The most surprising thing about going back to watch tense 1970s “conspiracy” thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men is how relaxing they are.

If you’re a socialist or a more vaguely defined “political leftist,” you might not fully realize what a strain it is living with the ideologically brainwashed attitudes that have permeated mainstream American media since the Ronald Reagan era. It isn’t just the overt propaganda films, like the war-hawk flicks bookending this period, 1986’s Top Gun and 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, that stress you out. It’s the steady drip of conservative messaging in such forms as pro-family sentimental-ism, pious American exceptionalist patriotism, reverence for authority, hero worship of the police and the military, and avoidance of any recognition of systemic causes for seemingly individual problems.

The conspiracy films of the 1970s are wonderfully refreshing in their curdled loathing of the powers that be and the corrupt systems they’ve put into place. Watching them today, it just looks like common sense — the dark discoveries made by horrified anti-heroes in these films, played by Warren Beatty and Robert Redford and Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. We really have been living in a dystopian national security state, under increasingly heavy surveillance, passively enduring the public idiocy of elected officials as our lives steadily go to hell, while the real, unelected, ultra-capitalized power brokers in the nation foment wars and order assassinations and undermine democracy worldwide.