Winter Kills: If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Not Paying Attention

Nick gets mixed up in a paramilitary exercise

|Bob Aulert| The 1970s film industry was rife with paranoia, as films like The Parallax View (1974), The Conversation(1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and All The President’s Men (1976) played to eager audiences shocked by the revelations of Watergate and quite ready… Continue reading

Slapstick for Paranoids

|Cole Seidl| Paranoia is mainstream again. Since September 11th, 2001, the American collective unconscious has been building towards a degree of paranoiac saturation unseen since the golden age of conspiratorial thinking in the 1970s. On September 16th, 2001, Susan Sontag published Continue reading

Turn Your Gaze Upon This Wretched Thing: The Schismatic Spectacle of Brian DePalma’s Hi, Mom!

A white man waving at the camera, with the image cut off horizontally and mirrored at the middle

|Courtney Kowalke| I cannot escape the reach of Ancient Greek theater. The last piece I wrote for Perisphere was about Mai Zetterling’s The Girls and a fictional production of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata. It turns out a large part of director Brian DePalma’s inspiration for… Continue reading