Mainstream media have decided that conspiracy theories represent such danger for the world that anyone who could be branded a “conspiracy theorist” deserves the Internet equivalent of the death penalty. However, despite their associations with “fake news”, propaganda and destructive psychological manipulation, conspiracy theories actually owe their existence to certain very real conspiracies and very real cover-ups that were gradually revealed in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s. Those revelations produced only the tip of a much bigger iceberg, but they were enough to create almost complete distrust of the government among the American public. This coincided with the New Hollywood and larger creative freedom, as well as filmmakers’ desire to exploit the phenomenon by producing political thrillers dealing with government conspiracy. These films, which certain critics even grouped into the specific genre of “political paranoia”, usually pitted a single individual against faceless, but brutally efficient organisations with assets in all elements of government and society in general, making the protagonist’s cause look not only dangerous but hopelessly quixotic. Few films provided the audience with the essence of the genre as The Parallax View, the 1974 thriller directed by Alan J. Pakula.
The plot, based on the novel by Loren Singer, begins in Seattle when the presidential campaign of popular candidate Charles Carroll (played by William Joyce) is violently ended during a visit to the Space Needle. The assassination was the work of a lone individual, who also died during the event. At least, this is the conclusion of the US Congress committee that formally investigated the matter. Lee Carter (played by Paula Prentiss), a television reporter who witnessed the event, thinks otherwise and, three years later, becomes disturbed after finding that other witnesses have recently died in mysterious circumstances. She tells her former boyfriend, newspaper reporter Joe Frady (played by Warren Beatty), that she might be next, but he dismisses her claims. When she is found dead after an apparent drug overdose, Frady changes his mind and decides to investigate the matter, beginning with the death of another witness. The trail leads him to a small town where he barely survives an attempt on his life, but manages to find clues about the mysterious Parallax Corporation that apparently recruits potential assassins. Frady ultimately uses the opportunity to fake his own death and use an assumed identity to infiltrate Parallax as one of its potential recruits. He discovers that another popular politician, Senator George Hammond (played by Jim Davis), might be Parallax’s next target, so he tries to prevent history from repeating itself.
Even those viewers that are only slightly familiar with United States history won’t fail to recognise that the inspiration for the plot was the real-life assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, followed by the assassination of his brother Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Both events, conveniently blamed on single individuals acting without sensible motive, left many questions unanswered and the speed with which the American political establishment tried to sweep those questions under the carpet created fertile ground for conspiracy theories, usually associated with the military-industrial complex or what is these days known as the Deep State. The premiere of The Parallax View coincided with the unfolding of the Watergate scandal, and the public, already accustomed to the prospect of the highest government officials being involved in nefarious activities, didn’t need much effort to connect the dots between the dark and depressive fiction on the screen and equally dark and depressive reality in the newspaper headlines. That might explain why the film initially failed at the box office and among contemporary critics; its message was too close for comfort in a time of the Vietnam fiasco, scandals and an emerging economic crisis, when people didn’t need nor want a reminder of those sad realities. It isn’t surprising that the reputation of the film grew only later, when critics and film scholars, unburdened by its proper context, found its proper value and discovered it as one of the most underappreciated gems of New Hollywood.
Even without its context, The Parallax View represents a very good example of the thriller genre. The script by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr., with an uncredited addition by Robert Towne, skilfully reconciles the complexities of a wide-ranging conspiracy with the simplicity of a single individual’s investigation. Director Alan J. Pakula, who two years earlier employed a similar style in his thriller Klute, takes a cold, almost Kubrickian, approach to the characters and story and even when something spectacular – like assassinations – happens, it happens very quickly and people react to it naturally. Pakula generally avoids the experimental style that was very much in vogue following the successes of the French New Wave, apart from using split screen. An important exception could be found in the film-within-a-film, which appears in the scene where Parallax handlers test Frady as a potential subject by providing him with audio-visual stimuli in the form of iconic images. The montage works both as an illustration of brainwashing techniques and the closest the film’s authors come to explicit socio-political commentary. The Parallax View could be the perfect film, if not for Michael Small’s musical soundtrack which is at times too distracting.
Those who like to find flaws in a film might find something in the casting or the way it was used. Apart from the protagonist and his former girlfriend, all characters are not only easily disposable but one-dimensional. That includes the lack of a strong villain; instead we are presented with sometimes menacing, but mostly faceless and forgettable cogs in a much larger machine. Warren Beatty, who was at the height of his New Hollywood fame at the time and enjoyed a reputation as one of the greatest screen idols, might not look like the best choice for the Hitchcockian concept of an “ordinary man in an extraordinary situation”. But his star-like persona is exactly what this film needs; the audience, at least those viewers accustomed to Hollywood standards, must believe that a single individual could have some chance against an all-powerful organisation. Beatty as a star serves that purpose and the script cleverly uses his character’s ingenuity to make the film interesting by hinting that The Parallax View might at the end of the day have a conventional happy ending. When it turns out that both protagonist and audience have been manipulated, the result is one of the most effective and most disturbing endings in the history of cinema.
Perhaps the biggest flaw of The Parallax View might be found in its basic concept being somewhat dated. It is hard not to think that entities like the Parallax corporation exist in today’s world. But their methods have apparently evolved. When faced with “problematic” individuals that stand in the way of their sinister plans, there is less need for complex assassination schemes that might leave too much incriminating evidence. Recruiting a Twitter mob and starting a “cancelling” campaign is today much cheaper, simpler and apparently more efficient. In this context, The Parallax View might look both more and less disturbing than half a century ago.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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