In his essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," historian Richard Hofstadter identified a "sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy" that serves as a recurring pattern in American history.
Movies have had a complex relationship with conspiracy theories. Misleading - and often outright false - documentaries have been used to push everything from 9/11 conspiracy theories to COVID-19 disinformation.
The sense that we live in a world filled with dark forces and sinister plots can be queasily intoxicating. That sense can also spill into films not explicitly about a conspiracy theory.
The conspiratorial thinking that has become a prominent part of the 2020 presidential election, thanks to QAnon, shows how deeply ingrained these ideas are in contemporary politics.
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