The Relative Visual Position of Objects in Space (The Paranoia Trilogy)

Film is the engine of paranoia.

In the 1970’s director Alan J. Pakula created what has been called his “Paranoia Trilogy”: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976). These three films, taken together, do in fact tell us a lot about the cinematic nature of that strange mixture of belief, doubt, and fear that we call paranoia but also something about the ways that cinema can (and can’t) interact with such a vibrant, textural emotional register.

Film is a paranoid art form.

There is an inherent tension in cinema between what we can see (or hear) and what we can’t see (or hear). The edges of the frame always produce anxiety over what might be happening just outside our scope. Hitchcock understood this perhaps better than any other filmmaker; his films are filled with the just-out-of-frame, whether the fall from a clocktower James Stewart can’t quite see in Vertigo, the body just under our noses in Rope, or the suspicious activities of a man barely noticeable through the window in Rear Window. Anxiety is potent when information is just out of reach.

The Paranoia Trilogy is 1970’s U.S. cinema in a nutshell. Pakula’s own career predates those of the “film school brats” who rose to prominence in the era; among other films, Pakula produced 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird — but the Trilogy captures the spirit of the decade that followed the 1960’s. Unlike the freewheeling rebellion of Easy Rider or the slick structuralism of The Godfather, the Paranoia Trilogy is a nervy odyssey into the American sociopolitical psyche that begins and ends with exposure: of self, of state, and of truth.

Exposure of Self: Klute (1971)

Like the best films noir, Klute strips people and social structures down to their beating hearts. For Klute, those hearts are uniquely sexual: as Jane Fonda’s Bree implies, the world is full of “hypocrite squares” who use sex workers like her while maintaining their respectable veneers. The villain of the piece, an abusive stalker, is one such “square”, but so is the titular Klute, a stiff, laconic investigator whose pathology runs deeper than Bree’s stalker.

Klute feeds on Bree’s paranoia, feeds on the investigation. Like Bree’s stalker, Klute is an outside observer, a Hitchcockian voyeur, the other side of the same coin. Klute is almost an extension of Bree herself, a way for Bree to investigate her mental disturbances. Bree, likewise, is an extension of Klute, a way for him to feed his investigatory fantasies.

Paranoia is a distinctly feminine endeavor: it involves a peculiar kind of openness on all fronts, a particular kind of vulnerability, and so for the Trilogy it falls on Bree to embody paranoia most fully and in the most familiar form. Anxiety, for men, is thus an unacceptable feminization which Klute can project onto Bree. Klute, as Bree notes, has no judgment against her, even as she has progressively and uncomfortably exposed herself to him; this could be because Klute, ever the fixer, has a vested interest in engaging in a “rescuing the fallen woman” trope, but also in sewing up the gaps left by fear and anxiety.

Near the end of the film, when confronted by her stalker, knowing he might snap at any moment, Bree plays it as cool as possible as he pontificates:

There are little corners in everyone which were better off left alone. Sicknesses, weaknesses, which should never be exposed. But that’s your stock and trade, isn’t it, a man’s weakness? And I was never really fully aware of mine until you brought them out.

Women, or a kind of mythic Woman-figure, embody for him as for so many men a personal fracture, the exposure of self “which should never be exposed”. Bree’s (feminine) paranoia is the result of her stalker’s behavior, as if he has projected it onto her as a more acceptable target for his own (feminine) psychic anxieties. As a man, the feminization brought on by his fragile emotional state is unbearable, and he must pass it to a female figure.

Exposure of State: All the President’s Men

The flipside to the deeply personal Klute is the third in the Trilogy, the transparently political All the President’s Men (1976). Based on the book of the same name, the film followed Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they dig into questions involving the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. The rest, as they say, is history.

What follows is, indeed, a true blue conspiracy. The inner workings of a government are on put on display as a corrupted network. The revelations shake the world.

All the President’s Men is the key journalism film of the modern age; the film is to journalism what Jaws was to the ocean. But no film since, including the somehow Academy Award-winning Spotlight, has captured what Pakula managed to with All the President’s Men. Pakula’s film is not about journalism or Watergate.

For context, place the film next to The Post, Steven Spielberg’s abysmal 2017 spiritual sequel to All the President’s Men, centering on the leaking of The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. The film ends on the Watergate break-in, a nod both to history and to the film to which The Post seems most indebted. But it’s also a misleading smokescreen.

If Pakula’s is a film that could only have been made so close to its reality, The Post is a film that could only have been made forty years removed from it. The paranoia that electrifies the investigatory efforts of Woodward and Bernstein is gone, replaced by a distinctly neoliberal emphasis not on the work involved in the release of information to the public but on the adminstrative oversight: The Post is a top-down view of journalism where All the President’s Men is bottom-up. Paranoia is a reverse-luxury, something that Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks can afford not to have.

It’s telling that the end of Pakula’s unofficial trilogy — a grouping that’s almost a conspiracy theory, a loose connecting of dots — ends on a true story, or at least a story about a true story. If Klute takes place in the labyrinth of the disturbed mind, All the President’s Men takes place in the labyrinth of a disturbed state; the entire sprawling operation is infected with Nixonian paranoia, and as with Bree and her stalker, the paranoia spreads.

The Post is about certainty, as if built upon the Washington Post‘s Trump-era slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. It’s a film that naively wishes we didn’t live in a post-truth era, that trusts in the power of revelation. All the President’s Men, in context, knows nothing is so stable as we wish it could be. Revelation is weak, and the truth is only knowable so long as you trust the lens that brings it to you.

But the real point of All the President’s Men is something else: namely, what if it wasn’t all in your head?

That’s the terrifying truth in All the President’s Men. You’re not imagining things. You’re not just jumping at shadows. After two pieces of fiction on the subject of paranoia, finally, proof that there really is someone following you. You’re still paranoid, but at least there’s a paper trail leading to the highest power in the nation. Which is more terrifying: looking behind you to see nothing, or seeing something there?

Exposure of Truth: The Parallax View (1974)

As in Klute, there is a terrified female character in The Parallax View who, in a suggestion of the feminine nature of paranoia, plants the seeds of doubt and fear in Warren Beatty’s reporter Joe Frady, infecting him and setting the narrative in motion. This time she won’t survive, and a man will be plunged into paranoia full stop. This explains the scene in which Beatty gets into a brawl over his perceived effeminacy: even at that early stage of the film, his masculinity is called into question alongside his sanity.

The Parallax View takes place, like the 1970’s itself, in the shadow of assassination. In a clear parallel to the conspiracies surrounding the killing of JFK (starting with the film’s portentous political motorcade, a clue that this fictional politician is not long for the world). As with Bree, it could all be in Joe Frady’s head. The process of finding out is dangerous. All three films in the Trilogy, not coincidentally, center on investigation: the process of digging for truth can only open up more fear, more anxiety, more uncertainty.

Hence, at the fulcrum of the Paranoia Trilogy is Beatty’s performance as a dogged investigator. His curiosity will become his undoing as he stumbles into a web of madness and, ultimately, truth, or as much truth as can ever be had. In leaving mysteries intact, in leaving questions unanswered and answers unquestioned, The Parallax View is deeply anxiety-provoking, a nerve-wracking core that refuses to comfort its viewers, a living, breathing center-that-cannot-hold. It is impossible to expose the truth.

“Therefore, There Will Be No Questions”

Or so sayeth a shadowy group of men following the assassination of a United States senator in The Parallax View.

Paranoia might be defined not so much as the fear of being followed but the fear that they don’t need to follow you. Put another way, paranoia is the fear of order. Too much order, too much meaning, too much purpose, becomes oppressive. When everything has meaning, nothing does.

Paranoia begins with a hole, a bullet-hole, perhaps, but really a hole in the truth, which, of course, is nothing more than our perception of it. Paranoia begins when something seems out of place, but maybe, just maybe, everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be. Paranoia is both distortion and the truth located in that distortion.

Literature is inherently unqualified to discuss paranoia. The essence of literature, even a first-person account, is a kind of omniscience, or at least a knowledge that you’re seeing every word, every piece of information on offer. Film, again, thrives on the anxiety of what we cannot see but understand is, or could be, there, just out of frame. There’s always something hidden.

We are pulled through film as unwitting experimental subjects. Watching the Paranoia Trilogy, especially in breathless succession, is like sitting for the Parallax test film, as Beatty does.

Unlike the more famous film forcibly shown to Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Beatty sits voluntarily. He’s in deep. Unlike Alex, who knows he is being programmed, Beatty believes he is being tested. And maybe he is being tested. Or maybe he’s being programmed. Maybe we, the viewer, are being programmed too. Pakula’s Trilogy understands this perhaps more than any cinematic work: films are instructions veiled in entertainment. Watching a film requires reading it; to read a film, one must open oneself to paranoia, to the possibility that there might be deeper meaning, that there might be order in the apparent chaos.

That’s why it’s so effective that the Paranoia Trilogy is a set of genre pictures: by drawing consciously upon unspoken patterns that make up genre, the films (particularly The Parallax View) play on the way we’re trained to connect the dots, to see the secret codes embedded in the system. Don’t ask questions, just follow the plot the way you’ve been trained. Like Joe Frady, you might be close to the truth, or you might just be a cog a machine that’s bigger than you know.

To be paranoid is to be unstable. Fear (the emotion found in the typical horror film) roots a person into place, but paranoia (the emotion typically found in films we call “thrillers”) dislodges its subject from steady ground. Conventional film poses the myth of the coherent subject-position: that’s why films typically have satisfying resolutions that purge emotions like paranoia. Hitchcock’s films end when the lights go up.

If paranoia is a lack of stable, coherent subject-position, then film has taken as its obligation to purge the more paranoid aspects of film. Hitchcock can do this through resolution: the fire that consumes Manderley at the end of Rebecca, or the death of Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. The elements that destabilize are eliminated and the audience is reassured that they won’t be bothered again; the sojourn into uncomfortable emotional territory is over.

What makes the Paranoia Trilogy remarkable, then, is the way Pakula undercuts the typical modes of resolution. The ending of The Parallax Trilogy is particularly dissatisfying in that it raises more questions than it answers and leaves the paranoid elements intact. But even All the President’s Men does something similar, ending the Trilogy in a crescendo of paranoia in which, for the audience as for the characters, suspicion is justified.

You’re not crazy; there really is something bigger going on. There always has been.