How On Screen Conspiracy Got Stupid in 2025

Words: Valeria Berghinz

In the cavernous darkness of a deserted parking lot, a streak of white light catches a man’s eyes, this black-blue portrait punctuated only by the flicker of a cigarette. From the shadows, the stranger says “Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys.” It’s Deep Throat speaking – a depiction of a real press informant by the same name – whose leaks helped expose the Watergate conspiracy, the political scandal that forced U.S. President Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

This vignette comes from Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film All The President’s Men, an adaptation of the real account of journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s labyrinthine investigation into Watergate, an odyssey into the innermost depths of political corruption and a love letter to journalistic integrity and the pursuit of truth. The film was the final instalment in Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy, a run of movies that bottled the anxious, distrustful pulse of 1970s America.

In 2025, one could point towards an unofficial trilogy of conspiracy and distrust in the recent releases of Ari Aster’s Eddington, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia. Less than a year into Donald Trump’s second tenure as the president of the United States, it may seem that we are living through unprecedented times of social and political discord, specifically as it relates to the paranoid mind of the ever-growing mass of conspiracists amongst us. But political paranoia has a long tradition of persistence throughout social and political history, so why does it feel so different now?
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In an arrestingly prescient essay, adapted from a lecture he gave in 1963, Richard Hofstadter develops his theory of ‘The Paranoid Style of American Politics’, tracing a lineage of conspiracy thinking that has tugged at the nation since its very inception. First came the Freemasons, then the Catholics, and later the Communists – the dominant bogeymen of Hofstadter’s time. In mapping this history of fear and finger-pointing, Hofstadter observed a crucial shift brought on by mass media: as public figures became more visible, it grew easier to cast them as villains, replacing the phantom “others” of earlier eras with recognisable faces.

And so Woodward and Bernstein, intrepid reporters of The Washington Post, would meticulously unravel the vertiginous heights of the Watergate conspiracy person by person – “all the way to the top.” All The President’s Men is an incredibly stylish film, holding itself with the realistic gravitas of a documentary but brimming with the stylistic flair of Gordon Willis’ cinematography, nicknamed the Prince of Darkness for his command of shadow. Above all, it’s the real account of two individuals within media who took on the rotting corruption of government and actually won. Closing out Pakula’s trilogy – preceded by the fictional and more pessimistic Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974) – it seemed the nebulous skies of paranoia had cleared, that democracy could still be saved, that conspiracy was not, after all, ruled by an omnipotent hand who could not fall, but by Deep Throat’s “not very bright guys.”

“We are far from the days of intrepid reporters; now every citizen with a cellphone is a reporter themselves – either doing far-right ‘down the rabbit hole research’, filming strangers to ridicule on Twitter, or policing one another en masse on social media.”

Such a positive, one could call it naive, finale is seemingly unreachable when looking at the paranoia cinema of today. One Battle After Another comes the closest, not in stating that an individual can save the world, but in saying that it’s still worth trying. It’s the least conspiratorial of my three contemporary picks, yet the only one that peers directly into the camp of powerful men and their self-serving network of decisions. Colonel Lockjaw rains military destruction on a city simply to earn his place in a secret society: the Christmas Adventurers Club, a group of elites skirting democracy in pursuit of white supremacy. An absolutely ridiculous name for the very real, genuinely terrifying reality that is seeing immigrants inhumanely apprehended, incarcerated and deported in the U.S. today. In a way, Paul Thomas Anderson is optimistic about the individual and pessimistic about the regimes of power, with his own stylish flair exposing the absolute chaos of our times – far from the controlled investigations of Pakula. One could hardly imagine Colonel Lockjaw dropped into a neo-noir.

Then come the completely insane and fatalist films that are Eddington and Bugonia. These two approach the current state of conspiracy much more head-on, with Eddington depicting small-town hysteria during the storm that was 2020’s Covid Lockdowns, the rise of Q-Anon and the Black Lives Matter protests. On the other hand, Bugonia sees two conspiracists kidnapping a high profile CEO in their maddened belief that she is actually an alien in disguise. Here we approach the algorithm-addled minds of the general population and how conspiracy seeped from the fringes into the mainstream, with both films squarely taking on the great issue of our times: talking to one another is impossible. 

All the way back in the ’60s, Hofstadter addresses this impossibility of communication through paranoia, explaining how the conspiracist sees the nefarious enemy as an entity of absolute evil and himself, therefore, as the absolute opposite – a saviour “always manning the barricades of civilization”. So this polarisation has always existed, but never before has it been harnessed to such an extent by the political powers that be, with Trump endlessly courting his conspiracist-minded supporters as the headlines of his presidency plunge into depths of absurdity previously unimaginable. 

Could we picture a newspaper’s takedown of the U.S. President today? We are far from the days of intrepid reporters; now every citizen with a cellphone is a reporter themselves – either doing far-right ‘down the rabbit hole research’, filming strangers to ridicule on Twitter, or policing one another en masse on social media. Meanwhile, Trump has demagogued the press further than any previous president could, his cries of “Fake News!” preceding even the advent of AI – the coming of which feels like a true nail in the coffin for facts and information.

It's not that absurdity in politics is a new thing – it was, after all, Deep Throat who was instrumental in Nixon’s takedown. But those “not very bright guys” have seemingly made a circus of their dimness whilst holding political office, and to now portray them as shadowy figures to dismantle would be inconceivable. Instead, contemporary Paranoia Cinema shows how far we’ve fallen, not even being able to trust the government to be clever enough to come up with a genuine conspiracy to uncover. Now it’s all about a maddened population and their idiotic superiors with their reigns of terror. Can we even blame each other for getting a little paranoid?