the parallax view (spine 1064)

The Parallax View
Directed by: Alan J. Pakula
1974
​Spine #1064

The Parallax View, like many great movies, is a film both intensely, indivisibly of its time and eerily relevant today. As one of the key paranoia thrillers of the 1970s, its premise was forged in the crucible of the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations, while dovetailing directly into the fallout of the Watergate scandal. Watching the movie today, it’s startling just how much its cultural echoes have come full-circle. So much has changed in the past 50 years, but in some respects nothing has changed at all.

The story begins at the Seattle Space Needle, where popular Senator and Presidential hopeful Charles Carroll is assassinated, his killer subsequently plummeting to his death (the movie takes great pains to divorce itself from any sort of political stance; much is made of how the maverick Carroll adheres to neither party). Three years later, investigative journalist Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) is visited by his TV reporter ex Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss)… who bore witness to the Senator’s murder and is convinced her life is in danger, revealing that six other people who were present that day have since died under mysterious circumstances. Frady dismisses her concerns, but when she’s found dead of a drug overdose, guilt compels him to look into her claims. His ensuing investigation eventually leads him to the Parallax Corporation… a private organization that claims to be recruiting “security operatives,” but appears in practice to be targeting the socially disaffected and maladjusted, and training them as assassins-for-hire.   

There are two ways of looking at this movie. Director Alan J. Pakula has precisely one mode as a filmmaker: sober-faced self-seriousness… and one could argue that his terse approach squanders the obvious pulp potential of the premise (Vincent Canby of The New York Times hinted at the sort of macabre fun a director such as Hitchcock might have unleashed with this material). On the other hand, the film’s matter-of-factness gives off a slight chill that’s slowly absorbed by the surface of your skin, without you even being fully aware of it… at least until it insinuates its way into your nerve fibers. The signature set piece, in which Frady - having successfully positioned himself as a potential recruit - is subjected to subliminal conditioning (LOVE. MOTHER. FATHER. HOME. COUNTRY. GOD. ENEMY. HAPPINESS), recalls A Clockwork Orange, only with none of Kubrick’s fabled showmanship. Pakula’s camera tips absolutely nothing. The sequence goes on for so long - the interplay between words and images so unnervingly opaque - that the effect is downright disquieting. We’re not sure what to think or feel. After a while, we begin to question whether the montage is actually having some sort of subconscious effect on the viewer. How would you even know? It leaves one feeling genuinely shaken.

Warren Beatty, paradoxically, is very much a movie star… who happens to not really be giving a movie star performance in this film. With his feathered hair and chiseled features, he was at the absolute apex of his 70s studliness, but Frady frankly isn’t much of a character. His crusade for the truth isn’t framed with any particular driving motivation or specificity (we know he used to have a drinking problem, that’s about it) - rather he’s the vessel through which all social grievances and frustrations on the part of the moviegoing public were filtered and expressed vicariously. Director of photography Gordon Willis did exemplary work on Pakula’s prior feature Klute, but he outdoes himself here… utilizing light and shadow within his screen compositions almost like a Renaissance painter (okay, it’s not exactly Caravaggio, but characters emerge from - and disappear into - shrouded corners of the frame, as if to express the moral murkiness at work). Speaking of insidious conspiracies, Willis somehow lensed this picture AND The Godfather Part II in 1974, but didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for either - try explaining *that* particular nugget, if you care to.    ​

The Parallax View, a case could be made, was the single most pessimistic movie of the 1970s - which is saying a hell of a lot. More than anything, Pakula conveys that particular sense of bitter helplessness that raged throughout the decade. It’s reinforced at virtually every turn. When Carroll is assassinated, we witness the shooting on the other side of a pane of glass - powerless to intercede. When Frady pursues a lead to the small town of Salmontail, in Washington, a confrontation takes place against the backdrop of a dam opening its floodgates - the massive wall of water that comes bearing down on him a fitting visual metaphor for the system he’s fruitlessly attempting to expose. Best of all are the congressional committees - faceless, dispassionate tribunals… Willis’s camera starting at midrange, then slowly pulling further and further back… presenting their findings as immutable fact and declaring “There will be no questions.” Of course, when you take this festering form of paranoia and mistrust and merge it with the internet age, it’s hardly surprising that something like QAnon eventually takes root and proliferates - sucking vulnerable people down its toxic rabbit hole. It also explains, sadly, how a cheap demagogue like Trump rises to power. In 2016 there was at least a kernel of logic, however misguided, to Trump’s base of support… but it’s astonishing, even now, having been laid bare as the most pedestrian of snake oil hucksters, how people remain absolutely convinced that he’s some sort of noble outsider crusading against a corrupt cabal of Washington elites. Unfortunately, that renders a film like The Parallax View a bit of a bummer. It was never really a “fun” movie by any conventional definition, but its chilling truths no longer feel like a warning, but a prophecy.