A Good Survey, a Few Slips, but Inaccurately Titled

Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious, by Barna William Donovan

 As the subtitle promises, it’s a survey of “dark places” in American thought. Donovan not only narrates the production and reception of fairly recent films (the 1960s onward), he tries to illumine thought processes, worldviews, and audiences for the kinds of beliefs narrated in films like JFK, Hangar 18, or the Rambo series.  That is, the idea that great forces are working together to preserve their own power by deliberately misrepresenting reality.  An elite, this concept says, is running things for their own benefit.

HOWEVER—and this is where the book’s title is misleading—only MOST of this book’s content is about movies.  About 30%, in my estimation, is a survey of the milieus, mindsets, and history of belief in conspiracy in modern culture.  To my estimation, this is way too much verbiage to background any conspiracy theory covered in the films.

            Most goofs in the book were small.  The computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey is HAL 9000, not HALL.  It’s Darth Sidious, not “Siduous,” in Star Wars. In Star Trek VI, Gorkon is murdered on the Klingon ship, not on the Enterprise.  In his discussion of the Watchmen comics miniseries, Donovan never once mentions artist Dave Gibbons.

            A bigger mistake comes as Donovan summarizes (both comic and film) From Hell.  He wrongly says that Stephen Knight’s Ripper theory, the basis for From Hell, holds that Jack the Ripper was Prince Eddy.  No, no, a thousand fallen women no!  The Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution proposal is that coachman John Netley and Sir William Gull were the murderers.  They were trying to hush up the “crime” of Eddy impregnating and then secretly marrying a verboten Catholic girl.

            Overall, this is a competent survey, but too wordy.  As were many pulp writers, was Donovan paid by the word?

 See you Monday, fellow anti-conspiracists!