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Conspiracy Films as Popular History

In this seminar I tried to identify aspects of the appeal and interrogate the political and historical efficacy of conspiracy theory in films that discuss historical events. (I originally hoped also to discuss counterfactual elements in film but decided I was being too ambitious, and have postponed discussion of counterfactuals to seminar 8.) I treated conspiracy theory as a popular mode of historical understanding, and one that appeals broadly. We’re all familiar with some bestselling examples, and I suppose few of us would bother to take, say, The Da Vinci Code as anything but entertainment (though the Vatican got quite exercised about it) – but some literature and film proposes itself to be taken very seriously indeed. I discuss here several films that aspire to provide the ‘truth’, and something like the whole truth, ‘behind’ particular salient events or circumstances. However, I will be proposing that they often either fail to persuade or seem instead to be dealing with something else.

There is a whole genre of events and of discourse in Italy known as the misteri d’Italia (Italian mysteries): the history of Italy after the Second World War is dotted with murders or suspected murders, massacres and explosions that seem always to require more explanation. So: conspiracies in Italy do exist and have existed; many events are either insufficiently explained or incompletely punished (for example certain terrorist bombings, and state links with far right organizations). But I want to suggest that conspiracy theory often goes beyond mere explanation, and often fixates on events that have been adequately explained (for example the kidnap and muder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades).

I have discussed in a previous seminar the various ways we can treat film in terms of history. In this seminar I am discussing the work of filmmakers who present their material as the medium of history but which seem instead to be more useful as a source of historical understanding for us, in the sense that they seem to be symptomatic of historical conditions that may have been opaque to their makers.

The material in this seminar is drawn from my work on the representation of terrorism in Italian cinema. So, a little history:

A first clip to illustrate the representation in the conspiracy mode of right-wing terrorism – in this case vigilantism intended to confirm and encourage authoritarian sentiment. In this edited clip from near the end of La polizia ringrazia (Stefano Vanzina, 1972) we get the investigator, the tough-but-good cop Bertoni confronting the instigator of the crimes he has been investigating. It’s a very clichéd moment: the motivations of the crime are revealed and the guilty person should now come along quietly. Instead, Bertoni is killed, and we discover that even his trusted deputy (who bursts out the door at a certain point) has been part of the conspiracy.

With the Bologna bombing, the Moro is kidnap is the ‘best remembered’ event of the anni di piombo. The kidnap scene itself appears in several films (even one American film called The Year of the Gun), and seems to be presented as something like a traumatic primal scene when, late but definitively, innocence was lost. Notice the analogies in staging between the two clips below, the first from Il caso Moro (Giuseppe Ferrara, 1986), the second from the TV two-part movie Aldo Moro: il presidente (Gianluca Maria Tavarelli, 2008). I don't think these similarities are only to do with the fact that the clips are showing the same event.

I’m going to discuss now two other films that deal with the Moro kidnapping. Piazza delle Cinque Lune (Renzo Martinelli, 2003) is a spectacular thriller that uses a fictional plot to outline its own conspiracy version of the Moro kidnapping: twenty years after the Moro events, a judge on the cusp of retirement (played by Canadian actor Donald Sutherland) is given a super-8 film of the Moro kidnap scene and begins an investigation into those ‘really’ behind the kidnap. Again, the traumatic primal scene is replayed, this time as impersonation degraded film stock.

We’ve seen the second film, Romanzo criminale (Michele Placido, 2005), before. See here for some notes on it. It also offers a conspiracy version of the Aldo Moro kidnapping and presents a ‘puppet-master’ figure, apparently attached to the state, who uses the Roman gang to discover Moro’s whereabouts, only to refuse to act on its discoveries and so allow Moro to die. Here are some scenes with this figure or his deputy. Notice the location: an austere but fantastically located office high up in the very centre of Rome overlooking the Vittorio Emanuele momument. This huge and pompous edifice was dear to the fascists (as was Piazza Venezia itself where it sits and from a balcony in which Mussolini used to make his speeches). For some commentators this location is enough to suggest the unnamed puppet-master figure’s neofascist sympathies (a case of over-reading?). Certainly, the central location is enough to suggest the official even if covert nature of the man’s activities. More importantly the juxtaposition of the scenes of the puppet-master calling off the investigation and the audio recording (real) of the phonecall by Mario Moretti announcing the whereabouts of Moro’s body (the b/w images are also genuine footage) imply responsibility if not quite causality. The sequence is saying the state had the possibility to do more and didn’t. It doesn’t seem to speculate further in this instance.

I’ll come back in a moment to the two films’ conspiracy theories. But I’m interested here not in refuting the content of a given theory but in the structure of conspiracy theory itself. More precisely, I want to slide away from the alleged truth value to some discussion of the social functions of the conspiracy mode. One of these social functions is to give expression to disquiet or dissatisfaction about the manner in which a nation is governed. Mary Wood (in an unpublished piece) has written about the role of the conspiracy mode in Italian cinema as follows:

Wood is suggesting that a given conspiracy theory does not necessarily reveal the ‘truth’ behind, say, anonymous terrorist bombings or the Moro kidnap but rather offers a metaphor for a widespread sense that society is inequitably organized. Of course, it is unlikely that the makers of many conspiracy films would conceive of their purpose in that way. For example, Renzo Martinelli has vigorously insisted on the accuracy of his presentation of the Moro events in Piazza delle Cinque Lune. Following the prolific conspiracy theorist of the Moro kidnap Sergio Flamigni, the film proposes that Mario Moretti – leader of the Red Brigades at time of the kidnap and one of Moro’s jailers as well as the one, according to his own testimony, who shot Moro in the Renault 4 (he’s the one with the moustache in the clips above) – was an agent of a covert force controlled by the CIA. Conspiracy theories more and even less plausible than this one continue to envelop discussion of the kidnapping. It seems that the responsibility of the Red Brigades themselves can never satisfy: the Italian government, the Americans, somebody else, must also have been involved, and the explanations for their motivation for wanting Moro dead reach often a degree of elaborateness that would please a manuscript illuminator.

Perhaps the version of conspiracy theory in Romanzo criminale is less implausible because it is more vague. I doubt we are meant to see in the puppet-master figure the disguise of a real person. Instead, the character is a metaphor, a personification intended less to persuade than to communicate suspicions and to indicate state implication in the obscure events of those years. These sort of metaphors are typical of dramatic historical film (as discussed in seminar 2) and this sort of personification is typical of the popular imaginary more broadly, of, that is, the way in which processes are represented in our day-to-day thinking. Ryan and Kellner (1988: 98) write that ‘the paranoid side of the populist imaginary, which conceives of evil in the world as personal […] is incapable of conceptualizing the systemic character of power’.

Should we see this as a failure of thought? I don't believe so – we need to put the emphasis on that term ‘popular’ and tease out its implications (the necessity of an efficient mode of address to a wide audience, for example). Still, whatever the beliefs or intentions of their filmmakers, films like these and the conspiracy mode more broadly seem to me to reveal the intense desire for a sense of order and design in the randomness of events, in the context of the malfunction of democratic systems and the complex evolution of post-industrial society. Mary P. Wood seems to confirm this when she writes of the complexity of Italian life in the 1970s:

Wood is sympathetic to the power of the conspiracy thriller to give expression to political discontent. I’m a little more sceptical, because I feel that the conspiracy thriller often functions as a celebration of the power and efficiency of the conspirators it is supposedly denouncing. This has two aspects, which I’m going to go on to discuss now:

The first is that the we can understand the representation of personified conspiratorial power, in these puppet-master figures we have seen, as a kind of replacement for God, as invisible, irresistible all-powerful forces. The second is that the conspiracy thriller almost always represents resistance to the power of the conspirators as useless: the conspirators will always win, usually at the cost of the life of the resistor or investigator (as in La polizia ringrazia). This has discouraging implications on the political level.

Let’s begin with the idea of conspiratorial power as a replacement for God. I’m relying here on the work of Karl Popper, who argued in the mid twentieth century against what he called the ‘conspiracy theory of history’ which he found in simplistic forms of (‘vulgar’) Marxism. Popper points out that conspiracy theory tends simultaneously to efface and embody the impenetrability of historical processes by personifying these processes in the obscure and omnipotent figure of the conspirator, who is rather like a malign deity. We see this at work in Italy in modern times where various figures have been accused of planning all the atrocities and unexplained events known as the misteri d’Italia.

One of these is Giulio Andreotti, as portrayed in Il Divo. For Popper, such obscure figures become a substitute for the hand of God. Popper argues says that the conspiracy mode ‘is akin to Homer’s theory of society’:

Popper is thinking a bit (grumpily) like an anthropologist here: finding the God structure in the supposedly rational post-belief twentieth century. I might be less inclined to be dismissive because we are likely to find the God structure in our own thought also, and in Popper’s, even if we profess ourselves atheists and rationalists (as I do myself).

In any case, in Popper’s analysis, the prevalence of conspiracy theory is seen as a symptom of human impotence and of our ignorance of the nature of events; because modern societies are too complex for us to understand (for us to 'conceptually map'), we explain them by imagining that opaque events and processes have been planned by someone – by a malign God, the conspiracy puppet-master.

Despite the fact that the conspirator is a malign and cruel God, the work of imagining him is actually a consolatory activity: it gives meaning to events, offers a design behind complex historical processes and reassures us that someone is in control. The conclusion we can draw from this is that what pretends to be privileged access to the truth is in reality evidence of its opposite: the inability to orient oneself in a complex social system means we create a myth of power and design behind that system. So, if one of the social functions of conspiracy theory is to fill the place of God, it also proffers a kind of consolatory empowerment: the person who subscribes to the conspiracy theory feels he has insider knowledge (I’m using the gendered pronoun deliberately) not shared by others. Despite the sense of political impotence the viewer of a conspiracy film may feel, and whatever the frustrations of social and economic existence, that viewer feels he is endowed with a privileged knowledge about the way things ‘really’ are. The conspiracy film (or book) grants a sense of access to a secret or higher understanding, an access supposedly barred to the greater mass of men. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of conspiracy as a popular genre that it succeeds in flattering its viewer or reader as one of the elect even as it is retailed to multitudes.

I have written ‘he’ and ‘his’ above: does conspiracy appeal in particular to men? David Aaronovitch (2009: 304) writes that ‘conspiracy theories may be hysterias for men’. Perhaps this is so, but such a fact needs to be placed historically, I believe. Perhaps the supposed access to insider knowledge provided by the conspiracy theory works as compensation for a gender whose power and status is under challenge, whether by economic conditions (the demise of manufacturing, the end of job security) or ideological forces (the gains of feminism).

The period of the 1970s in Italy was not just a period of political violence: the 1970s witnessed a feminist movement of remarkable longevity and vigour which achieved changes in legislation (divorce, family law, the right to legal and safe abortion) and this implied, at the very least, a radical change in the conception of gender relations, and perhaps, more jagonistically, a threat to patriarchal power. Many now agree that the challenges of feminism and changing gender roles were more significant and had longer lasting effects than the violence and terrorism of the time. Perhaps the obsessive focus on events like the Moro kidnap and the conspiracy theories that have been derived from it may be working as disguised acknowledgement of and consolation for the threat to the position and status of men in 1970s Italy and beyond? (I can only suggest this here, but see here if you’re interested in this argument.)

I have just been dealing with conspiracy theory as a replacement for God. I now want to move on to considering some of the political consequences of employing conspiracy theory as a means to understand how society functions or as a means to understand particularly salient events within it. It seems to me that the problem with the conspiracy mode is that it pays a kind of involuntary tribute to the efficacy of the conspirators. The success of the plot tends to seem irresistible the conspirators always win - with the corollary from a political perspective that the viewer may be left feeling that protest and political activity is worthless. Even as the conspiracy film provides a counter-version of recent history it seems to ascribe an exaggerated competence and elusiveness to those who have governed brutally or corruptly. Arguably the personified depiction of power impressing its inscrutable but irresistible will on a messy world may well encrypt a fantasy of the strong, competent leader on the authoritarian model. We’ve talked about the conspirator as a replacement for God; but this is God as a dictator.

The personification of power in this popular conspiratorial mode may well allow the expression of anxieties or exasperation about the mechanisms and distribution of power in the social system. This is Mary Wood’s argument: conspiracy theory in film she says signals the failure of the hegemonic process; the question must be to what extent this expression functions as a critique of power or is ultimately a celebration of it.

To repeat my point: A problem with the use of the conspiracy mode from a political perspective is that the success of the ‘plot’ set in motion by the conspirators can seem irresistible, and the conspiracy can seem at once invisible and infallible. It is worth considering, in this context, what Judith Butler has written in relation to ‘paranoid’, i.e. conspiracy, theories of the September 11 attacks – American government did it etc. This is quite a difficult quotation, not well written, but basically what she’s saying is that by believing the US actually did it to itself the theorists are denying any capacity to act (for good or ill) to anyone else. (‘Agency’ here is the capacity to act.)

Extrapolating from Butler, we can say that the danger of the ‘paranoid’ or conspiracy mode is that it removes agency not only from the victims of the conspiracy but also from those (implicitly doomed to failure) who seek justice and proper commemoration. Inasmuch as it is a vehicle for what she calls a fantasy of omnipotence, and invests agency only in the conspirators, the conspiracy mode of thought asserts that the authors of the conspiracy are all-powerful and unreachable by the hand of justice.

So, I have been saying that the conspiracy mode puts the conspirators in the place of God, and at the same denies any political power to those who would try to change things: the conspirators are all-powerful and cannot be resisted. Even, however, as we feel this disempowerment, we are consoled by a kind of ersatz empowerment:

If we subscribe to the conspiracy mode then we are in the know; we do not suffer from the same illusions that others do - the naïve people - that things can be changed, that criminality can be punished, that politics can be more than the exertion of malign power. The claim to privileged knowledge made by the conspiracy film is a consolatory disavowal of the disempowerment felt by its audience, and compensation for the sense of dislocation and confusion felt by many in modern society.

Let’s have a look at a clip to illustrate some of these points. The following clip is from La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide (aka, Chopper Squad, Sergio Martino, 1975). In it, the tough-but-good cop Solmi discovers a coup plot involving the army, top industrialists, the Americans, the Italian secret services, and unbeknownst to him his own trusted deputy (as in La polizia). The end of the film shows Solmi at home with his girlfriend, and shows one of the leaders of the coup plot who Solmi has captured being taken for interrogation. It also shows the journey of the investigating judge to the same interrogation from his home in an affluent area. The murders, or executions, of both Solmi and the leader he has captured take place in this sequence: the captured leader is gunned down by Solmi’s treacherous assistant, presumably to ensure his silence. Solmi is shot from a car as he unlocks his own vehicle in the crowded parking lot on front of his apartment block. We see the face of his horrified girlfriend in slow-motion – notice the strangeness of these images. Notice also the costume and marching (?) music which suggest a militaristic register presiding beyond the domestic images.

The tragedy of Solmi’s death is found in the truncation of heterosexual communion: the lover’s sepia face in her reaction shots represents a sentimentalized exaggeration of the love theme. The theme of love, however, has also led to a kind of emasculation of the male protagonist: his work done (all the coup plotters apparently killed, caught or about to be implicated), he is seen for the first time genuinely relaxed in the scene in the apartment before his death — wearing pajamas rather than the slim-fitting suit or polo neck jumper typical of the tough-but-good cop in this and in many similar films.

He is also subject to his girlfriend’s concern as he risks a chill (Italian style) by pausing on the balcony. This ‘soft’ representation of the hero and her ‘maternal’ concern undercut the virility that has been so marked in the hero up to this point and what is most important is that the process suggests a certain inevitability or rightness in his death. Solmi’s enfeeblement - what I have called his symbolic emasculation - is contrasted with the ruthlessness of the conspirators who do not hesitate to eliminate him as well as one of their own. We can see this film, and the many others like it, as having a ritual function. The death of the policeman is the expression of an article of faith. It confirms our conviction that nothing can change, that the citizen is defenceless against systemic power which is represented as conspiracy - which as I have suggested, following Karl Popper may be another way of saying ‘God’. I’ll remind you of what Popper says: conspiracy theory prospers when belief in God is abandoned: ‘[God’s] place is then filled by various powerful men and groups — sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and the evils from which we suffer.’ The conspirators take the place of God: ensuring an order behind apparent disorder and so conferring meaning even while dispensing death.

Film is a fitting medium for the expression of our faith in these replacements for God. As Karnick and Jenkins (1995: 11-12) have suggested:

Wood suggests that conspiracy is one means to ‘make meaning about contemporary history and social anxieties’; my argument here would be that the conspiracy text is less about these anxieties than symptomatic of them. The claim to privileged knowledge made by the conspiracy film is a kind of consolatory disavowal of the disorientation felt by its audience.

I want to finish by mentioning my own discomfort with the critique/account I’ve just given. I’ve been refusing the conspiracy mode efficacy as a medium of historical expression, and treating it instead in (simplistic) ‘symptomatic’ terms. I think we have to build a way of describing material like this that doesn’t imply that ‘it should be otherwise’, but accepts the terms in which the popular imaginary functions.If you’re interested in pursuing this issue I recommend a pair of articles by Robert Burgoyne on the conspiracy film JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991). This controversial representation of the ‘truth’ behind the murder of John F. Kennedy was deplored by conservative historians for its misrepresentations and manipulations, and would be an example of ‘gender consolation’ for men according to my account above. For Burgoyne (and this links with our theme in seminar 4) the film is a remarkable attempt to imagine the nation according to the terms described by Benedict Anderson and he pays very close attention to the formal characteristics (and references to time) in the film. See the essay on JFK in Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, revised edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

For a very interesting take on conspiracy theories as a failed attempt at political empowerment see Fredric Jameson's short essay ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), pp. 347-60.

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References

David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009)

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004)

Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (eds and intro.), Classical Hollywood Comedy (London, Routledge, 1995)

D. Kellner and M. Ryan, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963)

Mary P. Wood, ‘Revealing the hidden city: The cinematic conspiracy thriller of the 1970s, The Italianist, 23 (2003), 150-62

___________‘Navigating the Labyrinth: Cinematic Investigations of Right-wing Terrorism’, in Terrorism Italian Style: The representation of Terrorism and Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema, ed. by R. Glynn, G. Lombardi and A. O’Leary (London: IGRS, forthcoming)

#conspiracy theory #Aldo Moro #Sergio Flamigni #Oliver Stone #JFK (film)#La polizia ringrazia #La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide #Piazza delle Cinque Lune #Il caso Moro #Aldo Moro: il presidente #Romanzo criminale