#parallax view

[kyleismoody]

The Parallax View and The Conversation: A Conspiracy of Looking

What is the point of a conspiracy theory?

Usually we see them defined as a way of outlining how plots against unsuspecting victims. It creates a narrative for “us vs. them,” a way to make sense of an often chaotic world. I had an entire podcast dedicated to it, talking about everything from the 9/11 attacks to MK Ultra, and even Bigfoot and other cryptids. But they always revolve around the same thing: the world is messy, there’s a plot against us, and these are the reasons why. We are storytelling creatures, and the story helps explain things in more comforting ways than “we live on a rock careening through space and are at the absolute whims of nature.”

Films around conspiracy theories are great ways of dealing with the messiness of these issues because they can easily cast compelling actors into convoluted plots that can delineate lines between good and evil. From movies like The Manchurian Candidate (1962 and remade in 2004, respectively) and Seven Days in May (1964), we begin to see how shadowy figures can be responsible for massive changes in the world. It’s easy to believe that those corporations and politicians we entrust with our goods and government would be sinister and want to enslave us; the reality of the world is much harder in that there are multiple systems and machinations set in place that take so long to grind to stop that we may never get to really change them. It’s easier to change ourselves than the system...that is, if we’re willing to change. 

The Parallax View and The Conversation are two films released within three months of each other in 1974. They both were crafted by excellent filmmakers (Alan J. Pakula and Francis Ford Coppola) with a focus on looking at how conspiracies and plots are set up. The difference is where the locus of control is placed. The Parallax View is focused on the unseen “them” of conspiracies, where we learn how the Parallax Corporation acts as an intermediary for political and social control. The Conversation is all about “us,” where we are under surveillance and act and react to the fact of being recorded.

The Parallax View focuses on the shadowy corporations and assassinations that became responsible for being the middlemen in plots against figures who are murdered suspiciously. Warren Beatty is there as a womanizing journalist named Joe Frady who witnessed a political assassination in Seattle at the Space Needle, and stumbles onto a pattern of murders committed against the other witnesses. Obviously riffing on the JFK assassination and the Warren Commission’s findings, Pakula plays with perception and fear in his examination of paranoia and how it manifests. The sense of discovery is largely what makes the movie so successful, as Frady soon sees that the Parallax Corporation is consistently growing and employing sociopaths and those who associate negative emotions with positive accomplishments.

This last part creates the best element of the movie, and it is breathtaking in its representation. Almost as though Frady jumps into the internet forty years after its release, The Parallax View makes its viewer experience the personality test in its horrific totality. It’s possible to watch this and see exactly what is so appealing about Parallax as a way of giving power to people that fall outside of the mainstream of society, which is eerily reflective of the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon and its ilk in the modern era.

Frady is recruited by the organization and ultimately tracks down the plans of the Parallax Corporation, which is targeting another Senator with policies that go against their interests. Cleverly outsmarting a planned detonation of a plane, Frady then tracks down the senator to a rally, where the politician is gunned down. Suddenly he’s fingered as the culprit, and as he tries to make his escape, Frady is shot by the recruiter that brought him into the organization. Pakula ends the movie with a simple interior shot of an almost faceless committee reading the Parallax Corporation’s intended narrative about Frady, which was his isolation as the patsy assassin. Fade to black, it will happen again, and Gordon Willis’s famed dark interiors match our moods as the credits roll. The unhappy ending is part of the appeal of The Parallax View, as it released during the Watergate hearings and denouement with President Nixon’s resignation before facing impeachment. It’s a dark mirror of our country at a time when public trust in institutions was badly damaged. Little would change over the next half century.

The Conversation is a strong internal companion to the sprawl of The Parallax View, looking at the interiority of protagonist Harry Caul’s life and finding it wanting. Caul’s life is spent in surveillance – of others and of himself. He constantly monitors his own actions and those of others to keep people at arm’s length, seeking to be the best wiretapper in the country and thus trusting nobody. Unwilling to let others in, and he can’t open up, Caul exists in a bubble of his own making. He breaks up with the girlfriend he’s afraid of admitting he has; he doesn’t answer questions about his personal life; he’s clearly repressed, and when we learn that his last east coast job resulted in the murder of an entire family, we can empathize to an extent.

It's fitting that I saw this so soon after revisiting Klute as it also has a similar focus on technology and audio. Caul thinks that he’s uncovered a conspiracy on a job trailing two errant lovers, and he fixates on the details of the tape, which unleashes its static hiss and obscures as much as it reveals. Coppola lovingly focuses on the different mechanisms that are used to reveal the conversations, with Caul only coming alive as he reveals the audio and uncovers what is a plot about the possible murder of the people he’s surveilling. Coppola also twists the knife by never revealing much about the plot, leaving his audience to learn the possible meaning with Caul.

The party that happens midway through the film is a fulcrum point for the audience and for Caul. We see him in his element around other conspirators, people that are experts at wiretapping but wholly oblivious to the human experience. They don’t seem to care about the possible destruction their constant surveillance will do to their subjects, and includes Caul in their list of subjects when a pen microphone reveals some truths about the protagonist of the movie. How scared he is to talk to women; how much the murders weigh on his mind; and how much he pushes away anybody that dares to look underneath the surface. The sex worker he sleeps with that night steals his recordings away, as the client who asked for them was getting impatient.

The final reveal is ultimately satisfying because of how much it plays with audience expectations. Caul believes he’s stumbled onto a plot to kill the two wayward lovers, and he heads to the hotel they stated they would frequent, only to find the girl already dead. Or is she? In a stunning twist, the wife of the executive that paid for Caul’s tapes turns up alive, with her husband murdered by her lover and his assistant. Brilliantly, they used Caul’s paranoid nature to create the conspiracy. It’s all about his personality, which is how they trap him. At the end of the film, as he searches for an impossible bug that is planted in his apartment, he tears apart his world, leaving himself only to play along with a recording that he has destroyed. The pessimism that was in The Parallax View manifests again in the personal, which is the masterstroke of The Conversation.

Small wonder that both these movies resonate almost a half century later. The Parallax View and The Conversation show the pernicious effects of paranoia, of believing that somebody is always watching you, and of always watching and listening to others. Movies like these with major stars don’t exist anymore in the budget-conscious and fearful studio system, as superhero films pay homage to them without implementing the banalities that Pakula and Coppola sprinkled into their fantasies. It would be impossible to recreate the moment of The Parallax View, where a decade’s worth of paranoid fiction merged with the seismic news of the Sixties and Seventies, and we found ourselves at the other end of forces beyond our control.

But it is possible to imagine ourselves as Harry Caul, obsessed with technology and its implementation. It’s possible to see how our very natures could be turned against us. Companies like the Parallax Corporation (or Meta, in this case) do it all the time, gaming us against our own wills to produce simple Skinner box content. In the end, all these movies do is reinforce how we are also watching ourselves, making it impossible to look away even when the price is more than we can bear. The real conspiracy theory isn’t us against the invisible other. It’s us against ourselves...and we always lose. 

[sloshed-cinema]

The Parallax View (1974)

Free filmmaking advice: don’t kick off your film by yeeting someone off the Space Needle.  For one thing, it’s probably a lot harder to pull off now with the new setup to the observation deck.  For another, how are you going to top that for sheer excitement?  Opening with a literal bang as a senator is assassinated while visiting Seattle, journalist and witness Joseph Frady becomes plunged into a dark world of conspiracy and secrecy.  Everyone present at the killing suddenly has a much shorter lifespan, and soon enough the mounting coincidences are too much for even him to handle.  Frady’s editor accuses him of being a two-bit reporter, but if nothing else he certainly has gumption and resolve.  To an extent, his investigation is detrimental to those around him—two witnesses are killed through his presence or inaction, and he offs at least one of those attempting to do the same to him.  But despite it all, he manages to make it to the heart of it all: the shadowy Parallax Corporation.  In some regards, he seems to be able to pull one over on these “human engineers.”  He passes both tests, one through guile and the other seemingly through his subliminal self.  He becomes close to his handler with Parallax, Jack Younger, and even manages to thwart an assassination attempt.  In some cases, he manages to pull of an act, behaving aggressively around Jack to seem antisocial.  But he’s still an impostor and an outsider in this world.  When Joseph stalks the Parallax assassin into the convention center where another doomed candidate will give a speech, we watch both characters ascend an escalator.  The assassin remains still, controlled and cool, an apex predator assured in his supremacy.  Joseph begins the ascent in a similar fashion, but even by halfway up he’s fidgeting and shifting, climbing steps when he could stand still.  How thoroughly did he really pull the wool over their eyes?  He may think he’s the sheep in wolf’s clothing, but he was still perfectly set up to play the patsy when another undesirable candidate bites the dust, caught in the rafters near a sniper rifle while the dead man careens ignominiously into a set of tables on his golf cart.

Yet despite the corporate dressing of the killings, this is a very political game being played.  Director Alan J Pakula makes an interesting and very intentional choice in directly brainwashing the audience through the Parallax screen test sequence.  After the lights fade on Frady in his chair, we the viewer are directly shown the same thing he sees, allowed to respond to it in whatever way we might.  The frenzy of images creates such paradoxes as to break the mind and draw out a rage response: Is America powerful or dying?  Is racism bad or good?  Are lovers sensual or depraved?  Is my father a protector or an abuser?  Is mother nurturing or feeble?  I am Thor, an Übermensch, and I am all that stands between good and evil to protect this country.  But at the same time, these images are elemental.  The film opens on a wonderful shot visually paralleling a First Nations totem pole with the Space Needle, suggesting we have always felt a compulsion to build monuments, no matter the culture.  And the images of presidents—Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington—are present in both the Parallax “orientation” video and the campy college card display at Sen Hammond’s rally.  These men are, among many other things, symbols, and symbols can be used in many ways, to many paradoxical ends.  We are all exposed to propaganda in some form.  Nobody is immune.  The film’s score knows this too, building a baseline of placidly reverential patriotic trumpets but inflecting this security with paranoiac stings.  Is the government aware of the cabal killing off select candidates?  In their Kafkaesque panel, the committee investigating these assures the public of their tireless efforts to uncover all evidence (available eventually, of course), but be certain that there are no conspiracies afoot.  There will be no questions.  Go back to your shiny cards and marching bands.  

THE RULES

SIP

A Parallax Corp pamphlet appears onscreen.

A conversation is shot through a glass door or window.

Someone is wearing sunglasses in a scene.

BIG DRINK

A piece of furniture in the Salmontail bar is broken.

Someone present at the opening assassination dies.

A shot is fired.

[popularculturesource]

THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) - Directed by Alan J. Pakula

[filmap]

The Parallax View Alan J. Pakula. 1974

Dam Gorge Dam, Rockport, Washington 98283, USA See in map

See in imdb

[katmaatui]

my beloved hal shelf has now because the hal and carol shelf...and yes that is green lantern 192 I just found it at the store today

[sarurun42]

socials ⭐️ portfolio ⭐️ comms ⭐️ vgen

[flashdoesahundredyarddash]

there's something depressing about barry dying hal goes all traumatic shit w/o him, and the fact that it's implied that hal wouldn't turn to parallax if barry's still around makes things sadder

I still cry about it to this day

I feel that every time I'm reminded of this, I spiral with Hal always saying how he has nothing to lose when really in moments like these he loses everything, and the reaction to it is insane.

This makes me want to bring up a lot of topics about death, losing someone who is loved personally, and what grief does to someone. How it is portrayed here... How Hal handles death throughout his whole life, depending on who passes is a whole different story. And that he could be an extremely sacrificial person who would do anything for the people he loved even if it meant something he was at both his lowest points and one of the most vulnerable points of his life. (This goes for both Barry and Hal. They do anything...ANYTHING...for the people they love.) We even had the time Barry turned into Parallax partially from the parasite, and just gleaming to Hal about the biggest fear is losing someone he loves which is so backhanded to Hal...let me tell you...

(hashtag pulling up cassiegirlwonders saying that Barry is one of Hal's strongest connections to humanity. THAT sticks in my mind.) How much Hal had the idea of saving Barry when he saved Ollie too? What dangerous possibilities would be pulled after Barry's death for Hal should be covered more...

[lascitasdelashoras]

Alan Pakula - The Parallax Wiew - El último testigo

[querelleofbros]

[nellarw95]

Happy Birthday Warren 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

Henry Warren Beatty

March 30,1937

Buon Compleanno 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

30 Marzo 1937

[lifeinasmalltowninjapan]

BBC2 Moviedrome (1988)

The Parallax View (1974)

Warren Beatty and Paula Prentiss

[itsblosseybitch]

Dominick and Griffin Dunne attend a screening of "The Parallax View" at the headquarters of the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, California, on June 11, 1974.

[mylifeincinema]

My Week in Reviews: January 27, 2024

Played a little Oscar/Best of 2023 catch-up, this week. However, I'm still two films away from having seen everything nominated for Best Picture, so I might wait to finish off My Best of 2023... until I've gotten them in (which will hopefully happen this week). Anyway, here's this week's batch of first time viewings.

Nyad (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin, 2023)

Annette Bening, Jodie Foster and Rhys Ifans are fantastic, and I have a soft-spot for underdog movies like this, so I found myself immensely invested in the film. Understandably - given their roots in documentaries - some of Vasarhelyi & Chin's decisions are awkward, particularly in the blocking/shot choices in the smaller, character-on-character scenes, but they're not too distracting in the long run. I'm especially happy with the Foster nomination, as she's really the scene-stealer, throughout. And while the Annette nomination is earned - as she's surely better than Robbie was - don't expect her to beat out our Stereotypical Barbie come time for My Best of 2023... Lead Actress list. - 7/10

Rustin (George C. Wolfe, 2023)

Colman Domingo owns every single scenery-chewing second he's on the screen. This is such a lived-in, emotionally fragile performance that's ultimately far too good for the film as a whole. That being said, the film itself isn't necessarily bad. Wolfe makes consistently makes interesting choices, and the rest of the cast give devoted performances that only pale in comparison to Domingo's powerhouse. But ultimately, there's nothing here aside from that lead performance that manages to move in the manner it's clearly trying for. The moments that are supposed to hit just never hit hard enough. - 6/10

Dumb Money (Craig Gillespie, 2023)

That whole opening chunk that's so painfully trying to be The Social Network is painful. I get it, it's an 'homage' because they're based on books by the same author", I just don't care because it's executed in a manner that screams ripoff rather than homage. It feels like lazy, boring filmmaking. Paul Dano is great, and every minute he's on screen, I was hooked. Some of the supporting cast holds their own well enough, too, but too many of them don't get any chance to shine outside of the forced moments on the page. This was still a concisely written, interesting look into the whole GameStop stock market movement that was all over the news a couple years ago, though. My main problem with that, is that this would've probably been better if they'd waited even just another year (or two) to make/release it. - 6.5/10

The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)

Pakula fills this film with seemingly simple shots that - paired with his patience as a storyteller - drown each moment with fraught tension. Beatty is really good as the rogue, obsessed reporter, here, too. But ultimately the patented lack of resolution makes the finale land with a mere thud rather than a satisfying bang. Still, though, Pakula's work makes this one more than worth watching. - 7/10

A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton & John Cleese, 1988)

Ridiculous. John Cleese makes this wonderfully wacky 180 throughout the film that makes for a lot of fun. Jamie Lee Curtis is as conniving as she is sexy. Kevin Kline is just great (though hardly/barely Oscar-worthy) as the unpredictably fumbling foil. But it's Michael Palin that stole the film for me, as his stuttering 'fool' and the old-lady assassination sub-plot were the moments that made me laugh the hardest; they were such absurdly silly stuff. - 7.5/10

Enjoy!

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

[unfotograma]

The Parallax View (1974)

[cemyafilmarsiv]

The Parallax View directed by Alan J. Pakula

[lefildariane]

The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)