphasise is the state of fear generated around Frady and Vargas. Plenty of people may eventually be bumped off in Z (and The Deputy early on), but the logistics are more important than the fearful, and the same is so in The Day of the Jackal.

Though we can say that Fred Zinneman’s film has a central character, nevertheless, The Day of the Jackal constantly opens out to explore the full logistics of the conspiracy. The film starts with a fleet of Citroens leaving the Elysee Palace, and its purpose is to show the reach and the effectiveness of the state positively, just as Z explores it negatively. Ostensibly, this early scene is there to show a failed assassination, and one based on fact. Disgruntled members of the OAS attempted to kill De Gaulle in 1962, in reaction to Algerian independence. But while it illustrates the attempt’s failure, it also conveys to the viewer the weight of authority behind the French government as it shows the beauty of the palace, and the money the state has behind it, in the numerous identical cars leaving the building. If we can usefully invoke Barthes in the context of conformity, we can do so again to understand the semiotic regime these images impose on the viewer. This was France in the midst of its thirty glorious years, of increased prosperity and growth, material comfort and consumer spending. It made sense that Barthes would write his essays often on consumption during these years, and perhaps none more so than his essay on the Citroen car. "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic Cathedrals. I mean the supreme creation of an era... " (Mythologies) Barthes sees in it the consumer article par excellence; the film shows it as an exemplar of state wealth and power over individual brand recognition. If Barthes can say it is a car "one pretends to drive with one’s whole body," then in the film, it is as though one drives it with the full authority of the state apparatus. Within the first ten minutes, the film tells us that De Gaulle is not an easy man to kill (unlike JFK?), and that those who try will be summarily punished. If Z proposes the clandestine assassination of a minor politician, Zinnemann illustrates what happens when you try to take out the leader of the Fifth Republic. The OAS members are very publicly executed.

It will take a man of immense skill to succeed, and the film plays off the individual whose actions we admire, and the state that needs to be defended. The Jackal (Edward Fox) is impressive and the French state formidable, and while the film focuses chiefly on Fox, it constantly broadens out to provide a rounded perspective. After all, the Jackal isn’t introduced until 8 minutes and 30 seconds into the film, as he finds himself hired by the surviving members of the OAS to have another go at De Gaulle. Given that there were many attempts on De Gaulle’s life, this is hardly implausible. The attack the film opens with was "dubbed the Petit-Clamart attack for the suburban Paris commune in which it occurred, it was one of 31 such attacks on the polarizing French leader during his lifetime." (History.Net) If at first you don’t succeed, best to hire someone with proper assassin experience as the film deviates from fact, but creates a believable counter history. However, while Z plays close to the truth, for all the abstraction as the main characters go unnamed, and the country too, as Costa-Gavras shows the brutality of a regime, Zinnemann shows the formidable intelligence of the French state as it takes out even so fine an assassin as the Jackal. When we first see him getting off the plane in a scene that resembles just a little the Deputy getting off one in Z, so we hear how he was responsible for key killings at the beginning of the sixties, as we hear mention of Trujillo and Lumumba, while the film grounds itself in the factual milieu of the time. Yet when Z shows us the Deputy getting off the plane, this is, of course, the victim. When the Jackal gets off, we begin to identify with the perpetrator. In many ways, The Day of the Jackal may be a conventionally filmed account, but its conventional nature works well for the material. Though often shot in a manner that isn’t too far removed from a Bond movie of the time, with elements of Hitchcock also, as Zinnemman film resists recent innovations, while Costa-Gavras’s absorbs the modernist use of a forceful and intrusive non-diegetic score and a jagged timeline, The Day of the Jackal conveys well what many a Hollywood film illustrates: money behind the production. This becomes a diegetic issue as well, with the state showing money is no object in trying to capture the Jackal, and the Jackal insists on half a million dollars for the hit when an average house in the UK would have cost about three thousand pounds. Inflation-adjusted, he would have received over $10m dollars. To outwit the French state wouldn’t have come cheap. All those establishing shots of numerous locations, the tilt from a mountain to a chalet (a la Bond), the close-up of the side of the train showing its trajectory (Roma Genova Paris), resembling Hitchcock, give the film its authority, as if mimicking a state in complete control, no matter the brilliance of someone trying to defy it.

In this sense, The Day of the Jackal is a film confirming the importance of the state apparatus, a post-war work when governments were still deemed more powerful than corporations, while Z shows its susceptibility to countervailing forces and also the pernicious power of the military. While we can acknowledge both are fine examples of the conspiracy thriller based partly on their constant refocalising, nevertheless, Z retains an element of paranoia all but absent from The Day of the Jackal. We cannot deny that form doesn’t always dictate content. Yet there is a very good chance that maximising focalisation on one character will help enormously in conveying the paranoiac atmosphere, even if the film is a character study more than a paranoiac drama. In both Taxi Driver and The Conversation, the films chiefly attend to their central characters who, from another perspective, could be seen as perpetrators of conspiracy. Travis Bickle looks to assassinate a presidential hopeful, while Harry Caul is bugging a couple he is under the impression are going to be killed by an executive, only to find he has misread the recording. Both Bickle and Caul are lonely figures, and this is chiefly what allows for the film’s paranoid sensibility, though they are involved in conspiratorial actions. Strong cross-cuts to others would have diluted the particular mood both films convey, one where nobody trusts anybody else, whether there are conspiracies afoot or emotional insecurities that expand beyond the parameters of the self. If we are reluctant to include them at the epicentre of paranoiac and conspiratorial cinema of the period, they nevertheless capture very well what, in an extension of Hofstadter’s term, could be called the paranoid mood.

Yet it might be worth saying a few words about different types of film conspiracies, and the characterisational expectations each mode demands. We can think chiefly of three: governmental, corporate and industrial, even if some overlap and other examples might be deemed to escape the definitions, like The Day of the Jackal. Nevertheless, Zinnemann’s film is governmental as the OAS is determined to assassinate De Gaulle, all the better to seize control, and is using the Jackal to do so. The OAS may not have had the power of the military, as in Costa-Gavras’s film, but they would have if they had taken out the French president. What is clear in Zinnemann’s film is that corporations and industries are not pertinent to the events that unfold. In contrast, in The Parallax View, the government and corporations seem closely aligned, and yet the film remains vague on how united they are, as the impression is that corporate America wants to remove presidential candidates who might not align with their views. In contrast, Ilustrious Corpses, shows opportunistic power brokers taking advantage of what were called the ‘years of lead’, to propose that hardline measures were required. These were the years between the late sixties and early eighties, and included, at the end of the former decade, various incidents that suggested a state in chaos, including the death of a policeman who died during a left-wing demonstration, a bombing planned by right-wing extremists at the Piazza Fontana, and the death of an anarchist worker while in police custody. All three took place in 1969. In 1970, The Red Brigades formed and became a powerful and radical organisation throughout the seventies, culminating in the death of Italian politician Aldo Moro, after his kidnapping in 1978. It was a period where so many political extremists were at play, it wouldn’t have been difficult to create a few covert political actions to produce the results required – tanks on the streets and the military in charge. Z and Illustrious Corpses are very different films; if we are right to assume that conspiracy opens narrative up and paranoia closes it down, that conspiracy offers manifold perspectives, and paranoia limits the scope of the world it shows. But the films can arrive at the same point: a military occupation. They are both, in this sense, governmental works over corporate or industrial ones. The Parallax View is muddier on this question as we wonder how in cahoots the corporation is with the government. If The Day of the Jackal can seem brilliantly old-fashioned, it doesn’t just reside in the skilful, conventional form Zinnemann uses. It also rests on the film showing the authority of the government without nefarious influences upon it.

We will say more about the industrial and the corporate nature of conspiracy, but for the moment, we might also muse over whether there is a division between the optimistic and the pessimistic, with the conspiracy thriller more likely than the paranoiac drama to end on the positive. We have already shown this isn’t necessarily true if we accept Z is more conspiracy than paranoia and ends as bleakly as Illustrious Corpses. Nevertheless, the paranoiac mood seems more inclined to generate an enveloping despair, while conspiratorial cinema often escapes it, seeing in the conspiracy a bad apple aspect, one that we can contrast with the strawberry punnet. The idiom pertinent to the former proposes that all you need to do is remove the bad apple that spoils things for everyone else, and all will be well. In our strawberry punnet metaphor, the strawberries become a coagulating, rotting mess because of a bad strawberry right at the heart of the carton. When in a more recent example like Enemy of the State, an ambitious National Security assistant director, Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight) has his heavies take out a congressman, who is against a bill the congressman believes is a threat to Civil Liberties, it is clear Reynolds is the bad apple who is causing the problem. Even if the film makes much of the surveillance systems that increasingly get into every nook and cranny of our life, the film’s conclusion is that with Reynolds dead, the bill can be ditched and our central character, Dean (Will Smith), a lawyer on the run from Reynolds and his team, can return to his happily married life. The film is far superior to Conspiracy Theory, made around the same time, but they both share a bad apple optimism over a strawberry punnet despair. In Illustrious Corpses, Z, and The Parallax View, democratic accountability is squished.

A film that hedges its best on this question, or achieves a quiet ambiguity over it, according to taste, is Three Days of the Condor. Joe Turner( Robert Redford) works as a researcher who looks at various pieces of information in journals, papers, magazines, and books, only to pop out one day for lunch and discover on his return that everyone in his office is dead. Turner tries to find out why, well aware that whoever did the deed will be after him, too. The film combines strong elements of conspiracy and fills out the wider story, as it cross-cuts at various points to give us information to which Turner is not privy, including when Turner is out of the office, and the film shows us his colleagues all murdered. It also offers us a third of the way through the film, scenes of the antagonist Higgins (Cliff Robertson), who claims he wants to bring Turner in safely, and who also speaks to those above him in the CIA. The viewer and Turner discover that Higgins has approved an operation to keep Americans safe and prosperous after the oil prices rise. The problem was that Turner uncovered, without realising it, a key operation, and this is why everyone in his office was exterminated. By the conclusion, Turner has given the story to the New York Times, but Higgins wonders if they will publish it, and Turner clearly needs to continue watching his back. By proposing the New York Times won’t publish the story, we might wonder if Higgins believes the paper would find it too outlandish, that the CIA has got to the journal, or that he wants to create an immediate doubt in Turner as they part. We are left wondering whether Higgins and others have merely been bad apples, or if there might be more than a hint of a strawberry punnet.

It may not be easy to discern precisely what Fredric Jameson means when he says when speaking of Three Days of the Condor "that trashing the apparatus thus underscores the gap between form and content in such postmodern representations of totality, where neither the plot nor its unique new technological object-world can bear the freight and import of the conspiratorial ideologeme that was to have revealed, not merely this specific political secret, but the very secret of the world system itself." (‘Totality as Conspiracy’) But perhaps one way of comprehending the problem rests on the film’s given logic. If we are sceptical about the conclusion to Enemy of the State, it rests on the encompassing nature of its initial conspiratorial ambition, one that then gets narrowed down to a plot the film can contain, removing both an epistemological void and a personal despair. Without saying too much about a film that is outside this essay’s general scope, as we chiefly concentrate on films between 1968 and 1980, nevertheless, the ease with which it closes down the problems it addresses is telling. The film’s denouement shows us lawyer Dean (Will Smith) tricking Reynolds into believing that some gangsters have the tape he is looking for, when we know that this is another tape, which compromises the gangster. Both Reynolds and the gangster die fighting over two tapes, thinking they are one and the same. Dean gets Reynolds off his back, and the bill Reynolds was so insistently trying to manipulate through Congress fails. The film cleverly but vacuously resolves the story, indicating both a happy ending and a conclusive one.

Three Days of the Condor offers instead an ambivalent ending, both politically and personally. The New York Times may or may not publish the story; Turner may or may not be targeted in the future. The viewer might see in this ending an inability to arrive at a proper conclusion, but what is dramatically neat isn’t always narratively appropriate. If a film creates the potential for a conspiratorial totality, it cannot arrive at optimistic conclusiveness and still be fair to its own premises. This isn’t really so in The Day of the Jackal, which does end indisputably. The Jackal is murdered, and De Gaulle survives. If the film doesn’t need to assume that De Gaulle is still under threat (despite the 31 assassination attempts on his life), this rests chiefly on how it is premised. The OAS have done the very best it could to take out De Gaulle, and that very best takes the form of the Jackal. He is the most brilliant assassin in the world, and even he can’t murder the French president. The conspiracy is uncovered, and there need be no paranoiac residue. In Three Days of the Condor, the film can’t quite close off the residual paranoia that accompanies the breadth of its conspiracy, and this is also true with Z, Illustrious Corpses, and most especially The Parallax View. The depth of the conspiratorial insists on the paranoiacally residual. Enemy of the State activates much of this depth and then insists it can be eradicated in a neat conclusion; Three Days of the Condor plays fair to that lingering threat. Turner may initially be a bookish bloke who just finds himself reading for a living, semi-oblivious to what his work entails. But when he returns to the office and sees all his colleagues shot dead, and is told at the end of the film that this is the price one has to pay for keeping the American people in the material comfort they have got used to having, this isn’t only a moral problem Turner sees, but a broader epistemological one too. In Enemy of the State, Reynolds is the bad apple using the apparatus of the state for his own ends, and hoping to use it still further if he can get a bill passed through Congress. But he can only do so because of the surveillance technology that is already there, and will continue to be there in the future. In a fine chase sequence, a man with the all-important tape is rushing through shops and corridors, streets and highways. No matter the ingenuity and athletics of his escape, it is all for nothing as he is throughout the chase being tracked by cameras that can zoom in and relocate. It is a great example of the chase sequence updated for the millennium, and while some might wish to concentrate on the optimism of the film’s ending, it would be understandable if many instead couldn’t get out of their minds the impossibility of escaping surveillance systems.

Despite occasional shots showing the intimidating presence of the World Trade Centre, Three Days of the Condor functions visually like a standard thriller, lacking the architectural resonance we find in various moments, especially in The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses. If Jameson is right that the film doesn’t find a correlative in its story for the complexity of its situation, neither does it find a visual form to convey the power structures at work. Perhaps the closest it gets is in a Kubrickian-like office when Higgins is interviewed by his superiors. It carries a coldness entirely in keeping with the procedural talk. Black chairs, brown desks, ochre and orange walls and thick, closed curtains, allowing no natural light. Jameson is right when he notes that in Three Days of the Condor "the neatly tied themes (Redford is a 'reader,' the CIA wargames are structurally connected and opposed to the deciphering of codes in printed stories and novels) are trendily inappropriate for its thriller context, and are thereby trivialised. Alongside this ideational window-dressing, the concrete and more genuinely filmic and spatial working through of these themes can be found in the descent into the interior of the telephone central." (‘Totality as Conspiracy’) Here, Turner, with great skill, manages to access a key figure involved in the conspiracy by contacting the assassin in a hotel room and offering a cryptic message. The assassin then phones this key figure, and Turner manages to get the person’s address in Maryland, where he will then go and seek him out. Such moments are consistent with the thriller context as Jameson suggests, and so much more effective, he believes, than the " intent to totalize", as he sees that many a work has the desire to cover all the ground and all the bases in the distracted feeling that this gigantic objet petit a somehow contains the very secrets of Being itself." (‘Totality as Conspiracy’)

Jameson invokes Lacan’s impossible object, a desire that represents an escape from lack that will never quite be met: an unattainable object of desire. A conspiratorial work needn’t arrive at this unattainability (it isn’t a problem for The Day of the Jackal), but if it indicates a problem greater than its own narrative containment, it can appear falsely conclusive. Jameson may be right when noticing that the film’s qualities rest on those that fit into the thriller format Three Days of the Condor adopts, but it nevertheless manages to convey within the story a fear far greater than the format usually needs to entertain. When Turner meets up with the CIA chief two-thirds through the film, he gets some answers, but he is left with even more questions, and may well wonder how much he can trust the chief. When the chief claims he doesn’t know about certain rogue elements within the organisaton, we aren’t sure if it is scarier that he doesn’t know, or if he is lying, When Turner meets up with Higgins again at the film’s conclusion, we still might be none the wiser, and certainly Turner isn’t any the less suspicious than he was earlier in the film. But the film’s qualities chiefly rest on its ability to resolve the story with satisfaction, without proposing that Turner is safe and that a newspaper would publish his story, and that justice will be done.

Most of the films thus far discussed have been governmental, with private money allusively present in The Parallax View. But corporations are perhaps often the middlemen between government manipulation and industrial coverups. They want to make a profit, and they will try and influence governments at one end, and industries at the other. What is unequivocal is that corporate lobbying has become a major growth industry in Washington, Westminster and elsewhere, and corporations have been using the legal system ever more effectively in recent decades. "A gap that has been widening since corporate lobbying began to regularly exceed the combined House-Senate budget in the early 2000s." Lee Drutman adds, "Today, the biggest companies have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them, allowing them to be everywhere, all the time. For every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions and public-interest groups together, large corporations and their associations now spend $34. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business." (Atlantic) Elena Giordano notes, "The practice of using lawsuits to silence journalists, activists and public watchdog organizations is on the rise in Europe. In 2023, almost half of such lawsuits (42.5 percent) were filed by businesses and business people." (Politico) The purpose is often to convince governments that moneymaking is a force of good, and to convince those who questions their motives and their concerns over public interest are buried under litigation. "In recent months," Leah Garcés says, "we’ve observed multiple corporations deploying similar intimidation tactics against various civil-society organizations. These legal threats — often baseless but always resource-draining — appear coordinated in their timing and approach, suggesting companies are emboldened to silence critics." (Mercy for Animals)

There have been numerous corporate/industrial films in recent decades, as though countering Ronald Reagan’s famous claim that the nine words we need most fear are: "I’m from the government, and I’m here to help." Industries and corporations seem to be a greater cause for terror. Films including Silkwood (the nuclear industry), The Insider (the tobacco industry), Michael Clayton and Dark Waters (chemical industry), Erin Brokovich (the gas and electric industry), and Side Effects (the pharmaceutical industry) are examples. The China Sydrome was madebefore Reagan’s presidency, in 1979, and looks at what are viewed as the competing claims of safety and profit. A news team goes out and plugs a nuclear power station outside Los Angeles, and instead witnesses a system failure. In turn, shift advisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) notices a leak leaving a radioactive puddle, and Godell is caught increasingly between whistleblowing and keeping mum. When he discovers that the safety inspector didn’t inspect all the welds and kept submitting the same image, Godell has no choice but to expose the company and invites the press team into the plant to witness his statement. The film isn’t afraid of cranking up the drama: one of the news members is driven off the road and dies, and Godell is killed after a SWAT team manages to get into the operating room and shoots him dead. It also has an ending that some might find overly optimistic, as Godell is seen to die for the greater good as the cover-up falls apart. On live television, while the authorities agree to a version of The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses’ claim that Godell was emotionally unstable, his friend, after some reluctance, acknowledges that Godell wasn’t a lunatic . He was a hero, and the film ends, aware justice will be done – a Capraesque notion of the one good man who can counter corruption and malevolent forces. It seems forced and might be closer to Enemy of the State in the falseness of its resolution, over the logical hard-headedness we have found in most of the other paranoia/conspiracy films we have addressed. And this isn’t to attack Capra for his happy endings – his film’s purpose has been to move towards heroic singularity. The China Syndrome doesn’t feel like that type of film, and so its conclusion can seem more optimistic than it ought, and one might believe that future events have borne this reservation out. Not only the catastrophes of Chornobyl and Fukushima, but also when thinking of the numerous films (and documentaries) that have since addressed industrial and corporate malfeasance.

The film is hardly paranoid at all, despite the crew member who is shunted off the road, and that Goodell is threatened and then, of course, killed. Yet the film comes close to zero focalisation and emphasises the conspiracy over the paranoiac, as it constantly gives us perspectives that open up the film and allows the viewer privileged knowledge. We see this perhaps especially in the cross-cut between the cameraman hoping to go to a meeting with key evidence to present to the nuclear company, and the meeting itself. The viewer is left to assume, in the juxtaposition of images, that the cameraman is going to be murdered so that he won’t be around to present the evidence. The cameraman might be given a few point-of- view shots, but he is grist to the mill of a conspiracy, not the subject of paranoia. Equally, though Jack is at ever-greater risk as he wishes to go public, he remains too much a function of a cross-cutting narrative that also focuses on other characters, like newscaster Kimberly Wells, to become its paranoiac epicentre. If Three Days of the Condor occasionally crosscuts to give us a broader angle on events, it usually remains within Turner’s purview and leaves the character able to piece together the story without knowing for sure that his death won’t be deemed part of the puzzle.

Thus, what The China Syndrome shows is that just because people are out to get you, that doesn’t mean you’re paranoid. Or at least, it doesn’t mean that this is the form the film will take. A cover-up needn’t be a cause of paranoia ,and this is partly why we have made much of focalisation. Near the beginning of Three Days of the Condor, the film might have felt more paranoiac than conspiratorial if it had stayed with Turner when he popped out for lunch. Instead, we also see what we will later find out is the main assassin and a couple of cohorts, and witness them slaughtering Turner’s colleagues. If instead, Turner had returned to find them all dead, and the viewer was as oblivious to events as Turner, we would have been closer to the paranoiac than the conspiratorial. The event would have been as inexplicable to us as it is to him, and the mood might have enveloped so that any event uncovered would have seemed weak next to the state of Turner’s mind. In a strict sense, one might see The Conversation and Taxi Driver as more paranoiac films than Three Days of the Condor, because the emphasis rests on the characters’ suspicious relationship with their environment, over concrete conspiracies. Turner may not be such a character, and it is clearly circumstances that turn him into one, but the film nevertheless wants enough of a paranoiac feel that it might have benefited from eliding certain moments, and all the better to bring out this quality, including the removal of the killings at the beginning, and the interview between the chief and his superiors.

One says this not because paranoiac films are necessarily better than conspiracy thrillers (it makes sense that Z and The Day of the Jackal rely so much on crosscutting and broader contextualisation), only that it would have deepened the sense of mistrust on which the film ends. Numerous industrial conspiracy films will have a dimension of paranoia, as people are out to silence them, but whether it is Dark Waters or Silkwood, The Insider or Extreme Measures (on corporate medical irregularities), the feeling of paranoia is usually secondary to the exposé. In paranoid drama, the mood is the thing; in conspiracy, the uncovering is the purpose. To open the film up to comprehend the full implications of the event is central to the conspiratorial, but it needn’t be in the paranoiac. If the film wishes to play up the paranoia, it is at risk of diluting it with narrative inclusiveness.

If both the paranoiac and the conspiratorial propose somebody is out to get you, then a vital question is how individuating does the filmmaker wish to convey this feeling of threat. Is it a crepuscular organisation, a governmental cabal, a powerful individual? If the latter, this is surely the ultimate example of the bad apple. But it can also convey the problem of power so concentrated in an individual’s hands. This might be useful if we want to create narratives that register the wealth of people who have more financial power than many a nation or corporation. The top ten richest people in the world have more money than many a nation’s GDP, including those of quite advanced European economies. In 2025, Elon Musk is deemed worth $363 billion, Mark Zuckerberg, $260 billion, and Jeff Bezos £240 billion. Croatia’s GDP is 98 billion, Slovakia’s 185 billion and Slovenia’s 75 billion. These might not be exact figures, but they are close enough to register that individual wealth has the sort of power matching that of corporations and governments. It needn’t be merely a narrative convenience to create power in a personified form. There may be many a hyper-wealthy individual now who could say what the manipulative, abusive and hubristic Noah Cross says in Chinatown, when detective Gittes asks him what he could buy that he doesn’t already own, and Cross replies, "the future, Mr Gittes, the future." When Musk says "if people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words", he might be speaking more broadly, but given he has had fourteen already, with various women, he seems as keen to spread his seed as Cross was his, even if the horror of Chinatown rests on his sleeping with his daughter and grand-daughter to do so. Musk needn’t be in prison for spreading his seed, but nobody more than Musk would seem likely to repeat Cross’s statement about the future.

Yet it is a claim many a billionaire could make, and we might wonder if the rich’s need to guarantee their own future is of much more importance than everybody’s present life. As Joe Biden proposed, when leaving government, "an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead." (BBC) Biden perhaps should have done more so stop this from happening, but as Timothy Noah says, after quoting the ex-president, "the new administration if the billionaires in Trump’s administration pooled their resources, they’d have enough to buy Denmark itself (GDP $450 billion)." (New Republic) In such an instance, personal wealth, corporate fortunes and governmental control all come together, leaving power in plain sight.

We might still be waiting for a film that registers the sort of reach encapsulated by hyper-wealth, but a work that has a decent stab at it in satirical form is Winter Kills. Marc Mohan commenting on the film as he interviewed director William Richert notes, that it captures "the surreal disenchantment that seems to permeate America’s political consciousness today. Huston’s depraved patriarch makes a memorable entrance leading a phalanx of golf carts across a course, a spirited blonde squeezed onto each side of his seat. ‘Look at that scene, and then look at Trump—they’re the same guy!’ Richert practically hollers." (OreganWatch) Yet the tone of Winter Kills is gently absurd, an over-the-top and constantly amused examination of overreach. Central character Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges) receives info that might resolve his brother’s assassination, as the film offers a few echoes of JFK’s murder. It seems to involve Kegan’s own dad, a man who lined his son up as president, all the better to retain a much greater power. It makes sense that the patriarch is played by John Huston (Cross in Chinatown), a figure who not only looks to own the future but has taken care pretty encompassingly of the present too. In one scene, Kegan goes with his enigmatic lover, Yvette, to a restaurant, and the head waiter rejects them at the door. She is wearing trousers, and the place doesn’t allow women in such attire. She promptly takes them off, and the waiter is even more affronted, insisting they leave. Nick says they won’t be going anywhere. His father, of course, owns the restaurant. Late in the film, Nick begins to understand just how great his father’s reach is when his father’s right-hand man explains how much surveillance is within his father’s purview. Cerutti has been monitoring events for decades and explains to Nick that Yvette was his brother’s ex-lover and was responsible for killing him. Nick thinks this is nonsense, but what he cannot deny shortly after is that Yvonne is dead: Cerutti tells him he can find her at a university anatomy theatre. Cerutti also admits, after Nick breaks his arms, that Nick’s dad spent $11m dollars turning his brother from a skirt-chasing college kid into the president of the United States. But Tim Kegan didn’t do what his dad said, so he had him bumped off. Pa didn’t put him in the White House to do good; he put him there to make money: it was a "cold-assed business proposition like everything else in society."

The film offers hubristic hyperbole, but who can deny that the sort of power the father exerts isn’t increasingly apparent in American politics? It isn’t just that Musk, as an unelected official, was given enormous powers in gutting various departments that were seen as wasteful; it is there too in the presence of Vice President J.D. Vance, a man made by one of Musk’s long term buddies/rivals, Peter Thiel. Antonio Pequeño IV notes, "Vance and Thiel’s relationship dates back to 2011, when the senator met Thiel following a talk the venture capitalist gave at Yale Law School that Vance has characterized as “the most significant moment of my time” at the institution, according to a blog post he wrote for Catholic magazine The Lamp." (Forbes) Speaking of Musk and Thiel’s friendship, Business Insider reckons "Soon after the PayPal-X merger, Musk and Thiel were on their way to a meeting with investors when Musk totaled the car while trying to show off its acceleration, ‘sending the McLaren flying into the air.’’’ Thiel may not have been impressed, but what matters is that they were close affiliates. Winter Kills is a film all about joining the most outlandish of dots, but with the aid of Wikipedia, it doesn’t take somebody very long to see all sorts of connections between powerful people that can make it look very much like a cabal. There are also various internet sites that pull in the gullible, or the investigative, according to taste, into ever deeper conspiratorial circles. One of the most famous over the last decade was Pizzagate. It was a conspiracy that proposed various Democrats were abusing children in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC. It started with posts on a website called 4Chan and, in the following years, kept growing and fell under the rubric of Qanon, the name of an original poster. It turned out children weren’t being abused, and there was no basement. But this didn’t stop someone determined to prove this was so when he shot out the restaurant and was promptly arrested. There is no smoke without fire, he might have presumed, and fired a few rounds trying to find out.

Not that all conspiracy thinking needs be as potentially mindless as those following Qanon. There has been the rise of "parapolitics, defined by Robert Cribb as the study of ‘systemic clandestinity’ or ‘the study of criminal sovereignty, of criminals behaving as sovereigns and sovereigns behaving as criminals in a systematic way.’" Jeff K sees that the term ‘parapolitics’ has only emerged in scholarly literature very recently, in the early nineties, and focuses not merely on the activities and crimes of clandestine and criminal groups like security services, cartels, terrorist organisations, secret societies, and cabals, but primarily on the systemic roles played by such actors." (Cartographies of the Absolute) This is where the deep state comes in, but this analysis of systemic clandestinity has suffered because of its claims coinciding with those of others like Qanon. Jeff K also looks, however, at the work of Mark Lombardi, a librarian and artist who offered complex rhizomic drawings that would avoid hierarchies, instead depicting networks that often indicated only the loosest of connections. His work wasn’t there to solve mysteries but acknowledge enigmas, to see the complexity of power relations. Jeff K quotes George Pendle: "his brilliantly detailed drawings actually make things harder to understand, not easier. Looking at the endless miasma of names, institutions and locations, his charts are more about obfuscation than revelation… Lombardi’s drawings are like a pointillist work, best viewed from afar. From a distance you can see that a system has been revealed, but the closer you get to it the more invisible it becomes." (Frieze)

In such works, we can acknowledge connectivity without conspiracy and allow paranoiac thoughts to dissolve into rational realisations. It isn’t that the rich and powerful are all in it together as blood-drinking ghouls, locking the newborn in basements, ready to drink their blood. But they are people who have enormous sums of money, know others who also have great wealth, and keep accumulating assets that pay big returns, all the while locking out those without assets and relying on their labour to prop up an economic system that isn’t working in everybody’s interests. Such a take allows us to see hyperbolic hubris at work, and seeing the sort of exaggerated power that Winter Kills turns into comedy, playing out as a form of tragedy in the real world, one that becomes ever more surreal as the zeroes keep accumulating. Timothy Noah proposes: " Let’s say you wanted to count out loud to one million at a rate of one number per second, never taking any breaks. (I don’t recommend this.) There being 86,400 seconds in a day, you’d be done in 11 and a half days. A guy in Birmingham, Alabama, named Jeremy Harper did something like this in 2007.’’ Harper managed one million in 89 days. But he ‘‘will never count out loud to one billion. Nobody will, because instead of 11 and a half days, or even 89 of them, counting to a billion with no stopping to eat or sleep would take 31 years and eight months. If you worked at Harper’s pace, taking breaks every day, it would take more than 244 years.’ (New Republic) This is indeed surreal wealth, and we might wonder what form of narrative, and which type of characterisation can encapsulate such exorbitant sums of money. When we watch a conspiracy thriller like Marathon Man, Christian Szell can seem a little like a variation of Dr Evil in Austin Powers. When Dr Evil says he will hold the world to ransom for $1m dollars. Understandably, Number Two reckons a million is a small sum these days, and their company Virtucom makes $9billion a year. Szell might be niftily nasty with dental instruments, but he is mediocre in the money stakes, as the end of the film shows him scrambling around over a few diamonds. Marathon Man can seem quant today as its evil, while horribly specific, can seem broadly benign.

When looking at paranoid and conspiracy films from the period, we can see in them a simplicity next to the complex times in which we now live. But the best of them, whether conspiratorial, paranoiac or moving between the two poles, allow us to recognise the narrative forms and the characterisational possibilities that can be adopted in comprehending the epistemological questions they raise. Enemy of the State is logistically more complicated, narratively quicker and dramatically denser than, say, The Parallax View or Illustrious Corpses. But it lacks the intricate questioning of the early work because its purpose isn’t to ask complex questions about governmental forces, but to put its central character in the most difficult of situations. The earlier films insist that dramatic tension is contained by epistemological purpose, in asking troubling questions, rather than generating troublesome scenarios, we see our hero wiggling out from under. If we have noted the superfluousness of the car chase in The Parallax View, it rests on the sequence having nothing to do with the film’s problematic: an exploration that shows the closer someone gets to revealing the conspiracy, the more likely they are to be the latest cog in the machine that allows it to continue. The car chase gives a false sense of agency to the character and damages the tonal coherence, one that shows Frady has little control over anything. If we believe the scene on the aeroplane is quite different from the car chase, even if they are ostensibly the same (he gets away in the car chase, gets the plane to land and escapes the bomb going off), it rests on him using automatic memory in the first instance and calculative thinking in the second. The first has nothing to do with thinking and resembles so many other such scenes in ‘70s cinema. The latter demands comprehending why the bomb is there and wondering how best to alert the staff so that the plane will land before it goes off, without alerting and scaring all the passengers on board. The scene is consistent with the thinking of a man who needs to know that the world is manipulative and that one must survive by countering these manipulations, well aware that they are potentially so all-encompassing that they constantly threaten to outstrip one’s cognitive capabilities. Consequently, Frady walks into the very conspiracy he is trying to counter, as he fails to see that his determination to foil an assassination will leave him as the patsy for it.

Enemy of the State isn’t interested in such intricacies as its purpose is always to resolve events narratively and emotionally, and we might wonder how many post-70s conspiracy films have shifted the emphasis from understanding the complexity of conspiracy and the intricacy of paranoia, to using a conspiratorial event as a veneer to what the ‘real’ story is about. In Enemy of the State, Dean is trying to hold his marriage together after an affair with a woman who is also an important contact for his work, and the film’s emotional purpose is to reveal that a former operative who has also been important to his work was the man who looked after her when her father died. He finds out all of this after this other woman has been killed by Reynolds’ team, and he can return to the family fold with his former mistress now dead and Dean understanding important aspects of her life. She is no longer haunting his marriage as a living being, but as a dead figure he has understood and grieved. All the shenanigans about conspiracies and numerous people killed, over Reynolds’ determination to get a bill through Congress, is just noise. The bill doesn’t go through, and it is resolved in an argument earlier between Dean and his wife: Dean had reckoned fear of surveillance was exaggerated; his wife didn’t, and by the end of the film the wife is proved right. And Dean is happy to concur. As with many a contemporary work, it reduces the most complex of events to the most basic of domestic concerns: to the protection and continuation of the family. It is there in environmental films (The Day After Tomorrow), contagion cinema (Outbreak), and action disaster movies (Twister), as if the characters require the most exaggerated of circumstances to accept the fundamental importance of family life. Subsequently, the viewer learns very little about the paranoid style and comprehends little about the mind’s workings when it comes to conspiratorial thinking. Works like The Parallax View and Illustrious Corpses allow us to understand the horror of realising how the very knowledge one seeks can become the death that will be administered because one has created the space to become a figure in the plan, just as Z can lay out the logistical complexity that shows how the military can surreptitiously assassinate and later take control of the government. None of the films uses the paranoiac or conspiratorial to arrive at a point other than its own subject. In other words, they aren’t just grafted onto a romance story or a marital crisis. When in Illustrious Corpses, Rogas’s child and ex-wife are invoked, it is no more than an aside about school fees. There is the suggestion in Z that the Deputy has been cheating on his wife. But these features aren’t important to the plot, because the sort of domestic or romantic through-line is of no importance next to the films’ understanding of their paranoiac or conspiratorial problematic.

When we initially proposed zero and maximum focalisation to differentiate between the paranoid and the conspiratorial, it was to indicate that though the films would have much in common, from a narrational perspective, they could seem quite far apart, bringing out quite different affects. To believe in conspiracy and feel paranoid are not one and the same, and the person staying up all night looking online at various theories might have a very different disposition from the person kept up all night staring at the ceiling in a state of perpetual fear. Yet what most of the films we have addressed is that a world ever-increasingly virtualised needs to viewed with vigilance and scepticism. If we believe that no matter how elaborate the conspiring, no matter how developed the paranoia, the film can retreat back into an assumption that bad apples can be eradicated, and where the fear was exaggerated, we might agree that the film has cheated on its premise and become part of the very thing it claims to be exposing: a world that we feel we cannot trust is deemed to be trustworthy because the filmmakers tell us it is so. This leads to contradiction, while the greatest conspiracy/paranoia films arrive at paradox. The latter accept the inevitability of their own diegetic logic: that the characters are caught in an impossible situation they won’t escape. By playing fair by their own reasoning procedures, they might offer dramatic despair, yet they don’t insist on pretending that squished strawberries are bad apples. When a film denies the integrity of its own throughline, it can seem like it doesn’t want to make sense of conspiracy; it has merely exploited it for its own ends that can seem even more insidious, whether the promotion of the domestic, the promulgation of the nuclear family, the exceptionalism of American democracy or whatever it might be. Illustrious Corpses et al don’t leave us with a false sense of optimism, but an epistemologically healthy dose of despair. There is hope, just not for us, Jonathan Franzen proposed in the New Yorker, in reference to a Kaka quote. That may be true, but so be it, if in our hopelessness we also have, at least, our reasoning faculties intact.

Conspiracy Cinema and Beyond

11/03/2026

The Paranoiac And the Conspiratorial

Conspiracy Cinema and Beyond

The Paranoiac And the Conspiratorial