Paranoid Celluloid Part 1: Watching Alan J. Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy”

Our current quarantine has granted me plenty of unasked-for time to fill some movie canon blind spots and revisit old favorites, which is truly one of the few things I’m grateful for right now. Earlier this year I read two books that, together, I now realize informed a lot of my recent viewing choices: Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which details the influential filmmakers that took over 1970s Hollywood, and David Talbot’s damning biography of Allen Dulles and the CIA, The Devil’s Chessboard. I’ve been tearing through 70s “paranoia” thrillers as a result, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1975), Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), and John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), as well as the focus of this entry, Alan J. Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” (1971 - 1976).

This decade of thriller was unsurprisingly defined by the political concerns of the era, and spoke directly to a moviegoing audience that was still reeling from the American invasion of Vietnam and the string of political assassinations throughout the 1960s. Furthermore, the production of these movies dovetailed with the trickling of revelations about clandestine government activities and intelligence agencies’ abuses, namely the publishing of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the Senate Church Committee investigations into the CIA, FBI, and NSA, and of course the Watergate Scandal. They’re characterized by shadowy, voyeuristic camerawork that evokes claustrophobia, themes of alienation and distrust of both institutions and those in one’s community, and plot devices involving the use of modern surveillance technology on everyday people. It feels quite obvious to say “these movies reflected the time period!!” but this span of thrillers really did seem to be dancing with history a lot of the time.

Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy,” an impressive run that consists of Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976), captures this anxious dynamic between everyday people and the “powers that be” from various points of view and degrees of pessimism. I think the formal elements of these films, as well as the means through which they engage with their historical moment, give us a good baseline for understanding what “paranoid” film might be. 

Klute (1971)

When a chemical company executive named Tom Gruneman goes missing and the only potential clue to his disappearance that remains is an obscene unsent letter he wrote to a sex worker, his coworker taps private detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) to investigate. Klute tracks down Bree Daniels, an aspiring actress and intended recipient of Gruneman’s letter, rents an apartment below her and taps her phone. Bree already has a paranoid streak about her and confronts Klute for trailing her, but is unable to identify Gruneman from a photo that Klute shows her - she’s had some rough clients, one of whom beat her badly a couple years prior, but she can’t confirm whether they are the same person. Despite her hesitance in putting her trust in a man, she and Klute develop a romance, and she confides in him that she feels she is being watched. After multiple sex workers turn up murdered, their deaths dismissed as suicides without investigation by the police, Bree is sure she is next. The murderer turns out to be a fellow exec at Gruneman’s company, the same man who hired Klute and who Klute has been reporting to for the entire film.

Of the trilogy, Klute is by far the most personal, and conveys the inseparability between surveillance and one’s body and mind. “Paranoia” is not an ambient milieu, or at least, it’s not just that; to the person in the grips of it, paranoia is a violation. No scene better encapsulates this than the film’s climax: Up until this point, the viewer knows that the man stalking Bree is recording her conversations, listening to tapes of her having sex, intruding on her most intimate moments. It’s not until he traps her and forces her to hear audio of her friend being murdered that her worst fears are confirmed. The tape recorder used throughout the film as a means of capturing Bree piece by piece is then used as a weapon to punish her, revealing paranoia for the psychic obliteration that it is. It also cannot be stressed enough how important the “Prince of Darkness” Gordon Willis’ cinematography is to the emotional weight of the film. He engulfs Bree in darkness as her world closes in around her and these shots have just as much power as any scene he shot in The Godfather.

The Parallax View (1974)

Warren Beatty plays reporter Joe Frady, whose newswoman ex girlfriend, along with six other witnesses to the assassination of a presidential hopeful, are murdered one by one. While investigating one of the murders he comes across documents about the Parallax Corporation, an organization that recruits political assassins. Frady then manages to infiltrate the Parallax Corporation, convincing them that he fits the psychological profile of an assassin, but as he gets deeper into the shadowy organization it eventually becomes clear that he is being set up as a scapegoat for the murder of another senator. The ending is a bleak one: a committee similar to the Warren Commission publishes their report stating that Frady, acting alone, killed the senator out of paranoia and misguided patriotism, and says they hope the verdict will end conspiracy theories about political assassinations.

While generally regarded as the weakest of the trilogy, I was really struck by The Parallax View and what it captures about the exhaustion involved in conspiratorial thinking. The key scene is the six-minute long recruitment video Frady watches when he’s invited to the Human Engineering sector of Parallax - he’s shown an unsettling montage of images, some evoking positivity and Americana and others more violent and disturbing, interspersed with text that reads, “COUNTRY,” “GOD,” “MOTHER,” and more. As the images become cross-associated with different themes, the more the mind makes strange connections between them - these discomforting connections form the bedrock for a conspiratorial mindset. And in his investigation of the agency, the more connections Frady makes, the closer he gets to (what he thinks) is the truth, the less control he really has over his fate.

Commenting on this film’s follow-up, Pakula once remarked that All the President’s Men represents “my hope,” while “The Parallax View represents my fear about what’s going on.” If you get deep into JFK assassination conspiracy theories, you’re likely (and not unreasonable) to think that those in power always win, and you can crawl closer and closer to the “truth” all you want, but even then what you turn up is probably what they’re allowing you to see. The depressing reveal of The Parallax View is not really that, yes, there is a corporation churning out patsies, but that Frady didn’t really have to infiltrate them at all. 

All the President’s Men (1976)

Based on the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men chronicles the two Washington Post reporters’ investigation into the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portray Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, as reluctant partners who discover they challenge each other as journalists. They manage to connect the five burglars in the break-in to corrupt activities around campaign contributions to Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. Woodward’s shadowy source Deep Throat, who repeatedly reminds Woodward to “follow the money,” reveals the break-in and conspiracy around it was not just intended to hide the involvement of CREEP but also to hide “covert operations” involving the “entire U.S. intelligence community,” including the CIA and the FBI. 

All the President’s Men is a classic that arguably created one of my favorite movie genres: people, often reporters, doing a really thorough job at the investigative task at hand for a three-hour runtime. It’s perhaps more of a conspiracy film than a paranoia film, for the characters do seem to have a sense of resolution from untangling the mystery at hand, but still maintains the noir-ish suspicion at every turn, emphasized once again by Willis’ camera work - Deep Throat revealing himself by lighting a cigarette in the shadows of a parking garage is iconic. The sources Bernstein and Woodward speak with repeatedly mention that “they” may be watching, and as the duo returns for follow-up questions, it’s clear from the chilly responses the sources give them that “they” have been there. 

I keep returning to Pakula’s quote about the film reflecting his hope. The end of All the President’s Men is a rush as we watch Bernstein and Woodward typing the full Watergate story, the sound of their typewriter keys clacking over the television in the newsroom, which shows Nixon taking the Oath of Office for his second term. We’re watching history happen before the supposed winners on the tv screen are aware that it will come crashing down on them. However there is an unintended (presumably) undercurrent of irony in this ending that I can’t shake right now. Because the fact of the matter is that Americans would go on to face a plethora of revelations about what their government is capable of, and said government’s reach and powers have only expanded. It seems that barely a week goes where we don’t receive information that should be a Watergate-sized scandal, and yet time goes on. It becomes increasingly difficult to argue that “they” haven’t won.

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I envision this as the first of a multiple-part series on paranoid film. But until then I leave you with the ultimate text on the JFK assassination: