Judging from a Distance
On BLOW AWAY #1, paranoid thrillers and implicating the audience.
We live in paranoid times. Conspiracy theories that once seemed like fringe movements have grasped public attention in a way that we haven’t seen since the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Misleading and often outright false narratives have cropped up about everything from 9/11 being an “inside job” to COVID-19 vaccines containing “tracking devices”. Even if you don’t subscribe to such fringe drivel, it is increasingly difficult to separate oneself from the paranoia of everyday life.
And it’s easy to see why. Mass surveillance, social media and true crime have come together culturally in a way that’s impossible to escape. Every few weeks there seems to be a new missing person that’s become the subject of mass public scrutiny. Where photos of the missing person are picked apart by “amateur sleuths” and details are cherry picked until everything culminates in people taking to social media to make moral judgments of complete strangers.
Hell, we’re all guilty of making some moral assessment of someone watching us from a distance. It’s just that modern technology has increased that distance and empowered that sense of morality to dangerous levels. We all want to exert control on the world. Even if that sense of control may lead us to the wrong conclusions.
I think paranoia and conspiracy are irresistible because they allow us to string together stories from seemingly unrelated details. They help make sense of an increasingly chaotic, disorganized world. But in the right hands, paranoia laden narratives tap into a deeper sense of unease and distrust that can help explore complex social issues.
Take Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
The film follows an injured photographer, L.B. Jefferies, who’s trapped in his apartment with a broken leg. His Greenwich Village apartment that overlooks a courtyard, gives him a view of the opposite apartment, and a view of a street where he can watch people going about their lives. Jefferies is a passive voyeur who spends his days watching his neighbours. Hell, we’ve all wondered what our neighbours are up to from time to time.
But when Jefferies believes to have witnessed a murder, his voyeurism becomes a vehicle through which he makes hard conclusions and moral judgments about the man in the neighbouring apartment. In a sense, the audience becomes implicated in his paranoia as we’re left in the middle wondering if Jefferies' conclusions are, in fact, the truth. That strange middle ground is where the paranoid thriller thrives. No easy answers but plenty of interesting questions.
Another film that implicates the audience into making hard conclusions about something seemingly innocuous is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
The film is about Harry Caul, a surveillance expert hired to record a conversation between two young people in the crowded Union Square. Caul’s a straight-laced, tightly wound man. As a result of his work, he’s intensely private. When he’s left with three tapes of the titular conversation, he must combine them into one usable piece. It ain’t easy making sense of everything.
Through that journey, he’s left to make conclusions about what it all means and what’s actually being discussed on the tape. The resulting paranoia leads Caul to a version of the truth about what he thinks he hears. Once again, the audience is implicated in Caul’s conclusions and left to wonder if he’s on the right path. By the time you reach the final act, the tragedy of it all is unavoidable. You’re thrown into one of the bleakest neo-noir endings ever committed to celluloid. And depending on your own conclusions - you probably saw it coming.
In Blow Out - director Brian De Palma offers a different kind of implication.
As a 1980’s remix on Michelangelo Antonioni’s stellar Blowup. De Palma finds a murder hidden within a soundscape rather than still photography. The film follows Jack Terry, a sound technician that may have accidentally recorded the murder of a presidential hopeful. Here De Palma uses elements of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy to build a complex narrative that suggests even the random acts of a serial killer could be part of a larger political plot.
In the end, we’re left with nothing more than a haunting sound. The implication of which is soul-crushing to both Jack and the audience. It’s one of the most damning and hopeless endings in neo-noir history. Which is really saying something.
My new comic series Blow Away is a riff on De Palma and Antonioni’s core concept but updated with modern themes and technology.
The series follows wildlife videographer Brynne Brautigan who’s stationed in the remote arctic wilderness of Baffin Island. She’s there to track an endangered species but when she witnesses what appears to be a propulsive argument between two climbers atop a neighbouring mountain that looks like it mounts into… murder she takes it upon herself to discover the truth.
Brynne becomes her own version of an amateur sleuth in pursuit of justice. Except she isn’t left to pick apart Instagram feeds or TikTok videos. She’s left with her own footage. Which looks something like this in the comic.
Brynne’s life is one of rigid boundaries and finding patterns within the most boring pieces of footage. As the reader you’re left in the middle implicated in her conclusions but left to make your own. But please don’t pick apart my social feeds looking for the answers.
Blow Away #1 is on sale today from BOOM! Studios.
Sounds cool, fun breakdown!