by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was one I’d wanted to see for quite a while: Conspiracy
Theory, a 1997 thriller directed by Richard
Donner (whose most famous credit is the first of the Superman films with Christopher Reeve, which turned out to be
the last movie I saw at the old San Diego Public Library downtown before it
recently closed pending the move to the new building near Petco Park — or, as I
like to call it, “Greedco Park”) from a script by Brian Helgeland. I’d wanted
to see it partly because what I’d heard about it suggested it had an
interesting plot — a New York cabdriver who believes in various nutty
conspiracy theories and regales his customers with them all day suddenly
stumbles on a real one and has to
figure out which of his fantasies has suddenly become real and who’s out to
eliminate him before he can expose them. The other reason I was interested is
the irony that the conspiracy-mongering cabbie, Jerry Fletcher, is played by
Mel Gibson — years before we knew he was really as nuts as the guy he’s playing in the film.
Unfortunately, Donner and Helgeland weren’t willing to leave it at that; rather
than the slow, Hitchcockian buildup I was expecting, they “out” the real
conspirator, Dr. Lowry (Patrick Stewart), almost immediately when, after the
first 25 minutes of the film have mostly shown Mel Gibson driving his cab
around town and stalking the woman he’s obsessed with, assistant U.S. attorney
Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts), Lowry and his agents kidnap Jerry, strap him to a
wheelchair, tape his eyes open so he can’t blink, expose him to strobe lights
and start questioning him incomprehensibly. (I was tempted to joke, “I
kidnapped you because in your newsletter you said William Shatner was a better Star
Trek captain than I am!”)
Eventually it
turns out that Dr. Lowry was a CIA agent involved in the MK ULTRA program —
which really existed; it was begun in the early 1950’s, officially sanctioned
in 1953 and continued for at least 20 years before its existence was finally
exposed as part of the Ford-era investigations of the CIA that led to reforms,
including a ban on government-ordered assassinations of individuals, that
remained more or less intact until they were swept away by the second Bush
administration in the wake of 9/11. What we know about MK ULTRA was that it
involved mind-control experiments with powerful hallucinogenic drugs, including
LSD (would-be mind controllers were really big on LSD at the time), as well as
various forms of torture, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, isolation and verbal
and sexual abuse. According to the Wikipedia page on it — which when you do an
online search is about the only thing that comes up that isn’t from a
conspiracy-mongering Web site — “The scope of Project MK ULTRA was broad, with
research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities,
as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated
through these institutions using front
organizations, although sometimes top officials at these
institutions were aware of the CIA’s involvement.” The Wikipedia page also
includes a photo of Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, who was living
in New York but took regular trips to Canada between 1957 and 1964 to
administer LSD and other drugs to MK ULTRA research subjects, and also to give
them electroshock therapy at 30 to 40 times normal levels, and Patrick
Stewart’s makeup in the film gives him a striking resemblance to Dr. Cameron.
As usual for a Hollywood screenwriter, the reality of MK ULTRA wasn’t enough
for Brian Helgeland; in his script, the program turns out to be a Manchurian
Candidate-style (the reference is actually
made in his script!) attempt to create assassins who could be programmed to
kill based on a psychological trigger. The gimmick is that Jerry Fletcher was
supposed to kill Alice Sutton’s father (why?) but at the last moment couldn’t
do it, so the CIA just got rid of him and dumped him in New York City, where he
became a cabdriver and the hash they had made of his brain inspired him to
become a conspiratologist and rig his apartment with various defenses,
including equipping it with firewall so he could incinerate it without burning
down the rest of the building; mounting combination locks on his coffeemakers
(he has more than one) so no one can poison his coffee; keeping padlocks on
just about every entranceway (Charles pointed out that any real conspiratologist would know padlocks are about the least secure sort of entrance lock); and mounting an empty
beer bottle on his door after he closes it behind him so it will shatter if
anyone tries to force their way in (which, of course, duly happens).
The best
part of the film is Mel Gibson’s riveting performance as the brain-fried
psycho; he really does seem like
the end product of a mind-control experiment gone awry as he visibly struggles
to try to get his synapses to fire in anything like a normal, functional order.
Julia Roberts does her best with a typically underwritten role — at least in
1997 her acting (if you can call it that) wasn’t as annoyingly mannered as it’s
become since (one of the most infuriating things she’s done in more recent
movies that she mostly avoids here is that trick of looking in the camera and
thinking, “Here I am! Aren’t I beautiful?,” the way Liz Taylor used to). The
imdb.com trivia page reveals that the part was originally offered to Jodie
Foster, who actually would have been considerably better, but given that the
attempted assassination of President Reagan is a major plot point and the
would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was allegedly motivated by his neurotic crush
on Foster, maybe the script hit too close to home for her. The film ends up a
four-way chase between Fletcher, Alice, Jonas and Lowry (Cylk Cozart), an
African-American of unknown loyalties — he originally represents himself as
active-duty FBI (as Jonas has as active-duty CIA) but Alice catches him out
when he doesn’t know the name of the FBI’s deputy director (who does? I’ll bet
a lot of FBI agents out there
don’t know the name of their deputy director) and it turns out he’s a member of
a CIA goon squad aimed at ferreting out renegades, and Jonas is the principal
renegade he’s after, someone who was involved in MK ULTRA and wants to
profiteer from it by selling its secrets to a sinister foreign power.
Eventually it ends up in a violent confrontation in the hydrotherapy pool of an
old mental hospital which was where Fletcher was brainwashed into being a
programmed assassin in the first place; Fletcher tries to kill Jonas by holding
him under the pool with a mop, Jonas pulls out his gun and fires it at Fletcher
(would it still work under water?), Alice shoots Jonas but too late to save
Fletcher — at least she thinks, though in a final tag scene it turns out
Fletcher is still alive but his new handlers from Lowry’s unit tell him Alice
will only be safe if she thinks he’s dead, and Alice is out riding a horse,
something she hadn’t done since her dad was killed. (As in Nights in
Rodanthe, horses appear at the end as a
symbol of regeneration and rehabilitation.)
It’s also got quite a lot of violence-porn, as we expect from a Mel Gibson
movie, including scene after scene in which he single-handedly subdues or
escapes from the latest goon squad that’s after him despite being horrendously
outnumbered (though if Gibson had directed it himself there’d have been even
more, and more graphic, violence-porn!), and Helgeland sneaked bits of real conspiratology into his script, from Fletcher’s
obsession with purchasing a copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in
the Rye every time he sees one for sale
(it’s known in conspiracy annals as the book that supposedly inspired Mark
David Chapman to kill John Lennon, and one of the Web sites I ran across while
searching for MK ULTRA said that Salinger was himself a CIA operative who
sneaked mind-control material into the novel to brainwash its readers!) to more
obscure ones like Fletcher’s obsession with the name “Geronimo” (supposedly a
reference to the Skull and Bones society at Yale, which claims to have the
skull of the real Geronimo at their headquarters) and a sequence in which
Fletcher, traced to a bookstore where he’s buying his latest copy of Catcher, flees and hides out in a movie theatre (a reference
to Lee Harvey Oswald fleeing the Texas School Book Depository and hiding out in
a movie theatre after allegedly shooting President Kennedy). Conspiracy
Theory had the makings of a great movie,
but as I said to Charles during a break we took in the middle, “Where was St.
Alfred when they needed him?” Hitchcock would have kept it well under two hours
long instead of letting it run a mind-numbing 135 minutes (about 100-105
minutes would have been the right length for this story), and he and his writers
would have kept Jerry Fletcher an ordinary citizen who stumbles onto a real
conspiracy instead of an off-the-rails CIA assassin. They would also have been
able to figure out a way to make the relationship between him and Alice
believable — at the start one gets the impression that he’s sort of a lucky
piece for her, someone she regards as a harmless crank even though the rest of
her office (including her boss, who’s murdered by Jonas’s goons at the start of
the final confrontation — don’t ask) thinks he’s dangerous and can’t fathom why
she agrees to see him — whereas as it stands Conspiracy Theory gradually removes itself so far from normal reality
that one can imagine a particularly demented conspiratologist deciding that the
great They had this movie made just to make conspiracy theorists look
ridiculous.
Conspiracy Theory is
also badly dated, since it’s not only pre-9/11 (the World Trade Center towers
appear as part of the New York cityscape at a time when that meant absolutely
nothing, though to a modern viewer that can’t help but bring to mind all the
conspiracy theories that have swirled around 9/11!) but also pre-Internet.
Jerry Fletcher is shown producing a newsletter called “Conspiracy Theory” and
mailing it to his subscribers — all five of them (four of whom are killed in
one night and the fifth is Jonas, subscribing under a phony name to keep track
of his former patsy) — when of course in the modern age he’d be running a blog.
Rather than boring his fares with his conspiracy tales (though he might do
that, too!), a modern-day Jerry Fletcher would spend his spare time sitting in
his room, connecting with the millions (or at least tens of thousands) of
like-minded people online and obsessing not only about the physical safety of
his living space but also the efficacy of the electronic jamming devices he’d
put on his computer to try to keep his communications from being read by THEM.
After the revelations that the NSA has been routinely spying on every American, monitoring their cell-phone conversations and
keeping track of their e-mails — and the polls indicating that most Americans
are just fine with that, thank you (though last Friday’s episode of Washington
Week noted that polls taken during the Bush
administration said 60-plus percent of Republicans approved of the government
spying program versus only 30-plus percent of Democrats, and now the partisan
breakdown is the other way around — suggesting that the American public is
split three ways: one-third think the government spying is O.K. no matter which
party is in power, one-third are against it no matter which party is in power,
and one-third think their guys
can be trusted with this knowledge base while the other guys can’t) — Conspiracy
Theory plays quite differently than it no
doubt did when it was new. But, alas, that still doesn’t make it a great movie
— or even an indifferent but eerily premonitory movie like the John Travolta
vehicle Swordfish, which had the
misfortune to come out just before 9/11 rewrote the rules on what would and
what wouldn’t be considered an acceptable depiction of terrorism in the U.S.
corporate media.
