NPR's Studio 360 got me thinking about something this past Sunday, and I've been mulling over this idea for the ensuing week. I'm not sure if I've got it completely down or not, but here goes.
The show was about Conspiracies (listen to the show here). During the late 60's and into the 70's, spurred by the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and then the Watergate scandal, the American public began embracing films which explored organized conspiracies. There's a great recap of many of the conspiracy films of the 70's here, including the Pakula's Paranoia trilogy (Klute, The Parallax View, and then he just cut to the heart of the matter with All the President's Men). Other films like Polanski's Chinatown and Coppola's The Conversation all indulged the country's willingness to believe that there were complex machinations going on behind the highest reaches of our country.
Of course, in the early to mid-seventies, it was easy to believe such a thing. The country had watched it play out on our small screen broadcasts of the nightly news. Shifting the locale from the couch to the movie theater wasn't that big a leap. Because the country knew from Watergate that conspiracies already existed, flights of Illuminati-esque fantasy no longer seemed like Manchurian tales of science fiction.
In the ensuing 30 years, pop culture conspiracy theories have trended back towards the fantastic and even comical. The X-Files, or Mel Gibson's bluntly named Conspiracy Theory didn't attempt realism, but inflected themselves as wild-eyed fantasies. It's no surprise, then, that the only conspiracy film to take itself seriously (though how serious it actually was is a matter of opinion), Stone's JFK, took its subject straight from the conspiratorial 70's.
How relevant is this today? Five years ago, a book swept the nation which told the story of a vast conspiracy to cover up a code which provides meaning to all existence. It's realism (or lack thereof) was then and is today a matter of controversy. Using what was certainly a Fargo-esque marketing ploy, the Da Vinci Code allowed millions of readers to convince themselves that maybe, just maybe, it makes sense that there is a benevolent power which humanity has gone to amazing lengths to cover up.
Perhaps, we are beginning to see a shift back towards conspiratorial acceptance based on current events. With every major event that world event, a wild conspiracy theory pops up to replace the official explanation of events. These are mostly laughed off, because, as Studio 360's guest, Jon Ronson, said, "The people who bombed the London tubes really are who we were told they were, and the Jews did not bring down the World Trade Center. What we also know is that the war in Iraq was the result of secret meetings between George Bush and Tony Blair (The Downing Street Memos). It's sad that conspiracies have become the template to world events."
My point is this: Since the beginning of the Iraq war, the great national discussion has been about how much of the rationales for war were made up to convince the country and how much of it was actually believed by the powers that be. Slowly, public sentiment has shifted. WMD's were not found, and the administration has continued to insist on painting a rosy picture when the public perception of the reality is much different.
And, while we are still not sure if what the public actually believes, perhaps the success of the Da Vinci Code, as a book, stands as a better measuring stick for the current American mood than public opinion polls to tell us that America is willing to exist in that conspiratorial mindset again. If so, the upcoming film version might foreshadow a resurgence of conspiratorial realistic films. If the current Zeitgeist is amenable to it, then it might be an indication that the public is ready to reassert themselves as a force against the powers which have conspired to make the past 5 years uncertain and chaotic. Though conspiracies are most often malicious, the public is willing to latch on to them because they make sense, and when a public tries to make sense of the realities surrounding them, there is really no limit to what might be around the historical corner.
ADDITIONAL READING: Documenting Conspiracy - The Chutry Experiment (About the film Loose Change, which is about the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 and is streaming for free, also check Chuck's comments for other conspiracy sites), The Paranoid Style in American Cinema - Richard Hofsteder in Harper's Magazine, 1964.
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