The early ’70s offered one explosion after another. Investigative reporters released world-historical bombshells: Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the My Lai Massacre; Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times; Jack Anderson exposing Richard Nixon’s relationship with ITT. … Continue reading The Paranoid Style in Cinema: The Parallax View (1974, Alan J. Pakula)

The shadow of assassination, even as it haunted America, seemed a perennial threat in postwar Europe. The ’60s and ’70s saw France, Italy, West Germany and Spain wracked by leftist terror groups and rightist paramilitary organizations, with government repression and … Continue reading The Paranoid Style in Cinema: The Day of the Jackal (1973, Fred Zinnemann)

November 22, 1963 was a defining event for a generation of Americans. John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas became a national trauma, experienced collectively through media as a later generation endured 9/11. Nor did the event offer catharsis: Lee … Continue reading The Paranoid Style in Cinema: Executive Action (1973, David Miller)

Welcome to The Paranoid Style in Cinema! This will be a (hopefully) weekly column chronicling the subgenre of ’70s conspiracy thrillers. We will begin, however, with their antecedents, focusing particularly on the best-known and probably most important.  We start with … Continue reading The Paranoid Style in Cinema: Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)