Through the Looking Glass - In Praise of "The Parallax View"

parallax: the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object - Merriam-Webster Dictionary

A totem pole fills up the screen. The camera pans left and now we see Seattle's famous Space Needle, which a moment ago was completely covered by the pole. Parallax. Seeing something from two different points of view. It's the Needle where a political assassination that drives the rest of the film will take place, and it's the opening shot that will resonate, tantalizing us with the ultimate question: how far will some people go to squelch their opposition?

When Alan J. Pakula's "The Parallax View" was released on June 14, 1974, the country was in a state of great unease. Vietnam was all but lost (a year later, the choppers would leave the rooftops of Saigon), Richard Nixon was less then two months away from resigning in the wake of Watergate, and Americans, who'd had a good ten years to reflect on JFK's assassination, were in the throes of conspiracy theories questioning exactly who was behind the murder of the president. Mistrust of authority had been a calling card of 60's youth; now it was more palpable than ever as that generation dealt with the inevitable hangover from the good times. The time was right for a thriller that could capture the uncertainty, the off-kilter feeling of the early 70's that the public wasn't being told the whole story.

"Parallax" fit the bill beautifully. I have loved this movie since first seeing it when I was about 16; it's creepy vibe gets under my skin every time no matter how often I watch it.

The story is simple enough. Warren Beatty, in one of his best, most nuanced performances, plays Joe Frady, a recovering alcoholic who writes for a small Seattle newspaper. (Small, indeed...the only other person on the staff we ever meet is Beatty's editor, played with refreshing world-weariness by the great Hume Cronyn.) After the popular presidential candidate Senator Charles Carroll is assassinated atop the Space Needle, a colleague of Frady's (Paula Prentiss) comes to him in a panic, fearing for her own life because, she claims, people who witnessed Carroll's murder are dropping like flies. Frady pooh-poohs her fears until someone very close to him is found dead. That sets him off on a mission to figure out not only that murder but all the others that could be linked to Carroll's. And that mission takes him into the shadowy inner world of the Parallax Corporation, which may or may not be keeping a staff of assassins on call, ready to take someone out at a moment's notice.

In the hands of another director, this story would probably be told rather straightforwardly, with Frady picking up small pieces of evidence as he puts the whole picture together. But Pakula does an interesting thing: he interrupts the main story for little asides that, while not making much sense logically, actually add to the overall sense of forboding.

Take, for example, the fistfight between Frady and a redneck in a bar that takes place early in the film. Sure, we could chalk it up to Pakula trying to goose the audience with a cheap action sequence. But then, when it turns out the redneck is actually a sherriff's deputy -- and that the sheriff is his uncle, sitting just a few feet away -- the movie throws us for a loop. Sure, the fight was exciting, but something else is going on here: namely, the idea that we're never sure who's who and who's doing what. Frady -- and by extension, the audience -- never quite knows who to trust.
Pakula's visual strategy also adds to the film's sense of unease. Working with the great cinematographer Gordon Willis, Pakula shoots most of his wide shots with a long lens, flattening out the landscape so that we think we can see everything, when in actuality we don't quite know what's lurking around the corner.

In many of the tighter, quieter shots, Willis digs into the shadows (one reason why his nickname was "The Angel of Darkness"), giving us dark, shadowy shots that make us question what we think we've seen. (There's a scene where Frady returns to his rented apartment and a man is sitting there waiting for him. But it's shot so darkly we can barely make the other man out at first.) It all supports the film's whole point that sometimes we can't trust our own eyes.

Then there's the famous, much-talked-about slide-show sequence. Frady, having gotten accepted as a possible candidate for work at Parallax, is given a psychological exam where he's seated alone in a dark theater and shown a five minute series of film clips with words like "God", "Mother", and "Father" flashed between the clips, and soft pop music playing on the soundtrack. At first, the words match pictures that we would associate with them -- sunlight through clouds for "God", a woman playing with her baby for "Mother". But then, as the music gets more ominous, the words and pictures don't match up. "God" flashes before a shot of Hitler. "Father" flashes before a shot of a man winding up to smack his kids. "Me" flashes before a shot of a little boy running in a dark hallway. The sequence was obviously created for someone in a questionable psychological state...exactly who Parallax is looking to hire. But once the sequence starts, Pakula never cuts to reaction shots of Beatty. We experience the sequence along with Joe Frady, but our viewpoints are all completely different. Parallax.

"The Parallax View" was the second of Pakula's so-called "paranoia trilogy" that started with 1971's "Klute" and ended with "All the President's Men" in 1976. But I think it's the best of the three. While the other two are good films in their own right, I find flaws in them every time I watch. But "Parallax" is the only one that, to me, sticks to a consistent tone of dread. The fact that, despite some dated elements, it still holds up more than 30 years later is a testament to Pakula's uncompromising, cynical, and despairing vision. It's a movie for anyone who refuses to take the world at face value. They won't think of "Parallax" as fiction; they'll see it as prophecy.