Does the current cinematic epidemic of the multiple exacerbate our already bad case of metaphysical uncertainty? The answer, I think, is no. In Hollywood films the multiplication of realities, identities and temporalities does not lead to skepticism, as one might expect, because every illusory reality, mistaken identity or a-chronological sequence of events is eventually given a clear narrative or psychological justification, having been ultimately designed to reinvest characters with a sense of agency: in other words, the ‘multiple film’, which transformed the psychopathology of multiple personality into a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, serves a therapeutic function. The contemporary conspiracy thriller's reworking of clinical paranoia into cultural paranoia fulfills a similar function.

While clinical paranoia used to be an irrational response to reality, cultural paranoia is increasingly seen either as inherent in the very structure of the new global economy or as a rational response, a ‘social practice’ through which the disempowered subject attempts to position himself with respect to the social/political world. Contemporary geopolitical conspiracy thrillers ‘borrow’ the symptomatic language of clinical paranoia to dramatize a new type of conspiracy, ‘structural conspiracy’: ‘conspiracy without conspiracy.’

Fueled by the Watergate scandal, post-Vietnam disillusionment, and public skepticism toward the Warren Commission report, the 1970s conspiracy thriller located conspiracy within government and corporate establishments, turning the focus of paranoia inward, toward America's own institutions. Films like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (John Frankenheimer, 1962), KLUTE (Alan Pakula, 1971), THE PARALLAX VIEW (Alan Pakula, 1974), ALL THE PRESIDENT's MEN (Alan Pakula, 1974) and Three DAYS OF THE CONDOR (Sydney Pollack, 1975) provided ‘textual resolutions for inadequately explained socio-historical traumas,’ thematizing the individual's powerlessness in the face of ubiquitous institutional control. The surveillance society thrillers of the 1990s ‒ WAG THE DOG (Barry Levinson, 1997), THE GAME (David Fincher, 1997), THE TRUMAN SHOW (Peter Weir, 1998), THE MATRIX (Andy and Lana Wachowski, 1999), THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (Josef Rusnak, 1999), and PLEASANTVILLE (Gary Ross, 1998) ‒ responded to the paranoia engendered by a media-saturated reality.