The overriding thematic concern of Alan J. Pakula’s political conspiracy thriller The Parallax View is conveniently telegraphed by the movie’s title. Of course, that theme may take a little longer to sink in for viewers inconvenienced by an ignorance of the perceptual phenomenon known as motion parallax. Motion parallax dictates that as one moves in space, objects which are closer travel farther across the field of vision than objects at a greater distance. In other words, the object being looked at hasn’t changed position at all, but merely appears to have moved as a result of the shifting perspective of the viewer. Or, put another way, the objective facts of an event remains unchanged, but the truth of those facts become a matter of subjective opinion based on where each witness stands in relation to that event. That, in a nutshell, is both the plot and theme of the film bearing the name of this perceptual distortion.
The Parallax View is one of several 1970s films in which suspicion of formerly trusted entities like the government and law enforcement became fodder for extensive conspiracy theories. The assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Watergate scandal and cover-up within the Nixon White House has contributed to a deep-seated pessimism toward the idea that anything or anybody could be trusted to do the right thing anymore. The reality, of course, was that the entities in question had not changed; the perspective of Americans had in the face of journalists no longer complicit in keeping the ugly truth about its leaders from the public. Everything had become fair game and nothing was off the table.
Unfortunately, this perspective was skewed by “investigative journalism” with less than perfect integrity when it came to getting the facts and doing the research. Lazy reporting combined with sensationalistic claims fed to a public that had gotten to the point where nothing seem too far-fetched created a distinctly conspiratorial milieu in which even the most obvious answer that answered all the facts could be pushed aside as mere government-manufactured fantasy in place of sexier conspiracy theories.
Such was the environment in which The Parallax View got made and released, joining alongside other classic films suggesting someone powerful was pulling the strings behind the scenes and nurturing the narrative of history according to their desires. From Chinatown to All the President’s Men, the byword of the day was that you can’t trust even what you see. None of the conspiracy films of the 1970s managed to tap into this zeitgeist with such perfect thematic coherence as the movie which titled itself after the very phenomenon which best described this new perspective on the business of running the country.
