Frady's premise wrong?


I'm old enough to have seen The Parallax View when it first screened in theaters. It was frustrating at the time, but I think few films, save for maybe Eyes Wide Shut, have expressed a zeitgeist of paranoia & ambiguity quite as well. Answers are simply not forthcoming: e.g. why is Parallax going after both Hammond & the senator on the airliner if they're opponents?

Still, I think Frady's basic assumption, that Parallax was recruiting assassins, was wrong. They were recruiting patsies, fall guys. People with personalities & histories that would make them believable as obsessed lone nutters, but who were also in no way reliable enough to operate as killers. Imagine one of them in custody, is he really going to take the fall & not tell the authorities all about Parallax? The only way an organization such as that can operate is to remain in the shadows.

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SPOILER warning:


Parallax was recruiting both: assassins and patsies. My hunch is that if you were one of those sacred few who passed the montage test, you were an assassin. The fella in the brown sport jacket with the khaki pants that were too short for his boots was an assassin. Frady follows him and witnesses him check a bag (w/bomb) onto a plane without boarding the plane. Frady thwarts the assassination of the senator on board (as well as every other passenger and crew member). If memory serves, this was the same assassin that was dressed as a waiter on the space needle when Senator Carroll was killed. Somebody else took the fall for that assassin. A Parallax patsy that the commission was able to declare "acted alone."

Same thing with Hammond. Frady did not shoot him, but someone did. Frady was locked on that catwalk and the door was only opened so that he could run toward it only to be blown away. Another Parallax employee was the assassin (perhaps the man who shot Frady at the very end); Frady was the patsy.

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