The second film in Alan J. Pakula’s “Paranoid
Trilogy” is the seemingly prophetic political thriller The Parallax View.
This foray into the realm of suspense solidified Pakula as a 70’s auteur. However,
by setting the picture at the intersection of both politics and profit, this
placated the public’s perception of collusive corruption as a form of
catharsis. Plagued by a writer’s strike and a pay-or-play pretentious
Primadonna (Warren Beatty), the script was always in flux. It was Pakula’s
commitment and steady vision that led the film to represent the anomic
transition in the collective consciousness; as our society moved through the
resistance and eventual acceptance/acquiescence to The Civil Rights and social
justice movements of the late 60’s. To that end, this brief paper is an
exploration of the film’s social footprint, acting as a coping strategy for the
political assassinations of the time, while paralleling the warnings of the
film with what has become our reality under the current Trump Administration.
PLOT
After the assassination of an
Independent Senator running for President, Journalist Joesph Frady (Warren
Beatty) gets embroiled in a sinister plot to eliminate the eyewitnesses. As he
continues to dig into these seemingly random and accidental deaths, he
discovers that a shadowy corporation called “Parallax” maybe recruiting and
deploying assassins for the American Government. Frady attempts to infiltrate
the corporation in hopes to thwart their next attack without realizing he’s
already been selected to be their next scapegoat.
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT
The
historical relevance of The Parallax View cannot be overstated. Like
Pakula’s Previous film, Klute, it too represents the 1970’s.
Still a decade of transition, Pakula’s sophomore film in his “Paranoid Trilogy”
focuses on the catalyst for those transitions, and the resistance to the
positive social changes that they heralded. Here, Pakula uses film as an
interrogation tool to understand the very real historical events of the
political assassinations of the 1960’s and the disbelief/disappointment people
felt with the Warren Commission’s investigation into the JFK
assassination; particularly their conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Because the public believed this to be impossible, conspiracy theories were created
around it.
Director
Alex Cox, in a 2020 interview with the Criterion Collection, articulates that
at the time, a political assassination was so unbelievable that the public
could not fathom that it was the work of just one man (Criterion Collection,
2020). Thus, political films of the early 1970’s became about exploring the
collective trauma of these events and their relief through catharsis. However, the
longevity of film and its ability to shape the cultural zeitgeist have the
unexpected impact of validating conspiracies. People remember films far more than
historical events,
especially if they did not personally witness them.
Film:
A Historically Cathartic Coping Strategy
Coined
by Robert K. Merton (1948), the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” means a belief or expectation,
correct or incorrect, that could bring about a desired or expected outcome.
This would later be expanded into W.I. Thomas’s (1928) theorem of social (self)
construction. The Theorem states that “what is defined as real is real in its
consequences”. By this, it does not matter that the conspiracies surrounding
the Kennedy Assassination, and other government cover-ups, are factually
incorrect or downright erroneous. What’s important is that people believe in
them and then act and interact from that belief with other individuals and
social institutions. Claims may be false, but it does not make them any less
real, and therefore, just as consequential to the public’s understanding of the
world. This is further obfuscated by the lack of legitimacy of film and popular
culture as a source of knowledge.
Film
is a subset of the larger media social institution, whose goal through the
process of socialization is to show us what has value in a society, and provide
passive knowledge production. The media shapes our understanding of ideological
concepts like masculinity, femininity, honor, love, and youthfulness. It
presents the viewer with what the collective dominant culture considers
“normal” (Kilbourne 2000). It is a sad irony that social institutions and the
public carry an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the soft power of
film and pop culture to shape public perception. It is understandable that the
institutions benefiting from and/or using popular media as such a coercive
weapon against the mass society are also unlikely to acknowledge its power. But
the rampant rejection of this influential mechanism illustrates the depths of
media illiteracy in the US and the complicity of a pliant public. Film is
regularly used as a cathartic coping strategy to help us work through and
understand historical events that at the time seemed irrational. This is often done
by playing into grandiose theories of corruption that helps to make sense of
such an anomic event. However, by using film as a mechanism to process grief,
it inevitably gives legitimacy and longevity to those false theories. This can
become dangerous. If we are using film as coping strategies of collective
catharsis for public trauma, it can have the unwanted result of reinforcing
unfounded assumptions; such is the case with The Parallax View and other
films of the genre in the 1970’s.
David Miller’s Executive Action debuted
on the 10th Anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination; depicting a
fictional conspiratorial account of the event in which various parties in the
US government are involved. To further blur the line, at the end of the film, a
photo collage of 18 material witnesses who died in 3 years after the Kennedy
Assassination is shown. The film then cites a Sunday Times article which
calculated that the likelihood of all those people dying by natural causes was one hundred thousand trillion to
one.
Bugliosi (2007) later debunked this figure by
looking at the Times’ research methods and cited their error:
Robert
M. Musen, vice president and senior actuary at Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company, estimated that the odds of 15 people out of 2,479 in the Warren
Commission index dying within a three-year period, assuming a median age of 40,
would be 98.16 percent, or one out of 1.2. Assuming a median age of 35, the
number would be 57.09 percent, or one out of 1.75 (p 1013-1014)
Yet, the
error and correction are not what is remembered. Under conspiratorial circumstances,
claims are usually far more dramatic and interesting than facts. This, coupled
with the overall broader reach of the film (assuming a wide release), both
geographically and in the public consciousness, results in the narrative
dramatization of events being what people remember. Plus, films are not under
any social obligation for accuracy. In fact, many films have a disclaimer about
their product’s fictitiousness during the end credits. Even journalists who have both an obligation
and integrity to make retractions when dramatic high selling front page stories
are false, do so on the 8th page of the subsequent issue; often in
smaller font. Thus, there is a greater likelihood that conspiracies told
through film have a better chance sticking in the collective consciousness of
the public (and in the cultural zeitgeist of the age) than their retractions. This
conspiratorial collective consciousness is compounded by the subsequent release
of films with a similar premise which adds “evidence” in the mind of the public
as to the legitimacy of those conspiracies. Enter The Parallax View.
Developed from the 1970’s pulp book of the same name, Pakula along with writers David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr., broadened the focus of the book around the murders of witnesses to the Kennedy assassination into a film about order behind the chaos of such an event. By Pakula’s own admission, the film that he wanted to tell was about “a nightmare based on the terror of the time.” (Bobrow 1974). To that end, the opening of the film makes references to both the JFK and RFK assassinations. The film merging the two into an epitomized feeling of collective suffering that was reflective of the public’s attitude. As the film progresses, Pakula replaces uncertainty and fear with complicated conspiracy and rage. He moves the public out of complacency and fuels an era of institutional skepticism, and a rejection of American Exceptionalism that eventually turns prophetic.
Production
The film is an adaptation of Loren Singer’s
novel of the same name.[1] An unfolding mystery
without established bearings. The reader is dropped into the story in the
middle of the action without set-up or explanation, which would be fine if
exposition happened somewhere between the pages. The plot is rushed, scenes are
truncated, and the characters are as thin as paper. Thus, the work really began at the script
level to transform this dime store noir-adjacent source material into a coherent
film. Thankfully, Pakula never read the novel, only the first draft of the adapted
script by Robert Towne. This caused little of the novel to end up in the finished
film besides lingering disconnected threads. For context, a scene with Frady
and a Sherrif is pulled directly from the opening of Singer’s text. However, Pakula
places this scene a third of the way through the picture, after we have
established who characters are. This transforms the scene from an established
opening, into the film’s fulcrum, when the truth of the conspiracy is verified
and the plot deepens.
By
all accounts, the making of The Parallax View was chaotic. At the time
of Principal Photography in April 1973, Hollywood was already in the midst of a
massive Writer’s Strike that would eventually last 111 days. Meanwhile, Warren
Beatty prior to the strike, had negotiated a “Pay or Play” contract for the
film. This meant that if production did not use Beatty for the film (allow him
to “play”) they would have to buy him out of his contract (to “pay” him)
usually for more than his agreed upon salary. This also meant that the film had
a hard start date based on Beatty’s availability. Because of these initial
constraints, the shooting schedule started without a finished script (Towne’s
draft still needed reworking), no writers, and an actor that was disappointed
that the studio called his bluff (i.e. kept him under contract).
Colorist
and Cinematographer John Borrstin, who was an intern on Parallax under
DP Gordon Willis, confirmed the chaotic spirit of the shoot. He described a set
where new script pages were coming in everyday as Pakula and producers took
over rewriting duties. In this anarchic atmosphere, Pakula told Willis that
they would “find the film in the edit” and that he “needed a movie with a rubber
backbone” because Pakula wasn’t sure what he would be able to shoot on what day
(Criterion 2021). Borrstin remembers being “field promoted” to colorist because
Willis was operating with such a skeleton crew. Willis would go on to express
frustration at this process, particularly with Pakula whom he described as a
“Dump Truck” director. Willis fumed over Pakula requesting a variety of
different shot, angle and lens choices that would allow the film to be created
in the editing room. He complained that Pakula didn’t even know what the ending
of the film was until the day they shot it (Criterion 2004). Willis, on the
other hand, believed in a greater level of design to his pictures. He understood
the role of an editor as a refiner of the cinematographer’s vision, rather than
its creator. Therefore, as the film’s photographer, he had to be the guardrails
of the picture.
As
that guardrail, Willis shaped the film’s style with two unique choices. He
would shoot the film in 2:09 anamorphic widescreen and use jump cuts to further
the story forward. At the time, anamorphic widescreen was typically reserved
for the western genre given the wide angle and distance it provides the image.
Perfect for photographing the landscape of the west, but not usually the first
choice when shooting a political thriller. Willis, leaning into Pakula’s desire
to have the film be a catharsis for the political assassinations of the 1960’s,
drew upon the surveillance theme and used that anamorphic widescreen to give
the audience a feeling of voyeurism. In the assassination scenes, the camera is
always at a distance or there is a barrier between the camera and what the
audience should be looking at. We view the first public murder obfuscated
through a pane of glass and witness the aftermath of the final shooting from
the rafters, often holding these wide shots, forcing us to live in the wake of
violence. Willis’s use of the jump cut gives a frenetic pace to the film that
doubles as the film continues. Yet, by repeating the same lenses and the same
distance for the close-up, right before the cut, it allowed Willis to
manufacture some kind of continuity in the film’s visual language.
SOCIAL
ANALYSIS
“Parallax…refers to
the changes in an objects apparent position depending on where you stand”
(Heller
2021:5)
The idea of “parallax” has deep roots in the
sociological perspective. As a definition, the sociological perspective is a
parallax to the general reality in which most people are socialized. It trains
us to look outside of our own personal biographies to understand the
interconnectedness of individuals, organizations, institutions and nations (Mills
1959). Thus, seeing the world from a sociological perspective is in-and-of-itself
a consistent parallax, because it is a different vantage point on the world
that constantly reshapes your opinion of it. The Sociological lens creates a
fractal in one’s perception of reality allowing to see an object and behavior
from a variety of parallaxes. It is a view that often cannot be taken back and
with its burden of understanding comes a compulsion for social action.
By
his own admission, The
Parallax View is Pakula’s
Baroque Period; attempting to dramatize the absurd contrast of Americana that
we all live within. To that end, the opening shot of the film starts on an
Americanized “totem pole” then pans left to get a view of Seattle’s Space Needle.
He wanted to convey at the outset the contradictory confluence of bizarre
Americana images. The first being the remnants of a conquered people alongside
a massive engineering achievement only made possible because of that indigenous
cultural and structural annihilation. As the film progresses, it presents a
cautionary tale of a world that is marred by constant surveillance, collusion
between corporations, politics, and the courts, along with an aggrieved
entitlement that results in the public consent to violence. Unfortunately, the
dangerous world that the film warns us against, we took as a blueprint. For much of what was cautionary in The Parallax
View is now our lived reality.
The Panopticon, and Surveillance
Capitalism
C. Wright Mills (2000) defines The
Power Elite as:
“…those
political, economic and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping
cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as the
events are decided, the power elite are those that decide them.” (p18)
Part of the
power elite’s manufactured omnipotence through their domination of these (interlocking)
institutions allows for them to fabricate a performative omniscience through
the creation and control of the surveillance state and the eventual profiting
from it (Zuboff 2019).
The Panopticon, a form of prison
construction created by Jeremy Benthem inspired French Philosopher Michel
Foucault (1977) to use Benthem’s diagram as an extended metaphor for the consistent
overwatch of the bureaucratic elite on the general populace. These Millsian
elites have a monopoly on three interlocking modes of power:
·
Sovereign
Power- (Framed
through a Monarchic Lens) typical CEO Top-down Structure, Executive Branch.
This is the power of the economy and those in financial circles
·
Disciplinary
Power – Power of
Institutions (Prisons, Governments, Schools) The organization of individuals in
a time and place. These are the sources of political and military elite’s power
through a bureaucratic organization
·
Bio-Power- The Power to Control
populations lived experiences
The most
impactful mode of Power for Foucault (1977) is Bio Power. Defined as the
ability to control how another person experiences their body; through both how
their body functions and how their body is allowed to be represented. The
result of this power is the subjugation and domination of the public. Society
becomes one of surveillance rather than spectacle, and that surveillance is
normalized (Foucault 1977). We are not surprised to see representations of the
State woven into our daily lives. Empty police cars on freeway onramps give the
image of roving police patrols. Blacked out domes in ceilings of stores and
government buildings give the perception of endless observation. Yet, it is the
possibility of observation that becomes the exercise in power that is the most
effective, generated not from the State mechanism themselves but preemptively
from the populace to regulate each other. Disciplined masses in this way no longer need control
to achieve obedience. They are manufactured docile bodies that have
internalized a feeling of learned helplessness often through the mechanism of
socialization and previous experiences with the carceral state. Thus, the power
of these elites, and the realms that they control, often go unchallenged due to
their normalization and general ubiquity. This diffusion of the discipline
power of the elites extends into the digital space.
The Disciplined Society created by
the elite’s control over the three interlocking modes of power allows for
societal surveillance to be monetized and made electronically ethereal through
its extension into the internet and social media. Surveillance capitalism is a
profit-driven incentive for the collection and monetization of personal
information. The collection of this “metadata” is then sold to other companies
that use the data they have purchased to advertise their own products and
services to internet and social media users. In this exchange, people and the
information about them are the products. Yet, According to Zuboff (2019) this
has wider implications than just an increase in profit.
Surveillance
Capitalism has four major components:
- The drive toward compounding
data extraction and analysis.
- The development of new
contractual forms using computer monitoring and automation.
- The desire to personalize and
customize the services offered to users of digital platforms.
- The use of the technological
infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and
consumers.
Based on
this, not only are these corporations profiting exponentially through the selling
and use of private digital information but also seek a disciplining of the
digital space that mirrors Foucault’s coercive panopticon. Unfortunately, the sovereign,
disciplinary and biological power of either Surveillance Capitalism or the
panopticon are not mutually exclusive, but instead dangerously tethered
together.
Surveillance Capitalism and the
panopticon work in tandem. The panopticon is the structured framework that
Surveillance Capitalism works within. While it may be a little reductive to
think about the panopticon being the hardware and Surveillance Capitalism being
the software of this integrated mechanism of multi-variant systems of power,
this image does well to illustrate the way in which this partnership exists.
The existence of penopticonic control is represented by tangible objects (such
as Flock Safety surveillance cameras) they are the
physical manifestation of the sovereign, disciplinary and biological forms of
power. The cameras are placed there by security companies (Sovereign Power)
that have a contract with the company or the government (Disciplinary power)
that are used to control how the people captured on those cameras interact and
experience their bodies (Bio power). Simultaneously, these cameras collect
information that is then sent to contracted agencies like local police with the
ability to be accessed by other state agencies with little regulation.[2] This creates a reality in
which surveillance is both tangible and intangible, that we are beset by the
mechanisms of observational dominance and yet oblivious to what information is
captured, how it is used and who has access to it. Similarly, The Parallax
View dramatizes the collusion of the Panopticon and Surveillance Capitalism
through the film’s opening and closing sequence and the Parallax corporation’s
initial written recruitment process.
Pakula
bookends The Parallax View with a declaration from Judicial
representations of Disciplinary power. Just after we witness the assassination
of Independent Senator Joe Carrol, Pakula shows us a wide shot of a six Judge
Panel (meant to invoke the Warren Commission’s conclusion in their
investigation into the Assassination of Jon F. Kennedy) as the camera slow zooms
in. During this push-in, as the opening credits begin, we hear a single voice (presumably
the Chief Justice) that definitively declares that the murder of Joe Carrol was
the work of one person who acted alone with no evidence of a wider conspiracy. We
are told that the findings will be made to the public, and the commission is confident
that the public will come to the same conclusion once they read the report, but
the panel considers this matter closed. As his statement ends, we get the
film’s title card. This opening is then mirrored and repeated with the closing
credits. At the end of the film, as we’ve just born witness to Frady’s fate, we
then cut back to the same commission. This time, they are giving a report about
the second assassination and Frady’s supposed involvement. Pakula reverses the
shot into a pull back from a close-up shot of the commission as the end credits
begin. We hear the same justification as we did in the beginning, this time using
Frady as the scapegoat. Yet, the contradiction between what is being said and
the film we just watched confirms, as the audience suspected in the beginning, that
this was a coverup, and a clear exercise in disciplinary power.
Given that The Parallax View was produced and released between 1973-1974, there is no direct example or representation of Surveillance Capitalism as defined. Yet, like consumers under Surveillance Capitalism, people are the products for The Parallax corporation; who are creating and selling assassins. Like the collection of metadata to then be sold to other companies and alphabet organizations by Surveillance Capitalism, The Parallax Corporation in the film uses a series of personality tests as recruitment tools. Behind the scenes, John Boorstin created the corporation’s personality tests based on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory; the most widely used psychometric test for assessing psychological traits and psychopathology to this day. These psychological profiles parallel the kinds of information gleaned by advertisers through an analysis of someone’s metadata. But instead of constructing a psychological profile to better sell products and maintain coercive control, The Parallax Corporation is looking for personality traits that could create an assassin or be used as justification for their false condemnation. This is not to suggest such a vilification is purely fictional, as people’s personal data including search histories, pictures, purchases and social media posts have been used by members of the criminal justice system (prosecutors and defense attorneys) to proselytize for the denunciation or absolution of their clients in the eyes of the public.
From Parallax to Palantir
In 1964, prior to the Watergate Scandal and the rash
of Political assassinations, two thirds of Americans believed that the
Government was run for the benefit of all people (Reich 2020). The period of political shocks soon after, caused a precipitous decline in
that belief; only rising during the Regan administration and again in the years
just after 9/11. By 2013, 70% of people believed the opposite (Reich 2020). By 2025, that number was close to
80% regardless of Party affiliation.
Pakula’s ‘Paranoid Trilogy’ along with films like Coppola’s The Conversation,
The Day of the Jackel and Marathon Man not only were therapeutic
in understanding those period-political shocks but were strategically placed to
be warnings for what life could be if we didn’t learn from such events. Much of
what The Parallax View shows us is more relevant and timely than Pakula
could have predicted. Much of the collusive actions and clandestine behavior engaged
by The Parallax Corporation in the film are understood mechanisms of the way
that governments and corporations operate together, presently. One such
mechanism is Disaster Capitalism.
Coined by Naomi Klien (2008), Disaster
Capitalism is the practice (by a government, corporation or regime, etc.)
of taking advantage of a major disaster by adopting social and
economic policies (with the purposes of enriching elites) that the population
would be less likely to accept under “normal” circumstances. The government, or
other private organizations exploit the “shock” of a natural disaster and prey
upon the public’s disorientation by pushing through “pro corporate measures (what
Klein calls “Shock therapy”) often under the guise of protectionism (Klien 2008).
This process is quite easy to follow:
·
Govt
and/or Corporations wait for a Crisis to happen (or help to manufacture one)
·
Declare
a moment of “extraordinary politics” and suspend partial or complete democratic
norms
·
Develop
or pass a piece of legislation that rams through the corporate wish list.
(usually in the form of deregulation)
We
have Seen this process in action through a variety of different “Shocks”
·
From
the shock of 9/11, we got The Patriot Act and the Iraq War
·
From
the shock of Hurricane Katrina, we get the corporate restructuring of New
Orleans
·
From
the shock of an influx of Non-white Immigration, we get the increase in I.C.E
funding to engage in mass deportations
Because Disaster
Capitalism and the Shock Doctrine have become standardized, and some might say
“best practices” or “good business” among the corporate and political
institutions; it is easy to see how The Parallax Corporation can be seen as a
precursor to such tech “broligarchs” as Peter Theil with Palantir and Elon Musk
with Starlink.
As I
explain in a previous Essay (2026):
Palantir-
By far the most famous of the ‘Rings’ inspired broligarch tech companies. The
name “Palantir” is a reference to the all-seeing stones of Sauron the Dark
Lord. One of which corrupted the Saruman the White. Created by Peter Theil and
apt to its namesake, the company’s focus is on data harvesting and
surveillance. With its contracts, it
allows governments, militaries and corporations to combine and analyze data
from multiple sources using AI software.
It has been tied
to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as DHS,
ICE, and CBP agencies domestically
Musk
further put his thumb on the scale of war with his Starlink system when in
Sept 2022, as Ukraine began to gain ground in its defensive war with Russia, Musk
shut down his Starlink system in the areas where the Ukrainian forces were
using it for communication and coordination. The blackout stopped the advance
of the army and hindered the reclamation of the land from Russia. Theil and
Musk are private citizens that are exacting their will on State Affairs; just
to exercise their power.
While The Parallax Corporation is a precursor to the “tech bro” fascists that we seem to be inundated with in both corporations and politics, there is a key difference that needs to be acknowledged. In The Parallax View, Pakula, drawing upon the historical shock of the political assassinations of the 1960’s, assumed that a crisis had to happen for the exploitation of Disaster Capitalism and “Shock Therapy” to be able to be implemented. That, outside of the shock, the public would not be pliable enough to agree to greater restrictions, self-regulation, and the deregulation of corporate behaviors. In the 50 years since, we have learned that the actual event is less important than the belief in one. Our government and corporations have learned that if we can just give people the feeling of shock; that the disorientation and fear that is produced, regardless of whether it’s accurate or justified, can produce the same level of acquiescence in the public. Therefore, “shocks” don’t have to have a physical manifestation anymore. These fears can constantly exist in the minds of the populace, contributing to a culture that maintains collective compliance (Glassner 2018).
The Manufacturing of Public Consent
to Violence
Manufacturing
Consent is a term used by Edward Herman to identify the way in which major
media conglomerates shape public perception resulting in an increase in
corporate profits and the overall pacification of the populace. Manufacturing Consent/Desire is a
mechanism of the powerful; to control the non-powerful. However, this only
happens after the people relinquish their power to those in higher status
positions (usually through a democratic process, at first).
According to Chomsky and Herman (2002):
There
are two ways that you get people to relinquish their power:
·
Fear: We are living in a tremendous
culture of fear that puts us in a constant state of unrest. Because of this we
will freely give up our civil liberties to feel safe again.
·
Convenience:
If it means that
we can have an easier time day to day, have our needs and desires satiated
faster than before, we are willing to give up our privacy, autonomy and agency.
When people are lulled into a state of complacency by “the shiny new things” or
easier access to forms of entertainment ,
this consumerism becomes a road to social and political apathy.
A lot of
this is fueled by the media’s use of The Propaganda Model.
The Propaganda model has 5 key filters:
· Size, Ownership and Profit Orientation- There are only 6 companies that make up over 93% of all media in the United States (Disney, Comcast, WB-Discovery, Paramount, Sony and Amazon) Many of these monopolies have become “access
· Advertising: License to do business- “Manufacture Desire”. It is through advertising that we are sold the aforementioned large quantities of meaningless goods and services through Consumeristic Philanthropy which inevitably leads to Commodification, Commodity Fetishism, and Consumer Engineering/Planned Obsolescence in which our identities get wrapped up in the products that we buy as an expression of our (so called) uniqueness.
· Sourcing Mass Media News- Major media conglomerates have special access to news and the government. Political Administrations can decide which news organizations are more reputable. Decrying others (that do not side with the administration) as Fake News This led to the coining of the term “Alternative Facts”.
This
is a practice is usually coupled with “Gaslighting” and Dog Whistling tactics
· Flak and Enforces- This is the use of lawsuits and other bureaucratic means to silence unwanted or unpopular opinions to maintain social control of the populace. The fear of getting wrapped up in the exploitative and labyrinthian criminal justice system paralyzes resisters and protestors into both silence and compliance
· Anti-Communism/War on Terror/ Israel-Gaza-Iran This is a major social control mechanism. This is when ideological forces are deployed to support powerful investments based upon socio-cultural beliefs. There is a normalization of institutional support for specific domestic and foreign policies by entangling support for these (often) discriminatory and dangerous policies/actions with a sense of pride and nationalism.
The
Parallax Corporation deploys this model perfectly. Based on what we’ve seen in
the film, the company known as Parallax offers a variety of different services.
We are never really told what industry The Parallax Corporation is in because
it is seemingly in everything (Size Ownership and Property Orientation).
Through its advertising, it manufactures the consent and desire for political
assassination. It isn’t brainwashing, exactly. It’s more so identifying which individuals
would have the capacity for political violence and then foster those ideas
(Advertising- License to do Business). The Parallax Corporation is also in the business
of controlling the narrative of the commissions results after each
assassination (Sourcing Mass Media News) while going to bureaucratic and
homicidal lengths to dissuade any form of disruption of these behaviors from
outside forces (Flak and Enforcers). In the end, their entire corporate
structure is a social control mechanism to shape the political sphere for their
own gain.
Dreams Deferred: Masculinity,
Aggrieved Entitlement and the Parallax Test Sequence
A common intersectional understanding
of the white supremacist capitalist heterosexist ableist patriarchy is that it
harms everyone (hooks 2000). Regardless of the barriers or avenues that you
experience that shaped your ability to access resources through various amounts
of symbolic (demographic legitimation), economic (Wealth), Institutional
(Bureaucratic) Social (relationships) and Cultural (Experiences) power- the
mere existence in such a system hurts us all; even among the ones with the most
access, and the most opportunities; because they are the ones that have been
duped the deepest. To be clear, this harm does not in any way compare to the levels
of vitriolic dehumanization and violence experienced by those that have been
‘othered” by this system. But it is still not without pain. Those with greater
access to resources and opportunities, predominantly middle class heterosexual able-bodied
white men, were promised a Dream, “The American Dream”, and all they had to do
was “follow the rules.” And now, for a few generations of white men, those
dreams have been deferred.
For Generations,
Middle Class White Men were told:
· Go to school, get good grades, and a job will be waiting for you (after college).
· Be respectful to people, be honorable and you will always find a romantic partner.
· Mind your business, stay out of trouble, be frugal, and you’ll be able to buy a house and provide for your family
· Pay off debt, make good financial decisions and you’ll be able to retire with at least a third of your life left
Such men did not take these promises as what they were, the carrot of social control and conformity. They understood it as a binding social contract. Unfortunately, when this contract was rescinded, their own anger over its loss was eventually weaponized against them and others through aggrieved entitlement.
Aggrieved Entitlement is the sense
that those benefits to which you believe that you are entitled have been
snatched away from you by unseen social forces that are larger and more
powerful (Kimmel 2013). Because these rewards promised to these individuals
were heavily tied to their sense of heterosexual gender identity, the pain of
aggrieved entitlement is one of emasculation (Vito Admire and Hughes 2017). Unfortunately,
the type of masculinity that is eradicated through the denial of (the American)
dream can only be regained through the toxic practices of alcohol consumption, sexual
objectification of women and violence. Thus, men’s rage is then weaponized by
providing these “Angry White Men” with scapegoats for their bitter maliciousness
instead of their actual culprits. So, these men are told to blame Feminism and
Racial Justice, Immigrants and trans kids, women, the poor and indigent, progressive
politics and the idea of inclusivity, rather than the system itself. This is because
it is easier and psychologically more satisfying to construct a villain as the
source of your problems, rather than acknowledge the reality that you were bamboozled;
that the “dream” you spent your life chasing… was a mirage.
“They call it:
“The American Dream” because you got to be asleep to believe it.”
George
Carlin
In The Parallax View, The
Parallax Corporation’s visual personality test plays on this sense of aggrieved
entitlement and weaponizes white male rage. About an hour into the film, Frady
is brought to the offices of The Parallax Corporation to take part in an audio-visual
personality test. Pakula keeps the shot wide as Frady enters the room. A
distant disembodied voice instructs him to sit in the chair, get comfortable,
place his hands on the box on either side of the chair, to sit back and observe
the visual materials. The film then cuts to black and as the test begins, the
shot fills the screen (as if the audience is taking the test) and the sequence
of images goes on, unbroken for 4 and ½ minutes. Interspersed between the images
shown are a series of title cards, that repeat throughout, in seemingly random
order. They are LOVE, MOTHER, FATHER, ME, HOME, COUNTRY, GOD, ENEMY and
HAPPINESS. After each title card the test shows an image that we are assumed to
associate with the title card just before. So, the image after LOVE we are to
associate with Love etc. As the test begins, the title cards and their
corresponding images seem to be idyllically framed to the myth of “The American
Dream”; images that invoke relationships, marriage, children, and wealth and
status. But as the Title cards continue, the images that follow become
increasingly perverse, disturbing, and contradictory. The images often highlight
a passing on what was promised, a fostering of aggrieved entitlement and anger for
what was reneged. These title cards and images continue to be cycled through faster
and faster, further blurring the line between the idealism of America’s Ideal
values: what we say we believe in (relationships, parenthood, Religion, nationalism)
into our Real values: the values that we live by (wealth, luxury, alcohol, sex,
violence, racism, misogyny, and homophobia). As the images continue to flash
quicker, an image of Marvel Comic’s Thor is inserted to evoke a sense of
heroism in the viewer as the rest of the images are complicating who enemies
are, and what happiness looks like. The test concludes with instructions to
proceed to their offices, and we see Frady walk out. Through this sequence, Pakula, unbeknownst to
himself (and others) at the time, approximated the experience of scrolling
through social media 30-40 years before it was created.
Now, in 2026, we take the Parallax
Personality Test, daily. Our interactions with these digital applications are
monitored, controlled, siloed, collated and compiled. The information is then
sold to corporations and shapes our public consciousness. This is illustrated in
the way that the “manosphere” was integral in
shaping the image of Donald Trump
as the Prime masculine candidate in the minds of young white male voters in
2024. Through his appearances on programs
like “The Joe Rogan Experience” and Theo Vaughn’s Podcast, Trump was able to
tap into the aggrieved entitlement of young men. He validated their (unfounded)
concerns about Black Liberation, their (unsubstantiated) claims about the
dangers of Feminism, while also reinforcing traditional values, anti-
intellectualism, and quelling their sexual anxiety against women (Stanley 2018).
Thus, we exist in a perpetual Parallax personality test that has weaponized us
into fascism.
‘Parallax’ Parallels with the US
during the Trump Era
Under
the rule of Trump’s second term, we are living the cautionary tale dramatized
in The Parallax View. When Trump took office in January of 2025, he set
a list of executive orders that upon comparison with the film, transformed a cautionary
tale into a disturbing reality. Not only did he begin to solidify more
traditional values through executive orders around gender, sexuality and anti-trans
rights. He also implemented NSPM-7 (National Security
Presidential Memorandum) 7.
This is a refocused directive for all State Agencies to define Anti-Fascism as
a domestic terrorist threat, and that:
“Common threads
animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and
anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government;
extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold
traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
This memorandum
is ignoring the DHS’s own findings that the greatest terror threat, in and
to the United States is, in fact, White Nationalism. Instead, it is inverting the
claim of anti-Fascism as its opposite without some institutional
self-reflection, that if you are against “Anti-Fascism” you are positioning
yourself as favoring fascism.
Similarly to The Parallax View, the
second Trump administration views active shooters, or political violence
against the political left as “lone wolf scapegoats”. They only become
conspiratorial when it is against the political right, haphazardly attempting
to connect them to a larger collective threat. This is typically done through
the manufacturing of consent through the media and shaping the narrative to
their political ends. One example being the way that FBI director Kash Patel
released information direct to social media while the
investigation was ongoing into a planned attack at a UFC event. He also openly shared on social media the language
that was written on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s shooter in September 2025 incorrectly
concluding that they were antagonistic to the political right. Instead, the language on the casings speaks to
an online video game subculture
that seems to be more aligned with nihilism that anti-MAGA.
As I
mentioned in a Previous essay (2025)
Still, the Trump Administration
politically weaponized Kirk’s assassination during their Rally-style memorial
service, and further, used it to justify the declaration of Antifa as a
Domestic Terror organization, the passage of NSPM-7, and the crackdown on Free
Speech. Thus, the murder of Kirk became a justification for more
authoritarian-like policies from the Trump administration.
Additionally, Trump’s engagement of Stochastic Terrorism on January 6th 2021, prior to the capital attack, of which he was absolved through the Supreme Court decision in 2024, illustrates that we are living in a “Parallax future”. Where the Supreme Court, through “The Shadow Docket” (like the commission in the film) makes a ruling without ever hearing a case. A reliance on which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson believes “risks an “enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect”. A mechanism that, perchance, could be used to cover up corporate espionage into carrying out political assassinations as depicted in the film.
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CONCLUSION
Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View seems timely,
because like the 1970’s, we are currently living through a transition point in
our history. Our everyday sense of ennui is fueled by a feeling of anomic
uncertainty due to the systematic annihilation of our social institutions. This
is happening first in the public’s confidence in said institutions, then
through the defunding of those institutions, and eventually through the removal
and replacement of those institutions by privatized companies (like the fictional
Parallax Corporation). Unfortunately, these actions are not done through clandestine
means as indicated in the film but performed broadly with open declarations by
an authoritarian executive. In looking at where we are now, from where The
Parallax View predicted, clearly Pakula didn’t go far enough.
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[1]
Not to be confused with the self-defined magnum opus of Philosopher Slavoj
Zizek
[2]
This power has nefariously used by bad actors in these local and state agencies
to stalk and assault current and former partners
