Why cinema suddenly loves conspiracy theories
From Disclosure Day to Backrooms, a new wave of films promotes stories of paranoia, alienation and mistrust. What are they trying to tell us?
Thank heavens for cinema, that light in the darkness and the source of all shocking scoops. It tells us to wake up and take action before it’s too late that we live in the Matrix. The CIA killed JFK. That our spouse is a robot and our boss an Andromedan. Also, there is an Escher-style staircase beneath the Tokyo subway and a disembodied zombie leg stalking the hook-up parks of Brazil.
How might we react if a trusted friend said all this? Would we be entertained or appalled, enlightened or freaked out? Would we even regard them as a trusted friend any more?
“People have a right to know the truth,” declares the young whistleblower in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, a line that echoes a thousand other whistleblowers. As played by Josh O’Connor, heroic Daniel Kellner has a backpack of state secrets that incontrovertibly prove the existence of aliens and point to a sinister government cover-up. Disclosure Day is fiction, but it hints at insider knowledge. The 79-year-old director – the most trusted brand in Hollywood – even appears in the trailer to vouch for the film’s authenticity. He splices himself amid the crop circles and spacecraft, commenting on the action like an authoritative news anchor. He says, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful for people to know that all of this is true?”
We are not alone, Spielberg tells us – and neither, for that matter, is his film. Disclosure Day is merely the biggest and splashiest in a wave of paranoid conspiracy tales that recall the 1970s heyday of The Parallax View, Soylent Green, Capricorn One and The Conversation. These modern-day descendants tell different stories and wander down different rabbit holes. But they all speak the language of alienation and mistrust and seem to be groping towards a revelatory final truth.
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, it’s the conviction that the world’s millionaire elite are literal aliens in disguise. In Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, it’s the fevered speculation over the sexual kinks of the neighbours. In the forthcoming Wild Horse Nine, it’s the dark, buried treasure of the US’s Cold War past. Martin McDonagh’s comedy-thriller casts Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich as a pair of CIA veterans, spinning their wheels on Easter Island as they prepare for their next super-secret assignment. “Do you ever get paranoid that you’re not being paranoid enough?” asks Malkovich at one point. It’s a rhetorical question. Metaphorically or otherwise, everyone is wearing tinfoil hats.
Is this a trend? Are all these pictures related?
Common sense, our trusted friend, tells us that life is random and arbitrary and that we’re mostly making it up as we go along. But the conspiracy theory is like a seductive interloper, sidling up to assure us that, actually, that’s not true at all. Everything is connected, part of a grand design. “There are no coincidences, honey,” explains the wild-eyed dad in the new Netflix thriller The Truthers. These bizarre productions, therefore, are all here for a reason. They have a message for us, if we would only shut up and listen.
“I found a place,” whispers Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays the furniture salesman in the mesmerising Backrooms. He can’t be more specific, because the place is a mystery and doesn’t appear on any map. It’s a system of corridors and office spaces, simultaneously sterile and sickly, that has been hiding in plain sight. If you believe the credits, Backrooms was directed by the then 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who road-tested the concept as a popular web series. According to some wilder sections of the fanbase, it was shadow-directed by Osgood Perkins, its 52-year-old producer. The film is a locked-box mystery, a teasing riddle to solve. Therefore, it must keep at least one secret of its own.
Backrooms is the best kind of paranoid conspiracy tale because it never feels the need to fill in all the blanks. It’s scary, strange and unashamedly confounding. It’s also purely cinematic, a ready-made metaphor. The backrooms sit behind an illuminated window or a screen. They might be the movies, or TikTok, or the internet’s darker corners. “It’s like a maze,” marvels Ejiofor, after he has pushed at the hinge and made his first foray inside. “It just goes on and on.”
Are all of these red-pill productions connected? Tangentially, of course, yes. Is there a grand design? Almost certainly not. Films are knee-jerk responses to the outside world. They pick up on its tensions and pander to public interest, like the medicine shows that once roamed the backwoods in search of fresh business. Conspiracy theories provide the illusion of order and control. They offer the reassurance of a story; the sense that life makes sense. This is another way of saying that they are a fabrication, a lie. What’s more upsetting: to think that the government is hiding aliens or to accept that they’re not? What’s scarier: to believe that aliens want to talk to us or to imagine that they never will?
Are we being paranoid enough? Thomas Pynchon – the unofficial laureate of the conspiracy genre – identifies a condition that is still worse than paranoia: an anti-paranoiac state in which nothing connects to anything else, where there is no lock to unpick or shining truth to uncover. It is a condition, he says, “not many of us can bear for too long”. People need plot twists and cliffhangers, teases and reveals. Spielberg is a past master and surely knows this already. So do Lanthimos and Aster and the 20-year-old director of Backrooms. So, too, does Trump.
