Paranoid's Delight

Our very first Filter item, from May of '95, looked at an unlikely strain of multiculturalism within the Michigan Militia, courtesy of Nightline's town meeting two weeks after the Oklahoma bombing.

Last month's release of Mission Impossible -- Brian De Palma's big screen version of the revered sixties television series -- offered a reminder of just how far the fine art of paranoia has fallen over the past two decades. Nineties culture, of course, has plenty of conspiracies whirring through the infosphere -- the black helicopters of freemen lore, Kenneth Starr's Whitewater intrigue. They just don't happen to be all that credible. Once upon a time, the paranoiacs were the heroes, the truth-tellers; they were Woodward and Bernstein, or Tyrone Slothrop from Gravity's Rainbow -- the ones attuned enough to detect the microphones hidden in the lampshade, or the telltale click at the end of the phone conversation. Nowadays the conspiracy theorists come in less appealing flavors: militia men, letter bombers, Ross Perot.
The paranoid mode in American cinema, in particular, has suffered heavy losses over the past two decades -- losses that invariably distress cinephiles raised on the great American Renaissance films of the early seventies, films like Klute, Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, The Parallax View. Once the dominant inflection of the thriller genre, the conspiracy film has steadily withered away, replaced by moronic, Lethal-Weapon-style buddy flicks (and their highbrow Tarantino cousins) or the deeply conservative, strangers-invade-my-home-and-steal-my-children vein of Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
This woeful history is one reason why the advance word on Mission Impossible was so promising: the film was too confusing, critics complained, with too many disguises, betrayals, false alliances to follow. These were encouraging words for devotees of seventies cinema, most of whom tend to be great advocates for narrative unintelligibility. The classical conspiracy picture was always eager to confuse the bejesus out of its audience, despite the fact that most of them were mainstream, big-budget films. They took their production values from Hollywood and their storytelling from Jean-Luc Godard. The more bewildering the better, the motto seemed to be.
Today's films, on the other hand, generally offer up a few modest reversals over the two hours (the bad guy goes from being a radical ideologue to a machine-gun-toting venture capitalist, a la Die Hard.) But for the most part they keep their plot points meticulously defined, as though they were written in some kind of high-security cell where the slightest deviation, the slightest hint of ambiguity, might send Shane Black or Joe Esterhas hurtling into the room to draft a script revision. The conspiracy films of old kept you guessing all the way to the end and beyond, since most of the plots were too byzantine to digest in one sitting. The films actively cultivated a disoriented viewer, and for good reason: the central experience in watching these films was the pleasure of losing your bearings, the pleasure of the conspiracy -- where all the exits are false ones and no single map can account for the entire terrain.
The fact that Mission Impossible was directed by Brian De Palma -- itself something of a secret, given that his name never appeared in the otherwise exquisite trailer -- also bade well for the movie. De Palma, after all, spent a third of his career improvising around Coppola's chord changes in "The Conversation." (He spent another third doing the same to "Vertigo.") But Mission Impossible turns out to be a strange mix: a great film, and at the same time a great disappointment. As a technical achievement it is impeccable. Unlike most of his peers, De Palma understands that the key to a compelling thriller lies in the dynamic range of the film, and not the sheer intensity of the action. This is one reason why Mission Impossible is a far superior film to Twister, the summer's other blockbuster. Twister oscillates predictably back and forth between two modes: the scenes where it's really, really windy, and the scenes where it's not. In Mission Impossible, however, De Palma wisely choreographs his three major set-pieces at three different rhythms: the opening intrigue at the American Embassy in Prague, conveyed with the jolts and tuxedoed glamour of an espionage film; the break-in at Langely, which may be the most suspenseful use of silence since Cary Grant's two minutes waiting for the bus in North by Northwest; and then the terminal velocity of the final scene atop the TGV, hurtling through the Chunnel with a helicopter improbably tethered to its tail. Each sequence has a pace all its own, and each might have dominated a lesser film. De Palma plays them all against each other flawlessly, like a master-spy working the embassy ballroom.

Suck's Ana Marie Cox writes in to say:
"... it's not that we're less paranoid now than then - it's that we're more jaded. conspiracies get uncovered on a regular basis, and in our own living rooms. hard to make a movie out of something that happens every day...."
Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

Apple's Web site for Mission Impossible is rumored to have some interesting material, but it requires a bewildering array of plug-ins and helper apps to get into the action. For a mass market promotion, the technical hurdles seem pretty steep, but perhaps the show at the other end is worth it.

What disappoints here turns out to be the plot, though not for the reasons you'd expect. The real problem with Mission Impossible is that the film isn't confusing enough. Sure, the game-playing between the principal players is relatively intricate, though the central twist is unlikely to surprise anyone who paid attention to the opening credits. (Let's just say one character is too prominent to die in the first ten minutes.) The problem here -- and it's not so much a problem as it is a symptom of something else, something larger than De Palma's film -- is that the moves and counter-moves of Mission Impossible all exist on the same level. You're introduced to each of the major variables in the first twenty minutes: the quibbling, cocksure agents, the suits from Langely, the anonymous mole, the arms dealer looking to buy some secrets. De Palma lines them up for you like a roll call. The movie does manage to spin these basic elements into a complicated web over the two hours, but it's a web with limits, since all the players are defined so early in the action. De Palma's quick enough to keep you guessing, but you're still guessing within a fixed set of rules. It's a cinematic shell game: you may not be able to follow the action as it unfolds, but you can be pretty damn sure that there'll be a ball under a shell when the money is counted.
The films of the seventies, on the other hand, were always opening out onto a broader, more sinister vista. Where De Palma builds his intrigue laterally, the American Renaissance films aimed for depth, adding layers and layers to their narratives, to the point where every chance event -- every wrong number and passing glance -- suggested something looming dark and conspiratorial beneath it. (Think of Redford groping his way haplessly through Condor, or the ever-widening gyre of All The President's Men.) The classical conspiracy film left you waiting for that one last shot, where the camera dollies back to reveal that all the characters have in fact been dupes of some other, unnamed, agency, lurking somewhere beneath the NSA, the CIA, CREEP, and the FBI -- and whatever other acronyms you passed on the way down. Like the fractal geometries of nonlinear math, these films jumped readily from one scale to the next. Each struggle led, inexorably, to a more profound struggle beneath it, and with each step the stakes grew larger, and more imponderable.

Our Dialog on Wage Stagnation from April of '96 discussed the role of globalization on the declining wages of American workers -- a trend that began with the '73 crisis. Click here to listen in on the discussion.

The lesson here, it seems to me, is that there are several types of moviegoing confusion, and some are more productive, more resonant than others. On a formal level, a traditional conspiracy is a way of reconciling yourself to a chain of cause and effect that exceeds your perceptual skills: you know that something's happening, but you don't know what it is. That's why the subterranean intrigue of seventies cinema was such a brilliant antidote the pathologies of the era: Watergate, of course, but also the deep logic of the emerging global economy, most painfully felt during the oil crisis of 1973. Conspiracies are a way of reconciling yourself to otherwise bewildering causal links, where every minor shift in the Consumer Price Index leads back finally to some Saudi cartel on the other side of the planet. (It's not for nothing that Gravity's Rainbow, Condor, and the Watergate hearings all appeared that same year.) When each trip to the supermarket is in some way linked to the distant negotiations of the IMF, it's no wonder the paranoiacs start to occupy center stage in the popular imagination.
You'd think the digital age would produce a comparable appetite for conspiratorial depth, given its network of zeros and ones shuttling imperceptibly through the ether. De Palma does go to great lengths to digitize the Mission Impossible brand, with much sound and fury about cellular connections, Usenet searches, and the obligatory PowerBook product placement. (The basic format of an internet e-mail address, however, seems to have been beyond the scope of the continuity editors.) But as Terrence Rafferty pointed out in the New Yorker last month, De Palma mainly uses the high-tech gadgetry to expand the cinematic point of view, employing an array of QuickTime windows the way he leaned on the split-screen during Carrie's prom night. In other words, the tech is introduced to make the visual language more complex, and not the narrative. The confusion of the seventies film was an index of what the French call mise-en-abyme, the philosophical vertigo of peering into the abyss, of contemplating something too large to contemplate. Today's confusion is measured in frames-per-second, where the image moves too fast for the eye to follow (as in the thunderous credits sequence or the PowerBook ads.) The seventies films took their cues from Godard and Pynchon. De Palma, predictably enough, looks to MTV.
There are worse fates, to be sure -- particularly with a film as tight and as dynamic as Mission Impossible is. And the classical conspiracy plot continues to enjoy a subcultural following, though it has relocated to different media in recent years. The cyberpunk novel (and particularly Gibson's trilogy) looks a great deal like a seventies flick, albeit one projected through VR goggles. But the most vital and inventive conspiracy narrative of our present time is on television, of all places -- a scenario that would have been all but unthinkable twenty years ago, back when the formulaic cop shows dominated the airwaves, and the real innovations took place on the big screen. Where we once looked to Klute and The Parallax View for our recommended allowance of paranoia, we now turn to the X-Files. Old-time conspiracy fiends may find the shift to the small screen disappointing, but the sad truth is, given Hollywood's pathetic efforts of late, it's the only mass cultural offer on the table right now. In paranoia, as in good society, you dance with the one who brung you. After all, you never know who they might be working for.
(June 6, 1996)

The onscreen effects in Mission Impossible -- including those split images on Tom Cruise's 500 series PowerBook -- were created using Macromedia Director. Click here to learn more about this package from Cyberian Outpost.

Matt Neuburg wrote an interesting piece for Tidbits last year about the e-mail inconsistencies in Disclosure, saying that they were "as if Hollywood had decided to portray people driving cars, but, not actually having seen a car, they got the number of wheels wrong, or which side of the road you drive on."

Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

Our very first Filter item, from May of '95, looked at an unlikely strain of multiculturalism within the Michigan Militia, courtesy of Nightline's town meeting two weeks after the Oklahoma bombing.	Last month's release of Mission Impossible -- Brian De Palma's big screen version of the revered sixties television series -- offered a reminder of just how far the fine art of paranoia has fallen over the past two decades. Nineties culture, of course, has plenty of conspiracies whirring through the infosphere -- the black helicopters of freemen lore, Kenneth Starr's Whitewater intrigue. They just don't happen to be all that credible. Once upon a time, the paranoiacs were the heroes, the truth-tellers; they were Woodward and Bernstein, or Tyrone Slothrop from Gravity's Rainbow -- the ones attuned enough to detect the microphones hidden in the lampshade, or the telltale click at the end of the phone conversation. Nowadays the conspiracy theorists come in less appealing flavors: militia men, letter bombers, Ross Perot. The paranoid mode in American cinema, in particular, has suffered heavy losses over the past two decades -- losses that invariably distress cinephiles raised on the great American Renaissance films of the early seventies, films like Klute, Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, The Parallax View. Once the dominant inflection of the thriller genre, the conspiracy film has steadily withered away, replaced by moronic, Lethal-Weapon-style buddy flicks (and their highbrow Tarantino cousins) or the deeply conservative, strangers-invade-my-home-and-steal-my-children vein of Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. This woeful history is one reason why the advance word on Mission Impossible was so promising: the film was too confusing, critics complained, with too many disguises, betrayals, false alliances to follow. These were encouraging words for devotees of seventies cinema, most of whom tend to be great advocates for narrative unintelligibility. The classical conspiracy picture was always eager to confuse the bejesus out of its audience, despite the fact that most of them were mainstream, big-budget films. They took their production values from Hollywood and their storytelling from Jean-Luc Godard. The more bewildering the better, the motto seemed to be. Today's films, on the other hand, generally offer up a few modest reversals over the two hours (the bad guy goes from being a radical ideologue to a machine-gun-toting venture capitalist, a la Die Hard.) But for the most part they keep their plot points meticulously defined, as though they were written in some kind of high-security cell where the slightest deviation, the slightest hint of ambiguity, might send Shane Black or Joe Esterhas hurtling into the room to draft a script revision. The conspiracy films of old kept you guessing all the way to the end and beyond, since most of the plots were too byzantine to digest in one sitting. The films actively cultivated a disoriented viewer, and for good reason: the central experience in watching these films was the pleasure of losing your bearings, the pleasure of the conspiracy -- where all the exits are false ones and no single map can account for the entire terrain. The fact that Mission Impossible was directed by Brian De Palma -- itself something of a secret, given that his name never appeared in the otherwise exquisite trailer -- also bade well for the movie. De Palma, after all, spent a third of his career improvising around Coppola's chord changes in "The Conversation." (He spent another third doing the same to "Vertigo.") But Mission Impossible turns out to be a strange mix: a great film, and at the same time a great disappointment. As a technical achievement it is impeccable. Unlike most of his peers, De Palma understands that the key to a compelling thriller lies in the dynamic range of the film, and not the sheer intensity of the action. This is one reason why Mission Impossible is a far superior film to Twister, the summer's other blockbuster. Twister oscillates predictably back and forth between two modes: the scenes where it's really, really windy, and the scenes where it's not. In Mission Impossible, however, De Palma wisely choreographs his three major set-pieces at three different rhythms: the opening intrigue at the American Embassy in Prague, conveyed with the jolts and tuxedoed glamour of an espionage film; the break-in at Langely, which may be the most suspenseful use of silence since Cary Grant's two minutes waiting for the bus in North by Northwest; and then the terminal velocity of the final scene atop the TGV, hurtling through the Chunnel with a helicopter improbably tethered to its tail. Each sequence has a pace all its own, and each might have dominated a lesser film. De Palma plays them all against each other flawlessly, like a master-spy working the embassy ballroom.
Suck's Ana Marie Cox writes in to say: "... it's not that we're less paranoid now than then - it's that we're more jaded. conspiracies get uncovered on a regular basis, and in our own living rooms. hard to make a movie out of something that happens every day...." Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

Our Dialog on Wage Stagnation from April of '96 discussed the role of globalization on the declining wages of American workers -- a trend that began with the '73 crisis. Click here to listen in on the discussion.	The lesson here, it seems to me, is that there are several types of moviegoing confusion, and some are more productive, more resonant than others. On a formal level, a traditional conspiracy is a way of reconciling yourself to a chain of cause and effect that exceeds your perceptual skills: you know that something's happening, but you don't know what it is. That's why the subterranean intrigue of seventies cinema was such a brilliant antidote the pathologies of the era: Watergate, of course, but also the deep logic of the emerging global economy, most painfully felt during the oil crisis of 1973. Conspiracies are a way of reconciling yourself to otherwise bewildering causal links, where every minor shift in the Consumer Price Index leads back finally to some Saudi cartel on the other side of the planet. (It's not for nothing that Gravity's Rainbow, Condor, and the Watergate hearings all appeared that same year.) When each trip to the supermarket is in some way linked to the distant negotiations of the IMF, it's no wonder the paranoiacs start to occupy center stage in the popular imagination. You'd think the digital age would produce a comparable appetite for conspiratorial depth, given its network of zeros and ones shuttling imperceptibly through the ether. De Palma does go to great lengths to digitize the Mission Impossible brand, with much sound and fury about cellular connections, Usenet searches, and the obligatory PowerBook product placement. (The basic format of an internet e-mail address, however, seems to have been beyond the scope of the continuity editors.) But as Terrence Rafferty pointed out in the New Yorker last month, De Palma mainly uses the high-tech gadgetry to expand the cinematic point of view, employing an array of QuickTime windows the way he leaned on the split-screen during Carrie's prom night. In other words, the tech is introduced to make the visual language more complex, and not the narrative. The confusion of the seventies film was an index of what the French call mise-en-abyme, the philosophical vertigo of peering into the abyss, of contemplating something too large to contemplate. Today's confusion is measured in frames-per-second, where the image moves too fast for the eye to follow (as in the thunderous credits sequence or the PowerBook ads.) The seventies films took their cues from Godard and Pynchon. De Palma, predictably enough, looks to MTV. There are worse fates, to be sure -- particularly with a film as tight and as dynamic as Mission Impossible is. And the classical conspiracy plot continues to enjoy a subcultural following, though it has relocated to different media in recent years. The cyberpunk novel (and particularly Gibson's trilogy) looks a great deal like a seventies flick, albeit one projected through VR goggles. But the most vital and inventive conspiracy narrative of our present time is on television, of all places -- a scenario that would have been all but unthinkable twenty years ago, back when the formulaic cop shows dominated the airwaves, and the real innovations took place on the big screen. Where we once looked to Klute and The Parallax View for our recommended allowance of paranoia, we now turn to the X-Files. Old-time conspiracy fiends may find the shift to the small screen disappointing, but the sad truth is, given Hollywood's pathetic efforts of late, it's the only mass cultural offer on the table right now. In paranoia, as in good society, you dance with the one who brung you. After all, you never know who they might be working for. (June 6, 1996)
The onscreen effects in Mission Impossible -- including those split images on Tom Cruise's 500 series PowerBook -- were created using Macromedia Director. Click here to learn more about this package from Cyberian Outpost.
Matt Neuburg wrote an interesting piece for Tidbits last year about the e-mail inconsistencies in Disclosure, saying that they were "as if Hollywood had decided to portray people driving cars, but, not actually having seen a car, they got the number of wheels wrong, or which side of the road you drive on."