There Will Be No Questions

Read the comment sections on Forbes Breaking News clips or any other political brain rot, and you will learn that American politics has become a movie. “Idiocracy,” to be exact. Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy, a box office failure upon release, has steadily enlarged its footprint as a cult classic since the rise of Trumpism a decade ago. Over the years, the film has become shorthand for politicians of any party acting dumb, not just Republicans. Wherever there’s footage of a Congressional shouting match, or a future secretary of defense being asked how many pushups he can do, the comments are bound to point out that “‘Idiocracy’ has aged like fine wine.”

Another cinematic frame has emerged among YouTube commenters. They have increasingly come to view politics through the lens of a paranoid thriller, in which the government is all-knowing and all-powerful, where the ultra-wealthy are in cahoots with the deep state, pursuing an agenda that is against the interests of ordinary Americans. But where “Idiocracy” represents a vision of incompetent government, there is no contemporary analog for this darker view. When politicians oppose stock trading bans, or Boeing whistleblowers die mysterious deaths, no one seems to know what movie we’re watching. And yet, we already have a number of classic films that capture this mood to a T. They were once associated with a specific side of the spectrum: the left.     

Seventies thrillers like “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor” depicted an elite corruption that was all the more frightening because it was both omnipresent and unseen. They suggested that you can try to locate it and root it out, but you probably won’t make it back alive. These films emerged during a decade when, according to Erik Davis, “the horizon of individual and social possibilities abruptly narrowed.”

In the ‘70s, the future appeared narrow because the recent past had been revealed to be covered-up and staged. The Vietnam War, starting with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, as well as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. were all recast in a new light by the Pentagon Papers, COINTELPRO and Watergate. Opening the newspaper meant learning the government was even more covert and retaliatory than what had been reported the week before. By the time Nixon was helicoptered off the White House lawn, the American public was done falling for lone gunman theories.

Political conspiracy cinema hasn’t just faded from the zeitgeist; it isn’t getting made anymore. It’s not hard to see why. Even though more people than ever regard corruption as the norm rather than the exception, liberals have ceded a healthy skepticism of institutions to the right, with paranoia and distrust now associated with MAGA and QAnon. Believing in a deep state — which is not that different from believing clandestine special interests dominate Congress and hold power that is beyond the reach of elections — has been rewritten by liberals as looney conservatism. Accepting the lab leak theory, or claiming the Democratic Party was knowingly propping up a walking corpse as president, makes you suspicious, if not a red-hatted MAGA true believer.  This red-blue reversal colors the backdrop to the disappearance of political conspiracy cinema. Perhaps, though, it also sets the stage for the genre to plot a comeback.

Beginning with “Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967, American filmmaking entered its auteurist phase. This “New Hollywood” was attuned to how craft and technique not only construct fictions, but the ways they are interpreted. (Is “The Graduate” about a young man having sex with an older woman, or is it more about the numbness, boredom and confusion that colored their affair?) Assassination plots, White House scandals and counterintelligence programs, including the official lies told about each, all jibed with one of the central theses of New Hollywood: controlling the narrative was about controlling its interpretation. There’s the story, and there’s how the story is read.

Like Trump, Tricky Dick was a dumping ground for symbolism. “Nixon’s spirit haunted American cinema throughout the ’70s,” wrote Jonathan Kirshner. “Any movie that talked about power, privacy, paranoia, institutional corruption or the madness of the patriarch, no matter the setting, was inevitably talking about Nixon.” But while that observation may be necessary to understand the decade’s two most quintessential political conspiracy thrillers, it is not sufficient. “The Parallax View,” directed by Alan J. Pakula, is about a shady corporation that assassinates politicians for no reason, no matter what they believe. Likewise, “Three Days of the Condor,” directed by Sydney Pollack, deals not with machine party politics but with the CIA. Nixon might’ve been a common point of reference, which is all the more likely since both films shared a writer. However, neither film treats disgraceful presidents as the culminations of vast, system-wide depravity. Doing so would’ve hamstrung their critiques.

Even in broad daylight, “The Parallax View’s” inciting incident is practically hidden. A presidential hopeful is shot and killed at a private campaign event up in the Space Needle. It’s not clear whether the killer is the caterer caught in the throng with a smoking gun, or if it’s the other caterer at the far end of the unlit room, tucking his revolver back into his suit jacket. Local journalist Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) isn’t able to get into the event that day, but nonetheless doubts the official narrative claiming one psychotic individual acted alone. In the years following the assassination, multiple witnesses die strange deaths. One of them comes to Frady’s apartment and tells him that she believes she’s next (her prediction is correct). As to why this is all happening, she suggests, “Maybe we all saw something up there.”

That word, maybe, captures the motivations that propel “The Parallax View.” Maybe the presidential candidate was a threat to the status quo. Maybe the Parallax Corporation, which matches up mercenaries with clients, didn’t anticipate that Frady would infiltrate it. Maybe this seedy company has a political agenda. Maybe our protagonist is on the right track. Or maybe none of these statements are correct; the Parallax Corporation inflicts violence with no real aim, and it has been toying with Frady since the Space Needle. The film ends with a congressional committee falsely announcing that Frady has killed a different politician. The journalist has no chance to defend himself; Parallax has both framed and eliminated him. 

In “Three Days of the Condor,” researcher Joseph Turner (Robert Redford) is on the run from a clandestine faction within the CIA. Turner is employed by the agency, working in Manhattan at a front operation disguised as a literary society — where he stumbles upon a secret plot to seize oil fields in the Middle East. The clandestine faction, now discovered, is eventually taken out before it can “become an embarrassment” for the agency. But the CIA’s plan with Turner is less clear, or at least not as pressing. He tells an operative that he has shared his entire saga with the New York Times, thus incriminating the agency. Panicked at first, the operative calms down and slyly asks, “How do you know they’ll print it?” It never occurs to the runaway researcher that the security state might interfere. In this scene, it’s as if he’s thinking to himself, “What do I do now?”

In contrast to the previous era’s political films, these thrillers emphasize elusive, harder-to-name powers that dwarf and flatten all machine party politics. The politicians in “The Parallax View” are independents — a device for rendering them indistinct and inconsequential without overtly labeling them liberal or conservative. Parallax is just as prone to take out a Democrat as much as a Republican if it means perpetuating their corporate dominance through random acts of fear and uncertainty. In “Three Days of the Condor,” there’s presumably no use for Congress because the CIA controls the economy. Should the agency lose its monopoly on foreign oil, America wouldn’t function. But even journalism, the avenue for holding bad actors to account regardless of their persuasion, is no longer a guarantee. Frady, the lapsed small-time reporter, behaves like a muckraking investigative journalist to take on a corrupt system. (Too bad he doesn’t know that Parallax killed his editor.) As for the logical and bookish Turner, he has been so focused on outmaneuvering the CIA that he hasn’t considered whether other institutions — like the New York Times — have been poisoned.

Paradigmatic of the genre, both Frady and Turner have their worldviews shattered. The institutions they thought upheld our nation do not value justice and fairness, and they do not know how to process this discovery. The two Joes analyze and write about society for a living, which makes for another crisis: they were trained in epistemic skills that have become outmoded. In these depictions of America, humanities and communications degrees are worth nothing. The protagonists’ professional fates are a reminder that elite corruption mutated into corporate-owned media, where financial bottom lines demoted the standards of truth mourned by these films.

When was the last time a Hollywood production was full of this much righteous political rage? I would say “JFK,” given that it helped kill the genre. Without litigating its credibility, the simple fact is that nothing could top the hysteria of Oliver Stone’s 1991 epic. Subsequently, political conspiracy cinema phased out of thrillers and pivoted to comedy, playing into the public’s casual acceptance that the establishment is rotten. Elite anti-heroes go to absurd lengths to hide corruption in “Wag the Dog,” or they say screw it and flaunt it for all to see in “Bulworth.” Thrillers in the ’70s said that politics were sick; conspiracy-inflected comedies of the ’90s said that politics were a sick joke. By the 2000s, all of politics was just a joke. At its funniest, you had the Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading,” in which the CIA’s bureaucracy is so unwieldy that everybody is getting tricked and no one is responsible. At its dullest you had “Idiocracy,” which merely takes the idea of being surrounded by idiots to a comedic extreme. Stone’s film motivated Congress to declassify documents related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Judge’s film permitted viewers to roll their eyes at such real-world achievements.

During the first Trump term, politics became no joke. They either risked disrupting on-screen escapism or being incorrect. Marvel slop was about big, good men who fought to keep the world normal; artsier movies added the requisite twist of big, mean men who were Trumpy and a little weird. A24 releases seemed less intent on being memorialized in the Criterion Collection than in Slate think pieces. Too political for the escapists and too MAGA-fied for the libs, conspiracy had no place in this industry. Then again, it didn’t need a production studio to feel cinematic. QAnon gave its participants an outlet for world-building and immersion, more Comic Con than Tea Party rally. Conspiracy had come a long way since “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor.” It ceased to be about decoding special interests and analyzing how they oppressed us all. Its adherents had lost interest in the American public; they had instead become fixated on the country’s main character, Donald Trump.

Amid the liberal apathy surrounding Trump’s return, left-leaning audiences might lose the energy to judge works of fiction on the basis of their ideological hygiene. If this exhaustion reopens the door for political conspiracy cinema, it will be far from enough to truly revive it. In the era of New Hollywood, conspiracy was an irresistible subject for directors itching to explore the dissonance between reality and interpretation. The industry conditions that gave us those classic ’70s thrillers — the rise of independent theaters that championed releases from outside the American mainstream, the major studios willing to bankroll productions that were edgier in style and substance in order to stay in business with the indies — are long gone. That was one formula for how you get difficult movies made that are exciting for audience members to think and talk about together, regardless of who they voted for president. There isn’t a comparable formula today.

You won’t find any more Hollywood films that call the New York Times a pawn of the security state. You also won’t find any that are avant-garde in the slightest. In “The Parallax View’s” most famous scene, Frady sits in a dark, single-seat theater. From his perspective, we see words and images on a screen: “God” with a church, MLK Jr. and the KKK; “me” with toddlers, Thor and Lee Harvey Oswald; Hitler with “enemy” and “country.” This jarring, experimental scene was and remains a conversation starter. It has urged viewers to ask each other, “What’s going on? What could it all mean?”

Those aren’t simplistic questions — they’re for making sense of art and political power alike.