Some early viewers have been offended by the movie’s “cool, jokey complacency”. The jokes come mostly “at the expense of the myriad political victims of America’s relentless interventionist politics”. Certainly, for those used to the paranoid thrillers from the Seventies like The Parallax View (1974) or The Domino Principle (1977),  which sought to lay bare America’s secret history, McDonagh’s flip, caustic tone seems a deliberate affront. In place of Deep Throat’s gravelly sotto voce in an underground garage, we have a spook laughing about messing up other people’s countries while on a mini-break.

McDonagh, in having Chris spill secrets from his bar stool, deliberately upends the conventions of the great conspiracy thrillers of the Seventies, which depended on the scarcity of disclosure. Their climaxes usually came with a congressional inquiry or a newspaper scoop: Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) ends with Robert Redford’s CIA bookworm on the pavement outside the New York Times, having handed over the story. All the President’s Men (1974) ends with a fusillade of teletyping. To adapt the old Watergate maxim, crimes require a cover-up to register as crimes — and a heroic press to unmask them.

Fifty years on, the secrets are out. Or rather, the secrets are content. Conspiracy theories are the raw material of some of the most popular podcasts and YouTube channels in the world, and they are regularly spouted from the presidential podium. Meanwhile the actual record has never been more available: WikiLeaks cables, Edward Snowden’s slides, and tens of thousands of pages of JFK files declassified by presidential order. There is, if anything, too much of it. Revelation no longer registers, in the same way that Trump’s malfeasance barely registers, because he is so open about it. Asked in January why he was allowing so much conflict of interest, he said plainly: “because I found out that nobody cared.” Why bother with the cover-up?

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Why liberalism triggers conspiracy panics

By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

The flourishing of American paranoia in the Seventies took its cue from Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in November 1964. For Hofstadter, this political approach was used by everyone from John Robison to Joe McCarthy, waving his lists around frantically in hearings. It was pedantic, mock-scholarly, piling up documents and footnotes, then leaping from real facts to a fantastic conclusion: usually the unmasking of the hidden enemy set on destroying American civilization. For all the implausibility of, say, Hollywood being a hotbed of Soviet sleeper agents, the paranoid worldview ends up more coherent than reality, because it leaves no room for accident or ambiguity. Everything can, ultimately, be explained. The paranoiac is therefore a dramatist who has forgotten they are making it up.

If the style of Seventies paranoia cinema owes a lot to Hofstadter, it is Dick Cheney we must thank for much of the content. At a lunch with editors of the New York Times on 16 January 1975, President Ford was pressed on why anyone should trust the commission he had appointed 12 days earlier to investigate the CIA. The agency’s own internal record of its past operations — the so-called “Family Jewels” — held material, Ford said, that would “blacken the reputation of every President back to Harry Truman”.

“Like what?” asked one of the editors.

“Like assassination.”

When Ford’s commission duly reported that June, the assassinations weren’t in it. Cheney, the president’s 34-year-old deputy assistant, had gone through the draft with a pen, paying particular attention to the 86-page chapter on plots against foreign leaders. He inserted recommendations the commission had never voted on, deleted ones it had, and, where the commission had found CIA activities unlawful, recast them as merely exceeding statutory authority or as “improper”.

Cheney’s pen marked a bad day for American democracy but a great one for the country’s thriller writers. The reality of the CIA’s plots, even in the redacted form that appeared in the report of the Senate’s Church Committee that November, was a catalog of bungled kidnaps and assassination attempts, subcontracted to Mafia hoods, Cuban exiles and Corsican gunmen, and, cigars poisoned with botulinum.

It was enough, in the words of the report, to “strain the imagination” — and the gap between the redacted public record and the reality fed thriller writers and Hollywood screenwriters with the myth of CIA invincibility for 50 years, in everything from Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975) to Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which gave the CIA a starring role in Dallas, right up to the Bourne films, which have the CIA tracking a man across Europe in real time from a bank of screens in Langley.

When the agency’s darkest skeletons were finally declassified in June 2007, director Paul Greengrass printed out all 693 pages and gave them to the cast of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) — in retrospect, maybe the last gasp of the paranoid style in American filmmaking. The movie’s Operation ‘Blackbriar’ was directly based on the illegal surveillance operations of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton which over two decades had secretly opened more than 200,000 letters passing between the United States and the Soviet Union as well as indexing some 300,000 Americans for being in the anti-war movement.

Today, believers don’t need official documents. Online, they can find thousands of fellow fantasists to back up their ideas and algorithms to amplify their most outlandish theories. The Covid pandemic proved a ferocious accelerant. Uncertainty about whether everyone else would follow the rules fed a more generalized distrust not of the “enemy above”, as Jesse Walker puts it in The United States of Paranoia (2013), but the “Enemy Within”: paranoia directed not at shadowy government agents, but at neighbors behind their picket fences and lawn sprinklers. As a Twilight Zone episode once had it, the monsters are on Maple street.

The circle of distrust narrows, but it never quite reaches the mirror. What the paranoiac fears most is not persecution but irrelevance. Better to be the object of a thousand plots than to discover that no one is thinking about you at all. That is Chris’s predicament in Wild Horse Nine. Malkovich plays him as an Angleton gone to seed, monologuing into a Dictaphone for a memoir to be published after his death, and blabbing state secrets to strangers to watch them react. He isn’t a whistleblower; he’s a man testing whether disclosure still has any voltage, and finding that it doesn’t.

This is the condition Hofstadter didn’t foresee: not that the paranoid style would turn apocalyptic, but that its apocalypses would become so commonplace as to be banal. The hero’s discovery is everyone else’s Tuesday. What’s left, when revelation is worthless, is loose-lipped farce. In HBO’s White House Plumbers (2023), the Watergate burglars, as played by Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, are bunglers straight out of Veep: they can barely get through a door. Chaos or conspiracy? How about both?

It’s an apt metaphor for what happens during one of the public meltdowns that double as free entertainment for the extremely online. The splatter of drama, the rush to consume, the way we pick over every last sordid detail of the controversy until there’s no meat left. What we miss is that the details hardly matter, as individually fascinating as they may be; indeed, a large part of this problem is that we only ever talk about it in terms of its most recent iteration. We obsess over the individual characters — the Bean Dad, the Racist Cheerleader, the Guy Who Didn’t Cum On His Cat (the internet remains unpersuaded) — yet fail to grasp that they’re all starring in the same self-perpetuating tragedy.

Granted, some characters make this drama more riveting than others, and last week’s iteration was a peak example of the form. Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez waged a six-day war of attrition over a colleague’s retweet of an off-colour joke.

The offensiveness (or entertainment value) of the joke itself is a matter of taste. What quickly became clear, however, is that the joke was not the point. The problem was what it represented: the mere tip of an imagined vast, sexist iceberg lurking below the surface. Some claimed that it signalled the hidden sexism of the reporter, Dave Weigel, who retweeted it; others, including Sonmez, insisted that it was symbolic of a deep-seated culture of misogyny in the Washington Post itself. This type of projection is intrinsic to such online controversies: nobody ever makes a one-off mistake, everything is part of pattern. (When John Roderick, now better known as Bean Dad, tried to create a teachable moment by getting his daughter to work out the machinations of a can opener without help, internet scolds were so incensed that they reported him to Child Protective Services.)

We watched the action like a TV show: the callout, the apology, the suspension of the colleague (for a full month without pay) when the apology was deemed insufficient, the escalating demands from Sonmez (who not only supported Weigel’s suspension, but wanted everyone who publicly criticised her public criticism to be professionally sanctioned as well). All this, combined with a series of leaks from inside the increasingly-exasperated Washington Post leadership apparatus, built to a climax as hotly-debated as the series finale of LOST. How could they possibly fire her? How could they possibly not?

The immolation of Sonmez’s career seemed simultaneously inevitable and impossible, right up until the moment when it happened. And when it did, we swarmed. We feasted. And then, within days, we moved on — our appetite for drama sated, but the point thoroughly missed.

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The media is run by trolls

By Kat Rosenfield

Every one of these meltdowns, from the dad with the can opener to the reporter with an ax to grind, owes its existence to an ongoing erosion of interpersonal trust. Consider how suspicious one has to be, how consumed by paranoid cynicism, to see a veteran reporter retweet an off-colour joke and declare it not an isolated error in judgment, but a definitive glimpse of the darkness that lurks inside his heart.

Never mind that the man in question has worked with and mentored women who loudly attest to his decency. Never mind the countless positive interactions amassed over the course of a 20-year career. The mask has slipped, the jig is up, the retweet is not just a retweet but a revelation. What kind of person finds a joke like that funny? A woman-disrespecter, that’s who! And having telegraphed his true disposition toward his female colleagues, surely the person in question is unfit to remain employed.

It is not hard to identify the flaws, and the threat, of a workplace policy founded on the notion that one’s employers should be meting out punishments, firings and fines, over matters of taste. The comedy you laugh at, the music you listen to, the art you hang on your walls at home: any of these things might grate against the sensibilities of a coworker, especially one who is in the habit of opportunistic offence-taking.

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The case for the sexual revolution

By Kat Rosenfield

Such a rule would allow unparalleled interference by bosses into our private lives — policing not just the things we say outside of work, but the things we enjoy. It is hard to say where it would end. “You retweeted an offensive joke” becomes, “You were overheard telling an offensive joke to your friends at a bar,” becomes, perhaps, “You were captured by one of our corporate surveillance drones exiting a Ricky Gervais show, and our facial expression-analysing algorithm confirms the presence of mirth.” The boundaries between our work lives and our private lives have never been more permeable, and it has become increasingly easy for employers to track our movements — and hold us accountable for them — outside the office. And in a moment where brands are expected to have identities and values the same way people do, it’s all too easy for corporations to lay claim to their employees’ expression and activities as company property. You are never not at work; you are never not representing the brand.

It has also never been easier — as the Washington Post saga makes painfully clear — for office politics to become fodder for public consumption, as disgruntled employees seek to litigate their grievances in front of a bigger, more sympathetic audience. As much as employers might be interfering in the private lives of their employees, we the public also know much too much about workplace conflicts that are none of our business. Josh Barro, in his Very Serious newsletter, put it best: “If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.”

But the greatest cost is to our humanity, our interpersonal relationships. To walk around in a state of constant suspicion about the character of every person we encounter: it wears on us. It isolates us. And left unchecked, it brings us to a point where the only thing we share with our fellow humans is the conviction that everyone around us is only pretending to be good, and that the only way to truly know someone is to watch, and wait, iPhone camera in hand, for the tiniest crack to open up in their false veneer of decency.

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The cruel world of yoga

By Kat Rosenfield

We’ve been here before, of course. In moments of diminished trust, we turn on each other, becoming obsessed with ferreting out the subversives in our midst. Anyone could be a witch, or a communist, or a homosexual; everyone must be closely watched; and no misstep is too small to be worthy of indictment. The notion of an honest mistake ceases to exist entirely. Consider the case of the meteorologist who made an unfortunate spoonerism while trying to read the name of a park named after Martin Luther King, Jr., or the sports reporter who stuttered with similar results while speaking about Kobe Bryant’s death — and the enormous number of people who insisted that this was no accident, but incontrovertible evidence that these reporters must use racial slurs in private, all the time. A slip of the tongue? Ha! The only thing that slipped was the mask you’re wearing. That sound could only come out of your mouth if that word, in all its hateful and hideous glory, was already in your head.

Perhaps this is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which art and politics and opinions are increasingly seen as indistinguishable from one’s essential self. Matters of taste, or personality, now get swept up under the banner of capital-I-identity; you don’t just laugh at the sexist joke, you are the sexist joke. Even the silliest iterations of this phenomenon, like the obsession of certain young people with niche sexual and gender identities demarcated by bespoke pronouns and colourful flags, speak to a broader cultural impulse to make sense of things — and of other people — by slapping labels on them. Meanwhile, the idea that a person might contain self-contradictory multitudes, or that his taste in comedy, art, cuisine or decor says very little (if anything) about his character, cannot be borne in our present environment. The inscrutable nature of other people’s hearts is not an enticing mystery, but a source of horror: they could be hiding anything in there. The problem with this, of course, is not just that too many good people are saddled with permanent reputations for badness as a result of something as silly as a tweet, but that the cheapening of “badness” as a concept makes the perpetrators of actual evil much harder to identify.

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You can't police offence

By Kathleen Stock

There’s a paradox here: that in a moment where social media gives us unprecedented access to other people’s thoughts, we have become consumed by fear of all the things they might be thinking but not expressing. There’s a pervasive sense, perhaps owing to the inherent performativity of the medium, that signs of virtue cannot be trusted, but hints of vice should be treated with deadly seriousness, investigated, and prosecuted where possible. In the age of oversharing, it is the things we supposedly do not mean to reveal that are the most revealing.

And so we must be vigilant, ever watchful for the possibility (nay, the likelihood) that the mild-mannered coworker is actually a secret white supremacist, that the friendly kindergarten teacher with pastel pigtails is child-recruiting groomer, that your spouse is a clandestine enjoyer of weird pornography, or worse, problematic jokes. The circumstances, the politics, the main players may change, but the heart of every cancellation lies the same terrifying conviction: that other people are unknowable, and dangerous, and cannot be trusted.

Making colleagues nod and bootlick when they have no desire to do so is the essence of power. But the despot feels the need for this sham acknowledgment not to demonstrate strength. At root he is irritable, morbid, totally oversensitive. Watching sycophants crawl along marble floors confirms his deep suspicion: human beings are low creatures. This confirmation makes him feel better.

Imagine we are allowed to send one writer into the Kremlin, with the intention of translating its walls and turrets and atavisms into literature. I’d choose Ryszard Kapuściński for the assignment. Nobody ever captured despotism with such vividness; no other witness, and no other stylist comes close. He would have seen the table, and known.

For much of his professional life Kapuściński was communist Poland’s lone foreign correspondent. He was always broke, being shot at, sneaking on to planes, and taking notes. Reporting for PAP, the Polish news agency, he made the brokenness of the world his subject. In Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and eventually with Imperium (1993), in the ashes of the USSR.

“I was an envoy,” he wrote, “engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate.” As envoy, Kapuściński witnessed 27 revolutions. Bolivia, Mozambique, Sudan, Benin, Iran… Rulers changed; governments fell. Surfing the roar and the blood, the only thing Kapuściński thought constant was “helplessness”. A revolution like Iran’s “demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it annihilates the ideals that called it into being”. Experience taught him to fear desperate crowds chanting slogans.

Three elements combine frictionlessly in his work. There is Kapuściński the reporter, who hangs out everywhere with anyone, observing perpetually, a world-class noticer. Insanely brave and desperately lonely, he is nearly killed by snakes and bullets. He bypasses high politics and slums it in the places where maggots wriggle under people’s skin. This is the Kapuściński who said: “I don’t want to stop at observation. I want to take part.” Then there is Kapuściński the excursive essayist, the expert on anything, who can explain the tragedy of Shi’ism, or the history of the Iranian oil industry. Finally there is Kapuściński the poet, the imaginative genius, armed with metaphor, simile, and a subtle Aesopian language that can hold the universe in a rain drop.

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By Will Lloyd

Wonderfully, vast areas of Kapuściński’s life and work turned out to be lies. The envoy was an occasional spy and willing informer for Poland’s communists. The supposedly journalistic accounts he rendered were exposed: tattered and hole-ridden. His transmissions were deceptions. Kapuściński, often described late in life as the “greatest war correspondent in the world” and “the reporter’s reporter”, had been spinning fantasies for decades. Serious journalists hated this. They were ashen, and felt cheated. They shouldn’t have been shocked. You only needed to read a sentence of Kapuściński to know he was more than a journalist: he was an artist. He had to allow himself more. His ultimate creation was himself.

The character was mottled with fictions. Had he really awaited execution by Belgian mercenaries at Usumba airfield in the Sixties? Did he genuinely witness a massacre in Mexico City in 1968? Was he actually in Santiago for the Pinochet Coup in 1973? Nope: lie, lie, lie. He did not meet Che Guevara before his death in a seething Bolivian jungle. Nor did he meet Patrice Lumumba, nor did he watch fish deflesh the corpses of Idi Amin’s opponents that bobbed on the waters of Lake Victoria. Did his father escape the Katyn massacre, when Stalin murdered 20,000 Polish soldiers, as Kapuściński said he did? Oh, you better believe it’s a lie.

When a friend confronted him with the truth that a Tanzanian riot he wrote about was, in fact, utterly different to his account of it, Kapuściński shouted at her: “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter.” He maintained that formal objectivity was the real lie. Nobody was impartial. Trying to be was the fantasy.

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The war on Martin Amis

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Adam Hochschild called Kapuściński’s work “magic journalism”. A genre all of his own. And like every good magician Kapuściński was a con artist. Since the full reveal of his lies in 2010 many have chosen to place the emphasis on the con, not the art. But I’d forgive almost anything to read a good paragraph. Kapuściński tuned more of those than most. Many truths are less profound — and frankly, less entertaining — than most of Kapuściński’s lies. The world suffers from a deficit of good paragraphs. It has more than enough facts.

And they’re not straightforward lies either. He liked to make wild literary images stand place for the facts of whole empires. In Imperium he states the simple data of the USSR’s size, twenty-two million square kilometres, with continental borders longer than the equator. So far, so factual. Then he goes further. Kapuściński says that he has never seen these borders without “thick coils of barbed wire.” In the constant snows, heats, and sand storms of the Imperium, the wire quickly deteriorates. The wire must be replaced — “one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire.” (Can one assume?) But then he goes even further.

What about the prison camps? They must need wire too! What about the wiring for atomic ranges, barracks, warehouses!? Multiply, he demands, the amount of wire needed by the number of years the USSR existed for… That’s why nobody could buy a spoon or a hammer in Smolensk or Omsk in 1987! All the raw materials were “used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.” He imagines the most important telephone call one imperial official could make to another being: “Are you all properly wired in?” The whole flight of fancy is daft. Completely untrue. But does it express the “essence” of the USSR — that it was inefficient, wasteful, cruel, essentially an enormous open-air prison — yes. Like Tony Montana, Kapuściński always tells the truth, even when he lies.

So we parachute Kapuściński into the Kremlin to uncover the “essence” of the place, and of Putin. His credentials for the task, though faked, are peerless. Kapuściński planned, though did not complete, a trilogy on absolute power, its consequences, and its downfall. The two books he did produce, The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982), describe the rule and overthrow of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Iran’s Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The third, clinching book would have been about Idi Amin; for some time Kapuściński kept a hand-drawn diagram of the Ugandan despot’s brain in his Warsaw flat. As soon as the USSR began to tremble during the Gorbachev era, Kapuściński realised he had other things to describe.

The Shah and the Emperor are different but the same. Kapuściński plays the surreal medievalism of the Ethiopian court for laughs. After the Emperor’s undoing he claims to have tracked down every flunkey: the pillow-bearer, who slipped the appropriate cushion under Selassie’s feet when he sat on thrones built for taller emperors; the servant who followed the Selassie’s dog around with a satin cloth, ready to wipe away the urine it habitually sprayed on visiting dignitaries; the Minister of the Pen, and the Keeper of the Third Door, and the Servants of the Bed Chamber… Like the Shah’s poets, generals, and economists, the Emperor’s lackeys cringe, push, and jostle.

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Vladimir Putin's dangerous madness

By David Patrikarakos

Despots seek abjectly loyal men. Their inner circles are composed of galley slaves, without any autonomy. Their property and their lives are always at risk. This is Putin’s world too. “The smart oligarchs get how things work here and the dumb ones aren’t oligarchs any more,” a senior Kremlin official told the Financial Times this week. “Everyone who doesn’t like it is out, or in prison.”

In Kapuściński’s imagination despotism is a guise. He depicts the Shah and the Emperor as actors, with Iran and Ethiopia as tragic stages. The Shah performed “a one character play, and the actor was also a director. Everyone else was an extra.” The aged Selassie weighs a mere fifty kilograms. His knees are stiff and he can barely walk. But he understands his role; he is a “theatrical paternalist”. When watched “he forced a certain elasticity into his muscles, with great effort, so that he moved with dignity”. Everyone, despot included, is forced to pretend. Think of Putin’s “gunslinger gait”. Farcical dissimulation flows from the top down.

Society under the despot is fatalistic and paranoid. Iran and Ethiopia are choked and immobile places. The people exist largely to be spied on. The Emperor’s courtiers are embarrassed that there even are Ethiopians. They lament “provinces where the people are depressingly savage, pagan and naked; without instructions from the police they might do something that might offend His Majesty’s dignity”.

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By Giles Fraser

Iran’s difference with Ethiopia is oil. The Shah gets drunk on it. Like Putin, he confuses petro-billions for strength, wisdom and authority. Kapuściński sees oil as “a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts”. The filthy liquid, and all the billions, poison the Iranians who control it. Western operators scramble — as they have done in Russia for decades — to pick scraps from the table. They ignore the secret police, and the vanished journalists, because the pickings are so sweet.

The Westerners ingratiate themselves with a new class: “the petro-bourgeoisie”. They produce nothing but consume restlessly. The only thing Kapuściński’s Iranian oligarchs don’t buy are English football clubs. In the sight of cramped towns and the sullen majority, the new class “mounts an exhibition of the Iranian dolce vita, knowing no measure in its dissoluteness, rapacity, and cynicism.” Do the upper echelons realise their elegant lives are being played out on a volcano’s edge?

In both cases the mixture of ever more isolated courts and rulers with an ever more immiserated population, eventually produces the explosion that destroys the regime. Though never made explicit, that was Kapuściński’s lesson for the communists who ruled Poland for most his life, and for today’s despots: you will miscalculate in the end. The despot pursues unpopular military adventures, he promises too much, and he is no longer able to see himself from the outside. Their tables stretch longer, and longer still. His people become conscious of the “subjugation, barrenness, vagueness, and the emptiness of existence”. The moment they snap — and Kapuściński calls the timing of such moments “the greatest riddle known to history” — it ends.

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Has Putin overplayed his hand?

By Edward Luttwak

The Shah tries everything. He shoots protestors, and promises democracy. His prisons overflow and they empty out. Repression and liberalisation do an ugly, jolting dance. The despot does not know which partner to choose. In Ethiopia, the Emperor begins to give up; “He was too old to stop the impending avalanche.” All is in vain. In Iran the people “simply did not want a Shah any more”. The performance ends, the lights go out, and the despot trudges off stage.

Despotisms, like great art, linger after they finish. Kapuściński lied about many things, but he was under no illusions about the fate of the despot’s audience. If life was a film they would achieve catharsis. They kill the despot. Their flags fly above the capitol’s square. Flowers are pushed down gun barrels. Kapuściński knew this was wrong. In the real world real damage cannot be undone.

His exiled Shah jets forlornly between five star ski resorts. His senile Emperor is left under house arrest. Endings that are minimal, not maximal. But the audience, their peoples? You can remove the despot, you can use his table for firewood, except he has already salted the earth. Psychologically and socially despotism lives on. What is left behind in Kapuściński’s fables of Ethiopia and Iran is “an empty sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly”.

His fable of today’s Kremlin would end this way if he were alive to write it. There are 144 million Russians. Putin may be assassinated by one of them during a palace coup. They may fill the streets until the pressure scuttles him. He will be removed somehow, one day. But if Kapuściński is right, Putin will live through what he’s done to his people for decades yet.