The New Hollywood Paranoia Cycle

Everyone calls them conspiracy films, which is the least interesting thing about them.

The run of American thrillers made between roughly 1971 and 1976 — Alan J. Pakula’s three, Coppola’s surveillance picture, Pollack’s CIA chase, a scattering of imitators — does contain conspiracies. It contains corporations that assassinate, agencies that murder their own, and institutions that lie at scale. That inventory is real, and treating it as the subject explains almost nothing about why these films still frighten people fifty years later, when the specific institutions they distrusted have been replaced twice over.

The subject is competence. In every important film of the cycle, the protagonist is exceptionally good at a specialised job, and the film’s terror is generated by the discovery that the skill is the mechanism of his defeat. The better he works, the further into the trap he goes. That is a formal idea, and it is why the cycle outlived its politics.

The date stamps matter

Set the timeline down, because the compression is the point.

The Warren Commission reported in 1964, and a substantial minority of Americans never accepted it. The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, demonstrating that the government had lied about Vietnam continuously for two decades. The Watergate break-in was in June 1972; the Senate hearings ran through 1973; Nixon resigned in August 1974. The Church Committee began publishing in 1975 and confirmed that the CIA had run assassination plots and drug experiments on unwitting subjects.

Now put the films against that. Klute is 1971. The Conversation opened in April 1974, four months before the President resigned over the contents of a tape recording, and Coppola has spent his life explaining that he wrote it before Watergate and nobody believes him. The Parallax View is 1974. Three Days of the Condor is 1975, a film about the CIA murdering its own analysts, released the year the Senate confirmed the CIA had been murdering people. All the President’s Men is 1976.

The cycle is running alongside the news at the same speed, which is a very unusual thing for a studio system to manage, and it happened because New Hollywood had briefly handed final cut to directors who read the paper.

Competence as the trap

Look at what these men actually do for a living.

Harry Caul is the best surveillance man on the West Coast. His entire professional identity is the ability to recover a conversation from an impossible acoustic environment, and he does it — the film’s opening sequence is a masterclass in his skill working perfectly. The recovery is what destroys him. Had he been mediocre, he would have handed in a muddy tape and gone home.

Joe Turner in Three Days of the Condor reads books for the CIA, looking for plots that might be operationally useful. He is good at it. He finds a pattern in a mystery novel’s translation rights, files a report through channels, and the report gets everyone in his office killed. His competence is the trigger, and the fact that he followed procedure correctly is what makes him a target.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men are reporters doing reporting. Pakula’s radical decision is to film the method itself — the phone calls, the doorsteps, the cross-checking of a name — for two hours, and to make the accumulation of professional diligence the source of the suspense. The film is frightening in exact proportion to how well they are working.

Joseph Frady in The Parallax View is a journalist who infiltrates the organisation, and the film is a demonstration of what happens to a man who is good enough to get in.

There is a shape here, and it is a very old one dressed in contemporary clothes. The Greeks called it the thing that undoes you being the thing that defines you. Pakula and Coppola gave it a job title.

Willis prints it dark

The craft argument is unusually concrete, because one man shot most of the cycle.

Gordon Willis photographed Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men, along with the first two Godfather films, and he acquired his nickname — the Prince of Darkness — by doing something laboratories considered a mistake. He underexposed. He lit from above, letting eye sockets go black. He refused fill light in scenes where the convention demanded it, and printed the results dark enough that projectionists complained.

The effect is a frame you have to search. In Klute, Jane Fonda is repeatedly placed in rooms where the shadow occupies more area than she does, and the audience does the work of finding her, which puts them in the position of the man on the tape recorder. In The Parallax View, Willis and Pakula compose in extreme wide, dwarfing Warren Beatty inside architecture — a dam, a convention hall, a courtroom — until the human figure becomes a detail in a system’s floor plan. The film’s most famous shot is a killing staged at the top of the Space Needle, photographed so that the geometry of the building matters more than the body in it.

All the President’s Men takes it furthest with the Library of Congress: the camera starts on two men at a desk with a pile of request slips and rises, and rises, until they are two dots inside a concentric pattern, and the shot argues the film’s entire thesis without a word. The scale of the institution against the size of the method.

That is the visual grammar of the cycle. The compositions state the odds.

The Parallax test

One sequence deserves isolating because nothing else in American cinema of the period looks like it.

Midway through The Parallax View, Frady sits in a chair and watches a film the corporation uses to assess recruits. It is a montage of still images sorted under headings — love, mother, father, me, home, country, god, enemy, happiness — and over roughly five minutes the categories corrupt. Images that belonged under one word start appearing under another. The music builds. The cuts accelerate. What began as a reassuring slideshow of Americana ends as an incitement, and it is achieved entirely through editing rhythm and juxtaposition, with no dialogue and no explanation.

Pakula shows you a brainwashing rather than describing one, and he trusts the audience to notice what is being done to them while it is being done. It works on the viewer in the cinema exactly as it works on the character in the chair. Fifty years on it remains the single most disquieting five minutes in the cycle, and it contains no violence whatsoever.

The ancestors the cycle robbed

The collector’s obligation: none of this was new, and knowing where it came from sharpens what the 1970s added.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is the blueprint, and it is deliberately ambiguous about which side it is frightened of — the reading as anti-communist and the reading as anti-McCarthy have both been defensible for seventy years, which is a sign of how precisely Don Siegel built it. John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) supplies the machinery: the assassin who does not know he is one, the institution operating inside a man’s head, the political convention as a killing ground. Pakula lifted that last image wholesale.

The formal ancestor is European. Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) gives a photographer a frame that may contain a murder and lets him enlarge it past the point where the grain dissolves into abstraction, until the evidence and the noise become the same thing. Coppola took that idea and rebuilt it in sound; De Palma took it back and rebuilt it in sound again, more cruelly. Three films, one gesture: a professional magnifying his own evidence until it stops meaning anything.

What the 1970s contributed was the paperwork. The 1950s paranoia film is about an invasion. The 1970s version is about an organisation with an office, a budget, a recruitment process and an HR film, and that bureaucratic texture is what makes it modern.

The case against the cycle

Two objections, and the first one is serious.

These films flatter their audience. A conspiracy thriller offers the viewer the pleasure of being the one who sees — of sitting in the dark two steps ahead of the credulous public, in possession of the truth about the powerful. That is a narcotic, and its long-term effects on American political culture have been visible for some time. The cycle’s descendants include a great deal of genuine poison, and the form’s structure is partly responsible: once you have taught an audience that the official account is always a cover story, you have built something that cannot be switched off.

The second objection is that the cycle’s floor is embarrassing. Executive Action (1973) restages the Kennedy assassination as a conspiracy with all the dramatic energy of a committee meeting. Capricorn One (1977) turns a faked Mars landing into a chase film and stops thinking about its premise by the second reel. Winter Kills (1979) is a shambles that acquired a cult through its own production disasters. The good films of the cycle number about six, and the machinery that made them made a lot of nonsense at the same time.

The defence is that the six are the ones with the competence thesis in them. The failures are all films where the conspiracy is the subject, which is the argument in miniature.

The funeral

The China Syndrome opened on 16 March 1979 and the Three Mile Island reactor partially melted down twelve days later, which is the cycle collecting its final piece of evidence. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers had already moved the paranoia indoors, into a San Francisco where the institutions are already staffed by the enemy and nobody is coming.

Brian De Palma buried it in 1981 with Blow Out, a film about a sound recordist who captures a killing on tape and possesses every technical skill required to prove it. He is superb at his job. The film is about what his superb work is finally good for, and the answer is the coldest ending any American thriller of the era reached.

Start with The Conversation and The Parallax View, then read the longer route through the decade’s paranoia thrillers or the essential ten. Watch what the protagonists are good at. The conspiracies date. The expertise does not, and neither does the discovery — arriving in the last reel, every time — that being right was never the same thing as being safe.