A recent viewing of the new Lanthimos joint Begonia made me realize how mainstream conspiracy as media narrative has become. I do not mean to suggest conspiracies are more popular now, although they may in fact be¹, but that their deployment in commercial media, viz., cinema is. To name a few other examples Scorsese’s Killers of Flower Moon, Aster’s Eddington, Cregger’s Weapons, and PTA’s One Battle After Another. All five movies use conspiracy like a trident: as plot, as tone, and as commentary; yet they do so with a uniqueness to each that suggest conspiracy as part of our actual superstructure. I would suggest more so than the 60s and 70s. That is what I think is so interesting. Spoilers for all these movies to follow.

We’ll briefly analyze the movies, relatively isolated, before returning to a synthesis. We’ll group two of the movies, Begonia and Weapons, as they’re two sides of the coin: sci fi and supernatural.

Killers of Flower Moon

In many respects this is quintessential Marty. Based off a book, organized crime, and his usual collaborators. It recalls Goodfellas or Casino, and like both those adaptions and unlike the earlier aforementioned movies, based on a true story. Here a conspiracy of organized crime driven by greed against the native Osage nation. The film is deeply upsetting because it is true, but it is also perhaps the most hopeful on our list — clearly due to the director’s unyielding faith. The film is a Catholic in its repentance and apology.

By virtue of Killer’s story being told, we its viewers, are made to reckon with the atrocities of past. It serves as acknowledgment of what has happened, and will happen, or is happening, again. It serves as call to acknowledge that there is in fact some nefarious plot. A call that whats happening is not accidental, and never has been.

It is also a stand in for other movies. Consider Marty’s earlier The Irishman, and it’s focus on who murdered Hoffa. Or Vice, and the role of corporate greed informing politics. Or further back Chinatown.² That is to say, movies with narratives about actual conspiracies. Taken alone, it is not interesting that these movies exist, nor that they found critical or box office success. In many ways, Killer‘s is just a continuation of this tradition. What sets it apart, however, is a global pandemic. Filmed during, COVID and amid the BLM protests. It’s impossible that the film’s racially charged conspiracy narrative would not be informed by reality. Art imitates life.

One Battle After Another

The Christmas Adventures as a racist deep state organization are enough to qualify OBAA as conspiracy film. Still it would be impossible not to acknowledge that OBAA and PTA’s Inherent Vice are both adaptations of Thomas Pynchon novels. And Pynchonesque has come to be a stand in for paranoid, absurd and conspiratorial narratives about American counter culture. Inherent Vice is faithful to its written counterpart, Battle is more of adaptation and modernization. Importing, or foreseeing, the recent history of ICE raids; and drawing on the imagery of the aforementioned BLM protests in a captivating set piece of civil unrest and resistance.

Pat Calhoun, the protagonist of Battle, is not quiet as overtly paranoid/ pot brained as Inherent Vice‘s Doc. Nor is his story as expansive as Doc’s. Rather Pat’s is more familial. Its unsure if Doc is able to piece together the plot as easily as the viewer can — particularly after a few rewatches — but the only change Doc is able to initiate is reuniting Coy with his family. Much of the plot happens to Doc. And by the movies end he remains stagnant as time marches on. Pat, on the other hand, reunites with his own found and actual family, and adapts to the times. Previously paranoid of cell phones, the movie closes with him figuring out how to take a selfie on his new iPhone as his daughter heads to a protest in Oakland. The next generation must pick up the torch and carry on.

Where Killers of Flower Moon’s hope is informed by grace, One Battle After Another takes solace in action. The work against conspiracy.

Eddington

Both Killers and OBAA are influenced by the pandemic, where Eddington is the most explicitly about the pandemic. The movie depicts lockdowns, political tension, the spread of misinformation, protests in the fictional town of Eddington. The characters of Eddington grope about in the dark, looking for any explanation to the madness around them. Violence ensues and in the chaos all remain blind to that fact that they’re victims of a global technocratic elite. By the movies end a data center has been erected in their small town. The very thing that enabled madness is perpetuated and celebrated with a ribbon cutting.

The irony of Eddington is that the conspiracies presented in the film serve as a distraction from the real scheme, which presents itself oh so transparently. The town’s denizens are pacified with hysteria. And more ironic, is that while Eddington is more explicit in its real examples; the spectacle of the film itself obfuscates that we it’s viewers have already opt’d into this world. Killers and OBAA present routes through and out, via grace and work. Eddington suggests that neither matter, as the superstructure is now too strong.

Begonia and Weapons

Begonia, like Eddington, draws from reality quiet a bit before launching into the fantastical. There is vaccine hesitancy in the film. A beat concerning antifreeze that mirrors both Trump suggestion that injecting bleach could cure COVID, and the perpetuation through podcasts that horse dewormer is a possible remedy. By the film’s end we learn that the conspiracy theorists are, mostly, right. There actually is a cabal of aliens controlling and shaping the world government. That they’re doing it for our good an inconsequential detail. Eventually the aliens of Begonia decide humanity is a lost cause and ends the experiment. A sequence of beautiful still life inspired shots follow, showing people who have dropped dead.

In Begonia the conspiracy serves as plot. Viewers are unsure if Jesse Plemon’s character Teddy is right or crazy, until it is ultimately and tragically reveled he’s both. And inso we come to see him as something of a complex maryter, victim, and monster. Almost as if he’s been plucked from the New Mexico of Aster’s Eddington.

Weapons moreso draws on the paranoia derived from conspiracy. The disappearance of a classroom full of kids reflecting school shootings³, loss of childhood during lockdown, or lives loss during the pandemic; to name a few. The eventual disclosure in the Gladys section recalls both the fake conspiracy of democrats hiding children in a pizza parlor basement and the bizarre Peter Thiel statements about getting blood transfusions from the young; not to mention the horrific images of people hooked up to ventilators during the covid pandemic.

And once the kids are released from Gladys’ we see they’re not the same. Essentially reduced to a vegetative state — its unsure if they’ll ever recover. Although the movie’s open suggests they don’t, as we’re told they disappeared to never come home.

Synthesis

Despite all being written and shot around the same time, it is not accidental that these movies and all thematically similar and in discourse with one another. As students of cinema PTA, Aster, and Lanthimos have all studied Marty’s films. PTA famously modeled sequences in Boogy Nights on Scorsese’s earlier works. And PTA has actually confirmed he worked on the script for Killers of Flower Moon. Ari Aster helped produce Begonia. Marty cited Midsommar is an influence on the pacing of Killers. Joaquin Phoenix has stared in both Aster’s and PTA’s movies; Brolin in Cregger’s and PTA, too. Leo in both PTA and Marty’s. Jesse Plemons in Marty’s and Lanthimos. Emma stone stars in Eddington and Begonia. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, there’s clearly something in the firmament.

The pandemic changed much. But it seems to have rewired our worldview in a meaningful way. Conspiracy theories, once reserved for fallouts, outcasts, stoners, and extremists are more mainstream now than ever, and will come to define the twenty-twenties.

I suppose much of this is derivative. One could, and one probably should, argue that if we pull the thread far back enough we would just write about the foresight Pynchon had. That Pynchon is the great keystone to understand our current cultures receptiveness to conspiracy in media. But I think, while true, that misses something important. My mother⁴ is not going to read Pynchon, but she has seen many of these movies.

It’s important that these movies are their narratives are mainstream. It says something about our current general distrust. And it’s important that the answers presented vary as well, because it’s likely there is no broad, one size fits all, solution. It will take Marty’s faith, PTA’s action, but enough humanity to keep us from turning into Teddy.

1. Truthfully, if pressed, I think not. Conspiracy qua conspiracy have existed from time immemorial. Old testament idols, political mechanisms of antiquity, to know-nothings, Catholic Irish presidential assassinations, or the interweaving of local law enforcement with wannabe militias. Our brains are hardwired for pattern recognition: it’s self defense. ↩︎
2. Itself not dissimilar to Inherent Vice. In fact, a tighter exploration would likely focus on just these two movies. ↩︎
3. I’m unsure how else one is to interpret the giant, floating, AR. Cregger tells us the image came to him in a dream. But even Lynch’s films show us conspiracy can fester into our dreams. ↩︎
4. Nor most of us. ↩︎