Post-Watergate Paranoia
The dominant emotional tenor of the film is paranoia. While it takes a good twenty to thirty minutes for suspicion to fully bloom to the point where the audience can no longer accept any character other than Warren Beatty’s protagonist at face value, once it reaches that level all bets are off the table and even those whom Beatty seems willing to trust may not gain that level of confidence by viewers. The Parallax View is part of a wave of films as diverse as Chinatown and Jaws that work on some level as a thriller fueled by the paranoia that the government was keeping some very awful secrets from the people.
Assassination Conspiracy Theories
Part of the paranoia so widespread in 1970s is due to the wave of high-profile political assassinations of the 1960s and the conspiracy theories that rose to fill in gaps of what some viewed as questioned not fully answered by the official investigation. In particular, the shadow of some of the loonier JFK assassination conspiracies hangs over much of the film and almost certainly inspired its version of All-Powerful Puppet Master: the Parallax Corporation. Without the contextual background of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., this would be a very different sort of thriller.
Silent Complicity of the Press
Ironically, in light of the fact that Alan J. Pakula also directed All the President’s Men, the power of the press is revealed here to be practically non-existent in exposing the truth. The main character is a small time reporter and he does provide the cold comfort of knowing that a dogged journalist can still get to the truth. The unspoken thematic implication here, however, is that since the little nobody from a Podunk newspaper nobody cares about is the only one going after the real story behind what really happened during the assassination that opens the film, the media are complicit actors in legitimizing the constructed truth of the conspirators.
Truth Is a Matter of Perspective
The title of the movie refer to a perceptual displacement in which an object’s apparent fixed location in space moves not as the result of the viewer’s perspective. What seems to be true in the film is only true to some and only because they have been manipulated into the right position to force a perception that what they are seeing actually happened even though it did not. The extrapolation here when ignited by paranoia is that nobody can ever be really sure that what they are being told is the truth since they are only being given one perspective.
