The Paranoid View

There’s a long, shadowy tradition of films about dark motives, hidden conspiracies and fevered psychology. In 1962, now almost two-thirds of a century ago, John Frankenheimer directed The Manchurian Candidate, a robust candidate for any list of politically paranoid thrillers. China, Russia, the North Koreans, even hidden traitors in our own government—everyone, seemingly, is in on the secret truth, everyone but you and me.

Other members in good standing of Paranoid Pictures include Robert Kramer’s harrowing dystopian ICE (1970), the JFK assassins of Executive Action (1974), the genial lunacy of Winter Kills (1976), and, of course, one of the undisputed “thought leaders” of the whole Deep State genre, 1974’s The Parallax View.

Two years after The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer directed Seven Days in May, in which the Pentagon secretly plots to push the president aside and seize power. But for sheer conspiratory-ality, he may have topped them both with the little-seen third member of this trilogy, Seconds (1966), about an ultrasecret private company that, for a high price, will give you a new face, a new identity, a completely new life. I bet you’ve already guessed that the price will turn out to be even higher. Nowadays, this has become a familiar premise of dystopian fiction, but sixty years ago it was a disturbing Rod Serling-style novelty with a unique visual “look.”

Seconds fits in a special subgenre of medically related conspiracy; Coma is one of the best known. Part of what made Rosemary’s Baby (1968) effective was the rather unexpected possibility that a widely trusted, seemingly kindly old ob/gyn doctor was in the power of Satan.

Mental hospitals are especially prone to cinematic nightmares, from Hitchcock’s Spellbound to The Snake Pit to Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor to The Caretakers. Being convinced, rightly or not, that you’re a sane person unjustly imprisoned in a madhouse must be bad enough, but to really make things worse, the guards, the doctors, even the head of the institution, just might be psychopaths themselves. Who knows how high this goes? Even speculating about it will land you in a straitjacket.

Then again, you don’t want to be one of the first patients taking an experimental drug, either. In Bigger Than Life, prescribed ‘health-giving’ injections have the unexpected effect of gradually turning James Mason into, in effect, Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Let’s get back to cheerier stuff. Yeah, right. Punishment Park (1971) is a fictional documentary set only a year or so in the future, when Nixon has filled every prison in America with political dissidents. To deal with the overflow, prisoners are offered release if they endure being hunted for three days in a desert compound.

That’s not even the grimmest Deep State mock-doc fantasy of the period; that dubious prize goes to 1970’s ICE. The letters do indeed stand for a government enforcement agency, although not the one today. You could think of it as an ultra-low-budget, more sincerely deranged version of One Battle After Another, made 55 years earlier.

The film was shot in 16mm on the streets of New York to give the impression that “this could be today or tomorrow.” The premise: America is at war with Mexico (the details are vague), black America is in armed revolt, and most young whites who haven’t been drafted are part of Antifa-like revolutionary resistance groups. The main characters aren’t innocent longhairs, but gun and bomb wielding terrorists facing torture, even castration at the hands of plainclothes Feds. This was too much for audiences to stomach even in the wake of Kent State and urban riots. ICE barely got distribution and was shown in only a handful of theaters.

TV was more than happy to get in on this attitude of fear. 1968’s Shadow on the Land was an ABC TV movie starring Gene Hackman and John Forsyth that was improbably planned as a weekly series: Today’s America is ruled by a brutal dictatorship while brave resistance fighters within the government and military get knocked off trying to save the country. On a less (overtly) political level, 1971’s The Brotherhood of the Bell stars Glenn Ford as a professor who discovers that a secret fraternity he joined in college has silently guided and nurtured his entire career, as it has thousands of other obedient elites who are honeycombed all over governments and businesses. Now it’s time for the pledges to pay up.

A new word was everywhere: “backlash.” What Hunter S. Thompson decried as “That doom-struck year of Nixon” (he meant 1971) saw the passions of the left start to burn out. What lingered was a pervasive attitude of doubt. This was often exaggerated by groupthink. Vietnam and Watergate were solemnly sold to the public as vast conspiracies. Cynics on both the left and right proclaimed that you can’t trust the elites. The fix is in. Money talks. After all, who even knows who’s really in charge?

Expressing some of the sardonic humor of the era was an underground comic book, probably a Zap Comix, headlined “You Killed Kennedy! Proof Inside, $2.00”.

A generation later, Mel Gibson’s Conspiracy Theory was a rare, relatively politics-free thriller about an admittedly borderline crazy savant whose incredibly imaginative theory about an impending assassination turns out to be, in the words of an old physicist, just crazy enough to be true.

A sidenote about how cinema is changing: This year, the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival presented an entire AI-created feature film made by a pair of brothers, Iranian exiles. A grim story of imprisonment in Iran, it cost $2,000. That is not a typo. For a vast cloud of politically varied countercultural AI hobbyists, it’s not just hype anymore: they can turn out credible-looking photorealistic animation while sitting at their kitchen tables at midnight. Live action? With each passing year that uncanny valley gets shallower.

There’s good and bad in this for aficionados of freshly made cinematic conspiracy, now that almost any fantasy you can describe can more easily emerge on screen. If your neighbor wants to remake ICE or Punishment Park with January 6 defendants as the victims, he has the freedom to do so. But that also means that there’s nothing stopping Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes from fronting a feature-length instant Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A sobering thought.

One moment that sums up cinema’s view of the Deep State is near the climax of Futureworld (1976). Investigative reporter Peter Fonda confronts establishment figure Arthur Hill, the mysterious tycoon backing the sinister animatronic theme park. Fonda thinks he’ll stun the out-of-it old man with shocking facts he’s uncovered about secretly replacing humans with robots, but Hill just haughtily laughs it off.

Fonda gasps—even the former Easy Rider can’t believe that the establishment is that evil or corrupt. “You mean…you mean you’re in on it?” he asks incredulously.

With amused pity and withering contempt, Hill speaks for the conspiratorial boss class everywhere. He hisses and boasts at the same time: “Of course I’m in on it.”