Let’s talk about something that’s seemingly all the rage in recent times—conspiracy theories.
Perhaps it isn’t too surprising that in a world which for the last couple of decades has felt like it’s swimming in a stupor of confusion and turmoil, more and more are trying to cling to something that helps them see sense and patterns in all of it. But even before an age where anyone can open a Youtube account to rave about the truth that only them and anyone coincidentally like-minded can apparently perceive, this sort of cultural snake oil was hardly absent. It’s all part of the human need for there to be a plan, for there to be a respite from the seemingly capricious turns of history.
After all, doesn’t it feel more right that some vast cabal was behind Oswald, as opposed to it just being a case of one bitter young man with rifle training and a good vantage point getting the opportunity he needed against the most powerful politician in the world? Isn’t it more reassuring that there was something bigger at play than a band of angry jihadis slipping past airport security and managing to tear the pride out of a superpower?
But why try to go against what’s now, right? I could probably make up my own theory and find at least a couple of believers out there after rambling into a webcam. Let’s see—the world is in fact being secretly influenced by…giant kiwis. That can shoot lasers from their eyes. And the kiwis are in collaboration with reverse vampires, Kanye West’s saner clone who lives on Venus, and Justin Timberlake, who is actually a time-travelling robot. Once Jeff Bezos sells exactly 1138 blue and yellow electric massagers shaped like his own head from the dark web version of Amazon you can only access if you spill Kool-aid on your keyboard, that will signal the ascent of the kiwis to walk all over the Earth, with technology superior to our own, but that’ll only the beginning! They’re here already! You’re next—
Ahem. Point is, this has all been around for a while. You can arguably trace the conspiracy theory in our modern mainstream back to the seventies, when the Nixon administration succeeded so well in single-handedly destroying the trust that had been up to then been held in the American government. That in turn lead to the rise of the conspiracy thriller, with the notable instigator being All The President’s Men, a classic I can recommend not only for being a stylistic progenitor of everything from X-Files to Bourne. Another notable example from the decade is today’s subject, which helped both popularize a conspiracy theory even as it somewhat deconstructed it—Capricorn One.
With concepts of cover-ups and falsehoods coming from the very top now imprinted on a much bitter US zeitgeist at this point, eyes turned even to the nation’s greatest accomplishments, like the moon landing. The premise of the film deals with NASA having to falsify a televized Mars landing, with its funding in the balance—reflecting that after the Apollo landings, US officials very quickly found much better uses for tax dollars than expanding human horizons, like defoliating random rice paddies in Vietnam. Hence, the astronauts in question are sequestered away in a remote base, while outside, a journalist played by Elliot Gould starts to catch onto something being wrong. The cast is, for the time, definitely a solid one—you’ve got solid luminaries like James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and…OJ Simpson. Yes, kids, back then OJ was popular enough to have his own stint in Hollywood too, and coincidentally he also knows a thing or two about half-baked conspiracy theories I guess.
From a technical and presentation side, I have to say, Capricorn One holds up pretty well. You’ve got a nice sense of escalating tension, you’ve got some very well directed action scenes—in the climax, there’s lots of shots involving an aerial chase that for seventies are damn impressive and still exciting now. You want to cheer for our astronaut protagonists as they break out of captivity, with each one scrambling to evade government forces. And if this was 1994, I would have so many topical jokes about OJ being chased by law enforcement. Still, we also see that there’s no guarantee for our main characters, adding just that little bit of tension that keeps you going to the end.
But the main point comes from that ultimate climax, and how the film ultimately recognizes what few seem to do—the actual logistics of a conspiracy. It spirals into coverups of coverups, and it acknowledges that all you need is just one thing to slip by the net. Watergate, after all, was blown open by just one humble security guard. The more elaborate a plot, the more cogs in motion, the more it takes for just one errant factor to bring it all down, and that’s basically what happens here. You can argue it may not have been the filmmaker’s conscious attempt, but that’s certainly what I choose to take from it.
Perhaps it is also the lesson you should really take from it. There’s plenty of books over the decades, all of them robustly priced of course, dramatically painting pictures of vast plots that somehow can’t exert themselves over mid-tier publishing houses, including the space program—and as someone who does hold great respect for all the thousands of people that helped mankind look to a bigger universe if for a time, this is all material I have a rather sour opinion on by now, to put it one way.
And indeed, much as shady officials in Capricorn One fail, so too did ones in real life go on to fail in covering up even just misbehaviour in the White House under Clinton, and so much more since. Stories are what we make of them—and fun it can be to speculate, the dangers of diving fully into the rabbit hole have made themselves painfully and often tragically apparent. Fixating on fantasies of vast and dramatic forces seemingly acting in omnipotence seems to lead inevitably to the more mundane but genuinely damaging everyday corruption being seemingly ignored or dismissed by those that take the plunge--that want to justify their allegiances without the matter of questioning, or just want to play being Fox Mulder, living the life of seeing the secrets only they can.
Maybe truth gets distorted in the haze too easily now, some might say, in our media realms of noise and confusion. Perhaps that’s also exactly why keeping away from the temptations of trying to live those fantasies is more important than ever…
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