From Epistemic to Hermetic Paranoia. Conspiracy Cinema and Its Digital Legacy

The 1970s is regarded as the heyday of the conspiracy film. During this period, European and American directors developed an aesthetic of paranoia that, according to Fredric Jameson (1996), expresses the impossibility of a cognitive mapping of modern power relations. In the crime plots of these films, investigations often lead nowhere, and the investigators appear as traumatised victims of a total conspiracy that anticipates everything they do. In recent conspiracy culture, by contrast, the paranoid aesthetics of 1970s cinema is widely recycled to create a delusional certainty in which “patterns replace absolute proof” (Coale, 2019, p. 22). This is also happening in new digital film genres such as online videos and YouTube documentaries. In Hollywood political thrillers, which themselves remediate (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) this expansion, the main theme becomes precisely the competition between different hermeneutics of suspicion.
While the understanding of paranoid thinking as a continuous and fundamental form of modernity (Melley, 2016) is widespread in cultural and social science studies, this essay will focus on its transformation. It will argue that there is not just a gradual but a categorical difference between the conspiracy aesthetics of the 1970s and the conspiracy cultures of the present: In the age of QAnon, the topos of the grand conspiracy has evolved from an expression of traumatised subjectivity in a corrupt society to a tool of proactive social disintegration. This suggests a radical shift in the implicit frame of reference of conspiracy theories, which now seem committed to the model of authoritarian liberalism described by Wendy Brown (2019).
In order to understand this development, film studies analysis and social science reflection are combined: The essay first analyses the narrative and aesthetic strategies employed in the 'conspiracy film' genre, focusing on representative examples from the 1970s and today. It then examines how the narrative and aesthetic strategies of cinema are taken up, re-adapted and circulated by Internet culture as an audiovisual means of ritualised communication (genre in the sociolinguistic sense). This includes popular cultural references to commercial films that are gaining prominence in current conspiracy discourses, especially in the QAnon conspiracy (Bloom & Moskalenko, 2021). The essay concludes by showing how this circulation is in turn observed in 'official' Hollywood film culture.