Centerless corporate conspiracy may not even know its own motives

Evidence

The terrifying climactic moment of The Parallax View – when the silhouette of Beatty’s anonymous assassin appears against migraine-white space – for me now rhymes with the open door at the end of a very different film, Peter Weir’s 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. Although presumably corporate, the interests and motives of the conspiracy in The Parallax View are never articulated (perhaps not even to or by those actually involved in it). 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 is not clear if its aim is to pretend that it doesn’t exist, or to pretend that it does. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 141

Categorization

• XREF: The open-door contrast between The Truman Show’s freedom and The Parallax View’s total determinism echoes the book’s running theme of capitalist realism foreclosing alternatives. — connects to: Corporate conspiracy in The Parallax View is deliberately centerless and unaccountable — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 141
• QUESTION: The claim that a conspiracy might ‘pretend that it exists’ vs ‘pretend that it doesn’t’ is worth unpacking as a model of how corporate power operates.

Related

• Corporate conspiracy in The Parallax View is deliberately centerless and unaccountable (similarity 0.94)

Broader Connections

• Corporate conspiracy in The Parallax View is deliberately centerless and unaccountable #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 141