The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  It shouldn’t be surprising to see such speculations after COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and other measures fanned the Left’s fears of the government. But that wasn’t the only factor at work. Every subculture accumulates demons, and by the late 1970s the New Left and the counterculture had plenty of demons to contend with. If it is possible to discuss “the sixties” in reference to events that took place in 1978—and culturally speaking, I think it is—then the deaths at Jonestown, a colony that until its destruction had presented itself to the world as a multiracial socialist utopia, marked the end of the sixties, a moment even more deflating than the Charles Manson murders or the Rolling Stones’ lethal concert at Altamont. The massacre also came within a month of the assassinations of San Francisco’s liberal mayor George Moscone and the city’s first openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk. If there were ever a time when a spirit of doom hung over the California counterculture, this was it.

  Brussell’s grand conspiracy narrative found a way to link Jonestown to the San Francisco shootings, and it managed to work in the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Manson murders, the Zodiac killer, and the sixties assassinations too. As history, it was a jerry-rigged assemblage of facts, half facts, rumors, and guesses. But as a mythic translation of a jarring historical moment, it had a powerful pull. Brussell transformed a collection of free-floating anxieties into an external enemy with a name. She gave her listeners a way to talk about the meltdown in progress.

  You couldn’t cite someone like Mae Brussell in mainstream conversations, of course.35 But you could cite Hollywood. And while she was working, a wave of movies offered a similarly sinister portrait of American elites—so many movies, in fact, that a new phrase eventually entered the critic’s vocabulary: the “1970s conspiracy thriller.”

  The old Motion Picture Production Code, with its restrictions on filmmakers’ freedoms, finally collapsed in the late 1960s.36 A loose group of upstarts took advantage of the more open environment, ushering in the period known as the New Hollywood. The new moviemakers tended to be affiliated with the counterculture, and their films were filled with skeptical takes on established institutions.

  Older writers and directors attempted in turn to imitate the young Turks’ approach. And with Watergate, the level of skepticism that the public was willing to accept on-screen increased dramatically.

  A few films of the sixties, such as Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965) and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), had anticipated the atmosphere of dread found in so many of their seventies successors, though both of those examples avoided the later pictures’ corporate and governmental villains. Frankenheimer was already a well-established director of conspiracy movies at that point, having made a sharp adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the blander but more commercially successful Seven Days in May (1964). The latter is a dramatically flat picture that falls periodically into heavy-handed speechifying. But if it isn’t a compelling piece of filmmaking, Seven Days is still interesting for its politics: It’s a Brown Scare story about a right-wing military plot to oust America’s elected government. The script was written by Rod “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” Serling, and Frankenheimer later reported that President Kennedy had been “most anxious” to see the movie made. JFK had done “everything he could to make our life easy,” the director explained, including timing a trip to Hyannis Port so it would be easier for the crew to shoot a scene outside the White House.37

  There were other precursors to the 1970s conspiracy genre. Filmmakers sometimes got away with disrespectful portraits of intelligence agencies or their stand-ins in movies that were satiric (The President’s Analyst, 1967) or semisatiric (The Manchurian Candidate); or drew heavily on the conventions of the crime movie, where a certain cynicism about the police was often present (North by Northwest, 1959; Mirage, 1965); or were upmarket adaptations of the new breed of skeptical, world-weary espionage novels (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, 1965). But the modal spy movie of the 1960s featured a Bond clone battling a cartoonish supervillain. The modal spy movie of the 1970s featured an amoral intelligence bureaucracy killing and manipulating sympathetic characters. Even a fairly straightforward entertainment such as Don Siegel’s Telefon (1977), in which the hero tries to stop a rogue Russian from activating an old network of Manchurian Candidate–style assassins scattered around the United States, could give the tale a twist by having that hero work for the KGB rather than the CIA. By the end of the story both the Soviet and the American governments want the protagonist dead, each for similar—and similarly unattractive—reasons. The effect is to make both sides of the Cold War seem like one vast, callous machine.

  If Frankenheimer was the preeminent conspiracy director of the sixties, then the king of conspiracy cinema in the seventies was Alan J. Pakula. After dipping his toes into paranoid waters with Klute (1971), a police procedural that avoided overt politics but reveled in showing surveillance and corruption, the director gave us The Parallax View (1974). Fredric Jameson called Parallax the “greatest of all assassination films”;38 and if you won’t go that far it’s still hard not to think of it as the model assassination film: the first picture that comes to a movie buff’s mind when the phrase “1970s conspiracy thriller” is spoken aloud.

  Parallax opens with the assassination of a presidential candidate at the top of the Seattle Space Needle. We then learn that witnesses to the killing have been dying under mysterious circumstances. The hero, a reporter, initially refuses to believe that a conspiracy is afoot. But when his former girlfriend joins the ranks of the dead witnesses, he starts probing the story, eventually infiltrating an enigmatic organization called the Parallax Corporation. Parallax turns out to be in the business of producing assassins, and the infiltrator turns out to be in over his head: He thought he was preparing to expose a conspiracy, while in fact the conspiracy was setting him up as the patsy in yet another assassination. At the end of the film, both the reporter and the new target are dead, and a Warren Commission–style group has covered up the truth. “The committee wishes to emphasize that there is no evidence of any wider conspiracy—no evidence whatsoever,” its spokesman announces. “It’s our hope that this will put an end to the kind of irresponsible speculation conducted by the press in recent months.”39

  The third entry in Pakula’s informal trilogy, All the President’s Men (1976), dramatizes the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation. It has moments of tense paranoia, even playing with the idea that Bob Woodward might be killed for his efforts to expose the scandal. But it ends with Nixon expelled from office and the threat to the republic excised, a rather happier ending than we saw in The Parallax View. For all its gritty cynicism, All the President’s Men embraces the story line in which Nixon was an aberration and the system ultimately worked: an Enemy Above story that reaffirms the social order.

  But if conspiracy films sometimes ended up expressing comfortably mainstream ideas, the mainstream in turn was inching toward dissent. Look at Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), that rare case where Hollywood sought a mass audience by making a movie more radical than its source material. Like the James Grady novel that inspired it, Pollack’s picture pits an isolated CIA analyst against a cabal within the agency and then against the agency itself. But the screenplay—coauthored by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who also had a hand in writing Parallax—takes the scenario further. As Olmsted put it, the film “eliminated the few sympathetic CIA characters who were in Grady’s novel. It also changed the central conspiracy from drug smuggling to unauthorized covert action. . . . It was not mere greed that led them to murder but their fanatical, misguided patriotism.”40

  A decade earlier, the filmmakers behind the James Bond movies had been so wary of politics that they had routinely replaced the Bond novels’ Soviet villains with an apolitical terror network called SPECTRE. Now a studio considered it commercially savvy to add controversial politics to a picture. And the studio’s instincts were sound: Condor became the seventh most popular fi
lm of the year, taking in more than $41 million at the box office.

  Executive Action (1973) was scripted by the formerly blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo from a novel coauthored by Mark Lane. It is essentially an assassination procedural: A group of wealthy and powerful men plot the murder of John F. Kennedy, and then their hirelings carry out the killing. The dark center of the movie’s worldview comes through when a character explains the secret purpose of the Vietnam War: to bring down the Third World population, so black, brown, and yellow people don’t “swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America.” At the same time, the movie has a certain innocence as well. In one scene a reluctant conspirator asks, “There ought to be a better way of settling things like this. Have you researched [Kennedy’s] private history?” The historically unlikely reply: “If we could find a way to discredit him, believe me, we would have done it by now.”41

  Such moments of naiveté were absent in Winter Kills (1979), a jet-black comedy based on a Richard Condon novel. That one was inspired by the Kennedy killing too, but instead of Executive Action’s flat earnestness it offered a wild ride through virtually every conceivable perp in a JFK conspiracy: mobsters, intelligence agencies, anti-Castro Cubans, even Hollywood itself. The mastermind behind the murder turns out to be the president’s own father.

  Michael Winner’s Scorpio (1973) opens with the CIA killing an American ally and framing the local opposition for the deed. (“It’s not his death that’s important,” an assassin explains. “It’s who appeared to have killed him that counts.”)42 Clint Eastwood’s tongue-in-cheek The Eiger Sanction (1975) features a murder-happy secret agency run by a vampiric ex-Nazi. Other films followed the example of Mickey One and Seconds, soaking themselves in paranoia without overtly inserting a secret government into the story. In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert racked with guilt about the possible consequences of one of his assignments. In Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), Hackman plays a private eye pursuing a mystery that never quite resolves itself. In both pictures he’s a lonely loser being manipulated by forces he doesn’t understand.

  Hackman was a lonely loser in 1977’s The Domino Principle too, but this time the character has been dropped into a Parallax View scenario: He’s a convict quietly guided into becoming an assassin for a mysterious, apparently all-powerful cabal. The Parallax View ends on a downbeat note, but it still contains the possibility of reform: It shows an America that’s been subverted by an identifiable set of villains, one whose virtue could be restored if those criminals were somehow removed. That glimmer of hope is absent here. The film’s fatalist worldview is set up in a monologue heard at the beginning of the movie while we watch a disturbing, jaggedly edited montage:

  Do you believe you decided to come to this theater today? That it was your own idea, of your own free will?

  Whether we know it or not, we’re all manipulated. It’s becoming almost impossible to think or even act for ourselves anymore. We’re manipulated. Programmed. Brainwashed. Right from the start. Right from the day we’re born. By family, by press, by radio, by television. And more and more we know less and less of who They are.

  Who could They be? Is it the boss we work for? Who tells him what to do? Is it the government? Whoever’s in power, it seems just the same. So who’s behind Them?

  It’s reached the point when They could take an ordinary man and so manipulate him that They could get him to kill the most important man in the world.43

  Yet this movie wasn’t made by a Penn or a Coppola. It was directed by Stanley Kramer, an established filmmaker known for his earnest, preachy message movies promoting liberal reforms. There’s no hope of any reform in The Domino Principle; the corruption it depicts is all-encompassing and inescapable. Even after Hackman’s character kills two of the conspirators at the end of the story, the film’s final shot before the credits roll shows the rifle of another assassin, perched above the protagonist and prepared to dispatch him. It’s telling that we never explicitly learn the identity of the man Hackman is supposed to murder, though it is strongly suggested that he’s the president. Like the gunman ordered to kill him, he’s just another interchangeable and disposable cog in the machine.

  The movie is unsatisfying in several ways. Hackman is wonderful in his part, and several sequences have an engagingly unsettling quality, but the film has one of those scripts where smart people suddenly do stupid things because the plot requires it, and it includes more than one heavy-handed conversation in which characters articulate themes that didn’t really need to be stated aloud. It was not a critical or commercial success: Reviewers wrote it off as a Parallax View knockoff, and audiences stayed away. But in its clumsy, derivative manner, The Domino Principle demonstrated how pessimistic and paranoid a view of American politics you could get from even the most mainstream popular entertainers.

  The suspicious spirit surfaced in other genres too, from science fiction (1977’s Capricorn One, in which NASA fakes the moon shot) to comedy (1978’s Foul Play, in which a librarian discovers a plot to assassinate the pope) to detective fiction (1979’s Murder by Decree, a Canadian import in which Sherlock Holmes uncovers a Masonic conspiracy behind the Jack the Ripper murders). Westworld (1973) manages simultaneously to be a conspiracy thriller, a science fiction film, and a western. The 1979 satire Being There isn’t a “conspiracy movie” in the ordinary sense of the term, but it does casually include a scene in which powerful men select the next president while standing under a Masonic emblem. Another satire, Network (1976), ends with group of TV executives organizing the assassination of one of their stars—“the first known instance,” the narrator informs us, “of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”44 The seventies also saw a renaissance of the horror film, a genre that deals with the demonic whether or not the story includes a conspiracy. Even Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), a popcorn movie about a shark, turns on a small-town mayor’s attempts to cover up a threat to public safety.45

  The body-snatchers subgenre had something of comeback, too. An inspired remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers appeared in 1978, with the old anxieties about the anthill society replaced by anxieties about cults and seventies narcissism. And feminists got their own version of the tale with Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives and the film it inspired three years later. The villains in Levin’s thriller didn’t come from outer space. They came from the other side of the bed.

  The book opens as Joanna Eberhart and her family move to the apparently idyllic suburb of Stepford, Connecticut, where it soon becomes clear that something is wrong with the town’s women. “That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives,” Eberhart tells herself: “actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.”46 The women’s own husbands, we learn, have conspired to kill off their flesh-and-blood wives and put busty, servile androids in their place. The substitute spouses are uninterested in anything but cleaning their homes, raising their children, and sexually pleasing their men.

  There are echoes here not just of Body Snatchers but of Riders of the Purple Sage. But in Ira Levin’s Connecticut, unlike Zane Grey’s Utah, there is no escape from the totalitarian enclave. Jane Withersteen gets away from the suffocating Mormon patriarchy. Joanna Eberhart succumbs to the suffocating suburban patriarchy. She too is finally replaced by a robot programmed to enact the 1950s suburban ideal.

  Or rather, a satiric spin on that suburban ideal, one that altered the original in an important way. The stereotypical woman in a postwar suburb was a joiner: When she wasn’t doing housework or tending to the children, she’d be involved in the PTA, the Cub Scouts, or a charity. But the Stepford wives don’t have social lives. The men meet in a lodge called the Men’s Association, giving a vaguely Masonic cast to the conspiracy. The women don’t me
et anywhere. There used to be a Women’s Club, and it could attract a crowd of fifty to see the feminist icon Betty Friedan give a speech. That ended after the Men’s Association imposed the new order. The only organized women’s activities in Stepford involve ladies too old to have been replaced.

  Friedan’s cameo is a tip-off to Levin’s intentions. In The Feminine Mystique, a best-selling book published in 1963, Friedan warned that “a new breed of women” was coming to the suburbs. “Like the empty plains of Kansas that tempted the restless immigrant,” she argued, “the suburbs in their very newness and lack of structured service, offered, at least at first, a limitless challenge to the energy of educated American women.” But once those pioneers helped establish the new communities, subsequent settlers “were perfectly willing to accept the suburban community as they found it (their only problem was ‘how to fit in’); they were perfectly willing to fill their days with the trivia of housewifery.” Men began to fill the most important volunteer jobs, and housework expanded “to fill the time available.”47

  If you bred Body Snatchers with The Feminine Mystique, Levin’s novel would be the result. Except that it appeared in 1972, not 1963, arriving at a time when Friedan’s vision of the suburban future had been averted. There was a much more vibrant women’s movement in the seventies, and there was much more visible resentment of that movement as well. In effect, Levin took an allegory for Friedan’s critique of the postwar suburb and overlaid it with a critique of the antifeminist backlash.