Two Kinds of Paranoia Movies

I recently ran my Blu-ray and DVD shelf against ten years of my Letterboxd log. What came back wasn't the taste profile I expected. I'd have told you, if you'd asked, that I'm drawn to paranoia, institutions, systems, conspiracies. That's true, but it's not exact, and the data made me work out where it splits.

There are two versions of the paranoid institutional story. One is the whistleblower film: the system exposed, the political reverberations, the piece that runs in the paper. The other stays inside a single person's subjective experience of the system and never really comments on it. I thought I liked both equally. But I don't: I prefer the second one, and I've apparently never truly liked the first.

The split in numbers

Spotlight (2015) and The Report (2019) are good films and I rated them well, but they're outliers in the log, not the pattern. The pattern is Hitchcock, De Palma, and Jordan Peele, who score above my average across the board. They are doing something specific: watching someone until the watching descends into something physical. Most of their films involve a person constructing or surveilling another person, and the institution or system around them barely gets named. It doesn't need to. You feel it as pressure on one body, one consciousness.

Strip out the franchises I own for nostalgic reasons and the horror on my shelf tells the same story: Scream (1996), X (2022), The House of the Devil (2009), I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016), Under the Silver Lake (2018), Memories of Murder (2003), Shutter Island (2010). None of them are really journalistic. They are visceral, subjective and all of them stays lodged in an account of what happened.

Style has to be earned, not applied

I've written before, on this blog, about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and what its Cold War flatness does for Smiley's world. That stiffness isn't decoration, it's Smiley himself: buttoned-up, institutional, giving nothing away, because that's who he is. The camera is the character.

Set that against Nolan and Villeneuve, directors I otherwise rate strongly, and you can see the same techniques fail when they are not attached to anyone's interior life. Tenet (2020) is the lowest score I've ever given a Nolan film, and it's the one with little subjectivity. Arrival (2016) does the same thing to me at a smaller scale. Compare that to Oppenheimer (2023), which is arguably Nolan's most political story and also his most successful recent film for me, because we never leave Oppenheimer's head. Villeneuve's Prisoners (2013) work the same way: the coldness is a father's grief, not a directorial signature laid on top of the story.

What this means

The moment the system gets explained, or the clear feelings about what the characters did or didn't do gets resolved into something clean and objective, then I've made the wrong film. I've made the Arrival version instead of the Prisoners version. My own shelf has apparently been telling me that for a decade.