The following notes on The Parallax View were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. The Parallax View will screen at the Chazen Museum of Art on Sunday, October 22 at 2 p.m., the first in a selection of movies that were each created "In the Shadow of the JFK Assassination." The Chazen is located at 750 University Avenue. Admission is free!
By Josh Martin
As presidential candidate Charles Carroll proclaims that he is “too independent for [his] own good,” a gunshot rings out to interrupt his words, sending a bright burst of blood onto an interior window of the Seattle Space Needle. A film that begins with a vague air of suspicion erupts into shocking violence, killing the senator who remains a symbolic cipher to the spectator. A silent chase ensues across the Needle, concluding as the mysterious assassin plunges into the void below to his death. From here, we move to a room that exists in a functionally abstract space, where a committee of faceless, nameless bureaucrats directly inform the viewer of their findings regarding the Carroll assassination. As the camera pushes closer in, the committee chair says the shooter acted alone out of a “misguided sense of patriotism”; the man insists that there is “no evidence whatsoever” of a broader conspiracy. There will be no further questions at this time.
Welcome to 1974’s The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula’s second chapter in his thematically linked “Paranoia Trilogy”. Along with 1971’s Klute and the Watergate thriller All the President’s Men (1976), The Parallax View probes the inescapable and existential distrust of a decade marked by increasing disillusionment of the American people and a creeping cynicism about those in the upper echelons of power. Adapted by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr., and an uncredited Robert Towne from the book by Loren Singer, Pakula’s film is the quintessential “paranoid thriller,” as deemed by Time critic Richard Schickel (in an otherwise hilariously misguided review discussed later in this essay). Processing the devastation caused by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, The Parallax View shapes the conspiratorial thinking of the American political climate into a tense, provocative, and distinctly cinematic nightmare. The sense that something is not quite right – that nefarious systemic forces greater than any one individual are at work – pervades every moment of Pakula’s picture.
Three years after the opening assassination, the viewer reunites with our surrogate for this journey into the heart of darkness: Joseph Frady, played by New Hollywood legend Warren Beatty. An industry iconoclast and a famed playboy, Beatty’s performance as Frady channels both his undeniable screen charisma and his prickly public image. Frady, a journalist for a local rag in the Pacific Northwest, is positioned as a thorn in the side of everyone he encounters – sarcastic, disheveled, and profoundly anti-authoritarian. Frady’s milieu is seedy and low rent, far removed from the high stakes and thrills of American politics. Compared to the space of click-clacking typewriters and frantic chatter in All the President’s Men, the newsroom here is still and empty, an eerie space occupied only by Frady and his aging editor.
The narrative kicks into motion with the sudden reappearance of Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), a former friend/journalistic rival of Frady’s. Desperate for Joe’s help, she insists that a number of individuals who were present for Carroll’s assassination have since died under mysterious circumstances. Frady is dismissive, evocatively chalking it up to the paranoid mindset of the moment: “Every time you turned around, some nut was knocking off one of the best men in the country.” Despite Lee’s pleas, Beatty’s smarmy womanizer sees nothing of concern.
Smash cut to Lee’s body, dead in the morgue. If Frady didn’t sense something off before, he does now. Existing in a generic space somewhere between the noir procedural of Klute and the newsroom drama of All the President’s Men, The Parallax View follows Frady’s search for the truth – a search that is as ominous as it is futile. Shot by legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis, deemed the “Prince of Darkness” for his brilliant chiaroscuro compositions in films like The Godfather (1972), the film’s narrative tension plays out in predominantly visual (and sonic) terms. Static, empty spaces and extreme long shots work in coordination with unnerving silence, preempting the explosions of sudden violence that the film occasionally indulges. Faces are obscured by Willis’ harsh lighting: when Frady meets an agent of the Parallax Corporation, the mysterious entity that forms the film’s central enigma, he is almost completely invisible, shrouded in shadows. (Pakula would repeat this stylistic pattern in the first meet-up with “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men)
The centerpiece of the film is one of the most extraordinary sequences in the entire thriller genre. Frady visits the Parallax Corporation’s headquarters, and in a space not entirely dissimilar to a movie theater, he sits down to watch a six-minute montage of still images. The montage begins with simple associations: LOVE followed by images of the ideal heterosexual couple; MOTHER followed by photos of wizened, caring women. As the montage accelerates, the sequence becomes a jumble lacking clear definitions and categorizations, thrillingly modern in its execution of meaning’s collapse. Pakula and editor John W. Wheeler fuse images of violent cops, fascist violence, and major political figures like Kennedy and Nixon, all united by the reoccurrence of a comic book image of Thor. The suggestion of the sequence is that the montage can be used as a brainwashing device – a way of convincing vulnerable individuals that they are participants in the re-ordering of society through violent force. The concept that a film or photographic image is uniquely capable of transmitting this dangerous force forms the sequence’s most tantalizing implication.
Of the three films in Pakula’s trilogy, David Thomson notes that it is the only one “that missed commercial success, or an Academy Award nomination.” Thomson contends that this is a matter of the film’s lapses in coherence (and its overwhelming bleakness), but the lack of enthusiasm from reviews like Schickel’s may have also contributed. The Time critic called the film “ugly and dramatically unsatisfying,” scoffing at the far-fetched conspiracies that underpinned its narrative. While “ugly” is a word that few would associate with a Willis/Pakula collaboration, one could argue that the film is purposefully unsatisfying – as frustrating and unfulfilling as the Warren Report on the JFK assassination that Thomson evokes at length.
Indeed, The Parallax View’s finale is thoroughly despairing – no answers, no resolution, a continuation of a sinister cycle. After the dramatic events of the conclusion – which should remain unspoiled for the viewer – we merely return to the same abstract space that opened the film. Yet this time we begin in a close-up on the desk of authority, moving outward as the boilerplate speech is read by these anonymous figures, a statement the spectator knows is a lie. By the end of the shot, the figures are specks on the screen, barely legible to the viewer. We are even further from understanding the motives of the corporation or any hope of an exposure of the truth. But it does not matter: there will be no questions at this time.