Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy Then and Now: Breaking and Entering the American Style
Bernstein: “How can you keep going at something past the point when you’d believe it?”
Woodward: “We just have to start all over again.”
The opening sequence of All the President’s Men begins with several pregnant seconds of a washed-out gray screen. Then, suddenly, startlingly, the gun-shot crack of a typewriter arm as it smacks against what we now understand to be an extreme close-up of a sheet of typing paper. I imagine that 1976 movie-goers jumped a bit in their seats—that is how loud the clack is. We watch as the typewriter—operated by an unseen person—pounds out the date: June 1, 1972. We are so close that we can see the loose, pulpy weave of the paper.
The page gives way in a sort of wipe-dissolve to news footage of a helicopter landing at night on the Capitol lawn. A newscaster narrates, informing us that it carries President Nixon and the First Lady, who only fifteen minutes before had landed at Andrews Air Force Base after an eight-day summit in Moscow. The helicopter’s wheels touch down at precisely 9:32PM. Nixon is scheduled to address Congress and the nation at 9:40PM. We watch as the Sergeant-at-Arms announces the President’s arrival in the House chamber, and then as the President walks to the rostrum, shakes hands with House Speaker Carl Albert, an Oklahoma Democrat, and then turns, smiling broadly, to the microphone.
The very next shot is of a black screen, which, like the opening white screen, is an illusion. It is not the one-dimensional black void of a title screen, but the pitch-black interior of a building. We hear muffled clicking and scraping noises, then voices, until finally a door opens and we see two, three, maybe four—it is hard to tell from this distance—figures in the doorway. Then a flashlight clicks on, the beam sweeps the walls. The final revelation comes with a quick cut to the exterior of the building, where we can now see multiple flashlights dotting the dark windows of the Watergate Hotel.
One would think that a film about the Watergate scandal would begin with the break-in that took place on June 17, 1972, but for some reason we begin on June 1. In narrative theory, the narration of an event that takes place before the present action of the story in order to provide important background information is called analepsis, or, more commonly, a flashback. It stands in opposition to prolepsis, or flashforward, in which an event that takes place in the future relative to the narration of the story is revealed in order to create a sense of anticipation or anxiety. The effect of this quick shuttling between the near past (June 1) and the present telling (June 17) by a filmmaker four years hence is puzzling.
The effect of the news footage here at the start of the film creates the sensation that what we are about to see is based in fact. But the footage also has an ironic effect, immediately reminding contemporaneous viewers that they have seen this story before and they know how it ends. Mark Currie in About Time: Narrative Fiction and the Philosophy of Time defines prolepsis as the “anticipation of retrospection”: now let us watch it again, but this time through new eyes.
All the President’s Men, directed by Alan Pakula, is a 1976 adaption of the bombshell 1974 book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein dramatizing—novelizing, really, in the third person—their investigation into the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The film was first imagined by producer (and co-star) Redford as a “small” project shot in black and white, starring unknown actors, but the source material and subject proved too big and sensational to contain, and so it transmogrified into a blockbuster.
Driven by a subtle, taut screenplay by the legendary William Goldman (who would go on to win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay), brought to life by The Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and the smoldering good looks of Redford and off-beat method acting of co-star Dustin Hoffman, not to mention the continued national fascination with the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation, the film topped the box office in April of ‘76, holding its own for weeks against the likes of Taxi Driver and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next.
Now at fifty years old, All the President’s Men continues to be lauded as one of the finest filmic representations of shoe-leather investigative reporting, and arguments for a free press, but the film’s larger themes transcend the pugilistic world of political journalism. Critics now see it as the culmination of a suite of films that began with the psycho-sexually charged noir Klute (1971), and the political thriller Parallax View (1974). Together, the films are a retconned trio dubbed the “Paranoia Trilogy.”
Retconned is short for retroactive continuity. Merriam-Webster, which added the term to its dictionary in 2021 based on its increasing popularity and currency, defines it as a “literary device in which the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed.” Specific instances of retconning are evident in the multiverses spun out from television and film adaptations of comic books and literary works (think: Spider-Man, Dr. Who, and Sherlock Holmes).
But the term’s origins are not as recent or conventional. The Webster editors trace the term to theologian E. Frank Tupper’s 1973 book The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Pannenberg, a Lutheran deeply influenced by Karl Barth (his dissertation director) and Hegel, is best known for his career-long commitment to the development of a theology premised on “history as revelation.” He argued that an account of Christian faith should proceed rationally from the historical personage of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, rather than an irrational, blind faith. “God’s presence is hidden in the particulars of history,” he wrote in a 1981 essay reflecting on his body of work. “God’s revelation takes place in history . . . and not in some strange Word arriving in some alien place and cutting across the fabric of history.”
Pannenberg’s theology was based upon a proleptical or anticipatory eschatology, that history is rightly understood when seen as flowing backwards from Jesus’s resurrection. Tupper writes, “Pannenberg’s conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future [death and resurrection of Jesus] into the past.” In other words, God’s divinity and ultimate love for the world is daily revealed within history, if you know how to look.
With this expanded understanding of “retconned” in mind, it is easy to see the ways in which it is fundamental to film, a medium capable of powerful immediacy and poignancy, while telling stories of events that have already happened and are perhaps even well-known to the audience. Specifically for Pakula’s trilogy, its retconned nature models both a way of looking and interpreting and also a way of living. Viewers are given the opportunity to peer into the origins of the paranoid dis-ease. Or at least that is the allure: that we are on a journey, too, tracing its origins.
But the proleptical approach also introduces the so what?—a deep sense of actual stakes—often lost in critical/theoretical conversations. We move beyond conspiracy and irony to revelation. The Christian story as seen through the anticipatory, proleptic lens of Pannenberg becomes “dangerous” in the way Johannes Metz defines it:
Christianity, as a community of those who believe in Jesus Christ, was from the beginning not first a community that interprets or presents arguments; rather, it was a community that remembers and narrates, with practical intent: a memory of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus that make its appeal narratively. The logos of the cross and of the resurrection has an indispensable narrative structure. Confronted with the human history of suffering, faith in the redemption of history and of the “new human being” is passed on in dangerous-liberating stories, under the impact of which those hearers who are affected by them become “doers of the word.”
In other words, recalling the events of human suffering and striving to see these events as part of a larger story, a larger whole, is the path to liberation.
The paranoia Pakula was interested in was not the clinical psychiatric condition defined by a “pervasive distrust and suspicion of others, leading to impairments in psychosocial functioning,” but rather a national paranoia born of widespread public distrust and disillusionment with America’s political class. From the racist state violence against the Civil Rights movement and subsequent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy, to the Warren Commission report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK, to the leaked Pentagon Papers, a clear pattern of antagonism towards and deception of the American people emerged. Journalism professionals and the public on whose behalf they worked, were so inured to government malfeasance that the botched break-in at the National Democratic Headquarters was widely regarded as a non-story.
Fifty years later, in the age of AI, distrust and disillusionment are even more pervasive. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center poll, when asked the question “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?” Only 17% answered in the affirmative, with 2% responding “just about always” and 15% responding “most of the time” (15%, a seventy year low—down from a high of 73% answering in the affirmative in 1958).
Journalists fared better with 43% expressing either a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in journalists to “act in the best interests of the public,” though those identifying as Republicans only answered in the affirmative 24% of the time, compared to 61% for Democrats. But it is not only politicians and journalists whose trust is lagging. Recent trends also show a downturn in trust in teachers and higher-education faculty, clergy, and leaders in the tech industry.
There is little doubt that digital communication has accelerated and is exacerbating this crisis. Pope Leo XIV, writing in Magnifica Humanitas, calls for increased recognition and ownership of responsibility on the part of Big Tech:
Those who control digital platforms and means of communication have a considerable ability to affect the collective imagination and to present a particular vision of reality as desirable. Such power should be constantly guided by the pursuit of truth and respect for human dignity, so that the culture fostered on the internet does not become an instrument of excessive distraction, homogenization or dominance, but rather a setting in which inner freedom and critical thought can mature.
As cynical as many are that internet culture and artificial intelligence can foster unity and assist in the maturation of critical thought, it is nonetheless crucial that the truth and unbiased ways for the public to access and pursue the truth be understood, as Pope Leo writes, “a common good and not the property of those with power or influence.”
To this end, Pope Leo calls for tech developers to be reflective about their role in cultivating this common good, but also for calls for renewed support for “serious journalism” and journalists who are “driven by a passion for truth,” such as those Pope Francis formally thanked during his papacy for reporting on the sex abuse scandal in the Church.
Magnifica Humanitas is not the first Church missive to speak to the importance of journalists and journalism. In 1971, the Holy See released “Communio et Progressio: On the Means of Social Communication” calling for deeper respect and appreciation for the “difficult and responsible role [journalists] play” in helping people to exercise their “right to information” that is “full, consistent, accurate and true” so that they might be effective citizens:
[Journalists] face formidable obstacles and these obstacles will sometimes include persons interested in concealing the truth. This is especially the case for reporters who give close-up impressions of the news and who, in order to do this, often travel to the four corners of the earth in order to witness events as they actually happen. At times they risk their lives and indeed a number of them have been killed in this line of duty.
Further, the letter calls for protecting journalists from intimidation and denouncing violence against them:
For these persons vindicate and practice the right of finding out what is happening and of passing on this information to others. . . . Without it, he cannot understand the perpetually changing world in which he lives nor be able to adapt himself to the real situation. This adaptation calls for frequent decisions that should be made with a full knowledge of events. Only in this way can he assume a responsible and active role in his community and be a part of its economic, political, cultural and religious life.
Journalists in this way play a central role in bringing about what the letter calls a “Christian vision” to “unify” all peoples and “deepen social consciousness” through the formation of “well-informed citizens.”
While not in any way a religious, or even spiritual film, All the President’s Men makes visible and dramatizes this “right to be informed and to inform.” In so doing, it acts as a corrective to a blasted media ecosystem by telling a story that at its heart is a journey toward the truth, intent on protecting the collective imagination from distortion and human dignity from the deforming effect of falsehood. The film reminds us, in the words of the 1971 letter, that our “right to information is not merely the prerogative of the individual; it is essential to the public interest.”
Pakula, who began his career as a producer on the 1962 Best-Picture nominated To Kill a Mockingbird, had a reputation as a meticulous craftsman who favored moody atmospherics and oblique shot geometries over emotionally rich characters. No doubt, the emotional tenor of his films is intensely, almost feverishly, cool, but they are far from flat. In an industry that rewards sentimentality and hearts on sleeves, Pakula was interested in trying to dramatize what it feels like to live in a world where the truth is often furiously hidden and protected from view by those who control the levers of power.
Dramatizing the search for what is elusive is at the heart of the archetypal hero’s journey. Pakula’s twist on civilization’s oldest story is that his journeymen are not supernaturally aided or gifted. Surviving by their own wits, they do not grandstand or deliver grandiose monologues. Setting aside their relative handsomeness, there is nothing exceptional about them at all except that they answer the call to adventure. Something just does not seem right, and these heroes feel called to investigate the source.
In Klute, a private detective (Donald Sutherland) hired to find a missing chemical company executive exposes the company man’s penchant for Manhattan call girls. Though not as overtly political as the subsequent films in the trilogy, it introduces motifs that would become synonymous with the Nixon era: wire-tapped phone conversations, framings, and cover-ups. Parallax View, shot in spring of 1973 and released two months before Nixon’s resignation in the summer of ‘74, feels like a clear predecessor to President’s Men, starring Warren Beatty as brawling loose-cannon reporter who stumbles upon a conspiracy so big and far-reaching that no one believes him.
Reviewing Parallax for Time magazine just two months before Nixon’s resignation, Richard Schickel was moved to observe: “the world is changed more by rational planning, however evil, than it is by irrational individual actions.” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that the bizarre plot at the heart of the film is handled “so soberly that they sabotage credulity.” During the years Pakula was making this trio of films, he frequently observed such bizarreness.
In an interview included in the 2019 documentary Alan Pakula: Going for Truth, Pakula provides crucial context: “You have to remember, when [Parallax View] came out it was after the year of assassinations, and during the Watergate hearings. And during the time when I was shooting the film America had become unrecognizable.” For that reason, he believed that Parallax View was his “most stylized film.” It dealt with an America “that has become surreal, an America that was Kafka-like. It was an adventure in which you never meet the bad guys.”
All the President’s Men is similar in this way. We see the Watergate burglars briefly, but only from the back as they are arraigned in a D.C. courtroom. Likewise, Nixon’s inner circle, who had direct access to the Committee to Reelect the President slush fund and orchestrated the various illegal operations, are portrayed as ordinary, loyal, patriotic civil servants (with bad haircuts and bad suits) just doing their jobs. Perhaps most remarkable, though, is the self-styled pedestrian nature of the Watergate “Plumbers” (as they called themselves), as they cause us to reconsider the origins of our historical distrust of government, shifting the conversation away from roguish individuals to a broader cultural and psychological phenomenon that historian Richard Hofstadter famously termed the “paranoid style.”
Turner Classic Movie’s 2022 celebration of the “Paranoia Trilogy” was accompanied by an essay connecting the film to historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” wherein he describes the “paranoid style” as a manner of political behavior in which otherwise normal, law-abiding, God-fearing citizens, emboldened by “feeling[s] of persecution,” come to believe “grandiose theories of conspiracy” in which demonic powers are plotting to destroy America.
The essay appeared in Harper’s Magazine just four months after Barry Goldwater’s speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention where he famously proclaimed, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The statement, and the speech it comes from, is quintessentially “paranoid.” “Time is forever running out,” writes Hofstadter, and if something is not done immediately the powers of darkness and evil will be victorious and all will be lost. In this way, the paranoid operative is led to believe that they can no longer trust civil authorities (politicians, police, and military) to do what is necessary: “the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.”
Hofstadter is careful to point out that though the paranoid style has been historically employed by those on the left and the right, he was finding it most active and virulent in an emergent “pseudoconservatism” rising out of Barry Goldwater’s speech and successful run to become the Republican presidential nominee. He observed that this new conservatism was concerning because it was not taking root in “profoundly disturbed minds” but finding expression in the political beliefs of otherwise “normal” people.
But why? Why would normal, everyday citizens with little to no exposure to radical politics become convinced of such far-fetched conspiracies and adopt hyperbolic and toxic political rhetoric? Hofstadter observes that most instances of the paranoid style stem from “movements of suspicious discontent,” in which a heady combination of xenophobic American exceptionalism and Christian triumphalism has been stoked. He saw it as a throwback to a “superstitious Manicheanism” in which all the various social, cultural, and political cancers are understood to emanate from a “single center and hence can be eliminated by some kind of final act of victory over the evil source.” Leadership of such paranoid movements gain stature and power by making grave prognostications that the end is nigh if they are not heeded.
This eschatologically-tinged political behavior is animated by the “way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.” “Believed” here takes on a different character. Belief makes it true, creating a perverse faith. Rather than the substance of things hoped for, faith is an allegiance to a sentimental vision in which an army of good Christian soldiers foil the diabolical plans of a demonic force.
But in order to generate support among otherwise normal, peaceable citizens, the enemy must be characterized as inhuman and supernatural, capable, even, of defying the natural laws of the universe:
Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history. . . . He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way.
Characterizing the enemy as manufacturers of history, it becomes clear why journalists (and journalistic institutions) have been prime targets for demonization. Since the beginning of the profession journalists have been accused of manufacturing history through the manipulation and outright fabrication of fact:
Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through “managed news”; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brain-washing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.
Ultimately, this conspiratorial perspective on the press appeals to what Hofstadter calls a “Manichean psychology” that finds a dualist worldview “far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities.” It is a way of thinking and perceiving that is supra-intellectual (“high IQ”), and a preternaturally intuitive sort of heroism.
But the main difficulty in disabusing adherents of the paranoid style that their beliefs are delusional is that they believe they are a kind of end-of-days religious elect:
Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy, and strike at susceptibility to similar themes in Christianity. Properly expressed, such warnings serve somewhat the same function as a description of the horrible consequences of sin in a revivalist sermon: they portray that which impends but which may still be avoided. They are a secular and demonic version of adventism.
What Schickel and Canby saw that other critics could not was that Pakula’s moody mise-en-scene was not compensation for a lack of skill in character development but an understanding that style is in the service of the story, and not the other way around. For Pakula, the struggle to be a good steward of the story goes beyond mise-en-scene to the deepest level of mythos. In a 1976 interview, Pakula was explicit:
[Parallax View] destroyed the American hero myth, All the President’s Men resurrects it. . . . Film students have asked me how I could do one and then the other, and I say it’s very simple: Parallax View represents my fear about what’s happening in the world, and All the President’s Men represents my hope. Like most of us, I’m balanced between the two.
Such balance, not to mention hope, is rare in the art world, but Pakula delivers. The adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s account could have easily become partisan, anti-Nixon propaganda, or a romanticized descent into the chain-smoking, macho world of daily journalists who see themselves as oath keepers committed to justice. Instead, Pakula focuses in minute detail on the maddening and painstaking process of getting it right. A spectacular and histrionic style would only amplify distrust, playing into the governmental gaslighting narrative that elite East Coast journalists would stop at nothing to take Nixon down.
To combat this willfully paranoid view that the press was conspiring against Nixon, Pakula chooses to focus the action of the film on the tedious legwork needed to establish the facts: numerous phone interviews, door-to-door cold calling, and combing through phonebooks, not to mention scenes in which the reporters and editors openly debate what can be credibly claimed, corroborated, and printed.
In one memorable scene, the reporters visit the Library of Congress and sort through hundreds of lending request slips to corroborate rumors that Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer later convicted for his role in the Watergate break-in, had checked out documents regarding the Kennedy family, with the intention of finding compromising dirt on Nixon adversary Ted Kennedy. In another scene, we watch as Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) patiently and cannily works to assuage the concerns of a low-level Committee to Reelect the President assistant who believes her house is being surveilled and is frightened to share what she knows.
But perhaps the most salient and true depiction of journalistic ethos comes in a montage at the midway point of All the President’s Men, dramatizing Woodward and Bernstein’s attempt to piece together a roster of those who had access to the infamous Committee to Reelect the President slush fund that was allegedly used to pay the Watergate burglars, as well as support attack campaigns against Nixon opponents. They have a few names, but in most cases all they have are initials—all their scared informants will share. An image of the reporters getting into a car and driving down a long boulevard shot from high above the District is inter-cut with an image of their penciled notes. No one will talk, and they are being pressured by their editor at the Post to turn up more than just innuendo. Here, the montage is interrupted by a static, medium shot of the two reporters sitting in a fast-food restaurant airing their frustrations. It is less than thirty seconds in length, but the brief exchange reverberates through the film and down through the previous films in the trilogy:
Bernstein: “How can you keep going at something past the point when you’d believe it?”
Woodward: “We just have to start all over again.”
These two lines draw attention to a kind of play within a play concerning retroactive continuity. The reporters have a strong and passionate belief that they cannot prove true. It challenges them again and again to return to the beginning, to ground themselves in what is real, what is verifiable.
The real-life Woodward and Bernstein have gone on record saying that this faithful attention to the methodology of investigative work endows the film with a powerful verisimilitude, and yet famed film critic Roger Ebert complained that it made for a film that is “truer to the craft of journalism than to the art of storytelling.” Ebert’s criticism is fair; there is a feeling of being, as he writes, “adrift in a sea of names, dates, telephone numbers, coincidences,” a feeling that is even more acute when watching the film cold, more than fifty years after the names of the Watergate burglars have faded from popular consciousness. This is the test of the staying power of any film—any great work of storytelling: does it continue to speak and offer truths beyond its contemporary moment?
In this case, yes. Pakula’s deft use of the tricks and tropes of the trade—flashforwards, flashbacks, clandestine meetings, wiretaps, troves of secret documents, which serve to dramatize the experience of covering one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history, not only keeps audiences intrigued, but they artfully capture the ineffable, creeping fog of paranoia the reporters felt hovering at the edges of their work.
Pakula dramatizes this paranoia most masterfully in the final scene between Woodward and Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), his high-placed government informant. Standing behind a concrete pillar, half-in, half-out of the shadows, Redford asks his anonymous informant, “How high up?” How high up in the White House does this corruption go?
“You’ll have to find that out for yourself. I’m taking great risk meeting you here,” mutters the shadowy figure. “I don’t like newspapers. I don’t care for any inexactitudes or shallowness.”
Footsteps echo in the distance, startling them, quieting them for a moment. “Did you remember to change cabs before coming here?” DeepThroat asks—this is the precaution they agreed on to prevent anyone following him.
“Yes,” Woodward says, but then, “Does the FBI know what we know? Does the Justice Department? Why haven’t they done anything?”
“If it didn’t deal directly with the Watergate break-in, they didn’t pursue.”
Just then, a car engine sparks to life and speeds out of the garage, tires squealing. The camera cuts from the men to the car. When the camera comes back to Woodward, Deep Throat is gone.
Above ground, we watch as Redford mounts the dark street. He is visibly shaken. He passes in front of a retaining wall made of concrete blocks embedded with shiny flecks of particulate. As he passes, the flecks seem to glimmer. That is how quiet and intense the moment is, even the block wall behind him is resonant.
For a moment, we believe that the scene will end as all the previous ones did—cut—and we are back in the yellow light of the vast Washington Post newsroom. Instead, suddenly, Redford startles and looks back the way he came, his eyes filled with fear. For a few beats the camera lingers, but not on Redford’s handsome face, but on the dark and empty street.
What is remarkable here is that just as Pakula demonstrates the way the faceless, impersonal forces exert a degrading dread, he is simultaneously holding up journalism for scrutiny. “I don’t like newspapers,” Deep Throat says. The “inexactitudes” and “shallowness” that he is critical of pushes back against any impulse to see Woodward and Bernstein as heroes in any conventional sense. They are only heroes insofar as they keep searching for the truth. His refrain throughout the film is uttered here again: “You’ll have to find that out for yourself.”
In this way, All the President’s Men feels politically neutral, especially when compared to the Gonzo journalistic ravings of Hunter S. Thompson, who characterized Nixon as a conniving, bloodthirsty hyena (and who just so happened to be staying at the Watergate the evening of the break-in—drinking tequila poolside, according to him). Goldman’s script avoids moral pronouncements and name-calling. Pakula resists falling prey to the Manichean impulse, portraying the reporters as good and Nixon’s operatives as evil, in favor of a more dramatically honest and satisfying dance between journalists and public servants who find themselves caught up in the machinations not of abstract social, cultural, and political forces but literal plots and conspiracies to manipulate others to maintain power.
But there is an additional sense in which the film has become a poignant model of virtue. Pakula holds a mirror up to the paranoid style and in so doing creates a new style of filmmaking that takes on an almost secularly ecclesial project. Pakula’s films are concerned with the search for truth within social and political hierarchies, and makes visible and visceral the violence that unfolds when citizens insist on the truth and dare attempt to unmask the man behind the curtain, but less in a bloodsport, Bourne Identity register than a Kafka as done by Orson Welles.
Pannenberg writes, “The real danger for faith lurks in its estrangement from rationality,” warning that the ultimate challenge to Christianity is not secularism, but “rival religions”—faith systems co-opted for political gain. When conspiracy thinking (the “paranoid style”) mimics this, it transforms politics into a totalizing worldview that demands a perverse allegiance. In this context, the investigative journalist becomes something more than a political operative; they act as a witness to the particulars of reality, a necessary check against the idol-making machines of power.
All the President’s Men makes this vital role visible, not by moralizing, but by dramatizing the search for truth as an act of resistance against this instrumentalization. When the conspiracy seeks to manipulate and dehumanize—making people complicit in the distortions of those in power—the reporter’s dogged refusal to accept innuendo is an act of reclaiming human dignity.
This is why Metz’s “dangerous memory” is so essential here. Memory and narrative are not merely tools for historical preservation; they are “categories of salvation.” They allow for the formation of identity in the face of dehumanizing forces. By narrating the truth—recalling events of suffering and striving to see them as part of a larger, coherent whole—we resist the “institutionalization of hatred.” Metz continues: “The God of this dangerous memory does not turn into a political utopia,” but rather grounds us as subjects of history, capable of resisting the totalizing and dehumanizing narratives of the paranoid style.
Magnifica Humanitas beautifully describes the fruit of this ethic:
As a result of the work of the communications media, Christians are better able to understand the state of contemporary world society, a society which is frequently alienated from God. Dramatists and journalists describe this alienation in significant terms asserting human liberty with all the force of their genius and with all the depth of their thought. Their creative power and descriptive skill have our admiration and gratitude.
Revisiting All the President’s Men fifty years later through the proleptic lens of all that has transpired in American politics since, exemplifies the ways storytelling and story-receiving sharpens our sense of anticipation, our sense that stories can caution us, enliven us, and be tools for sense-making. As Hofstadter says of the paranoid operative, “They portray that which impends but which may still be avoided.” In other words, they tell cynical stories; stories that have no real hope or aspiration to truth, stories that foreclose on themselves.
The message Nixon delivered to Congress and the American people on the evening of June 1, 1972, sixteen days before the Watergate break-in—which is not included in the film—was meant to assure the American people that the administration sought out dialogue with the Communist powers of Russia and China to reaffirm America’s dedication to the sacred ideals of a free and civil society, and to break the cycle of “perpetual confrontation.” The rhetoric of the speech, combined with the image of Marine One touching down against the majestic backdrop of the Rotunda, is a canny piece of political theatre, intended to project a kind of urgent and resolute competence, but which ultimately feels disingenuous in light of what will be revealed by story’s end.
In this way, the quick flashback-then-forward that begins the film places the audience in a present that feels precariously poised between the two. This is the function of film—or at least one function: to allow us to see with our own eyes what transpired yesterday, last week, last year, three hundred years ago, or millennia from now in a galaxy far, far away, but on a larger and more dramatic scale.
Thus, our orientation to film is as rapt witnesses to, and discoverers of, what has already happened; a rare experience, an opportunity to go back to the beginning and bring lessons from the past that may lead to different choices in the future. It is a feeling of being unmoored and alienated while seeking the truth, a sensation at the heart of this film, rendering it a deeply Christian story.
