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Updated December 13, 2001 A DARK 7O'S AMERIKA: PARALLAXED (Decoy) Politics has always been practiced by means of various techniques of deception. From the writing of Machiavelli to the stage-managed Labour election victory the pursuit of power is that which is only ostensibly visible. What it shows is not necessarily what it is and, concomitant with this, the commonly assumed concept of power is itself a strategic decoy: the state may administer and manage capitalism, it may promote throughout society a notion of individual control through the guise of a prime minister or president, but, as speeches blur into journalism and the surface rituals move into docudrama, power thrives through a process of inter-locking practices that, in themselves, are never perceived as being powerful at all. Not knowing power as a social-practice can mean that those who seek to make tangible its gradients are always in the thrall of a power that takes on occult and ever receding dimensions. This in turn is inchoately communicated to the less powerful as the disappearance of power as a social-fact, a practice, a technique which they can also wield. The business of politics take place behind such screens and makes bugging, law-breaking and assassinations a sanctifiable means of maintaining an unsuspected status quo when all other institutional means of silencing, deflection, removal and quietism have failed. (Preamble) Through the Watergate scandal of the mid 70's it became common knowledge that a president of the United States (Nixon) had authorised the bugging of his political opponents and that the American intelligence sector had been revealed as using illegal practices. When this was taken together with the ever-persisting disquiet over the spate of 60's political assassinations, the ever continuing war in Vietnam and other various acts of governmental hypocrisy it created a sense of unease as to who was actually in control and for what purposes. During this period sociologists charted a rising distrust both of the American government and of corporate business practices, going as far as to suggest that the country was undergoing a 'legitimacy crisis'. The American writer, Raymond Federman, described that suddenly there was a general distrust of the official discourse whether spoken, written or televised. For indeed, if the content of history can be manipulated by the mass media, if television and newspaper can falsify or justify historical facts, then the unequivocal relation between the real and the imaginary disappears. The clear line that separates fact from fiction is blurred (1). Through successive governments have worked to re-legitimise themselves -scapegoating always sacrificable politicians rather than admitting that government itself was on trial, suppression of information, the proffering of monetarist ideology in the late 70's etc-the effects of this mistrust of government and business were explored in various movies made on the fringes of Hollywood. These movies still carry poignancy not tightly specific to the events that inspired them and not reliant for their attraction on the nostalgias of recyclable decades. Whether called conspiracy movies, neo-noir, political thrillers or paranoid films, movies like THE PARALLAX VIEW, CHINATOWN, THE CONVERSATION and CUTTERS WAY are united through the way that they raise doubts in the viewer, causing a questioning distrust of authority and movements 'out' towards an apprehension of "fictional reality". These movies imbue their characters with varying degrees of 'knowledge' and put them in positions of having to search, uncover and ultimately challenge themselves. They create a communicable sense of unease linked to a gnawing portrayal that all is not transparently in its place; that there is always an unknown and unsuspected element. Para-politics, hidden agendas, corruption. These movies open up what Federman has described as a disarticulation of the official discourse in its relation with the individual (2). (Klute)
Between 1971 and 1976 Alan J Pakula made a sequence of films that were
dubbed at the time as a 'paranoid trilogy'. Mostly self-produced this
trilogy tapped into the laminable cinematic space between art-house
and general-release that had been opened up by the success of non studio
pictures like Easy Rider. Though celebrated later as a period
which yielded directors like Altman, Coppola, Scorcese and Spielberg
what is noticeable is that 70s movies, like those of Pakula, sidestepped
box-office formulas to work the nuances of film, creating complex 'popular'
spaces that problematise an overly compliant audience acceptance of
the powerful mythic dimensions of the official discourse. Mainstream
cinema is not free from this discourse as similar power-wielding dimensions
could well include the preponderance in cinema of self-regulated heroics,
the demarcation of clear boundaries, the anticipation of responsible
resolution and the expectation of a trustworthy, direct communication.
With Pakula most of these dimensions are brought into focus in the first
film of the trilogy, Klute. This has Jane Fonda as call-girl
whose experience of a "freak-trick" and her being the subject
of stalking makes her the central figure in Donald Sutherland's investigation
into the whereabouts of a missing corporate executive. At the outset
there is a blurring of whether the stalker is one and the same as the
absconded executive and the "freak-trick" but this play on
'normal subjectification' is heightened by the discontinuities of the
Fonda character. Her professional orgasms, her therapy sessions and
actress ambitions, her constant manoeuvring parallel the gradual unfurling
of the identity of the stalker: Cabel, a high-level colleagues of the
missing executive who has been violently unhinged by his association
with Fonda and seeks to further indulge yet cover-over his violent sexual
fantasies. Throughout Klute the key re-occurring motif is a tape
recording of Fonda's voice intoning a make-believe scenario that entices
Cabel to fulfil his desires. Whilst playing with the seemingly rigid
divide between fact and fantasy, enact and real, this tape recording
is also used to associate Cabel to the corporate world when, at one
point, Pakula films the tape recorder on a large office desk and has
the camera track-away from the desk to a slow , descending shot of a
glass-walled office building. Through this allows metaphorical connections
between profit and death and between ambition and madness (Cabel has
killed the missing executive so as to protect himself within the corporation),
Pakula does not simply present the corporate-killer as the epitome of
power in a good against evil struggle. This boundary-marker is breached
by the portrayal of the shifting relationship between Fonda and Sutherland,
their evasions, positioning and ruses that go to form the power-play
of their relationship. Furthermore, Pakula's camerawork also invokes
a sense of power as coming from the 'outside': horizontal shots, tightly-framed
composition, silhouette and shadow all evoke the unsettling, claustrophobia
of a twisting, untrusting urban world. To audiences of the day the most
disturbing facet of Klute was its psycho-sexual theme: that the
killer had some deep-seated sex and death drive opened and that Fonda's
taped voiceover is intentionally aimed at the viewer, points in the
direction of a monstrous sexual repression which is both administered
and ignored by the wider society. The inability and unwillingness to
confront such darkness does have its echo's in the film's denouncement
where Cabel has Fonda listen to a murder captured on tape and even though
Sutherland 'saves' Fonda the lasting 'resolution' of Klute seems to
reside in those screams that cut through the viewer as a painful crying-out
of the hidden costs and submerged violence necessary for powerful discourses
to remain legitimate. Story by Howard Slater. TO BE CONTINUED! notes:
(1) Raymond Federman: Critifiction - Post Modern Essays, SUNY Press
1993, p25 |