A new documentary assesses the mixed legacy of director Alan J. Pakula’s work, including his so-called Paranoia Trilogy.
‘You have to remember, this picture came out after the era of assassinations and during the Watergate hearings,” filmmaker Alan Pakula said of The Parallax View (1974). That admission occurs in Alan Pakula: Going for Truth, a 2019 documentary focusing on Pakula’s contribution to that fabled Seventies period of American film history when a movie’s substance directly reflected the changing culture. He recalls, “When I was shooting the film, America had become unrecognizable.”
That last quote explains the label “The Paranoia Trilogy” that the doc gives to three Pakula films — Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President’s Men — that Matthew Miele’s doc places at the center of the period known as the American Renaissance. But maybe it was the beginning of the end.
Pakula (who died in 1998) had a plodding, obdurate style but certainly rode the zeitgeist. The gloomy atmosphere in those three films connects social decay and female exploitation to assassination terror and distrust in institutions (the government). Pakula had broken off a successful partnership producing films by humanist director Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird, Baby the Rain Must Fall, Up the Down Staircase) and went his own way toward psychological-political chic.
Miele’s aim to distinguish Pakula’s social awareness instead reveals how Pakula’s shadowy suspense clichés matched the era’s political extremes — a corruption of style that ignorant reviewers considered “noir.” It elevated attitudes of liberal elites, so celebrity testimonials repeatedly laud Pakula’s “sophistication.” He’s described as “very progressive” or “intellectual” by such as Tom Brokaw, Sally Quinn, and Dick Cavett. “His thesis at Yale was the psychology of drama,” touts one critic-academic. “He was a feminist, I mean men can be feminists,” Jane Fonda adds.
Pakula’s screen “truth” obviously derived from a celebrity class that shares the disillusionment flaunted in those three Seventies mysteries — no doubt leading to the current casual nihilism and cynical view of American history. (His final project was based on No Ordinary Time, an FDR hagiography by left-wing historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who also pays talking-head tribute.)
Alec Baldwin calls The Parallax View “one of my favorite movies.” And Steven Soderbergh praises its thriller formula, citing its meta-propaganda centerpiece montage as “arguably the best film within a film that anybody’s ever created,” adding, “It’s certainly unthinkable now that you would stop a film dead for that length of time and show something that deeply deranged.” It needs to be pointed out that Pakula did not consider it “deranged” but part of the narrative — an experiment with advertising tropes imitating the semiotic sequences in Godard’s A Married Woman (1963).
Soderbergh was being smart-assed while Pakula’s explanation is straight-faced: “Indeed there was a cautionary tale for the Seventies. Beware. Hiding behind all sorts of patriotic symbols that can whip you up into a frenzy of excitement can be ideas that are not democratic, that are not free.” The Hollywood intellectual from the East Coast cautioned, “The genius of this country, that defines this country, are 18th-century ideas of enlightenment, of freedom and democracy, and we can all be manipulated.”
Yet Pakula’s most manipulative film was All the President’s Men (1976), which traded distrust of one institution for glorification of another — the journalist-savior myth that has curdled into countless incidents of public deceit and treachery by which journalism has today become unrecognizable.
Carl Bernstein (one of the film’s hallowed crusading reporter duo, along with Bob Woodward) is on hand to correct William Goldman’s facetious screenplay: “The only real inaccuracy in the movie is [Washington Post editor] Ben Bradlee said, ‘What the hell do we do now?’” On screen, Pakula permits snark from Jason Robards as Bradlee: “Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters.”
Turning journalistic skepticism into paranoia does not grasp truth but exposes ruling-class (Hollywood–Beltway) privilege. Pakula’s trilogy lacks the unpretentious, reformist spirit of crime-busting genre films by filmmakers who knew where they were headed politically. (Costa-Gavras being a European counterpart.) But Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy is at the root of Millennial Hollywood’s misdirected nihilism. (Pakula’s best film, Comes a Horseman, also used the Western genre for sinister Americana.)
Robert Redford, who produced All the President’s Men, muses, “Could [Watergate] ever happen again? It is now, in a more . . . extreme way.” But Redford is less facile when he warns, “What’s happening now involves journalism, it involves truth. The truth is getting harder and harder to find because so many people are claiming the truth.” By now, shouldn’t that mean All the President’s Men is a crock?
Miele’s doc won’t say so, relying instead on the paranoia chic that fuels liberal hysteria and self-justification. Pakula’s vision of an unrecognizable America predicted the social changes of the past decade — especially recently. Filmmakers who buy into the Pakula legend don’t dread today’s obvious political chicanery but more likely distract from it with paranoid political correctness.
