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13 Murdered Souls, Conspiratorial Cabals Frankenheimer’s Paranoia Films DAVID STER R ITT John Frankenheimer moved from live television to Hollywood features in 1961, and within the next five years he directed most of the pictures for which he is best remembered. The three that have come to be called his paranoia trilogy— The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), and Seconds (1966)— are cited by some critics as a point of origin for the cynical, alienated worldview found in much post-noir cinema of the 1960s and beyond. Film scholar R. Barton Palmer holds that these movies “undoubtedly inaugurated the paranoid thriller” (107). Stephen Bowie writes that Seven Days in May “casually perfects the formula of the paranoid thriller” and that the “unsettling and claustrophobic” imagery in Seconds establishes “a kind of cinematic grammar of paranoia.” Along similar lines, Jay Millikan argues that post-1960s conspiracy films, such as Alan J. Pakula ’s The Parallax View and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, both released in 1974, drew their “greatest influence” from The Manchurian Candidate and its “suspicion of . . . political institutions.” More recent films of paranoia and conspiracy range from Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) to Tony Gilroy’s legal thriller Michael Clayton (2007) and Jonathan Demme’s updated remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004). A comprehensive listing might also include such topical documentaries as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). While these movies share a fascination with conspiracies, they aren’t necessarily about paranoia in the clinical sense, which involves the “insidious development of a permanent and unshakeable delusional system” related to persecution or jealousy, with “clear and orderly thinking” accompanied by emotions and behavior “consistent with the delusional state” (National). Among the traits and attributes that a paranoid personality may manifest are fearfulness, anger, hypervigilance, irrational cynicism, guardedness, rigidity, humorlessness, self-importance, self-righteousness, and self-protection (Blaney 340, 349). Any 14 DAVID STERRITT film about a hidden agenda is a conspiracy film, but only one about delusion, fixation, or fear and loathing on a grand psychotic scale qualifies as a paranoia film. And only one with a hidden agenda—perhaps hidden even from itself—can be called a paranoid film. The most memorable parts of Frankenheimer’s trilogy fall into all three categories —they view paranoia and conspiracy from a paranoid perspective—and this accounts for their enduring power to dig under the receptive moviegoer’s skin. On their most obvious levels, the movies are against-the-grain melodramas touching on such hot ideological topics as cold war politics, military authoritarianism , instrumental psychology, high-tech media culture, mythologies of modern science, and the tension between popular perceptions of American history and the blood-stained realities they disavow. As shaped and inflected by Frankenheimer’s style, these real-world subjects take on enigmatic and uncanny qualities, tapping into the political as well as the clinical meanings of paranoia. In the 1964 title essay of his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, historian Richard Hofstadter argues that clinical and political paranoids “both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” but that the psychotic paranoid “sees the hostile and conspiratorial world . . . as directed specifically against him,” while the political paranoid “finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others” (4). Those clued in to the cabal live at a critical moment, moreover, faced with the knowledge that all might soon be lost: “It is now or never in organizing resistance. . . . Time is forever just running out” (29–30). Note how Seven Days in May evokes clock and calendar time so frequently that they become demi-characters in the story. The continuity between Hofstadter’s ideas and Frankenheimer’s cinema shows that the latter had many contact points with sociopolitical realities of its day. 1 Yet the dominant mood of the paranoia trilogy depends less on earthbound plausibility than on the interplay of story elements drawn from divergent, even conflicting categories—the possible and the impossible, the normal and the anomalous, the natural and the magical, the physical and the metaphysical. Their surface realism notwithstanding, The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds darkly suggest that unseen forces and cryptic energies are at work in the margins of their narrative worlds; Seven Days in May serves to drily contain and control a sense...

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