The Purpose of Paranoia: The Influence of Conspiracy on American Cinema

WARNING: SPOILERS!

There are few historical events that would capture the influence of American cinema more than the Watergate scandal that plagued America during the early 70s. The revelations that were uncovered during the Watergate investigation, and the investigations that it spawned, created a public distrust in the federal government. The growing claims of conspiracy and cover up over the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy, and his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy would also lead people to think twice about taking what the government said at face value.

            

One out of the three movies in Alan J. Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” (Klute, All The President’s Men and The Parallax View) The Parallax View (1974) would completely sum up the feelings of distrust and paranoia that existed during the 1970s. The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as a news reporter whose ex-girlfriend witnesses a Bobby Kennedy-esque assassination, acts as a time capsule of the 1970s.

Right when The Parallax View was released, the point of political paranoia in the United States was at its highest. The Watergate Committee, which led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, had spawned more investigations into the federal government. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities was formed after the Watergate Committee. The Committee to Study Governmental Operations was organized to investigate the crimes of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, since their complicity in Watergate proved that they were capable of breaking charter. When disturbing information started to be uncovered when the investigation of the CIA started, the Church Committee was formed to just investigate the crimes of the CIA.  During the Church Committee various domestic crimes of the CIA were uncovered, including OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD, which proved that the CIA had influence in both domestic and foreign media. When CIA involvement in the JFK assassination was deemed a possibility, the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed. The HSCA would re-investigate the assassinations of both President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The Kennedy assassination would once again be thrust it into the mindset of the public.

Even though The Parallax View would debut before most of these committees would be formed, it would be an eerie omen. Similar to the omens that would haunt Frank Sinatra during the early 50s and 60s. In 1954, Sinatra would star in a movie called Suddenly. He would play the leader of three gangsters that would capture the town’s sheriff (Sterling Hayden) and would hatch a plan to assassinate the President of the United States when his train stopped in town. The plan is strangely similar to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Sinatra would create a sniper’s nest on the top story of a house looking over the railroad where the President would stop. When asked why he was using a sniper rifle instead of a tommy gun by one of his cohorts, Sinatra would reply that the rifle would pack more of a punch. Of course, the film is not exactly like the Kennedy assassination, Sinatra and his men are stopped before they could assassinate the President. President Kennedy would not be so lucky. After the Kennedy assassination, Sinatra would sell all the rights he had to the film, casting it into the realm of the public domain. Sinatra would suffer another ill-fated omen with his film, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The film again stars Sinatra as a Korean vet who eventually uncovers that he and his fellow squad members were captured and brainwashed by communist during combat. The group’s former Staff Sergeant, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), would be hypnotized to assassinate the Vice-Presidential rival of his stepfather. Again, the end turns out differently, where Shaw assassinates his MaCarthyish stepfather and his mother (Angela Lansbury), who was revealed to be working with the communist. Shaw then kills himself, realizing that he posed a continuous threat. During the Church Committee, it was revealed in OPERATION ARTICHOKE that the CIA had been trying to hypnotize assassins since the early 50s, similar to the methods used in The Manchurian Candidate. The research to make a sleeper assassin would continue through the 60s and 70s in the infamous MKULTRA programs. A popular conspiracy theory for both of the assassinations of President and Senator Kennedy is that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were sleeper assassins, who were triggered to kill by the CIA.

The plot of The Parallax View would also contain elements of both Kennedy assassinations. As stated earlier, reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) has an ex-girlfriend who witnesses an assassination of a state senator that greatly compares to the assassination conspiracy theories of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. One assassin shoots the senator at close range, serving as a distraction, while another assassin is able to finish him off. Three years after the assassination, Frady’s ex comes to visit him, saying she is fearful for her safety. She reveals that several people who witnessed the assassination of the senator have suffered strange and unexplained deaths. This is an obviously nod to the list of people who suffered equally strange deaths that witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Daley Plaza on November 22, 1963. Frady eventually uncovers that a company named Parallax has been hiring angry, anti-social outcasts (similar to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan), who unknowingly, are going to take the fall for political assassinations. Frady goes undercover and applies to be one of these patsies and watches a film that shows a montage of pictures. Within this montage are pictures of stereotypical American images: apple pie, the American flag, and the nuclear family. But as the montage speeds up images of racial violence, graves, Nazis, and the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald are embedded into the montage.

Frady continues to stalk the man who believes will be his handler for Parallax. Believing that Parallax is not aware of his deception, Frady tries to prevent the assassination of another U.S. Senator. Not only does Frady fail, but Parallax has caught on to Frady and ends up framing him for the assassination. Frady is quickly killed by a Parallax assassin (dressed as a security guard) and the film ends with a governmental committee stating that Frady was a crazed, lone assassin, similar to the explanations given by the U.S. government over Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

            

The Parallax View wouldn't be the only film that uniquely captured the rampant paranoia of the 70s. Sydney Pollock’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) would also be an early post-Watergate film. Directed by Sydney Pollock and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, and Max von Sydow, Three Days of the Condor is about bookish CIA analyst Joe Turner (Redford) who comes back from a lunch run to discover that all of his coworkers have been murdered by assassins. Turner starts to play a cat and mouse game with his CIA handlers and the mysterious operative Joubert (von Sydow), who continues to hunt him down. It is eventually uncovered that CIA Deputy Director of Operations, Leonard Atwood, ordered the massacre of Turner’s co-workers because Turner was about to uncover a secret operation that would allow the CIA to take over Middle East oilfields. The movie is filled with paranoia and intrigue, but it is the ending of the movie that really portrays the cloak and dagger nature of the CIA. Turner eventually uncovers the plot, and confronts Atwood at his house at gunpoint. Joubert disrupts them and then unexpectedly kills Atwood. Though initially Joubert had been hired by Atwood to assassinate Turner, his superiors, discovering the secret plot, hired Joubert to take out Atwood. Joubert is courteous towards Turner, and even warns him to leave the country because the CIA may still try to have him killed. Turner leaks the story to The New York Times, and the film ends with a freeze frame of Turner looking over his shoulder; making sure that nobody is following him.

            

Three Days of the Condor would be one of the first in a slew of films that portrayed the shadowy world of intrigue that CIA agents traverse. A few years after Three Days of the Condor, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) would bring the shadowy world of assassination back to the screen. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a sound mixer for films who records the assassination of a governor. Dismissed as a Chappaquiddick-esque auto accident by the authorities, Terry holds the only piece of evidence that proves that it was an assassination plot. He is soon stalked by a mysterious government operative (John Lithgow), who is revealed to be an agent gone rouge. Lithgow’s character slightly compares to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the leaders of Nixon’s infamous “plumbers”, who organized the never carried out assassination of reporter Jack Anderson without the approval of the White House. 

Also, Terry having electronic evidence to prove that there was a conspiracy behind the murder is a reference to the infamous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

By the end of the 20^th Century, mainstream political conspiracy thrillers were in full swing with Enemy of the State (1998) and Arlington Road (1999). Enemy of the State starts Will Smith, Gene Hackman, John Voight, Gabriel Byrne, Jason Robards, and Tom Sizemore. The film is about Robert Clayton Dean (Smith), a lawyer who is given a videotape that shows a Congressman (Robards) being murdered in broad daylight by assassins working for NSA official Thomas Reynolds (Voight). Reynolds soon find outs that Dean has the evidence and starts systematically running his life, by getting him fired from his job and freezing his assets. Dean eventually stumbles across retired NSA operative Edward Lyle (Hackman, in a role that is a direct throwback to his character in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974)), who helps Smith avoid the government agents after him. The climax of the film happens in the backroom of a restaurant owned by D.C. mob boss Joey Pintero (Sizemore), who ends up in a Mexican standoff with Reynolds and his agents. The climax is important, not just because Sizemore has the privilege of being the only actor to portray the leader of a Mafia organization in Washington D.C., but because the ending could be a reference to the relationship that existed between organized crime and the intelligence community. During the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, it was revealed that the CIA worked with New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and Chicago lieutenant Johnny Roselli in an effort to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. (It is important to note that both Roselli and Giancana were both brutally murdered after their testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Teamsters Union Boss Jimmy Hoffa would also disappear around the same time of these murders.)

Right after Enemy of the State debuted at the box office, Arlington Road, another political thriller, was released. Instead of focusing on the government being the antagonist, Arlington Road is about widowed university professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who suspects that his new neighbors (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are terrorists. Professor Faraday, who specializes in American terrorism, becomes obsessed with investigating his neighbors and foiling their terrorist plot. Arlington Road would be the first in several films that depicted the paranoia of terrorism, especially after the 9/11 attacks. Civic Duty (2006) and the television show 24(2001-2010), for example, both deal with the paranoia and mass hysteria concerning terrorism in a post 9/11 world.

As the first decade of the new century came to a close, there would be several films made about CIA corruption, conspiracy, and its relationship with Islamic fundamentalism: Munich (2005), Syriana (2005), The Bourne Trilogy, Rendition (2007), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Body of Lies (2008) and The Ghost Writer (2010). But it would be two films (technically one is a miniseries) that focused on the early years of the CIA that would be the best. Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) and TNT’s highly fictionalized miniseries The Company(2007) are both based on the early years of the CIA and both have CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton as a central character in the story. It would be the haunting last words of The Good Shepherd that would sum up the attitude of the CIA since its founding: I remember a senator once asked me. When we talk about "CIA" why we never use the word "the" in front of it. And I asked him, do you put the word "the" in front of "God"?