Tropes, in prose and in cinema, are commonly used ideas or conventions that are at once familiar and if overused trite and cliche. Enemies-to-Lovers, The Real Enemy is the Best Friend, The Chosen One, The Hidden Society or World, are but a tiny sampling of well-worn tropes. The Harry Potterfranchise makes extensive use of two, Harry is the Chosen One, destined by prophecy to end the villain’s reign and life, and the entire ‘Wizarding World’ is hidden from the rest of humanity, existing in a secret space just outside of the public’s knowledge.
Used correctly tropes can make the world building of a piece of fiction faster and more easily grasped by the reader or audience; subverted they generate surprise and a fresh perspective that can illuminate actual reality; and badly deployed or overused they become cliches that tarnish and degrade a work. But something that is less considered is the danger a trope can present to the world that the reader or audience lives in, when a trope ceases to be a device for fiction and is taken on as a representation of reality.
The hidden but vast conspiracy, such as vampires, aliens, or a cabal of ultra-wealthy Satanists, who manipulate the world’s events, is, in my opinion, a terribly dangerous trope because it aligns so closely with actual paranoid delusions held by far too many.
In 1988’s John Carpenter’s They Live, adapted from the short story Eight O’clock in the Morningby Ray Nelson, a down on his luck itinerant worker, Nada, stumbles onto the fact that human society is being managed by extraterrestrial aliens who keep humanity in a perpetual state of perceptional blindness in order to craft the global capitalist culture by which they extract the world’s resources with the assistance of a small cabal of quislings that have betrayed the rest of the world for personal wealth and power. Nada, after a brief spree of killing the aliens as he encounters them, joins a band of resistance fighters and, in clear trope fashion, succeeds in revealing the vast conspiracy to the wider population.
Carpenter, whose political leanings are clearly on the left side of the accepted spectrum, intended his film to be a critique of capitalism and specifically the culture around the American Republican Party and the head of that party at the time President Ronald Reagan. However, not everyone interpreted his satire in the manner that Carpenter intended.
American neo-Nazis saw a very clear metaphor in the film, one that reflected and validated their own twisted conspiratorial delusions. To them the movie was very boldly speaking about the international influence and control exerted by ‘the Jews.’ Carpenter augmented this interpretation by not only having the aliens occupying the very top of American society, including the presidency itself, but they also lived and worked in the most common of professions, putting in their hours as beat cops and random businessmen on the streets — a bit of clumsy worldbuilding that validated the delusional and evil beliefs of the neo-Nazis and their ilk.
I do wonder just how much of the conspiratorial culture we suffer today was fertilized by the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. The movies that espoused the idea that the CIA manipulated events, that every assassination is evidence of secret plots operating behind the scene. Hell, how much of the moon landing hoax was supercharged by Capricorn One and its faked Mars mission plot? What looks ‘popcorn movies’ that only existing to pass a few hours are really ideas. Ideas that in the true sense of the word ‘meme’ take hold in people’s minds and spread like a virus.
This goes beyond the poorly thought out worldbuilding of They Live and into the heart of the story conceit, that, in the face of all reason and evidence, it is possible for a vast and all-powerful conspiracy to exist in the world. It doesn’t matter that in the end this is a silly and overly simple adventure story, the foundations of that story validates the very concept of that vast conspiracy. People may come away knowing that aliens aren’t real, but they ‘know’ that conspiracies are and the subtle effect of such tales is to reinforce and nurture such fantasies that are mistaken for reality.
Antisemitism is a live and terrible thing in our world. It is not a thing born of fantasies but one that is driven by dark and twisted ones, clumsy and ill-considered employment of conspiratorial tropes feeds into and reinforces it. There is not a direct line between stories like They Live and events such as The Tree of Life mass murder, but because the line is not straight or easily seen doesn’t mean that no connections exist. Stories shape how we see the world, what we believe to be true and what is false and they also instruct us how to fight the evil that they present. Because of this I think that vast and all powerful conspiracies need to be used in fiction with extreme caution and perhaps best of all, never.
