Dirt Diggers

Rating: Null/10 (2 December 2009)

Though Hitchcock and Lang brought the "conspiracy thriller" to Hollywood, the genre only blossomed in the late 1960s and 70s, with films like "Parallax View", "Capricorn One", "Manchurian Candidate", "Z", "Chinatown", "There May Be Giants", "Three Days of the Condor", "All The President's Men" and the many conspiracy/political thrillers of Zinnemann, Frankenheimer, Gavras and Pontecorvo. This was, after-all, the age of Vietnam, Watergate, various civil rights and gender movements, and the many nefarious government projects designed to squelch radicals, anti-war protesters and progressives.
The genre remained relatively quiet in the 1980s and early 90s, until the "X Files" TV series sprung to life. Stylistically indebted to Alan Pakula's "All The President's Men" (1976), from which it also borrowed the names of its heroes (Mulder and Scully, their names appearing on a list in Pakula's film), the series posited a world of vast conspiracies and government plots, the common man at the mercy of all manners of ridiculously elaborate schemes. With the tag-line "The Truth is Out There", the series spurred confused audiences through labyrinths of information, inviting them all to discover some elusive "truth" that ensured emancipation.
This trend ended with the boom of the internet, conspiracy thrillers now giving way to "conspiracy documentaries", which proliferated on the web and peer-to-peer networks. The internet generation lapped up such independent documentaries as "Loose Change", "Zeitgeist" and "Fahrenheit 9/11", most of which believed in a "secret order", a cabal of figureheads who conspire to reduce human rights and enslave the world. These works struggled to create a mono-myth, neurotically linking various conspiracies and hidden agendas into a single, all encompassing narrative that explains the purpose and point and future of every damn thing.
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. In this way, the "conspiracy thriller" is perhaps ultimately rooted in man's desire for order and control.
With conspiracies hot news again, philosophers/film-buffs like Slavoj Zizek got in on the action. For Zizek, we hurl cynicism towards official institutions ("They do not work!", "They're all corrupt!" etc), yet at the same time routinely believe in the existence of god-like conspiracies (an unseen Other pulling the strings). This apparently contradictory coupling of cynicism and belief, Zizek says, "is strictly related to the demise of the Big Other", which is just a fancy way of saying that as man loses faith in God, state, symbolic fathers, and the notion of absolute knowledge, control, competence or law, he begins to believe in "the conspiracy". He constructs the Other of the Other (ie "the conspiracy"), in order to escape the unbearable freedom The Big Other's 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.
Philosophers like Umberto Eco, himself noted for his conspiracy fiction, see the "conspiracy genre" in a similar way. For Eco, desiring control in a wayward universe, man by necessity creates a kind of paternal babysitter (be it God, a formula, a theory, an explanation etc) who provides, not so much meaning, as a reference point and so symbolic order. The conspiracy provides reassurances to the believer. It's a "lifestyle choice", akin to religion, in which our place in the world is no longer dependent upon sheer irrationality.
For historians and economists, "conspiracy" is something more prosaic. Capitalism creates monopolies, pockets of power and so inevitably groups who share similar (business) interests and goals, which are usually against the interests of the working class. "Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to control the public mind," Noam Chomsky once wrote. "People of shared trade meet together and conspire against the public," Adam Smith similarly said, and conversely, from William Blum: "The de facto censorship which leaves so many historically ignorant may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into our social fabric."
So for these guys, 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 that they are incorrect in individualising and personalising processes that are socio-economic and systemic, an approach which implies that it is just a question of personal morality rather than social structures.
Some modern "conspiracy thrillers" ("Eyes Wide Shut", "Existenz" etc) acknowledge this, with their untangleable webs of lies, accidents, truths and half truths, their nothing-ever-quite-adding-up narratives, their amorphous reality/fantasy/desire/real/hyper-real landscapes, all demarcations blurred, without any identifiable ground zero, but such films are rare.
Outside of Kubrick, few directors were as obsessed with conspiracies as Alan Pakula. Of all his conspiracy thrillers, though, "All The President's Men" is arguably the best. Yes, the film mostly fails as history, reducing a complex issue down to a simple David (newsreporters) vs Goliath (the government) tale, but never before had a film juggled information in quite this way. This is an epic procedural (foreshadowing films like "Zodiac" and "JFK"), less concerned about its characters than in swamping its audience with papers, names, facts and figures. Like our on screen heroes, we the audience are then invited to cutlass our way toward the truth. And while the film overstates the importance of its Washington Post reporters (Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, both effortlessly cool), who stumble upon President Nixon's attempts to bully and spy upon his political opponents, it conveys well the sheer incompetence of political figureheads, and the messy ways their "conspiracies" often take form.
8.5/10 - Ahead of its time, but also quite quaint now, in light of the US' many contemporary illegal, full-spectrum, global surveillance projects (PRISM, MUSCULAR, ECHELON etc).