174. The Parallax View

Song - Fool's Overture (Supertramp)

Movie: The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)

In which Alan J. Pakula and Gordon Willis transform into prime Steph Curry. I don't usually like writing such pseudo-hip sentences, but that's what the shotmaking in this film makes you do. There is not a boring shot in sight here and every frame is constructed to be both cinematically interesting and fit the overarching ideas of the film. Especially in the outdoor scenes, there is so much going on in the frame, with things to see both in the foreground and in the background. Yet you never a get full picture of what is going in the shot. There is always something in the frame that passes by too quickly, or is just blocked out of view, or can't be quite clearly seen. And even if you are not missing anything, you are often left with the impression that you are, that something interesting or worthwhile is going on that you haven't noticed. Similarly, the full scope of the story/plot (of a reporter who tries to uncover the real truth behind the assassination of a senator) doesn't become clear until the end, in part because of small plot holes. Those plot holes are I think unintentional and the result of some sloppy screenwriting, but this is the kind of movie that makes you doubt your own thinking.

The film is ruthless too. The hard cut between the scene in which the distressed Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), fearing for her life, confronts reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) and the next scene in which she is lying in the morgue is the most astonishing example of that. So is a boat trip and its aftermath, when it first starts becoming clear to us that Joseph never really had the upper hand, and never will. Every step he takes seems to be orchestrated and expected by The Parallax Corporation, something he only finds out when it's too late. The film has a bleak worldview, but I found that the ending does offer a glimpse of hope. The film begins and ends with a Commission giving a press conference on the closing of its investigation into the murder of a senator. In both cases it concludes that the murderer acted alone and that the conspiracy theories by the public are completely unfounded. Yet, the language in the last press conference makes it obvious that it's becoming increasingly harder to lie to the public.

The biggest legacy of The Parallax View is a sequence in the middle, in which Joseph, posing as a potential recruit of the Parallax Corporation is subjected to a short film where he is shown words like 'Happiness', 'God', Country, 'Father', etc, followed by images reflecting those words, e.g., a pile of money, a church, the American Flag, a fatherly figure. Throughout the film Joseph is shown different configurations of words and images, and it doesn't take long before this word association game takes a sinister turn. An image of a gun follows Happiness, an image of Hitler follows the word Father, Country is followed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a happy all-American family follows the word 'Enemy'. It's both an unsettling sequence and a joyously cinematic showstopper (I have seen it many times, despite seeing The Parallax View only twice), It's also a sequence that opens up many possibilities for pretentious writing about media, propaganda, capitalism and the American Dream. I am not going to that here, in part because the scene itself highlights better why Twitter and Facebook have sent so many people off the deep end than any thinkpiece or academic paper you could write on the subject.