Sunday, September 02, 2007
(8:02 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Parallax View (2006) and The Parallax View (1974)
Last night I watched The Parallax View, a 1974 conspiracy thriller starring Warren Beatty and directed by Alan J. Pakula. My goal in doing so was, as noted Friday, to discern if Zizek's failure to mention this movie in his 2006 massive tome The Parallax View was an elaborate joke. My results were inconclusive.Here is the plot: a senator is assassinated. The camera, but somehow none of the people present, can see that there was a second gunman and that the man who everyone assumes killed the senator never actually fired a shot. A government commission concludes that the killer was acting completely alone. Long-haired reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty)'s ex-girlfriend (or something) was among those present for the assassination and notices that many of the others who were also there have died in mysterious accidents; when she dies, too, Frady is on the case. He visits a hick town and is almost killed in the course of investigating the death of a judge who witnessed the assassination, but discovers materials in the small-town sherriff's house relating to a "Parallax Corporation," which apparently trains assassins. He figures out how to answer the questions on their entrance exams so as to indicate homicidal tendencies. There's some kind of boating accident involving a character whose role was unclear to me (the whole thing is pretty compressed), in which Frady is presumed dead. After his "death," he decides to try to join up with Parallax, and part of his training involves watching a montage of disturbing images:
To make a long story short, Frady really thinks he's playing these conspiracy people for fools, but it turns out that they were planning to frame him for the assassination of another senator, and the commission ultimately decides that Frady acted alone and was motivated by his paranoid obsession with the "fake" conspiracy in the previous senator's death. (IRONY!) It's fairly clear that he's being naive -- for instance, his handler tells him that something in his (pseudonymous) past doesn't check out, and so Frady just changes the last name of his pseudonym and comes up with another stupid story out of thin air, yet his handler never questions his identity again.
This last part is the key Zizekian theme of the movie: Frady doesn't realize that his "gaze" is included in the situation in advance and so is not being a good dialectical materialist. His lack of success in his attempt to uncover the conspiracy can thus be blamed on his lack of theoretical rigor. Other themes: Frady is operating "between the two deaths" (he is presumed dead and actually has an obituary printed, etc., meaning that he's "symbolically" dead); he acts as a kind of "vanishing mediator," discrediting "conspiracy theorists" while advancing the actual conspiracy.
That's all I was able to come up with, really -- at least in terms of the plot. Further analysis of the montage seems like it might be more productive in this respect. An unrelated note: Has anyone ever noticed that apparently every actor in the 70s mumbled their lines?
