K-Punk has a fantastic article up over at his website titled “… without any consequence for the original villains,” analyzing the role of the Parallax Corporation in Alan J. Pakula’s political thriller, The Parallax View (some of my own thoughts on the film can be found here, but they’re nowhere near as well-written and insightful as K-Punk’s), as well as the recent Red Riding trilogy and the events stemming from the financial collapse and protests at the G-20 Conference.

The terrifying climactic moment of The Parallax View - the silhouette of Beatty’s anonymous assassin against migraine white space - for me now rhymes with the open door at the end of a very different film, The Truman Show. But where the door in the horizon opening onto black space at the end of Weir’s film connotes a break in a universe of total determinism, the nothingness on which existentialist freedom depends, The Parallax View’s final “open door … opens onto a world conspiratorially organized and controlled as far as the eye can see” (Jameson). This anonymous figure with a rifle in a doorway is the closest we get to seeing the conspiracy (as) itself. The conspiracy in The Parallax View never gives any account of itself. It is never focalised through a single malign individual… Who knows what the Parallax Corporation really wants? It is itself situated in the parallax between politics and economy; is it a commercial front for political interests, or is the whole machinery of government a front for it? It’s not clear if the Corporation really exists - more than that, it’s not clear if its aim is to pretend that it doesn’t exist, or to pretend that it does.

What makes the article so worth linking to is that he manages to articulate a number of thoughts and fears that I’ve had recently, such as the growing sense that anonymous corporations and torturers are shaping our public consciousness with little recourse to even hollow words like “justice,” and that everyone, including and especially Obama, have participated in the coverup (not that one even needs recourse to such notions as conspiracy theories when the media’s self-stated goal is to spread propaganda as a means of realizing profits easier), and that the soulless structures are continuing to thrive like zombies by consuming living flesh. It’s no wonder they’ve called them “zombie banks.”

The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be different this time; but watch someone step up into management and it’s usually not very long before the grey petfification of power starts to subsume them. It’s here that structure is palpable - you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/ deadening judgements speaking through them. And surely we have all felt the effects of structure whenever we assume a so-called position of responsibility: we immediately find ourselves second-guessing our responses, anxiously concerned about whether we are doing what It wants, never sure if we are measuring up…

This is the kind of sense you get from watching neo-noir films like The Parallax View, movies made after the failure of May 1968. The sense that hope for a “violent” overthrow of the structure has ended, and that the structure qua big Other has realized it and registered that failure and, seizing the opportunity of consciousness’ momentary haziness and fog, recedes back into the night like a squid under the ocean, using its tentacles to puppet human bodies above the sea, humans whose actions seem at once foreign but seemingly autonomous enough to quietly accept infinite resignation and servitude by enjoining in the structure’s guilt-production: self-flagellation under the command of the Master’s anonymous voice.