Politics on Film | The Parallax View Contains Prescient Predictions of Our Current Political Climate
In the lead up to the American presidential election on November 8th, HeadStuff will be running a series of articles on politics in film and how they relate to the politics of our world. First up is Richard Drumm, who examines how The Parallax View‘s conspiracy plot is prescient in some ways of predicting our current political climate.
The Parallax View stars Warren Beatty as Joe Frady, a journalist who stumbles across a conspiracy that ties a seemingly random political assassination to the mysterious Parallax Corporation. Eventually uncovering that seemingly anyone who occupies a position of power in any major institution is in on it, he’s forced to fake his own death (after several attempts on his life) to try and get to the bottom of, and stop, Parallax. In the end, while attempting to thwart an assassination attempt on a senator, it becomes clear that Parallax is onto him: the senator is killed and Frady is framed as the crazed, lone gunman and shot by police.
The idea of vast conspiracies perpetrated by mysterious corporate forces was a distinctly 70s trope, born of the nihilistic-comedown from the optimism-high of the 60s in the wake of the “Silent Majority”, the perception of corporations having more power than the government and numerous high profile political assassinations. Given how little has changed, or really how much worse it’s gotten, it is odd there hasn’t been a remake.
The film is very much meant to represent the mood of the era. The conscious positioning of Frady – every bit the lone, “standing up to ‘The Man’”, man-of-action of more traditional Hollywood films – against a faceless force, the full extent of which you never get a clear idea of, was meant to imply that traditional heroes were of no use in this brave new world. The lines were no longer as clearly defined; you couldn’t always be sure who the enemy was or what they wanted and the individual going up against a corporation was more inclined to be viewed as a lunatic than some kind of people’s champion. It is a film about how the corporations have already won. Yet despite being a deeply pessimistic film about its own present, there are still elements of this negativity that were meant to be heightened and fanciful. What’s a little scary is how we’ve completely passed even those elements out.
A plot point involving a (thwarted) false-flag terrorist attack on a commercial airline probably seemed like a provocative and bold sequence at the time yet feels almost quaint in our era. After all, here we are fifteen years on and ‘9/11 Truthers’ as a concept has become a bemusing joke to some and a deadly serious movement to others. Every major terror attack (for they are frequent and numerous) is now scrutinised and analysed from every angle, with someone always claiming the government did it. Even accidents and genuine tragedies, like when an airliner goes missing, is just assumed to have been a deliberate act with a hidden agenda.
The existence of the Parallax Corporation itself feels also too small, too unimaginative in its scope. The privatisation of war and the military is now wholly a reality with the military-industrial complex making up a sizable part of the American economy. The film’s fear that corporations might have more sway than the government not only became true but the government embraced it and their methods. Over the course of the war on terror, between rendition flights, falsified claims of weapons of mass destruction and the wholesale compromising of personal privacy, there’s no real question that the American government is not only capable but clearly willing to engage in acts far beyond the imagination of a film like this. The real twist though is how normalised it’s become. If Joe Frady came screaming into modern America, putting forth his horrifying discoveries from Parallax View, he’d be met with an indifferent shrug at best or condescending “no shit, buddy” at worst.
In other ways the film remains a vision of a more dystopian American. Namely the callous murder of inconvenient politicians – though the shocking and brutal murder of Jo Cox in the UK, Post-Brexit, feels uncomfortably close. This doesn’t seem to have come to pass, at least not in the same way. Political scandals are all the rage these days with media spin and the alarming influence of their pundits as the new weapons of choice for political assassination. Though of course in this present presidential race, even the most hyperbolic comic couldn’t have imagined the monstrous walking parody that is Trump, who says anything to get a rise including outright and obviously lying, flip flopping with abandon and even claiming his political opponent should be murdered.
It’s a little bemusing how the film inadvertently draws a neat analogue parallel to aspects of our unprecedented digital present. The only point in the film where Frady has any real agency and manages to impact Parallax’s plans meaningfully is after he’s assumed dead. It’s only once he’s become no one, once he’s literally an anonymous warning written on a napkin that the knowledge he’s gained on Parallax is able to have an effect. One could certainly see an, admittedly slightly laboured, connection to modern hacker collectives. But laboured or not, it doesn’t change the fact that only when an unidentifiable presence uses their illegally obtained knowledge of a corporation’s dodgy dealings, are they able to be put to them to real use.
Fittingly as it’s the finale, the last piece of the film worth noting is the “lone wolf” archetype. While the film uses this as the method to hide the truth of the Parallax Corporation and its network of agents, the real world is far bleaker. The “lone wolf” has become an all too common trope in media reporting on acts that should be labelled white terrorism. Yet to do so would be to raise uncomfortable questions of ingrained bigotry and intolerance, class division, privilege, gun law reform and other topics the Purge films can be relied upon to vaguely gesture towards in an attempt to be political. Much like the present, the film’s media is happy to spin the act of political assassination on the mental derangement of an individual who is shot by police before anything can be learned of his motives. And here the film does prove a tad farcical in one key detail: modern American cops would never shoot an unarmed white terrorist so easily.
