The Parallax View - Loren Singer

 THE PARALLAX VIEW - LOREN SINGER

The book on which the film starring Warren Beatty is based, the film being one of the cult-famous trilogy of paranoia films from the 1970s alongside Klute and All The President's Men, all directed by Alan J Pakula. The idea that there might be a conspiracy around the assassination of John F Kennedy isn't anything new of course, but it's this that The Parallax View is about even though JFK is never mentioned nor Martin Luther King Jr for that matter. 

To better understand and appreciate the book, a chronology is probably in order: Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968. President Richard Nixon authorized the covert carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1969. Loren Singer wrote The Parallax View in 1970, The film based on the book was released in 1974. That same year, Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal.

These were the paranoid years when confidence in government - particularly in America - was dissolving. The years when what the general population was being told and not told could no longer be trusted, and rightly so.

The crux of The Parallax View is that witnesses to a political assassination are being bumped-off one by one but 'by whom' is the question. Without wanting to spoil the plot (but I will), the answer is that it's an arm of the government itself. A bureau within the State Department whose sole purpose is to defend and maintain the status quo.

This isn't actually revealed until we're past two-thirds of the book and is presented as a sort of shocking revelation but really it's not that controversial or even that much of a surprise, even for 1970. A representative of the bureau calmly explains everything over a meal of Beef Bourguignon in a restaurant, informing the Warren Beatty/journalist character the reason for the bureau's existence and why the journalist is on the hit-list:

'This country is involved in a battle. It has to maintain itself as a state and it has to continue in something like its present form for as long as the majority of its people want it to continue. The bureau is aimed at insuring that continuity. That's the job we were created to do. Quietly.

Place this country, this particular state in comparison with the great ones of the past, and you will see it's truly a giant. That's not to say there's nothing wrong with it. It's godawful in many areas but what's wrong with it can be changed. But what you have to see is that its existence is preserved. We have to manage its survival. That is precedent.

Every four years we congratulate ourselves on an orderly transfer of the government power from one group to another, but we don't really transfer much of anything - a sidewise shuffle between two centrist groups, and before or after the fact there is an attack, a skewering  of a man or men who are close to the center of the power.

That happens too often. It is omnipresent here. It is increasingly deadly. Its aftermath is presently apathy. That won't always be so. Each time we kill, we macerate the society a little more. We abrade it more, stretch its functional ties more, alienate more individuals more. That's why the bureau exists.'

So, apart from admitting to killing 'disruptionists', there's nothing really revelatory about this, particularly as America at the time was sending its children off to fight in Vietnam. Why should there be a distinction between killing in foreign lands and killing in the homeland if the reason behind it is the same? The casus beli. 

To this day wars are still waged around the world with the force behind them more often than not being America. Nothing has really changed since Vietnam. But are 'disruptionists' at home still being killed? This is the question The Parallax View begs.

Arguably, there's no need nowadays to be so crude as to shoot your 'enemy within' or to throw them out of office block windows or onto rail tracks. Nowadays you simply and a lot more subtley contain them with illusion or nullify them with distraction. You buy them out with concessions, trap them in poverty or even the mere fear of it. You enhance the spectacle, as the Situationists called it, so that the spectacle is all. You change working to live into living to work. You make men of machines and machines of men. You turn 'alternatives' into product, you turn rebellion into money and money into life and the meaning of it.

Nowadays you simply alter the algorithms... 

                                                                                                                                                                                       John Serpico