A Short Love Letter To ‘Q’ (The Winged Serpent, Not The Conspiracy Theory)

It’s the year 2020, and true to Larry Cohen’s ahead-of-his-time genius, I have to clarify that I’m writing about his 1982 film Q – The Winged Serpent, not the conspiracy theory that’s currently proliferating just about everywhere like some kind of pandemic (a figurative one, not the literal one that’s currently proliferating). I wasn’t sure exactly what this piece was going to look like as I typed out the title, but now I think that this is the article. Larry Cohen’s prescience is not limited to God Told Me To (which really demands its own article); in fact, with Q, Larry Cohen predicted QAnon 38 years ago.

Q is, along with The Stuff, one of Larry Cohen’s masterpieces of schlock horror; the two films complement one another beautifully. In The Stuff, Michael Moriarty plays a slick successful corporate spy who turns against his employers after discovering a monster. In Q, Cohen has Moriarty in a complementary role as a small-time, down-on-his-luck crook who discovers a monster and, in his desperation, tries to use the discovery to his advantage (Q‘s perpetually scheming, perpetually at-the-edge Moriarty prefigures William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo).

In essence, though, Q is less about an actual giant winged serpent than it is about the proliferation of conspiracy theories. In this allegory, the giant monster of the film is represents what QAnon does: the battle for truth. Does Q exist or not? Because it’s a monster movie, of course Q does exist, but in a more real sense, only the informational conflict is the story. Moriarty is a QAnon follower who rides his high horse as far as possible. He knows the truth and can — no, must — exploit that knowledge. Whether Moriarty is correct or not misses the point. Knowledge — secret knowledge — is status.

But in a more macro sense, it is the very reading of Q as a prescient prediction of QAnon that this piece is really about. Followers of QAnon are constantly performing deep, critical reads, only instead of film and literature they’re reading into the very fabric of existence. Q is a horror movie for rational people, but it’s a fantasy for QAnon-ers in which their deranged belief system is justified. But they shouldn’t forget that Q is a monster waiting to devour them.