Agency in the Cinematic Conspiracy Thriller

Paranoia as Pervasive Cultural Phenomenon

Fueled by the Watergate scandal, post-Vietnam disillusionment, and public skepticism toward the Warren Commission report, the 1970s conspiracy thriller located conspiracy within government and corporate establishments, turning the focus of paranoia inward, toward America’s own institutions. Films like The Manchurian Candidate, Klute, The Parallax View, All The President’s Men, and Three Days of the Condor provided “textual resolutions for inadequately explained socio-historical traumas” (Boyd & Palmer, 85), thematizing the individual’s powerlessness in the face of ubiquitous institutional control. The surveillance society thrillers of the 1990s (Wag the Dog, The Game, The Truman Show, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Pleasantville) responded to the paranoia engendered by a media-saturated reality. Recent conspiracy thrillers (Vantage Point, The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, The International, Inception, Salt, Breach, The Insider, The Constant Gardener, Syriana) testify to a growing uncertainty about issues of causality, responsibility, and agency, as well as to the routinization of conspiracy. As Peter Knight has argued, contemporary paranoia is “less an isolated reaction to an occasional abuse of power than the logical by-product of a routinized state of affairs....of seemingly benign corporate processes such as the gathering of consumer profiles via credit card purchases, website visits etc” (35). The “cultural turn” transformed what were previously considered psychopathologies—e.g. multiple personality and paranoia—into cultural phenomena.¹ As I have argued elsewhere,² doubling and multiple personality left the confines of the 19^th-century illness model and gradually acquired a more general, philosophical, cultural or metaphorical meaning: over the last several decades Hollywood has been “borrowing” the symptomatic language of doubling and multiple personality—characterized by trauma, memory loss, and blackouts—to create what appears to be a new genre of films structured around multiple—stolen, assumed or mistaken—realities, identities or temporalities. Similarly, while clinical paranoia used to be an irrational response, cultural paranoia is increasingly seen either as inherent in the very structure of the new global economy or as a rational response, a “social practice” through which the disempowered subject attempts to position himself with respect to the social/political world (Pratt, 36). Contemporary geopolitical conspiracy thrillers “borrow” the symptomatic language of clinical paranoia to dramatize a new type of conspiracy, “structural conspiracy”: “conspiracy without conspiracy.”

There have been various attempts to explain the dominance of conspiracy in contemporary culture. In Paranoia and Modernity John Farrell argues that the dominant post-war French critical discourse (Sartre, Althusser, Lacan. Foucault), which described “forms of agency, teleology, or intentionality—discourse, capital, power—[as] at once all-encompassing and alien, totally intimate yet totally other,” naturalized paranoia and cemented the view that we are “the victims of social relations of an unfathomable and inescapable manipulative power” (4). Postwar French intellectuals, following on the trails of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, “carried the suspicion of society to new depths: for Sartre, the ‘gaze’ of others imposes a fundamental experience of alienation; for Althusser, the discourse of responsibility is a primary instance of ideology; for Lacan, language itself is the source of our unnatural submission to the Father; and for Foucault, an unlocatable and alien power infiltrates every particle of our social being” (ibid.). In The Geopolitical Aesthetic Fredric Jameson examines “the figuration of conspiracy as an [unconscious] attempt . . . to think a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves” (1–2). Insofar as the conspiratorial text represents an unconscious, collective effort to cognitively orient ourselves in the present period of late capitalism, it points to our failure to think totality (the social/collective and the epistemological totality). “In the widespread paralysis of the collective or social imaginary,” writes Jameson, conspiracy has acquired new significance as “a narrative structure capable of reuniting the minimal basic components: a potentially infinite network [the collective] along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility” [the epistemological] (9). He reads the centrality of conspiracy in late capitalist culture as a response to (as well as a symptom of) our growing inability to grasp totality, to reconcile our...