From 1950 to 1981, there were four major attempts to assassinate a United States president, one of which succeeded (JFK was assassinated in 1963). In that same thirty-one-year bracket Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy were also murdered. This culture of political violence and suspected involvement of “larger forces” created some pretty weird movies.
One of my favorite movies on the paranoia express (remember, just because you’re paranoid does not mean they are not after you) is the 1974 classic Parallax View, an unusual and strangely outstanding movie that not too many people have seen. Sadly, Parallax View has been largely forgotten although it is a major movie for our times.
This may be one of the best movies ever made about the JFK assassination, although it barely makes reference to it in words or images. (Sharp-eyed viewers who don’t blink will catch a glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald.) As a film, it reminds me of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly with regard to gorgeous landscapes and soaring, dramatic music juxtaposed against wild events; Parallax View makes use of a lot of shadows and sharp-edged angles without making it too difficult to see what’s going on. (Remember when they had a battle at night in Game of Thrones and they just filmed a black screen with screams… It’s not like that.)
Like the Game of Thrones, Parallax View is a film about ancient times. In this film, we are transported back to the days when TV reporters were interested in the truth and did investigative work rather than getting their hair done and reading press releases on the air. Warren Beatty is spectacular as Joe Frady, a scruffy reporter who doesn’t mind literally chasing down a story. Just like the dragons in Game of Thrones, this shoe-leather investigative reporter harks back to ancient times. (Can you imagine Anderson Cooper breaking a nail to get a story? Can you imagine Rachel Maddow without her prepared talking points?)
The film begins with the a short backstory, when a TV reporter named Lee Carter (played by Paula Prentis) witnesses the assassination of presidential candidate, Senator Charles Carroll, at a reception held high atop the Space Needle in Seattle. The assassination as carried out by one of the waiters—who gets away—but a second waiter is chased across the Space Needle and plummets to his death. The official story is that the waiter who fell do his death did the deed, but there were witnesses who saw enough to question the official narrative. One of those witnesses is Lee Carter.
The main story commences about three years later when Lee Carter realizes that some of the other witnesses who were present at the Carroll assassination are turning up dead. (This also happened at the Kennedy assassination, see Richard Belzer’s definitive book Hit List on the dead Kennedy witnesses. Yes, that Richard Belzer, the guy who played Munch on Law & Order.)
Getting spooked, Lee Carter meets her old boyfriend Joe Frady and confides her fears. Frady brushes it off—it sounds like a dingbat conspiracy theory to him, but when she dies under mysterious circumstances only a few days later, a more sober-minded Frady embarks on a odyssey to find out what is going on.
Here is where the film gets really compelling: the movie has a real 1970s period feel and I mean that in a good way. Gorgeous natural scenery, unexpected plot twists and turns, bar fights, dead bodies, marching bands, car chases, a faked death, phony passports, bombs in midair, and artful scenes where dams release their floodgates as two characters fight in a river. It has that kind of outdoorsy on-location look that was typical of thrillers of the era.
Frady quickly becomes one of those man-on-the-run guys you see in detective movies, but he is a reporter and not a bystander. He has an agenda, too, so it’s not so much about being chased, it’s about trying to find the truth while being chased. In today’s vernacular, he has been red-pilled. He now believes that his old girlfriend and other witnesses are all being systematically murdered because of what they witnessed at the Space Needle. And as we know, no one is more relentless than a conspiracy denier who has been red-pilled.
Frady uncovers a mysterious and sinister organization called Parallax. The Parallax firm remains murky throughout the film, but their mission is clear. They recruit and train feckless sociopaths for work as political assassins. Frady gets himself enrolled in psycho school and the “training film” that he is shown—which appears at great length in the film—reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, except it is not really very much like that film. It reminds me of the Burgess film, because it tries to mold people into what they are not. It’s about brain washing and coercion, except what Parallax is up to doesn’t seem that bad at first. I mean how brainwashed can you be after a few movies?
Frady is trained as a Parallax assassin, except he thinks he isn’t trained at all. Frady believes he has outsmarted them. And that is the great hinge of the film. Did the Parallax method work on Frady? Or is Frady going to take down Parallax?
As Aretha Franklin once sang in a different context, who’s zooming who?
The film culminates in a grand chase scene at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and the ending is a bit of a surprise. Definitely a well-crafted film in the respect that the viewer gets a big payoff.
Parallax View is obliquely about the JFK assassination. Many witnesses to the assassination on that day in Dallas in 1963 died under suspicious circumstances. I don’t mean one or two people, I mean dozens upon dozens. And that plays out here. There are many (among whom I count myself) who believe that there are larger and more terrible forces behind the JFK assassination than one “lone nut” and a magic bullet.
The Parallax company stands in for those amorphous and unknown forces pulling the strings. The gigantic convention center where the final movie reaches its climax reminds me of the “Trade Mart.” For those not obsessed with JFK assassination information, JFK and his entourage in Dallas on that fateful day were on their way to a luncheon event at the Trade Mart, which was part of a much larger complex known as the Dallas Market Center. Like the LA Convention Center, the Dallas Market Center was a huge cavernous building with a network of catwalks, stairs, dark hallways, and vast open spaces. It had about ten million places to hide.
JFK died before he could reach the luncheon, but the Trade Mart was a terrible choice for a Presidential event for security reasons. In fact, it would be harder to imagine a more difficult building to secure than the Trade Mart. The Secret Service had objected strenuously to that building, particularly since there were other suitable venues in Dallas that could offer the President much better security. The high ceilings and catacomb of catwalks of the Trade Mart made security almost an impossibility.
Actually, JFK’s big luncheon event in Dallas was originally scheduled to be held at a more suitable venue called The Women’s Building, but on November 14, Governor Connally pushed very hard against a low-level White House guy named Kenneth O’Donnell to move the event to the Trade Mart. Then-Governor Connally was able to get the event moved from a secure and confirmed location to this most insecure place without any clear reasonable motive. Well, he had no motive to move the location, unless you think Connally was in on the plan to kill JFK. (That’s another story for another day.)
Had the event been held at the Women’s Building as planned, the Kennedy motorcade would not have traveled via Dealey Plaza, not gone by the famous Book Depository and grassy knoll, and the JFK luncheon event would have had first-rate security.
You have to be a pretty serious assassination geek to see the Trade Mart in the L.A. Convention Center in Parallax View, but it is there. Without bringing up the assassination of JFK, the film explores the broader themes of masterminds behind assassinations, mind control, political intrigue, a gullible public, security gaps, and that still unanswered question: who is really pulling the strings?
The company name of Parallax is well chosen. It’s a geometrical term and it refers to the fact that things can look differently depending on where we stand. It’s often used in astronomy but it has a literary meaning as well. Parallax stories can occur when the same story is told once from one person’s point of view and then again from another point of view. In this film, parallax becomes a metaphor for the fact that sometimes the same thing looks different depending on our point of view. In other words, one man’s conspiracy theory is another man’s truth.
The film was directed by Alan J. Pakula as part of an odd trilogy: Klute, Parallax View, and All the President’s Men. Roger Ebert once called it the “paranoia trilogy.” But if you’re looking for political ideology in this particular third of the trilogy, you’ll be disappointed in Parallax View. There isn’t any politics here other than that the government is not our friend. Klute is more about the surveillance state and All the President’s Men is about political machinations. Parallax View was a film about the deep state, before we called it the deep state, and the fact that there are forces controlling our national political life that we do not even know exist.
Although critically acclaimed, the Parallax View was not the huge success of a film it ought to have been. Today, it is largely forgotten. What’s weird is that it seems more relevant now than it did back in the 1974 when it was first released. I’m not sure that people in 1974 truly appreciated the eerie, twisted, tangled swamp of politics the way your average movie viewer does today. And there is parallax in how we appreciate it. Back in 1974, Parallax View seemed more like a cross between James Bond and North by Northwest but without the pretty girl to help drive the plot. Today, Parallax View seems like a great movie about political assassination. But we’re not seeing it back from the point of view of 1974 anymore, it’s 50 years later… 2024.
I plan to watch today ✅ Very intriguing, never heard of it.