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FMST 43: Conspiracy

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This course investigates the texts, narratives, and cultures of conspiracy as they are constituted in film, television, digital, and print media. We will concentrate less on the “truth” of any given conspiracy than on its popular and public impact and meaning – what it says, or might be saying, about ourselves, our world, and our times. The subject, then, is both conspiracy theory and theories about conspiracy. As this is a Film and Media Studies course, we will also pay attention to factors such as representation, technology, narrative, audience, and industry, and their relationship to both dominant and resistant ideologies.

Our focus is on the half-century dating from the late 1950s to the present, a period that extends from the Red Scare, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Apollo moon landings to Waco, 9/11, and contemporary controversies about Barack Obama’s citizenship and an all-encompassing New World Order. Confining ourselves to the United States, we will explore the ways in which public perceptions of conspiracies spread and evolve through media practices both inside and outside the mainstream, as a mode of education, entertainment, and political activity. Areas we will explore (moving from specific to general) include:

  • The tropes, recurring patterns, and characteristic forms of conspiracy
  • The role of different media in shaping perceptions and understandings of conspiracies
  • The relationship of conspiracy narratives/theories to other media modes such as journalism and documentary, and genres such as horror, science fiction, and mystery
  • The light shed by conspiracy narratives on the production and legitimization of knowledge
  • The possibilities and limits of “diagnosing” conspiratorial trends in relation to specific historical and cultural moments
  • Conspiracy theory as an element of democratic discourse, grassroots political movements, and ideological critique

Textbooks & Readings 

  • The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories. James McConnachie and Robin Tudge. Rough Guides Reference, 2008.
  • Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Mark Fenster. Revised and Updated Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
  • Additional readings marked [PDF] will be distributed via Blackboard under “Course Documents.”

Assignments  

20% Participation. Assessed throughout term; includes discussion board presence and pass-fail participation in two in-class debates (Weeks 4 and 9).

20% Screening responses and discussion leading. Once during the semester, each student will introduce a screening with a brief overview at the end of Tuesday’s class. He or she will then post a short response to that week’s screening, along with discussion prompts. This student will then lead our in-class discussion for that week, starting with a clip. Weeks with two movies will have two respondents.

30% Short papers. Three 3-5 page papers, due by email at the end of weeks 4, 7, and 10.

Together, the first two papers will constitute the midterm.

  • Paper 1 (Week 4): Film Analysis
  • Paper 2 (Week 7): Conspiracy Analysis
  • Paper 3 (Week 10): Conspiracy and Documentary Form

30% Conspiracy wall display and reflection paper. Due the penultimate week of class, this project represents the culmination of your experiences in and thinking about Conspiracy. Working in teams, you will create a public display at McCabe Library, a “conspiracy wall” of texts and images mapping out an existing conspiracy or one of your own design.

You will also turn in a 3-5 page reflection paper that discusses the conspiracy and the presentation you have given it. Further details will be given later in term.

CALENDAR (may change during semester) 

Week 1 (Aug 30-Sept 1): Course Introduction; Types of Knowledge

Read for Thursday: Fenster, “Introduction: We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now”; Birchall, “Know It All” [PDF], Lisker, “The MADE Manifesto” [PDF]

Screen: Conspiracy Theory (Richard Donner, 1997)

Week 2 (Sept 6-8): Reading and Paranoia

Read for Tuesday: Fenster Ch 3, “Finding the Plot”; Shapiro, “Paranoid Style” [PDF]; for Thursday,  Fenster Ch 4, “Uncovering the Plot” (pp. 118-142); Foucault, “Panopticism”

Screen: The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Week 3 (Sept 13-15): Red Scares and Pod People

Read for Tuesday: Fenster, Ch 1, “Theorizing Conspiracy Politics,” Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” [PDF]; for Thursday, Steffen-Fluhr, “Women and the Inner Game of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers” [PDF]; Marcus, excerpts from “The Manchurian Candidate” [PDF]

Screen: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956); The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). NOTE: LONG SCREENING.

Week 4 (Sept 20-22): JFK

Read for Tuesday: Fenster Ch 4 “Uncovering the Plot” pp. 118-142 (review); Simon, “The Zapruder Film” and “JFK” [PDF]; Hidell, “The Center of the Labyrinth” [PDF]

Screen: JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Thursday: In-class debate 1

Due by Sunday night: Paper 1 (Film Analysis)

Week 5 (Sept 27-29): Watergate and the 1970s

Read for Tuesday: TBA; for Thursday, “Project Mind Kontrol” [PDF]; Simon, “The Parallax View” [PDF]; Jameson, “The Parallax View” [PDF]

Screen: The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)

Week 6 (Oct 4-6): The Plot Against Women

Read for Tuesday; Knight, “The Problem with No Name: Feminism and the Figuration of Conspiracy” [PDF]; for Thursday, Valerius, “Rosemary’s Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects” [PDF]

Screen: Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968); The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975).

NOTE: LONG SCREENING.

Fall Break 

Week 7 (Oct 18-20): Space Invaders

Read for Tuesday: Fenster Ch 5, “Plotting the Rush”; Kay, “Democratizing Paranoia: How the Web Revolutionized Conspiracism” [PDF]; for Thursday, Bara, “The Secret History of NASA” [PDF]

Screen: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon (Bart Sibrel, 2001); Astronauts Gone Wild (Bart Sibrel, 2004).

Due by Sunday night: Paper 2 (Conspiracy Analysis)

Week 8 (Oct 25-27): The 1990s: The Truth is Out There

Read for Tuesday: Fenster Ch 4, “Uncovering the Plot” pp. 143-end; for Thursday, Graham, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? Conspiracy Theory and The X-Files” [PDF]; Bell and Bennion-Nixon, “The Popular Culture of Conspiracy/The Conspiracy of Popular Culture” [PDF]; Waco reading TBA

Screen: Episodes of The X-Files TBA; Waco: The Rules of Engagement (William Gazecki, 1997)

Week 9 (Nov 1-3): 9/11

Read for Tuesday: Fenster Ch 7 “A Failure of Imagination”; Helms, “Lingering Questions about 9/11” [PDF]; Meigs, “Afterword: The Conspiracy Industry” [PDF]

Screen: Loose Change (Dylan Avery, 2007)

In-class debate 2

Week 10 (Nov 8-10): The New World Order

Read for Tuesday: Fenster Ch 2, “When the Senator Met the Commander”; Heimbichner, “The Idiot’s Guide to the Cryptocracy” [PDF]; Weidner, “The Culling: A Speculative Look into the Global Apocalypse” [PDF]; Weston, “FEMA: Fascist Entity Manipulating America” [PDF]

Screen: Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement (Alex Jones, 2007)

Due by Sunday night: Paper 3 (Conspiracy and Documentary Form)

Week 11 (Nov 15-17): Birthers, Truthers, and Death Panels

Read: Kay, “Show Me the Birth Certificate: Conspiracism in the Age of Obama” [PDF]; additional readings TBA

Screen: TBA

Week 12: no class (Thanksgiving)

Week 13 (Nov 29-Dec 1): Approaching the End

Read: Fenster Ch 6, “The Prophetic Plot”; Marrs, “What Will Happen in 2012?” [PDF]; Wallace, “Four Horses of the Apocalypse: A Color-Coded Key to the Cryptocracy” [PDF]

Screen: Angels and Demons (Ron Howard, 2009)

Due: Conspiracy Wall displays and reflection papers

Week 14 (Dec 6): Last day of class

Student evaluations

Note: There is no final exam in this course.

Word Salad

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Hello, my name is Jared Lee Loughner

The shooting yesterday in Arizona of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, which left the politician critically wounded and six others dead, almost instantaneously conjured into existence two bleak and mysterious new entities, both in their way artifacts of language: the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, and the debate about the causes and implications of his lethal actions.

The 22-year-old Loughner seems an all-too-typical figure, one whom we might pity had he not so decisively removed himself from the precincts of empathy. An eccentric loner whose strange preoccupations, coupled with a tendency to rant about them in public, led to his suspension and withdrawal from the community college he was attending, he appears to have drifted into his homicidal mission with the sad inevitability of a piece of social flotsam awash on the tides of fringe discourse. He marks the return of a certain repressed specific to U.S. political culture — the lone gunman — whose particulars always differ but whose sad, destructive song remains the same. He is Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman, Nidal Malik Hasan: a gallery of triply-named maniacs whose profound disconnection from the shared social world toggled overnight into the worst kind of celebrity.

Like all other modes of celebrity, the fame and fascination specific to assassins has accelerated and complexified in recent times with the proliferation of data streams and their accompanying commentaries. We deconstruct and reconstruct the killer’s trajectory: the hours, days, weeks, and months that led up to their rampage, the ideologies that brought them to that final moment of the trigger pull. We sift through blog posts, Twitter feeds, and YouTube channels to assemble the kind of composite portrait that once would have been consigned to the scribbled diary kept under the bed, or the conspiracy wall tucked away in a smelly corner of the basement, its authoritative interpretation doled out slowly by experts rather than crowdsourced in breathless realtime. We ask ourselves what could have been done to avert the personal implosion, dismantle the ticking bomb, or in the phrase to which 9/11 gave new weight, “connect the dots” before something awful happened (a literally unthinkable alternative, since without the awful event, the current conversation would never have started: this tape self-destructed before you heard it).

Amid the fantasy forensics and reverse-engineering of psychopathologic etiology, it’s hard to escape the sense that we’re building a new Jared Lee Loughner out of words, sticking a straw man of signifiers into a person-shaped hole. The fact that Loughner survived his own local apocalypse is probably irrelevant to this story’s emergence: killers are rarely allowed to speak for themselves from the jail cell, having ceded their rights of linguistic self-determination along with every other freedom. The kind of annihilation I’m talking about is the plangent sting of The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), a masterfully cynical political thriller in which “lone gunmen” are mass-produced commodities of a faceless corporation, and the journalist hero — Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) — is himself framed as an unhinged killer after the fact.

Loughner, of course, is as undeniably real as his horrible actions and their tragic impact on the families and friends of the dead and wounded. I don’t mean to turn him into a fiction, just to point out that the picture we are now building of him is, in its way, another kind of cultural narrative. Which makes it rather ironic that among Loughner’s many obsessions, from the fraudulent behavior of his college teachers to the 2012 prophecy, is a fixation on grammar as a tool of mind control: what a critical theorist might rephrase as the construction of subjectivity through language. Lacan argued that we lose ourselves in the Symbolic Order only to find ourselves there as an Object: self-identity at the cost of self-alienation. It’s a paradox in whose twisty folds Jared Lee Loughner evidently lost his soul.

What emerged from the outputs of this particular black box might have been some kind of furious crusader, but I suspect rage actually had little to do with what took place in Tucson yesterday. Scrolling through the inflectionless syllogisms in Loughner’s YouTube videos is like studying HAL’s readouts: one detects only the icy remoteness of pure logic (a logic, it should be added, devoid of sense) — a chain-link ladder of if-thens proceeding remorselessly to their deadly conclusion. I think some virus of language did finally get to Loughner; I think words ate him alive.

***

The question now occupying the public: whose words were they?

I try to keep my politics off this blog, in the sense of signaling party affiliation outright. That said, it will probably surprise no one to learn that I’m just another lefty intellectual, an ivory-tower Democrat. My first reaction to the Arizona shootings is to read them as evidence that the rhetoric of the right, in particular Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, has gone too far.

I’m obviously not alone in that assessment, but if I’m being honest, I must acknowledge that both sides (and forgive me for reducing our country’s ideological landscape to a red-blue binary) are hard at work spinning Loughner’s onslaught in favor of their own agendas. In fact, looking at today’s mediascape, I see a giant hurricane-spiral of words, a storm of accusations and recriminations played out — because I happen to be tracking this event through HTML on a laptop screen rather than in the shouting arenas of CNN and FOX News — in text. The ideas that chased each other through Loughner’s weird maze of a mind have externalized themselves on a national scale like the Id monster in Forbidden Planet.

I know I will sound like an old fogey for saying this, but I’m startled by how quickly our tilt-a-whirl news cycle and its cloud of commentary have moved from backlash to backlash-against-the-backlash. When I want the facts, I go to Google News or (Liberal that I am) the New York Times; when I want to read people hurling the textual equivalent of monkey poop at each other, I read the comments at Politico, where you can still reliably find someone calling our President “Barack Hussein Obama.” While I have nothing bad to say about the stories carried on the site, working through the comments is like taking the temperature of our zeitgeist — rectally.

Commenters labeling themselves as everything from conservative to independent and “undecided” have seized on a tweet from one of Loughner’s former classmates to the effect that he was “left wing, quite liberal.” Hence (in their view) it’s liberal rhetoric that led Loughner to start shooting on Saturday morning. Or as “NotPC” puts it:

Liberals are always threatening anyone with violence, starting with Obama. How ironic, a leftist attempted to assassinate another leftist, I guess Gifford is not leftist enough she must be taken with a bullet from glock. Even the guy who tried to crash his airplane to IRS building in Texas last year was a leftwing, Amy Bishop who started shooting other professors (she’s a big Obama supporter) is a leftist; the guy who held staff of Discovery Channel last year was also a leftist, follower of Al Gore.

What’s the matter with liberals? You’re into violence! This is what you get when you read and listen too much of Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos), Arianna Huffington (huffpo), media matter, Rachel Maddow, Olbermann, Ed Shultz, Chris Matthews, Van Jones, and the LEADER of them all fomenting violence who disagree with LIBERAL MANTRA – BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.

Nothing surprises me about LIBERALS, even Charles Manson is a LIBERAL!

LIBERALS ARE WHACKOS! BUNCH OF LEFTWINGNUTS – ONE FRIES SHORT OF A HAPPY MEAL!

Teaching my Conspiracy class for the first time in Fall 2009, I became very familiar with utterances like this, even (I will admit) rather charmed by them. I can defocus my eyes and gauge the shrillness of claims about, say, the faked Moon landings by the number of capital letters and exclamation points. But I find it’s harder to be amused when the angry word-art accretes so quickly around a wound still very much open — lives and loves quite literally in the balance. Is my mind naive for whirling at the promptness of this inversion, the rapidity with which an act of supremely irrational violence has been repurposed into another, lexical form of ammunition?

The next few weeks will surely see many more such claims thrown around, and at the higher levels of the media’s digestive system, the production of much reasoned analysis about the language question itself. I’m sure I’ll engage with the issues raised, and eventually settle on a conclusion not all that much different from the position I already hold. But as I watch politicians work through their own chain of if-thens, framing and reframing the facts of Saturday’s carnage in hopes of advancing their own agendas (left, right, and everything in between), I believe I will have a hard time shaking a sense that we have been caught up in, rather than containing, Loughner’s particular form of madness.

Conspiracy in the Classroom

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Finishing the first week of a new school term always leaves me feeling as though I’ve launched some kind of ship — like I’ve broken a bottle of bubbly against the side of a vessel that then rolls proudly out of drydock. (Not that I’ve ever performed this particular action in real life. Like so many of my mental referents, it’s a composite of media memories: scenes from movies like Titanic, or the wonderful, ballsy opening shots of Star Trek: Generations, in which a champagne bottle tumbles through space to smash across the prow of the Enterprise-B.)

In this case, we’re talking two inaugural voyages: the first, a retooled version of my Animation and Cinema class, and the second, an entirely new course called Conspiracy. I’ll detail the Animation rethink in a future post, but for now, I want to share the Conspiracy syllabus, which I’m pretty proud of. Putting it together was a pleasurable summer’s labor: I watched dozens of movies, read reams of articles, and basically dug deep into the viny undergrowth of suspicion and speculation that anchors the U.S. political system (or at least our collective perceptions of it). The original inspiration for the class was simply my love of The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), which seemed marvelously strange and icily labyrinthine when I first watched it in the early 1980s. It, along with Phil Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Peter Hyams’s burnt-sienna cheese platter Capricorn One (1978), and Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film Three Days of the Condor (which has not aged well, sad to say) still exerts a special hold on my imagination, and I’m thrilled at the opportunity to explore it and other texts with a class of talented students.

What’s odd, of course, is that what once seemed in the fantastic sweep of its paranoia to be a close cousin of science fiction — indeed, in movies like Capricorn One and Coma (1978), the generic boundaries dissolve almost entirely — today comes across as naive, obvious, or both. Conspiracy narratives in the 1970s were like hushed whispers of a truth too terrible to dredge into daylight, yet too destructive to ignore; now our ears are deafened by the angry bellows of right-wing pundits, angry town-hall protesters, and certain Republican party leaders who believe our President is a socialist, that health-care reform involves the instigation of death panels, and that vaccinations cause disease. Those who aren’t actively enraged are cynically passive: why fight the system when it’s already become, Matrix-like, the fabric of everyday life? As with another topic I teach, fandom, the cultural polarities of conspiracy seem to have reversed themselves over recent decades: subculture becoming superculture, margin becoming mainstream. And if fandom is by and large about the production of pleasure within convection currents that link fringe and center, then conspiracy, following similar fluid dynamics, generates a darker miasma of dread and distrust.

The syllabus that follows is built around two topoi: the assassination of John F. Kennedy anchors the first half of the semester, the events of 9/11 the second. I’ve tried to address all the major permutations of conspiracy theory in the United States, including supernatural and feminist variations, yet I know there’s much more we could be looking at (and I welcome any suggestions for tweaking the lineup). The fun part has been coming up with a reading list that mixes “authoritative” academic perspectives with raw, disreputable textual troublemakers from the heart of conspiracy country. One of my hopes is that the course will take us from a time when conspiracy seemed an isolatable, nameable, unusual thing to one in which the digital remapping of media culture has multiplied the theories, speculation, and accusation to an unnerving din. Another hope is that students will ultimately come to think self-reflexively about their own practices of textual production and legitimation, and by implication the larger politics of a college education: their place in a system that turns economic capital into cultural capital. And maybe, by the end of the term, this small shared plot, this classroom conspiracy (it tickles me to note that conspire literally means to breathe together — an apt description of our biweekly meetings) will yield, for them and for me, some major insights.

———————————————————————-

FMST 43: Conspiracy – Fall 2009

This course investigates the texts, narratives, and cultures of conspiracy as they are constituted in film, television, digital, and print media. We will concentrate less on the “truth” of any given conspiracy than on its popular and public impact and meaning — what it says, or might be saying, about ourselves, our world, and our times. The subject, then, is both conspiracy theory and theories about conspiracy. As this is a Film and Media Studies course, we will also pay attention to factors such as representation, technology, narrative, audience, and industry, and their relationship to both dominant and resistant ideologies.

Our focus is on the half-century dating from the late 1950s to the present, a period that extends from the Red Scare, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Apollo moon landings to Waco, 9/11, and contemporary controversies about Barack Obama’s citizenship and an all-encompassing New World Order. Confining ourselves to the United States, we will explore the ways in which public perceptions of conspiracies spread and evolve through media practices both inside and outside the mainstream, as a mode of education, entertainment, and political activity. Areas we will explore (moving from specific to general) include:

  • The tropes, recurring patterns, and characteristic forms of conspiracy
  • The role of different media in shaping perceptions and understandings of conspiracies
  • The relationship of conspiracy narratives/theories to other media modes such as journalism and documentary, and genres such as horror, science fiction, and mystery
  • The light shed by conspiracy narratives on the production and legitimization of knowledge
  • The possibilities and limits of “diagnosing” conspiratorial trends in relation to specific historical and cultural moments
  • Conspiracy theory as an element of democratic discourse, grassroots political movements, and ideological critique

Textbooks & Readings

  • The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories. James McConnachie and Robin Tudge. Rough Guides Reference, 2008.
  • Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Mark Fenster. Revised and Updated Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
  • Additional readings marked [PDF] will be distributed via Blackboard.

Assignments

15% —Participation: assessed throughout term; for more, see note below.

25% —Activity on class blog: will be assessed three times during term for frequency and content of contributions. For more, see blogging handout.

25% —Midterm paper: due October 8, this 5-7 page paper will respond to the first half of the term by locating a pattern, theme, or idea that ties together a group of conspiracy materials (visual, written, or other). These texts should include both academic and nonacademic content we have looked at together in class, along with material you have explored on your own. In addition to identifying and defining a unifying element, the paper must make some kind of interpretive argument about its significance.

35% —Conspiracy wall display and reflection paper: due the penultimate week of class, this project represents the culmination of your experiences in and thinking about Conspiracy. Working in teams, you will create a public display at McCabe Library, a “conspiracy wall” of texts and images mapping out an existing conspiracy or one of your own design. You will also turn in a 3-5 page reflection paper that discusses the conspiracy and the presentation you have given it. Further details will be given later in term.

A Note on Materials and Methods

In this course we will explore a range of content from different points on the cultural spectrum, from academic articles to photocopied screeds and angry websites, from Hollywood blockbusters to digitally-shot and -distributed underground video. Navigating this material will mean paying attention to origins and rhetorical stance (i.e. where it’s from and what it’s saying) while simultaneously setting aside too-quick distinctions between true/false, logical/illogical, legitimate/illegitimate. While I don’t want to lose sight of “common sense,” I also don’t want the course to devolve into arguments about who really shot JFK. Our assumption will be that we can dabble in conspiracies and conspiracy theories without buying into them — or their counterarguments.

CALENDAR

Week 1 (Sept 1-3): Course Introduction; Types of Knowledge

Read for Thursday: Fenster, “Introduction: We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now”; Birchall, “Know It All” [PDF], Lisker, “The MADE Manifesto” [PDF]

Screen: Conspiracy Theory (Richard Donner, 1997)

Week 2 (Sept 8-10): Reading and Paranoia

Read for Tuesday: Shapiro, “Paranoid Style”; for Thursday, Fenster Ch 4, “Uncovering the Plot” (pp. 100-117)

Screen: The Game (David Fincher, 1997)

Week 3 (Sept 15-17): Red Scares and Pod People

Read for Tuesday: Fenster, Ch 1 “Theorizing Conspiracy Politics,” Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” [PDF]; for Thursday, Steffen-Fluhr, “Women and the Inner Game of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers“?[PDF]

Screen: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)

Week 4 (Sept 22-24): JFK

Read for Tuesday: Marcus, excerpts from “The Manchurian Candidate“?[PDF]; for Thursday, Fenster Ch 4 “Uncovering the Plot” pp. 118-142, Simon, “The Zapruder Film” and “JFK” [PDF]; Hidell, “The Center of the Labyrinth” [PDF]

Screen: JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991). Watch on own time before Tuesday’s class: The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962).

Week 5 (Sept 29-Oct 1): The Seventies

Read for Tuesday: Kael, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” [PDF]; for Thursday, Simon, “The Parallax View” [PDF], “Project Mind Kontrol” [PDF]; Hidell, “Who Killed John Lennon?” [PDF]

Screen: The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974). Watch on own time before Tuesday’s class: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)

Week 6 (Oct 6-8): Feminism and Other Science Fictions

Read: Tiptree, “The Women Men Don’t See” [PDF], Valerius, “Rosemary’s Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects” [PDF]; Hidell, “Is There a Satanic Child Abuse Cover-Up?” [PDF]

Screen: Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Watch on own time before Tuesday’s class: The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)

Due: Midterm paper

Fall Break

Week 7 (Oct 20-22): Space Invaders I

Read: Fenster Ch 5, “Plotting the Rush”; Bara, “The Secret History of NASA” [PDF]

Screen: Excerpt from Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1978), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon (Bart Sibrel, 2001), Astronauts Gone Wild (Bart Sibrel, 2004). Watch on own time: Mythbusters, “NASA Moon Landing Hoax”

Week 8 (Oct 27-29): Space Invaders II

Read: Fenster Ch 4, “Uncovering the Plot” pp. 143-end; Graham, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? Conspiracy Theory and The X-Files” [PDF]; Bell and Bennion-Nixon, “The Popular Culture of Conspiracy/The Conspiracy of Popular Culture” [PDF]

Screen: Episodes of The X-Files TBA; Conspiracy, “Area 51”

Week 9 (Nov 3-5): Politics and Race in the Digital Era

Read: Fenster Ch 3, “Finding the Plot” (review material on Clinton); Knight, “Fear of a Black Planet: ‘Black Paranoia’ and the Aesthetics of Conspiracy” [PDF]

Screen: The Clinton Chronicles (Patrick Matrisciana, 1994); watch on own time The Obama Deception (Alex Jones, 2009)

Week 10 (Nov 10-12): New World Orders

Read: Fenster Ch 2, “When the Senator Met the Commander”; Heimbichner, “The Idiot’s Guide to the Cryptocracy” [PDF]; Weidner, “The Culling: A Speculative Look into the Global Apocalypse” [PDF]; Weston, “FEMA: Fascist Entity Manipulating America” [PDF]

Screen: Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement (Alex Jones, 2007); watch on own time Waco: The Rules of Engagement (William Gazecki, 1997)

Week 11 (Nov 17-19): 9/11

Read: Fenster Ch 7 “A Failure of Imagination”; Helms, “Lingering Questions about 9/11” [PDF]; Meigs, “Afterword: The Conspiracy Industry” [PDF]

Screen: Loose Change (Dylan Avery, 2007); watch on own time before Tuesday’s class: United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)

Week 12 (Nov 24): Looking Forward to the End of the World

Read: Fenster Ch 6, “The Prophetic Plot”; Marrs, “What Will Happen in 2012?” [PDF]; Wallace, “Four Horses of the Apocalypse: A Color-Coded Key to the Cryptocracy” [PDF]

Screen: TBA

Thursday (Nov 26): Thanksgiving Break

Week 13 (Dec 1-3): Encoding/Decoding History

Screen: The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006), National Treasure (Jon Turtletaub, 2004)

Due: Conspiracy Wall displays and reflection papers

Week 14 (Dec 8): Last day of class

Student evaluations