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The AMC series Rubicon is one episode away from the conclusion that what will likely be its only season. The ratings quickly fell way off after its heavily promoted premiere, and the buzz has been leaning in the direction of finding the series too slow, or "glacially paced", as Television Without Pity put it after removing it from its recap lineup after five episodes. I found the show really got under my skin, but it's easy to imagine how torturous it might seem to somebody who was expecting something more like 24 or the Bourne movies. Produced by Henry Bromell, who's worked on such series as Northern Exposure and Homicide and wrote and directed the underseen movie Panic, Rubicon wound up using its murder-and-conspiracy angle as a hook for a detailed, simmering look at the way people live and work together--people who spend their professional days poring over "information" looking for patterns and hints that might thwart a terrorist attack, or deciding whether to issue a "recommendation" that someone a million miles away be killed, in the name of national security.
The principal characters--Will Travers (James Badge Dale), the supervisor of a team of analysts at a Washington "think tank", and the geeks under his command--are drones, just trying to do their jobs, but they can't leave what they do behind them when they go home at night, and they can't keep from getting run over by internecine politics and the ramifications of what they do. Will is the only one who has to worry about coming home to find an assassin waiting for him in his living room--the result of his having gotten close to uncovering a conspiracy that involves his boss (Michael Cristofer, channeling, and improving on, Richard Perle)--but his problems are just an extreme version of what's happening to his colleagues, who are struggling with drug problems and marriages that are either busted or on their way to the intensive care ward. The most poignant character on the show is Maggie (played by the sad-eyed, sexy-mouse Jessica Young), a single mother with a scary ex-husband who is assigned to spy on Will by Kale (Arliss Howard), an unreadable master spook who claims to have the hero's best interests at heart. She reaches out to Will, who's interested in her but too distracted by the emerging threats to his life to respond at first; left feeling pent-up and vulnerable, she invites a dweeb she barely knows over for a one-night stand, and then, when Will knocks on her door late at night, has to explain that she isn't alone. Eventually, Kale himself blows her cover to Will, because he's decided that she "likes him too much" to be trusted to keep a cool head about the job.
Bromell took Rubicon over after the show's original creator, Jason Horwitch, abandoned the project--"creative differences", you know the drill--after writing and directing the pilot. It could be that what makes Rubicon so distinctive, and so distinctively uncommercial, is the result of Bromell's taking over a series that belonged to a genre for which he felt no particular affinity and trying to reshape it in a way that would keep him interested without throwing away the central premise entirely. That genre is the conspiracy thriller, specifically the movies that came out of Hollywood in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam and the assassinations: The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor, and any number of stillborn duds and imitations. Those movies were much a product of their era, and they caught, as if in a bottle, a distinctive atmosphere of wised-up despair, which is passed along to the viewer: the hopelessness they make you feel about the state of the country and the odds of making things better is the price you pay for the fatuous sense of now being one of the few who know the awful truth. I grew up watching these movies on TV, and I know first hand their addictive appeal; the down side is that, having gotten addicted to them, I watched them again when I was old enough to see that they're not really very good. (The weakest and most disappointing thing about Rubicon, and what best ties it to those movies, is the nature of the conspiracy itself: the aging game masters who've risen to the top of the intelligence community seem to have been shaping events to result in catastrophic events from which they can profit financially. If anything, this is a kindness to the people who use cooked intel and friendly media filters to reshape perceptions of reality according to their ideological beliefs; the implication is that the real bad guys would be doing that just for the money.)
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The idea is that, by monitoring the viewer's reactions to the montage, Parallax can determine whether he is the right kind of resentful, ego-fueled, frustrated loser. In the '70s, the lone nut was what serial killers became in the '80s and '90s: the dangerous lunatic who was supposed to be everywhere, living among us, waiting to pounce, but who could be understood if only we could crack the code that would enable us to get inside his mind. Parallax, which--spoiler alert!--ends with Beatty not only failing to foil the company's next planned assassination but being scapegoated for it, has some claim to being the perfect paranoia thriller, conceptually worked out to a T and utterly meaningless. There's no attempt to explain how the corporation profits from its work, which seems to be non-ideological in nature. (The movie begins with the assassination of a presidential candidate who suggests Robert Kennedy, and ends with the murder of one who, as played by Jim Davis, is a ringer for John Connolly.) Ideally, Parallax might have worked as a hallucinatory nightmare with no pretense of realism, but as a director, Pakula was literal-minded to the point of plodding. It could have been a satire of conspiracy thinking, with the revelation that Parallax makes its money by publishing books and promoting public speakers who cash in on crazy theories about the assassination fever that the company is in charge of maintaining, but Pakula could have given Jack Webb a fun for his money in the humorless sweepstakes. But as it is, in its self-canceling perfection, it beautifully captures the appeal of the large-scale political paranoid fantasy, which lies not in offering a plausible alternate explanation for terrible events but reassuring those who can't deal with the idea that life is unpredictable and one fruitcake can get off a lucky shot that changes history by presenting a vision of a brilliant bad guy who's in charge of everything. seeing to it that all goes according to plan. The Parallax Corporation is the opposite of an agent of chaos.
Parallax wasn't a hit in its day, but Pakula's next movie, All the President's Men (1976), was the self-important prestige blockbuster of the Bicentennial year. Based on Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book about their journalistic spadework uncovering the Watergate scandal, it's a time capsule of a brief window in the history of Americans' perceptions of reporters, after they were presented in movies as disreputable, wisecracking, fun-loving truth tellers and before they were redefined as whores and ventriloquists' dummies interested in cozying up to those in power and mastering the repeating of conventional wisdom in hopes of landing a TV deal. Hushed and uninvolving to a near-hypnotic degree, and fated to play a little strangely to audiences who aren't eager for a chance to dance, one last time, on Richard Nixon's grave, it records a moment in time when it must have been a bigger thrill for Robert Redford to get to pretend to be Bob Woodward than it was for Woodward to know that, somewhere out there in Hollywood, Robert Redford was pretending to be him. It is hardly the only movie in which Redford labored under the delusion that actual acting would mar the sanctity of the proceedings, but Dustin Hoffman, as Bernstein, is only slightly more awake, even though the movie does observe the traditional rules of conduct: the pushy little Jewish guy is the one who goes behind the handsome blond WASP's back to sneak his way onto the story and who keeps badgering people who are nervous and scared, until the Great White Father steps in and says something like, "We wouldn't want you to do something that would make you uncomfortable", and pulls on his partner's leash.
The movie does show a fair amount of the drudgery that went into the reporters' investigation, but I wonder if it would have been made at all if Woodward hadn't been able to throw Hollywood the one gaudy device of Deep Throat, presented here as the Oracle of Delphi in a parking garage, an authority figure so omniscient and authoritative that he makes Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, even in the Oscar-winning person of Jason Robards, look like Fred Willard with his fly open. Watergate did its damage to the concept of justice in future cases of presidential corruption by setting an impossible-to-duplicate standard, so that from then on, anyone obviously guilty of doing something unspeakable who had neglected to actually record themselves doing it or authorizing that it be done could insist until they were blue in the face that there was "no smoking gun." All the President's Men probably did its share of damage to the journalism industry, drawing into it countless people who only turned into hacks and whores after discovering, to their dismay, that no all-seeing person was going to invite them to arrange a series of secret meetings so that he could shovel the story at them in enigmatic bursts.
The movie also has its place in the history of Watergate, for having bequeathed to us the line, "Follow the money." Such is the power of movies that everyone now knows that this is an actual key piece of advice that the actual Mark Felt gave the actual Bob Woodward, without which he could never have broken the actual case wide open, even though it was the creation of the screenwriter, William Goldman. Goldman also supplied the big wind-up speech with which Bradlee proves his mettle, delivered to his weary reporters while they're gathered on his front lawn in the middle of the night: "Look, you're both probably a little tired, right? You should be, you've been under a lot of pressure. So go home, have a nice hot bath, rest up -- fifteen minutes if you want-- before you get your asses back in gear--because we're under a lot of pressure, too, and you put us there-- not that I want it to worry you--nothing's riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution plus the freedom of the press plus the reputation of a hundred-year-old paper plus the jobs of the two thousand people who work there--but none of that counts as much as this: you fuck up again, I'm gonna lose my temper." For a boring, pompous movie about a national calamity, All the President's Men has a fair amount of Butch and Sundance in it.
(Redford is also the star of the 1975 Three Days of the Condor, which has a passing family resemblance to Rubicon; the hero works as a reader for the CIA, plowing through all kinds of published material looking for anything that might be of interest to the Company. He becomes a target when a report he's filed on the content of a pulp thriller strikes someone in the loop as hitting a little too close to home. Ideally, Condor ought to have a solid streak of black humor in it: Redford finds out he's in trouble when he comes back to work and finds that all his colleagues have been killed by assassins who were really after him but missed him because they timed their attack for when he was out on the office lunch run. Unfortunately, Condor was directed by Sydney Pollack, a splendid fellow who showed his talents off well in other films but who succumbed to a bad case of Pakula whenever Robert Redford was in the vicinity. As for Pakula, All the Presidnet's Men really marked not just the high point of his directing career but the end of his run as an auteur. He flamed out with Comes a Horseman, a failed attempt to make a really depressed Western, and Rollover, a total failure of a financial-conspiracy thriller in which the damn Arabs pull all their money out of our banks and precipitate a wordwide economic collapse. He rebounded commercially in the '90s with movie versions of Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent and John Grisham's The Pelican Brief, but nobody gave him as much credit for their success at their bestseller-list titles.)
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For what it's worth, my vote for greatest American political conspiracy thriller goes to Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), made thirteen years and a lifetime or two after De Palma's Greetings, in which the great lost comedy actor Gerrit Graham played a camera buff with an assassination conspiracy fetish. Instead of a realistic surface and the tone of a pamphlet meant to convince you that The System is rigged, Blow Out has the texture and intensity of a bad dream, the nightmare of someone who's seen what's happening to his country and feels powerless to do anything about it. De Palma threw together echoes of Chappaquiddick, the Zapruder film, and Nixon's ratfuckers, and even invented a new, clamorously empty patriotic holiday--"Liberty Day", in Philadelphia--just so that he could have a properly celebratory din in which to have his hero fail to save the woman he'd placed in jeopardy. Filmmaking talent aside, part of what makes it more sophisticated (and less smug) that Pakula's movies and the run of conspiracy thrillers is that De Palma doesn't discount the possibility of conspiracy but knows that, as the the foxes say in Lars Von Trier movies, chaos reigns: the political dirty tricks in Blow Out only escalate to murder because Burke (John Lithgow), the G. Gordon Liddy figure who's been hired to embarrass a potential presidential candidate with a sex scandal, saw his chance to simplify the plan and, after being cut loose by his appalled employers, runs amok. In his book The Dream Life, J. Hoberman called it the last '70s movie, and when it opened in the first summer of the Reagan presidency, it did feel like--and, at the box office and by most reviewers, was received as--a movie unwelcomely out of time.
One funny thing about these movies that was part of their appeal for me when I saw them as a kid, and that watching Rubicon has reminded me: they make investigating a conspiracy look like the opposite of being in a rut. People in movies who are investigating conspiracies are constantly trying to find places where they can meet people out in the open and not be easily observed or overheard. In The Parallax View, Beatty and a CIA discard played by Kenneth Mars compare notes while visiting an amusement park; when Redford/Woodward and Hoffman/Bernstein aren't at the newspaper office or in underground parking garages or on their boss's lawn in the middle of the night, they're kicking back in the waiting rooms of minor out-of-state government officials or at McDonald's, a scene that, when I first beheld it, I had no idea was probably meant to show us how badly these harried, underpaid American heroes had to eat. When my life consisted of being bused to any from the rural Mississippi wasteland to a school distinguishable from home chiefly by the fact that there were fewer cows and more asbestos in my classroom, I used movies to dream about the possibilities that having the autonomy of an adult might someday offer, and being a conspiracy buster looked like a pretty good way of life just for the unpredictable variety of places one might visit in the course of a day, even if you were likely to be framed for the killing of a Supreme Court justice after sipping coffee laced with a chemical that would simulate a fatal heart attack. I had forgotten how important that element was to the affection I once had for these films, and Rubicon reminded me, thanks largely to the character of Kale, who is always leaving someone a message to meet him on some rooftop or public street corner. So far, he hasn't taken Will for a ride on a rollercoaster, but I'm hoping they're saving that for the big finale.