A Theory of Conspiracies: What Paranoid Cinema Tells Us About Ourselves

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

A group of blindfolded men and women received word of something rustling in the woods and brave the dense forest, together, to find it. They come to where the origin of the rustling is within a small clearing of the wood. They move around in a circle, touching various parts of this mysterious entity. They begin to report their descriptions to each other. One man yelled to his compatriots, “Hey, I do believe this is a sasquatch we have happened upon!” Another man yells back in defiance, “No! This is a Man-in-Black attempting to harass and threaten us about unidentified flying objects.” Still, a woman screamed in righteous indignation, “No! NO! NO! this is the second shooter on the grassy knoll!” Each person’s subjective experience of whatever they were describing led to the subsequent development of their various religious cults, each with their distinct rituals, ethical standards, god(s), and tithing percentages. They never were able to move past their differences to recognize what this entity was the whole time. You see, they were mere mortals who couldn’t see past their own experiences.

Get it?

What this parable doesn’t tell you is that someone was watching these blinded people the whole time as they inspected the various parts of this thing in the wood. How else could I have passed this story along to you? The watcher — clearly being of superior sensory abilities, of a completely rational mind, and, according to the unspoken bits of the parable, of higher intelligence than the mere, blinded mortals fondling some entity in the wood — knew what it was the whole time and, yet, let these poor saps go on their merry way without any revelation.

What was the entity rustling in the wood, you ask?

The Government.

It’s always The Government.

Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make

Conspiracies and paranoia crop up in American cinema all the time. It is a significant foundation of the thriller genre, but it finds its way within every film genre from romance to horror to drama. American cinema is fascinated with the unseen, or not readily seen, powers that pull the strings, whether it is Spectre, the MIB division, or simply the deus ex machina of the divine conspiracy. The patterns being drawn speak to a distrust of authority, whether it is your family, your government, or your mind. We are a people perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop.

George Wead phrased the paranoid urge in American cinema as “filmnoia” and broke its parts down into five elements (that appear in varying levels):

“(1) an environment of social or mental chaos — German films of the 1920s were classic instances: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari takes place in a madhouse; in Variety murderous jealousy rages in a high-wire act. At the center of such stories are (2) single-minded, lonely heroes. Isolated from reality, these loners often feel mad or believe they are the only people who are not. They’re in (3) a story involving unheroic defeat or inexplicable death. In filmnoia, heroes don’t fail from lack of virtue but because failure is necessary for the well-being of (4) a dark, impersonal opposition. With furtive and shadowy antagonists at the helm, the protagonists are often (5) refused true catharsis.”

These film elements correlate with a recent academic paper done on the psychology of conspiratorial thinking that breaks it down into three motivational categories, epistemic, existential, and social. The authors break these motivations down by stating:

“Albeit to varying degrees, they are speculative in that they posit actions that are hidden from public scrutiny, complex in that they postulate the coordination of multiple actors, and resistant to falsification in that they postulate that conspirators use stealth and disinformation to cover up their actions…Experiments have shown that compared with baseline conditions, conspiracy belief is heightened when people feel unable to control outcomes and is reduced when their sense of control is affirmed…These findings suggest that conspiracy theories may be recruited defensively, to relieve the self or in-group from a sense of culpability for their disadvantaged position.”

Affirmation, control, and narcissism seem to be at the core of conspiratorial thinking. The person wants their truth to be objective and unfalsifiable. They maintain control of the overarching narrative in which they live and move through any and every piece of fortifying “evidence.” This castle of affirmation and control then breeds a hardened certainty of their intellectual beliefs. What they say is objectively true and if you agree then you are in the collective, if not, then you are part of the plot to hide what is true. Conspiratorial thinking, then, ends in individual and collective narcissism. The objective truth can be known and we are its arbiters. 

Yet, we all fall into these habits to varying degrees. It often does not devolve into a car wreck of insanity, but it ends in having to eat our own words or apologize for a wrong that was done due to a falsity we had previously believed. “Filmnoia,” then, allows viewers into the world of the paranoiac as both a warning and as an act of compassion — forcing us to see a little bit of ourselves, of goodness, in our doomed antihero.

It’s All In Your Head *Wink*

When I ponder modern conspiracy thinking, my mind often goes to Howard and his vat of acid in 10 Cloverfield Lane. The way the film starts is in that truly American style of paranoia where the “authority” in the narrative may not be telling you the truth. It does seem like Howard (played by John Goodman) should not be trusted. If the creepy stares and underground bunker don’t do the trick, then the bullet to the head and the breakdown of the flesh via acid will. Yet as Mary Elizabeth Winstead‘s Michelle navigates her eventual escape from the clutches of Howard, she comes to a paradigm-shifting realization: Howard was right the whole time.

Then my mind flits to 1997’s Conspiracy Theory starring Mel Gibson — whose whole existence is perhaps a little too close to the subject of the whole film — and Julia Roberts. You see, Gibson’s Jerry Fletcher, our paranoid protagonist, was right also; which theory he was right about, however, is the central conflict of the film’s narrative. It’s no surprise then that Patrick Stewart’s mysterious role would be at the center of the correct conspiracy theory. Go figure.

I don’t know what it says about my moral fiber when my mind goes to films where the paranoiac turns out to be right when hearing about and contemplating the newest conspiracy theory of the day — “blah blah blah 5G blah ferocious, man-eating rabbits blah blah Donald Trump.” Yet in my most human moments, I can sympathize with the ease in which the mind can make connections between disparate elements, forming a grand web, hoping that we don’t get caught up in it as well. It’s easy to see how transcendent narratives of “they” and “them” who live in the dark recesses and chambers of the shadows, pulling the strings, can, in their strange ways, be comforting. And it’s no surprise that at the base of these conspiracies there is untold money and power. In a country where money and power are often wielded with abandon to the detriment of whole populations, I again can find sympathy in the perception of powers and principalities that hold sway over the national weather.

And in my most tortured moments, I ask myself: what if they are right?

What if there is something out there that is hellbent on my destruction, on my family’s destruction? What if the hovering aliens are actually outside my door when I finally escape from my basement imprisonment? Or if my life was all a ruse made up through some form of MK Ultra brainwashing technique and those behind it were still tracking me?

Thinking these thoughts with any real veracity is enough to make someone go… mad.

Yet it isn’t that hard to think said thoughts. If someone put the time in, they could do a side by side comparison of how varying news outlets get their insular echo chambers to click on their headlines. Perhaps one of them is true (or the truth is somewhere in the middle), however, the constant barrage of information we are inundated with can wear down those of us with the greatest fortitude. Not to mention, the stories in the historical annals of the CIA and other government departments that were less than transparent in their presentation to the public. Sometimes it’s hard enough to know whether the person next to you is actually trustworthy or just another cog in our version of The Truman Show.

All of this to say, that we are probably all a few shitty days away from losing our bearings on reality and becoming D-Fens in Joel Schumacher‘s Falling Down. 

The Truth Is Out There…

The tricky part of conspiratorial thinking, however, is separating the conspiracy from the truth. JFK was shot whether as a result of a conspiracy weaved in the head of Lee Harvey Oswald, alone, or perhaps a wider web of political intrigue a la Oliver Stone‘s JFK. John Keel’s search for Indrid Cold and the alien conspiracies surrounding Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Roswell, NM, and the like now have a bit more bite to them after the Pentagon released actual videos of unidentified flying objects captured on video by some military pilots.

To this day The Ku Klux Klan gaslights African American citizens by downplaying their pain and suffering throughout American history from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and police brutality. Mike Nichols turned his camera on the story of Karen Silkwood (played by Meryl Streep) in 1983’s Silkwood. She was a nuclear whistleblower at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant who found various violations and evidence of employees being subjected to radiation. Her collection of evidence and the threat of going public ended with her death under seemingly suspicious circumstances. There was enough evidence that the official narrative of Silkwood falling asleep at the wheel is at least problematic if not outright false.

It is fairly easy to look at the recent onslaught of coronavirus conspiracies and the existence of QAnon and be understandably suspicious of the motivations of those who started them and all those who spread these harmful ideas, but what if actual justice demands that webs of intrigue be exposed. That the works of man must come undone. This is where conspiratorial thinking becomes beneficial for society. And in many of the cases told in films about environmental (and, subsequently, human) damage, there is a powerful entity or corporation that is seeking to hide what they’ve done. Everything from the recent Dark Waters to Erin Brockovich to A Civil Action and other films that explore fictional accounts of environmental disasters that have some basis in real-life stories requires us to imbibe our conspiratorial imagination if justice is to be done.

“There’s A Message In The Music”

Yet what separates the narratives that bend toward justice and those that bend toward irrationality and madness? Perhaps a couple of films can help us display the difference: Chinatown and Under The Silver Lake. In Chinatown, Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) narrows in on a conspiracy by L.A. Water and Power to dry up land to buy it at a cheaper price and force residents out of their homes. The twists and turns and reveals leave the audience baffled as to what the actual truth is, but our intrepid private investigator is relentless in his pursuit of that truth.

In Under The Silver Lake, our protagonist, Sam (played by Andrew Garfield), is a slacker living in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, and meets a new tenant to the apartment complex he lives in, the beautiful Sarah (played by Riley Keough). They have a seemingly joyful and magic night as they hang out together and the next morning she is gone. Her apartment is emptied. She has left without a trace. Thus begins Sam’s search for the woman that he may love (but more likely just wants to have sex with) and his search takes him across the various classes and districts of LA, seedy and fantastical alike. Yet when the answer to his mission is solved, he returns to his apartment complex, has sex with his more mature neighbor, and things go on as if the mission never took place.

There is a difference of motivations at the heart of these two characters. Jake — due partially to his chosen work and partially to his relentlessness — seems to be motivated by seeking out the truth for justice. To right a wrong and defend those victimized by the foreboding powers that seek to displace them. Sam, on the other hand, is on a quest. Quests, historically and in literature, find their purposes in an increase of wealth, power, or other selfish, narcissistic, ends. The goal of a quest is self-reverence. To be affirmed and to attain or control something or someone. It is always inward seeking.

If mysteries are so intrinsic to human existence, what gives our attempts at piecing the scraps of the universe together meaning? If we look at the difference between Jake Gittes and Sam, the disparities swell up from the depths. Gittes sees the conspiracy for what it is, an injustice being done, and loses everything in the pursuit of exposing it. Sam uncovers the mystery of his new blonde muse only to return to his normal life, unchanged, exchanging his fantasy of a night with Sarah for his neighbor.

The difference between Jake and Sam? The cost of justice in a skewed, seemingly chaotic world. Gittes pays a price for his snooping. Chinatown devolves into futility as one of his associates tells him, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Sam loses a day or two of meandering the streets and bunkers and quirky neighborhoods of L.A. only to return to his life at the apartment complex to spend the night with one neighbor instead of another. Jake is changed by the conspiracy he edges up against, Sam isn’t ultimately changed in any meaningful way. He remains comfortable in his own echo chamber. The search for truth and meaning connects Jake and Sam, but the intrinsic reasons behind their searches could not be more in opposition.

“What A Piece Of Work Is Man!”

The world we live in is full of conspiracies surrounding a once-in-a-century pandemic, a presidential administration like no other America has seen, the upcoming elections, and the ongoing promises and threats of Anonymous and QAnon. Many of these can be chocked up to humanity choosing to make any connections possible to avoid connecting dots that make them confront the actual truth that may be staring right back at them in daylight. Many of these conspiracies are simply means to affirm what we already believe despite evidence to the contrary.

Yet there are actual ills and wrongs out there that are being intentionally obscured to make profits, to consolidate power, or to watch the world burn. Uncovering these conspiracies is an act of justice, but at a significant cost to those who bear the brunt of the work. This cost is what severs the evil plots of men from the meandering selfishness that saturates humanity.

If “filmnoia” teaches us anything, it is the human inability to process and contend with the unknown, the odd, the seemingly inconsistent, and the chaotic. We are a species driven to find meaning because we have a viscerally negative reaction to what Albert Camus called “absurdity”:

“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world.” — The Myth of Sisyphus

We are uncomfortable with limitations. We are uncomfortable with the inability to make sense of things. It is the long legacy of the Enlightenment bearing down on us from the 1700s. Back when we believed that science and human perception and reason would be able to reveal the dark shadows of the gods and bring about a utopia borne of this newly revealed knowledge. Yet 300 years of history has only shown us that the mystery never ends, it just recedes into the microcosms of molecular particles and expands out into the galaxies of space and potential alternate universes. Humanity is forever chained to the mysteries that follow in the wake of new discoveries.

What are others examples of conspiracy theories in films? How do the characters interact with these theories and what does that say about the character? Let us know in the comments below!