Stop me if you've seen this one before. There's a guy (it's almost always a guy) who lives on the fringes of society, perhaps in a basement with a computer. He believes in a conspiracy theory that sounds a little nutty to his friends and family. He's the butt of jokes, until one day he's targeted for assassination. Turns out the Deep State is after him, because the conspiracy theory wasn't so crazy after all!
This paranoid thriller plot is, by now, one of the laziest tropes in the world of TV and movie writing. Not to be confused with the first wave of paranoid thrillers in the 1970s, classic movies which recounted actual attacks on democracy (All the President's Men, Z) targeted a genuinely out-of-control CIA (3 Days of the Condor) or examined our obsession with eavesdropping (The Conversation), this second wave of conspiracy entertainment dates back to the 1990s. That's when Hollywood appears to have discovered that if it sanded its villains down to a simple, shadowy "they," it could pander to a wide range of viewers who fear all kinds of secretive elite cabals. Read more...
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