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| Dean Bertram: Cracking the conspiracy code |
| 2006-05-19 |
| From Oliver Stone's JFK through The X Files to Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code, Hollywood catapults ideas from the radical fringe into the cultural mainstream ONCE upon a time, if someone approached you whispering about the hidden bloodline of Christ or the machinations of an ancient secret society, you could be reasonably certain that the person was a card-carrying conspiracy theorist or a fully-fledged nut (neither category being mutually exclusive). Nowadays, those who espouse such loopy beliefs are more often than not reasonably normal folk. They have simply taken the fictional revelations of Dan Brown's best-selling The Da Vinci Code a tad too seriously. As Ron Howard's cinematic adaptation of Brown's potboiler is set for worldwide release today, prepare for the coming swell of converts to the tale's distorted version of history. It is not the first time popular entertainment has catapulted ideas from the fringe into the cultural mainstream. During the past decade or so, Hollywood has sanitised an assortment of weird beliefs and helped create what American political scientist Michael Barkun identifies as "a culture of conspiracy". Take Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a film that encouraged audiences to scoff at the Warren Commission's findings (that is, that a "magic bullet" fired by a lone gunman had killed president John F. Kennedy). Stone would rather that we believe the leaders of the US military-industrial complex ordered Kennedy's assassination as part of a brilliantly orchestrated and masterfully concealed coup d'etat. The hard evidence for such a conspiracy is scant at best, but the film left numerous people convinced of the theory Stone championed. Not long after the release of JFK, The X Files (1993-2002), along with a plethora of similar productions, introduced a whole set of obscure terms from UFO belief into common parlance. If, as these popular shows contended, the US government had long conspired to conceal the truth about flying saucers, somewhere along the way someone must have dropped the ball. By the late 1990s, everyone seemed to know about Roswell, Area 51, Men in Black and alien abductions. Along with fictional dramas, a range of conspiracy-oriented documentaries - from Fox's ridiculous Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? (1995) to Michael Moore's ideologically skewed Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) - have contributed to the retardation of mass political culture. Intercutting the real with the staged and bombarding the audience with emotive footage and questionable data, these dubious productions served up an easily digestible but nonetheless half-baked reality, a type of dissent for dummies. Even though conspiracy films usually lack substantive evidence for their extraordinary claims, this is not to say that their production values are similarly absent. Indeed, the better the quality of the film, the better are its chances of influencing an audience. For example, JFK, as with much of Stone's work, is a visually stunning masterpiece filled with solid performances from an incredible ensemble cast. It is not surprising that its faux revelations hoodwinked so many viewers. Exceptional film-making rarely equates with accurate history. Cinema is an art form that encourages its practitioners to strive for brevity. A good film-maker knows when to cut to the chase and usually does so sooner than later. Simply put, the dramatic requirements of the medium demand that complicated historical processes be condensed into fast-paced, simplistic narratives (much as they are in conspiracy theories). Although the re-creation of relatively uncontested historical events is problematic enough, when dramatising a more contentious account the probability of a film-maker accurately portraying the past is infinitesimal. Stone says he regularly evoked dramatic license when making JFK. Departing not just from the historical record but also from the conspiracy theories on which he based the film, Stone created fictional characters and fabricated events to further simplify its crypto-historical narrative. Of course cinema, unlike, say, the written word, provides one with little time to consciously engage the specifics of each scene before the following scene begins. Instead, a film's mesmerising visuals, often mixed with a powerful musical score, can facilitate the transference of ideas directly into the viewer's subconscious mind. This is the magic of cinema, the medium's ability to help the audience suspend their disbelief so they can temporarily immerse themselves in the on-screen world. Unfortunately, pundits with a political agenda, a la Moore, can engage in a type of cinematic sleight-of-hand and slip distorted facts and fallacious reasoning past the critical faculties of audience members. Film has long been the propagandist's weapon of choice for this reason. Hitler and Stalin were both big fans of its inherent powers of persuasion. So was Lenin, who hailed cinema as "the most important of all the arts". Indeed, one cannot properly understand modern cinema without taking into account the influence of totalitarian film-makers on its development. Figures such as the great Soviet film theorist Sergei Eisenstein and the Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl developed cinematic techniques particularly suited to the transference of ideological messages. Many of these techniques remain in the armamentarium of today's film-makers. I'm pretty sure Howard has no ideological barrow to push with his adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. But who really knows? This is probably a moot point anyway. Because whatever his beliefs are regarding the controversial book, Howard is an Academy Award-winning director who is more than capable of taking the audience on a cinematic thrill ride, jam-packed with exciting revelations (bogus as they may be). Productions such as JFK and The X Files have demonstrated that this is often all it takes to inject fringe ideas into popular thought. Indeed, there will be plenty of cinemagoers walking out of darkened theatres during the coming weeks in an intellectual state similar to that of a child waking from a dream, unsure of where the imaginary world ends and real life begins. What this means is that along with blathering about JFK's assassination, UFO cover-ups and 9/11 conspiracies, the ranks of the ill-informed will now take it on themselves to enlighten the rest of us on the truth about the sexual relations of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. It's enough to make you say - through gritted teeth - "Hooray for Hollywood." Dean Bertram is an independent film-maker and writer. He recently completed his PhD thesis on UFO belief and American culture at the University of Sydney. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #1 heh, no such thing as negative publicity. For every weak mind willing to believe in their favorite soap character and the Da Vinci Code, there will be another percentage who will become interested in Christianity and discover why his Gospel has survived for centuries. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-05-19 11:12 |