A lit cigarette glows in the dark. A faceless voice describes sinister forces that are hard at work behind the scenes - a hidden conspiracy that controls our lives and perhaps even our thoughts. Then, like a ghost in the night, the voice is gone, leaving a residue of unease and a whisper of paranoia. As emblematic as
Deep Throat
in
All the President’s Men
or the
Cigarette Smoking Man
in the wildly popular
X-Files , that ghostly presence stands in for numerous other
voices
in a wide range of American films from the classic era of film noir through Oliver Stone’s
JFK
and Curtis Hanson’s
L.A. Confidential . In this sweeping and idiosyncratic synthesis of film and politics, Ray Pratt shows us how such movies are deeply rooted in post-war American culture and continue to exert an enormous influence on the national imagination. For decades American cinema has mirrored and promoted the postmodern anxieties and paranoid perceptions embedded in our society. Tapping into the moviegoing audience’s own projected fears, many Hollywood films seem to confirm our belief that there are indeed secret sinister forces at work and that our lives are at risk because of them. Pratt revisits blockbusters and cult favourites alike and shows their images of conspiracy have been fostered by the public’s increasing distrust of large organizations, producing in turn a cinematic
narrative of resistance
that challenges the status quo. He offers
Seven Days in May
and
Dr. Strangelove
as signposts of Cold War hysteria;
Chinatown ,
The Conversation
and
Missing
as clear reflections of our distrust of political and corporate elites in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate; and
Blue Velvet
and
The Stepfather
as dark countermyths to the
family values
touted by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He also considers gender paranoia in films like
Klute ,
Fatal Attraction
and
The Silence of the Lambs
and reminds us that sometimes, as in
Serpico , our guardian police forces need a bit of guarding themselves. Deftly interweaving cultural, political and film theory with fresh insights into film noir detectives, nuclear angst, sexual predators and government conspiracies,
Projecting Paranoia
is interesting reading for anyone interested in the American psyche or great moviemaking.
