"The belief in the Big Other as an invisible power structure which exists in the Real is the most succinct definition of paranoia."  Slavoj Zizek 

This is a review of "Marathon Man" and "The Falcon and the Snowman", two films by director John Schlesinger.

Though Hitchcock and Lang brought the "conspiracy thriller" to Hollywood, the genre only blossomed in the late 60s and 70s, with films like "The Parallax View", "Z", "Marathon Man", "Capricorn One", "The Manchurian Candidate", "Three Days of the Condor" and "All The President's Men". This was the age of Vietnam and Watergate, the public deeply suspicious of all political leaders.

The genre remained quiet in the 80s and early 90s, until the "X Files" TV series sprung to life. With taglines such as "The Truth Is Out There" and "Trust No One", the series posited a world of vast conspiracies and government plots, the common man at the mercy of all manners of ridiculously elaborate schemes. The only way out of the maze? "Fight the future!" as the tagline of the series' final season proclaimed. It was apparently our duty to trawl through the labyrinth of information, discovering some elusive "truth" that ensured our own freedom.

This trend ended with the boom of the internet, conspiracy thrillers now giving way to "conspiracy documentaries". The internet generation lapped up such independent documentaries as "Loose Change" and "Zeitgeist", whilst in the mainstream Michael Moore titillated his audience with stuff like "Fahrenheit 9/11". All these documentaries believed in a "secret order", a cabal of wealthy politicians and businessmen who conspire to reduce human rights and enslave the world. They struggle to create a mono-myth, linking various conspiracies and hidden agendas into a single, all encompassing narrative that explains the purpose and point and future of everything.

This need to "streamline narratives", to make them more "efficient", is reflected in the scientific community, who battle to create a "Grand Unification Theory" and ultimately a "Theory of Everything", merging everything from Quantum Mechanics to Special Relativity into one giant all encompassing formula.

So ultimately, the "conspiracy thriller" is rooted in man's desire to have control. The modern subject is one who displays outright cynicism towards official institutions, yet at the same time believes in the existence of conspiracies (an unseen Other pulling the strings). This apparently contradictory coupling of cynicism and belief is strictly related to the demise of the big Other. Its disappearance causes us to construct an Other of the Other (conspiracy) in order to escape the unbearable freedom its loss causes. Conversely, there is no need to take the Big Other seriously if we believe in an Other of the Other. We're therefore allowed to display cynicism and belief in equal measures. 

Man thus seeks to assert control over a wayward universe, to create a kind of paternal babysitter (be it God, a mathematical formula, a conspiracy theory, an explanation for violence/conspiracies/murder/war etc) who provides meaning and symbolic order. The Big Other provides reassurances to the believer. It's a "lifestyle choice", akin to religion, in which his place in the world is dependent on sheer irrationality. 

The problem with most "conspiracy thrillers", from the innocent days of Hitchcock's "Topaz" all the way up to modern fare like "The Da Vinci Code", are two fold. Firstly, they are not incorrect in suggesting that something is "wrong" amongst the "elite" or "best people", but they are incorrect in individualizing and personalizing processes that are social, collective and systemic, an approach which implies that it is just a question of personal morality rather than social structures. Secondly, and most importantly, these "conspiracies" ignore the fact that the Big Other simply doesn't exist. There is no symbolic order pulling the strings.

Some modern "conspiracy thrillers" ("Eyes Wide Shut", "Existenz" etc) acknowledge this, with their untangleable webs of lies, accidents, truths and half truths, nothing ever adding up, nothing ever making sense, the real and the hyperreal, the truth and the desire, all blurred, without any identifiable ground zero, but these are mostly films by intellectual directors.

Compared to these modern "conspiracy thrillers", "Marathon Man" and "The Falcon and the Snowman" are positively archaic. "Marathon Man" is a about a grad student (Dustin Hoffman) who gets embroiled in his big brother's business (Roy Scheider), which unfortunately has to do with spies, guns, double agents, diamonds and evil Nazi dentists. Scheider is suave, Hoffman is excellent and Schlesinger hits us with some neat visuals (the reveal of the Eiffel tower is stunning), but what's most interesting about the film is the way that its various plot lines don't intersect until the 1 hour mark. Even then, it takes a further half hour for things to start making sense. Unfortunately, the film ends with a clichéd showdown between the villain and the good guy, everything neatly resolved and explained.

"The Falcon and the Snowman" is a bit more ambitious. Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton play two friends who sell government secrets to the Soviet Union. Hutton works at a civil defence contractor and smuggles information out of his office and into the hands of Penn, a small time drug dealer who has no qualms selling to the KGB. Penn does this strictly for the money, whilst Hutton is disillusioned with the American government (particularly its attempt to depose the leader of Australia) and so sells the secrets strictly because he hates how his country conducts crimes and games of espionage. In other words, the film is about a conspiracy undertaken as a response to conspiracies.

"Marathon Man"  7.9/10 

"The Falcon and the Snowman"  8/10 

Aside from an oddly slapstick car crash and its clichéd ending, "Marathon Man" is an effective thriller, with several neat scenes. "The Falcon and the Snowman" is even better, Penn turning in a memorable performance.

Sentiment: positive