The films that director Alan J. Pakula made with cinematographer Gordon Willis—particularly Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President’s Men—defined the formal language of modern American conspiracy thrillers. These films leave us with a strange paradox, for simultaneously glamourizing and banalizing the search for evil. The glamour comes from their fashionably disheveled stars, eerie corridors, painterly shadows, and from compositions of vast, clinically malevolent symmetry. And the banality exists in what lies underneath these shadows, or at the margins of those dwarfing cityscapes: dull, powerful bureaucrats committing crimes for relatively straightforward reasons such as money, lust, and embitterment. The cover-ups driving these films are more interesting than the crimes being obscured, an irony that cuts to the heart of our addiction to conspiracy theories. They’re comforting after all, suggesting that existence operates according to plan rather than by the whims of chaos.
The Parallax View is about a company of mercenaries who are knocking off the witnesses to a senator and presidential candidate’s very public murder atop the Seattle Space Needle. This ghastly scenario shrewdly intertwines various rumors associated with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and it always seems as if reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) is on the verge of discovering a more grandiose truth that never arises. The architects of the Parallax Corporation are not über-villains out of a comic book movie, but business-suited cogs in a machine reminiscent of John le Carré’s spies. The motivations of whoever hired Parallax to kill the senator are never even revealed because Pakula implicitly sees them as distressingly, self-evidently ordinary: that the politician got in someone’s way.
The Parallax View is especially disturbing and relevant in our age of weaponized conspiracy theories. Like a paranoiac’s dream, the film feels as if it’s making itself up as it goes along, as it reportedly was. Frady chases clues, essentially entering various film genres as he proceeds—two of the most unexpected set pieces here could’ve come out of a Smokey and the Bandit movie—only to have his idealism coopted by Parallax, which utilizes him as a scapegoat for the murder of another senator. Parallax is an embodiment of the worst of capitalism, commoditizing rebellion while keeping consumers distracted from the true machinations of society. The name alludes to this idea, as “parallax” refers to an object’s seeming change in position depending on where someone stands. Depending on your vantage point, a senator’s murder is a sign of subterranean evil, business as usual, or all the above.
The mystery of a senator’s murder is of less concern to The Parallax View than the insidious corporatization of America. Murder is committed here for hire, rented out and divorced of the personality and neuroses that drove, say, many a killer from a Hitchcock film, while modernist buildings are utilized to signify alienation in the key of Antonioni and Godard. The opening image—of a totem pole that obscures the Space Needle from a certain point view—initially seems like a joke but signifies the film’s ongoing obsessions with erasure and co-option.
Frady’s trip to a small woodsy town initially feels like a warm refuge from the chilly office corridors that haunt so many Pakula films, until Parallax is revealed to be capable of influencing people even here. Tellingly, evil is revealed again via a large ominous structure—a dam with an alarm that sounds like a dinosaur’s death rattle. And the film’s scariest sequence, scarier than A Clockwork Orange’s corresponding set piece, finds Frady watching a Parallax recruiting video, which shows how easily images of American harmony can be flipped—or seen from a different vantage point—to emphasize the decay and exploitation lingering underneath. And in this moment we’re left with a lingering ambiguity: Is the video playing up to the psychosis of potential Parallax freelancers or revealing the truth of society?
Pakula and Willis frequently suggest that violence is latent everywhere, from the Space Needle to a small town to a newspaper office to a cozy apartment. Their compositions have a neutral, un-emphatic quality that runs counter to the pummeling instincts of most thriller filmmakers. When Frady enters a room, we’re allowed to feel as if we’re discovering for ourselves the propped-up feet that casually reveal an interloper (while providing the image with a through line). Or when cops grapple with a killer on the needle, they’re filmed from an almost aloof distance, as if this sort of thing happens all the time, a gesture that underscores the ludicrousness of the event, the strenuous work of the fighting, and the casual perversion of a death match set on a tourist trap. In The Parallax View, Pakula deflates the agency of conspiracy theories, even as he springs one, by showing how redundant they are: No need to look for the secret heart of America when its craziness is out in plain sight.
Image/Sound
One of The Parallax View’s visual signatures is the stark contrast it offers between people and landscapes. As Gordon Willis says himself in an archive interview included with this disc, he was interested in figures and space, and both are well-represented in the film. Crucially, the image on this disc, which has been sourced from a new 4K transfer, abounds in a wealth of visual textures. The foregrounds and backgrounds of landscapes are eerily pristine, suggesting a kind of open-air menace, while indoor scenes are often warmer, fuzzier, more intimate. Colors are intense, especially those of the American flag in the climactic sequence at a convention center, yet there’s also an attractive element of grain. The English LPCM 1.0 sound mix is also highly varied and balanced, placing particular emphasis on small diegetic sounds.
Extras
A video introduction by filmmaker Alex Cox contextualizes The Parallax View in terms of the many assassinations that occurred in America in the late 1960s, especially the killings of John F. Kenney and Robert Kennedy. Cox’s observations are complemented by the archive interviews with Alan J. Pakula, from 1974 and 1995 respectively, in which he speaks of the film’s themes and symbols. The best of the archive supplements, however, is the interview with Willis conducted with the American Society of Cinematographers in 2004, where he elaborates on the reasoning behind his iconic compositions, such as his interest in figures in space and disdain for coverage that indicates a lack of decisiveness. In a new interview shot for the Criterion Collection in 2020, Jon Boorstin speaks of helping to develop the psychology test featured in the film, though the best new supplement is the essay by critic Nathan Heller that’s featured in the booklet. Describing The Parallax View as a “noir of urban modernity,” Heller renders the film’s doomy and vastly influential style with peerless precision.
Overall
Alan J. Pakula’s seminal, nearly free-associational conspiracy thriller has been outfitted by Criterion with a beautiful transfer that underscores all its eerie nooks and crannies, from its lurid colors to its malevolent use of negative space.
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