“How can people believe this shit?”
That’s the reaction typically when I mention to someone that 17% of adults surveyed last December by the polling firm Ipsos said they believed the core claim of the QAnon conspiracy theory: namely, that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the U.S. government.
Bewildered exasperation is an understandable reaction to such polling data.
The troubling thing is that reactions of this kind are becoming commonplace as news stories, poll results and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans entertain some pretty peculiar notions these days.
Indeed, it seems as if a new conspiracy theory crawls out of the woodwork practically every week. If it’s not QAnon one week, then it’s the Wuhan lab leak that allegedly spawned COVID-19 the next. Mainstream newspapers are running stories about UFOs. Members of Congress suggest that former President Trump was in cahoots with Russia since 1987.
What keeps the majority of the public skeptical about these claims is the common-sense understanding that conspiracies are difficult to keep under wraps. Someone usually squeals. Or gets caught. Or sells his or her fellow conspirators out for money or some other concession.
The more bizarre the plot, the less likely it is to succeed.
Take the infamous “Gunpowder Plot” in England in 1605, when a group of English Catholics attempted to blow up the House of Lords with a cache of gunpowder hidden in the basement. The plot might have succeeded, but the plotters were betrayed by one of their number, who wrote an anonymous letter to King James I containing details of the plot.
Guy Fawkes and most of his fellow conspirators were arrested and sentenced to be be hanged, drawn and quartered. Other spectacular plots in history have miscarried for similar reasons. But that doesn’t seem to stop a sizable minority of people from believing that they are surrounded by multiple conspiracies directed by malign forces.
QAnon is merely the latest and most widely-known conspiracy theory to gain a foothold in the minds of Americans in recent years. Conspiratorial thinking is on the rise in the United States, as illustrated by the percentage of Republicans who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent (76% as per a Quinnipiac College poll), growing numbers of ‘anti-vaxxers’ who refuse to have themselves or their children vaccinated against common diseases, and a variety of other once-fringe beliefs now in general circulation.
Journalists and academics have pointed to the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media since the 1990s as the main drivers of disinformation and conspiratorial thinking; however, this post is an opportunity to highlight another major contributor to the present cultural climate of paranoia and mistrust: the Hollywood film industry.
STILL THE MOST POWERFUL MEDIUM
It’s easy to blame Hollywood. That’s especially true for any publication or opinion writer who is even moderately conservative in their stances on a number of social issues. Since the 1960s, the film industry has been blamed, fairly or unfairly, for a rise in violent crimes, drug use, teen pregnancies, and a general lowering of standards. Commentators on the political left have blamed Hollywood for perpetuating racist stereotypes, demeaning women, and glorifying organized crime. The list goes on.
Whether motion pictures have the human effects attributable to them is both debatable and an entirely appropriate topic of debate, but the film industry’s power to shape the social climate through its broad viewership, demographic reach and cultural cache is not generally viewed as worthy of discussion. Hollywood’s power to affect attitudes, in tandem with industries such as professional sports and popular music, has been accepted as a given by all segments of society since at least the 1940s.
Movies and television are influential media. Americans over the age of 18 spend, on average, four hours a day watching television, compared to the 3.5 hours a day engaged with their smartphone. A large portion of the television they consume consists of 2-hour movies. Americans watch an average of 20-30 motion pictures a year, aside from TV programming.
Everyone seems to keep a list of their 10 favorite movies in their head. Online discussion groups devoted to their members’ favorite television programs and movies abound, as do fan clubs and journals. Americans are obsessive movie-watchers. The movies they watch tend to mirror their obsessions — and have arguably helped to guide those passions.
MAINSTREAMING PARANOIA
The advent of social media was arguably the most important media development of the 2000-2010 decade, second only in importance to the popularization of the Internet in the early 1990s. The intent of social media’s creators wasn’t to spread paranoia, but rather to enhance social trust by facilitating the ability of the individual to find other, like-minded individuals with whom to share data and experiences.
However, the cultural backdrop against which social media emerged contained elements that countervailed against trust and social cohesion. Part of the issue was that the social media explosion of the 2000s was preceded by a cinematic era that treated government conspiracies as fodder for popular entertainment.
In the mid- to late 1990s, Hollywood produced several major blockbusters that featured as their central plot element a lead character who stumbles upon a sinister conspiracy led by members of some elite group — often high-ranking government officials, sometimes wealthy eccentrics — and must work alone to expose and neutralize the plot.
What follows is a short list:
- JFK (1991) starring Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon, and a veritable wish list of major acting talent at the time. Written and directed by Oliver Stone, the fictionalized film argues that Lyndon Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA plotted to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Costner’s character is a Louisiana judge, based on the real Jim Garrison, seeking to prosecute JFK’s alleged murderers and their accomplices.
- The Net (1995) starring Sandra Bullock as a computer systems analyst working for the US federal government who stumbles upon a plot by cyberterrorists to use government surveillance software to commit crimes. It’s initially unclear whether the terrorists are working for the U.S. government or against it.
- Conspiracy Theory (1997) starring Mel Gibson as a taxi driver who believes many world events are caused by elaborate government conspiracies. Gibson’s character becomes ensnared in a real conspiracy modeled on the CIA’s MKUltra program in the 1950s. The film also stars Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart.
- Air Force One (1997) starring Harrison Ford as a U.S. President whose plane is hijacked by Uzbek terrorists who are secretly in league with the Vice President, who is plotting to usurp the Oval Office.
- Eyes Wide Shut (1999) starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Cruise’s character is a doctor with a super-rich clientele who gets drawn into an occult society (implied to be Satanic) to which several of his patients belong. The secret society engages in bizarre sexual orgies and murders anyone unlucky enough to learn of their activities. Director Stanley Kubrick’s last produced motion picture.
What was notable about each of these films is that they featured major movie stars who were big box-office draws. Their implausible plot lines aside, each film attracted major acting and producing talent, was directed by a “big name” director, and was a box office success.
Prior to ‘JFK’ there was not much of a market for what Greymantle would term ‘paranoid entertainment’. Movie-goers in the 1980s were drawn to escapism and patriotic themes (i.e. E.T., Rambo). The idea that the government and elites were plotting to undermine American society seemed far-fetched. ‘JFK’ changed all that. Conspiratorial ideas surrounding the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy were widely known and discussed prior to 1991, but the film industry hadn’t sought to capitalize on those ideas through the medium of popular entertainment.
‘JFK’ proved to Hollywood that paranoia could sell. Once film studios figured that out, the floodgates opened. They’ve never really been shut.
FROM THE MOVIE SCREEN TO INNER LIFE
Michael Barkun, a professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University, was one of the first people to notice a growing shift toward conspiratorial thinking in the late 1990s. Barkun feared that the mainstreaming of fringe ideas through popular entertainment was likely to contaminate national life given the role movies play in forming and reinforcing a national consensus on what constitute acceptable and unacceptable political ideas. He outlined his theory in the 2003 book “A Culture of Conspiracy“.
In his book, Professor Barkun cited Richard Donner’s hit film “Conspiracy Theory” prominently because he believed it had introduced a vast filmgoing audience to the notion that the federal government is controlled by a “deep state” with ties with an international network of power brokers intent on establishing a ‘New World Order’. Barkun believed this view had previously been confined to a small, extreme right-wing fringe.
Barkun worried that the popular legitimacy motion pictures give to new ideas could lead large numbers of Americans who consider themselves to be in the political mainstream to begin flirting with fringe notions such as the “deep state”, with worrisome consequences for the U.S. political system.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
The film studios’ television affiliates soon got wind of a profitable new trend. Before long, a new breed of television serial emerged that included conspiratorial sub-plots. The first such program, which may be said to be the prime mover of the new trend, was “The X-Files” created by Chris Carter and starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
The ‘X-Files’ ran from 1993 through 2002 and grew in popularity with each passing season. The concept of the series was straightforward: two FBI agents are assigned to work on a series of cases, or ‘files’, which the FBI classifies as involving alleged extraterrestrial activity or the paranormal. In the course of their investigations, Agents Fox Mulder and Dara Scully slowly uncover the workings of a vast conspiracy involving a secret treaty between the U.S. government and an alien civilization that the feds and aliens will do anything to cover up. Mulder and Scully race against time and diverse shadowy opponents to expose the plot.
Prior to the 1990s, any television producer bringing a treatment for a new series with such a plot would have been laughed out of the executive suite and told to come back with a new idea. Situational comedies and police melodramas were the thing. Even for the 14-22 age set, science fiction and horror did not sell on prime time TV. The ‘X-Files’ shattered that unwritten rule and spawned a number of spin-offs, imitators, and sequels.
The most interesting aspect to the plot development of the ‘X-Files’ was that the series’ plot was much like an actual conspiracy theory in that one never got to the end of it – the truth was never revealed, the plot never exposed.
The heroes had to keep going one level deeper and deeper into the onion without ever finding the core. There was no plot resolution, just as no successful conspiracy theory is ever disproved or cabal unmasked. It just keeps going on and on, like a perpetual motion machine, drawn forward by the viewer’s/believer’s insatiable desire to learn the final truth.
The tagline of the series? “The Truth Is Out There.”
The shows’ fans never found it. But they were willing to keep searching, even if that meant searching in perpetuity. And in following that trail of thought, viewers of the ‘X-Files’ were introduced to the conspiratorial mode of thinking as a form of entertainment.
CHALLENGING THE ‘OFFICIAL VERSION’
The ‘X-Files’ was pure fantasy schmaltz, which its fans knew to be the case. However, as paranoid entertainment grew in popularity as the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, not all of the ‘X-Files’ imitators would treat the line between fact and fiction so clearly. In addition, the 2000s decade brought with it the phenomenon of ‘reality television’ which purported to be truer to life than dramatic, scripted TV series, but was often far more manipulative with viewers’ perceptions than were its fictional counterparts.
Shows like ‘The Secret Rulers of the World’ on Britain’s SkyTV and ‘The Conspiracy Files’ on the US-based Discovery Channel purported to be clear-eyed, factual investigations of real events, but tended toward the sensational and melodramatic, leaving doubts in viewers minds’ as to whether the events described really happened the way the ‘official version’ alleged, or were manipulated according to some secret script.
Popular culture was also getting darker. Violence in motion pictures was becoming more extreme and character portrayals edgier and more morally ambiguous. The late 90s and early 2000s brought ‘Spartan’ and the ‘Blade’ series to movie theaters.
The plot of ‘Spartan‘ (2004) focused on an abduction of the President’s daughter by child sex traffickers with the collusion of the President and his staff to prevent a scandal (the reason: the President was sleeping with his own daughter). Val Kilmer, playing a special forces operative, rescues the kidnapped First Daughter from a Saudi brothel before shooting his way through corrupt Secret Service agents and White House staff members to bring her back to American soil. The message: you can’t trust anyone. This is the first popular American movie to feature high-level government involvement with child sex traffickers.
The vampire drama series ‘Blade’ (1998, 2002 and 2004) is far more fantastical than ‘Spartan’ given its Lovecraftian horror elements and over-the-top special effects. However, there are underlying commonalities in the premises of ‘Spartan’ and ‘Blade’: the power structure is corrupt at its highest levels and run by ‘blood suckers’ of one kind or another. The common people don’t know the truth and are being preyed on by evil forces.
WHERE DOES REALITY BEGIN AND END?
The 2008 Financial Crisis seemed to kick conspiratorial thinking on both sides of the Atlantic into high gear. Leftists blamed “the 1%” for the bank meltdown and other social woes and launched new social movements like ‘Occupy Wall Street’, while the Right reacted to the Republican Party’s loss of power and the election of the first black President with the Tea Party, ‘Birthism’, and far-right media outlets such as Breitbart News.
The airwaves got nuttier in lockstep with the changing political climate. The year 2009 brought the reality TV series ‘Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura’ to cable television. Far from being just another television personality, Jesse Ventura was a former Navy diver, professional wrestler, and governor of the State of Minnesota. He was someone who supposedly knew something about the way the world actually worked.
‘Conspiracy Theory’ billed itself as a documentary style series, a bit like a somewhat off-beat version of ’20/20′, but the show’s episodes had a tendency to give the conspiracy theorists they interviewed a lot of air time and to make the official rebuttals look either weak or weasely. A frequent guest on the show was Alex Jones, a right-wing provocateur who would soon launch the cable TV show ‘Info Wars’, now-infamous for peddling a variety of extreme claims, including that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a faked ‘false flag’ operation.
‘Conspiracy Theory’ was just the start. Cable television shows, YouTube videos and websites that circulated every old and new conspiratorial claim from the ‘Protocols of the Elder of Zion’ to the “Vril Society’ to alien abductions were soon exploding in number. And people were sharing what they heard or read with their social media networks.
It seemed reasonable to ask in recent years whether people knew where reality begins, and where it ends. Where is the line between fiction and fact, rumor and proof, knowledge and superstition?
PARANOIA STILL SELLS
This is the social climate that gave us the QAnon conspiracy, first launched with a “drop’ by the anonymous ‘Q’ in October 2017. Q’s alleged mission: to uncover the machinations of the ‘deep state’ as a (supposed) insider planted deep within the federal government bureaucracy.
The writer of the ‘Q’ posts was simply regurgitating a variety of old conspiracy theories through Facebook and other social media platforms. But it is important to emphasize that the theories peddled by ‘Q’ and other online conspiracists continue to keep plenty of company with the products of Hollywood on the big and small screens.
In 2017, the year that ‘Q’ made his first post, the film ‘You Were Never Really Here’ premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film’s director, Lynne Ramsay, won the award for best screenplay and the film’s lead actor, Joaquin Phoenix, won the award for best actor.
The plot of ‘You Were Never Really Here” follows a lone, ex-special forces operative who is hired by parents to rescue their kidnapped daughters from sex trafficking rings. Mr. Phoenix’s character is adept at locating the trafficker’s layers, slaughtering the traffickers with blunt implements, and rescuing the kidnapped girls. The lead character gets more than he bargained for when he rescues the daughter of a prominent New York politician from a hidden brothel. He and his family are soon targeted by assassins and he narrowly escapes death on multiple occasions.
Ultimately, the climax of the film reveals that none other than the governor of New York State is in charge of the sex trafficking ring and responsible for the abduction of the girl, as well as for the corruption of multiple police officers who have been protecting the sex ring. This lurid and fantastical plot twist notwithstanding, “You Were Never Really Here” received widespread critical acclaim upon general release.
As Michael Barkun feared in the early 2000s, the conspiratorial mode of thinking has become mainstream and acceptable, powered mainly by cable television and social media, but still assisted by a motion picture industry that favors dark, ‘edgy’ anti-heroes and anti-establishment storylines featuring unimaginable corruption in high places.
STOP FEEDING THE FIRE
At this point, one might ask how media influencers active on the Internet, cable TV entertainment, and the motion picture industry can start to walk us back from the brink? What, if anything, can stem the tide conspiratorial thinking surging through the media complex?
Greymantle would like to suggest a few small steps.
To begin with, the industry can realize that it has a problem: promotion of paranoid entertainment that is making our lack of social trust that much worse. Second, it can stop financing films like “You Were Never Really Here”, which I have to admit I found to be schlock cinema masquerading as high art, kind of like re-making ‘I Spit on Your Grave” with a $20 million budget. In other words, pure grindhouse.
The industry can choose to stop feeding the fire of paranoia.
Sex trafficking is a real and horrific societal problem that urgently needs to be addressed. The gangs that control this monstrous form of modern slavery must be identified and destroyed. And filmmakers who are committed to providing a fact-based take on this phenomenon should be commended.
The writers and directors of the documentaries “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich” and “Leaving Neverland” now showing on Netflix and HBO have done the public a service by exposing the actual circumstances surrounding the trafficking of youngsters by powerful figures in finance and entertainment.
But cinematic artists who combine a focus on this problem with conspiratorial thinking and outlandish plot lines should be forewarned that they are taking us deeper into very dangerous ground, into a quicksand of rumor, sensationalism and hysteria from which it is becoming more and more difficult to extricate society.
Until next time, I remain – Greymantle.
