"The Parallax View is in a sense a meta-conspiracy film: a film not only about conspiracies but about the impotence of attempts to uncover them; or, much worse than that, about the way in which particular kinds of investigation feed the very conspiracies they intend to uncover. It is not only that the Warren Beatty character is framed/killed for the crime he is investigating, neatly eliminating him and undermining his investigations with one pull of a corporate assassins trigger; it’s that, as Jameson noted in his commentary on the film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, his very tenacity, quasi-sociopathic individualism, make him eminently frameable.


The terrifying climactic moment of The Parallax View – when the silhouette of Beatty’s anonymous assassin appears against migraine-white space – for me now rhymes with the open door at the end of a very different film, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. But where the door in the horizon opening onto black space at the end of Weir’s film connotes a break in a universe of total determinism, the nothingness on which existentialist freedom depends, The Parallax View’s ‘final open door ... opens onto a world conspiratorially organized and controlled as far as the eye can see’ (Jameson). This anonymous figure with a rifle in a doorway is the closest we get to seeing the conspiracy (as) itself. The conspiracy in The Parallax View never gives any account of itself. It is never focalised through a single malign individual. Although presumably corporate, the interests and motives of the conspiracy in The Parallax View are never articulated (perhaps not even to or by those actually involved in it). Who knows what the Parallax Corporation really wants? It is itself situated in the parallax between politics and economy. Is it a commercial front for political interests, or is the whole machinery of government a front for it? It’s not clear if the Corporation really exists – more than that, it is not clear if its aim is to pretend that it doesn’t exist, or to pretend that it does.


There are certainly conspiracies in capitalism, but the problem is that they are themselves only possible because of deeper level structures that allow them to function. Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of (‘better’) people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves."

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism