Alan J. Pakula was a versatile
writer, producer and director of cinema of the 1970’s through the 1990’s.
Unfortunately, like his fellow overshadowed contemporary,
John Sayles,
Pakula was eclipsed by the light of the New Hollywood golden children of Lucas,
Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg in the public consciousness. Adept at many
genres, Pakula made a name for himself with the suspenseful political thriller.
While his work may not have coined the term, it certainly redefined it. Three of
Pakula’s films emphasize this genre mastery: Klute, The Parallax View, and
All the President’s Men. These three films loosely encompass what has
been deemed Pakula’s “Paranoid Trilogy” and it is the next focus of the blog’s
continuous director deep-dives.
BRIEF BACKGROUND
Born in 1928 in the Bronx, Pakula, a life-long New
Yorker, eventually studied drama at Yale (graduating in 1948) before moving to
Hollywood, using his father’s contacts at the Warner Bros. cartoon department to
get into the industry. He got his first break as an assistant to Don Hartman at
Paramount, while simultaneously producing plays for the New York Stage. This
eventually led to forming a Production company with director Robert Mulligan
aptly named Pakula-Mulligan Productions.
The first big hit of this
partnership was the stage version and eventual film adaptation of Harper Lee’s
classic American Novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. This producing and
directing partnership, from this collaboration alone, garnered multiple academy
award nominations and three wins: one for each of the pair. This lucrative
partnership would last through the 1960’s, with Pakula first stepping behind
the camera to direct Liza Minelli in The Sterile Cuckoo.
Pakula made a name for himself among actors, earning
their respect and the coveted title of “an actor’s director.” Throughout his
career he directed 8 Academy Award Nominated performances, three of them
winning Oscar Gold, with two of those wins coming from “The Paranoid Trilogy”
itself (Jane Fonda for Klute, and Jason Robards in All the
President’s Men). Pakula was one of the directors that believed that
casting was one of the most important jobs, indicating that if you cast the
film correctly, you do not have to worry about the actor’s performance. This
might be one of the reasons that even outside of the acclaimed ‘trilogy’, actors
flocked to his films for the trust and faith he had in them, especially for the
way he was able to direct female actors.
Even though he only directed 16 films across
three decades, because of affinity for the craft and professionalism of acting,
he was able to secure several A-list actors. This had a differing effect
depending on where the actor was in their career. This “Pakula bump” made up-and-coming
actors a household name (Fonda in Klute), made established actors’ leaders
in the field (Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent and Denzel Washington
in The Pelican Brief) or reminded the public of older actor’s greatness
(Robards in All the President’s Men).
On November 19th, 1998,
while driving on the Long Island Expressway, a car in front of Pakula clipped a
metal pole in the road sending it through the windshield of his car. The pipe
struck Pakula in the head causing him to swerve into a fence. He was later
pronounced dead at North Shore University Hospital. Several tragic ironies surround Pakula’s
death. The first and most obvious being the loss of Pakula as an artist. A year
prior, in 1997, he proved that he still had the clout and cinematic gravitas to
construct his signature political thriller with The Devils Own, starring
Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. According
to his estate, at the time of his death he was working on drafting the film adaptation
of “No Ordinary Time”, a book on Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was out scouting
locations at the time of the accident. Secondly, the irrational accident that
caused his death, paralleled a lot of the “accidental” cover-up deaths depicted
in his films. Thus, the cinematic quality of Pakula’s death resulted in
unfounded speculation as to the intent around its cause. It became a
journalistic cliché to playfully suggest that studio heads or the US government
orchestrated the accident to silence Pakula for what he was secretly exposing.
Regardless of this conspiracy’s repetition in the news sources reporting on the
death, there is no evidence to suggest such a wild hypothesis. Still, the continued
repetition of this myth put it in the cultural zeitgeist and brought more
attention to his films posthumously.
FILMS
OF ‘THE PARANOID TRILOGY’
The films culturally dubbed “The Paranoid
Trilogy” include three films early in Pakula’s career from the 1970’s. While each film was constructed independently,
without the intention of linking the films through the narrative or similar
characters; film historians, critics and cinema scholars have connected these
films together because of their similarity of tone and themes which include the
representation of the 1970’s and the general distrust of the government. This
similarity could also be explained by Pakula himself and the ways that he
approaches the political thriller subgenre. The Films of this “loose trilogy”
of political thrillers are Klute, The Parallax View, and All
the President’s Men.
Klute
(1971)
The
first film in this unofficial trilogy involves a call girl to the wealthy (Jane
Fonda) helping a detective (Donald Sutherland) with a missing person case of
one of her Johns who may have been stalking her. Klute captures the
ambiance and the cultural mood of the 1970’s. Its eerie foreboding is
accentuated by Gordon Willis’s cinematography with grainy shot composition and wide-angle
shots. For as much space is shown in every frame, Pakula and Willis have the
remarkable ability to make each shot feel claustrophobic through editing and tight
cutting. Fonda, originally hesitant to take the role, eventually went on to win
the Academy Award for her portrayal of Bree. Less political than the other
films in this triptych, Klute, like a brilliantly crafted three-course
meal, appetizes.
The
Parallax View (1974)
According
to the description on the Criterion Blu-ray:
“Three Years after
the murder of a leading senator atop Seattle’s Space needle, reporter Joseph Fardy
(Warren Beatty) begins to dig into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the
killing-and stumbles into a labyrinthine conspiracy far more sinister than he
could have imagined.”
Based on
the dime store novel of the same name by Loren Singer, Pakula’s cinematic center
of the trilogy reinforces the political mistrust of the government and the
public’s monopolistic control by shadowy corporations. Their existence, let
alone their operation, filling people with dread.
While
this film was critically reviewed more favorably by established film
journalists than the public at large, the upcoming analysis hopes to recontextualize
the film as we look at it from the vantage point of the last 50 years and under
the current Socio-political context. Perhaps the film has gained more relevance
over the last ½ century.
All
the President’s Men (1976)
The final film in the series is also
the most famous. It garnered the most praise, and collected the greatest number
of nominations, awards, and other accolades. Based on the book of the same name
by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who in 1972, broke the
political scandal that would come to be known as “Watergate”; culminating in
the resignation of then President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.
This film was elevated over the
other films in the trilogy because of its depiction of real-life events, at a
time when the public was still trying to grapple with the reality of it. Before
the book came out, Robert Redford (who would go on to play Bob Woodward in the
adaptation) purchased the film rights to the book and was in active
pre-production when the book was released. Filmed in 75’ and released in 76’ All
the President’s Men traded on the public’s curiosity and insatiable hunger
for information on this historical moment. Because of the timing of the event,
being a part of the public consciousness of the time, and constructing a riveting
drama around those events, the third film in this loose trilogy is often
thought to be a complete standalone film.
THEMES
The title given to Pakula’s trilogy is evocative and
thematically self-explanatory. The “paranoia” in question is historically
specific to the time-period post the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s
in the US. By the 1970’s we started to see the fruits of that labor (particularly
with the creation of Title IX, the Roe v. Wade decision, and The Rehabilitation
Act of 1973). Yet, because the US had fought and struggled for these gains for
nearly three decades, this was a time to make sure that these policies were not
only enacted but enforced. There was an increase in the resistance from the
Government to implementing these changes and a concerted effort by social
institutions to minimize Civil Rights legislation’s effectiveness. This is what
led to the measured skepticism and distrust of the government apparatus during
this time; an emotional collective consciousness that Pakula’s films tap into.
All three films in the trilogy
illustrate the dangers of various mechanisms of government control, feeding conspiracies
in the wake of irrational events and a lack of institutional credibility. Whether
through depictions of surveillance, indoctrination, bribery, or murder, there
was a concerted effort in Pakula’s films for the audience to maintain a justifiable
suspicion of Government agents. To clarify, this was not a concerted effort on
the part of Pakula to shape public opinion, but rather to capture the feeling
of uncertainty and unease that followed these unprecedented historical events.
All three films came out during, or in the immediate wake of the Watergate
investigation and directly after the era of rampant political assassinations
which clearly informed these three thrillers. Conversely, the fundamental
success of these films shaped the way that the 1970’s was perceived both by those
who lived through it, and those that came after. Pakula’s ‘Paranoid Trilogy’
joins films like Coppola’s The Conversation, and Scorsese’s Mean
Streets in shaping the cinematic perception of the 1970’s in the populace; despite
dramatic license and the heightened reality depicted.
These three films ask foundational sociological
questions about institutions and organizational systems. Through this trilogy,
Pakula is interested in the fundamental tension between Agency (free non-coerced
choice) and Structure (the institutional mechanism, usually in the form of a bureaucracy,
with a goal of establishing and maintaining order) that is at the core of
Sociology as a discipline. While some have called this Pakula’s interest in “The Architecture of
Power”, within Sociology, these power dynamics can be understood through
the work of classical theorists like C. Wright Mills and Max Weber.
Weber, and Mills’ work on
institutional structures and the relationships within them are unparalleled. The
following essays on each film will be drawing from Mills’ work on “The Power
Elite” and Weber’s understanding of bureaucracy found in Economy and Society.
These essays will also draw on more contemporary scholars in various areas;
namely, Niklas Luhmann’s work on “Social Systems” and Shoshana Zuboff’s explanation
of “Surveillance Capitalism”. The forthcoming analysis plans to also make
allusive parallels to the contemporary political moment in the US; where we are
seeing a similar level of mistrust and even greater hostile resistance from the
government toward its people.
CONCLUSION
Alan
J. Pakula’s “Paranoid Trilogy” embodies the cultural and cinematic flavor of
the 1970’s. These films became the quintessential vision of what it was like to
work in films, as well as crystalize the public opinion of the government at
the time. As the trilogy gained in popularity throughout the decades, they have
inadvertently fueled the conspiratorially addle-brained into an irrational
spiral that has culminated in the Quanon sect of the dark web; thereby
tangentially contributing to the rise of our current fascistic-forward and
equally hostile government. Thus, through the analysis of these films, not only
will we see current socio-political parallels, but perhaps we can find the same
inspirational spark of resistance displayed in Pakula’s Protagonists; regardless
of the outcome.
