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In the film, "The Parallax View"
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, Reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) becomes an archetypal figure known as a patsy--a person who tries to prevent an assassination but is framed as a lone gunman who committed the
assassination. |
In the opening scene, Senator Charles Carroll (Bill Joyce), an independent political candidate
running for public office, is shot to death by a gunman while speaking to attendees of his campaign fundraiser atop the Seattle Space Needle, a giant structure in Seattle, Washington, that
resembles the Eiffel Tower. |
Carroll's security officers chase the accused gunman to the roof of the building, and the
gunman tumbles off the roof, falling to his death. |
In the next scene, a group of United States Government-appointed men sitting in tall, leather chairs behind a long, wooden dais declare that the assassination of Carroll was committed by a lone
gunman. |
Shortly thereafter, Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), a TV news reporter who prevented Joe Frady
from attending Carroll's tragic fundraiser, tells Joe that witnesses to Carroll's assassination are being murdered and that she believes she's next. |
Joe believes she's paranoid and refuses to help her. But, she soon ends up dead, and this makes
him curious enough to try to verify her allegations. |
So, he investigates the death of one witness to the Carroll assassination and discovers that
more than one gunman was involved in the assassination. |
He also discovers that the murderers worked for the Parallax Corporation, a company that
recruits assassins. |
Joe finds one of the company's entrance exams and sees that the questions are geared toward
finding homicidal people. |
He answers the questions accordingly and applies for work at the Parallax Corporation, which
recruits him, testing him first by showing him a short film that has a single message: Family, God, and country are one and the same and must be protected violently. |
Later, as part of his undercover investigation, Joe follows an employee from Parallax to the
local airport, where the employee plants a suitcase bomb on a plane from a commercial airline. |
Joe boards the plane and finds that one of the passengers is a political official: Senator
Gillingham (Robert Lieb), a man whose opponent is John Hammond (Jim Davis), a wealthy businessman. |
Joe successfully gets the plane to land, and the passengers all safely disembark. The plane
then explodes. Joe has saved all the passengers. |
He later follows the Parallax employee who planted the bomb to a building owned by John Hammond.
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There, Hammond is shot to death while rehearsing for a speech he was to give at his political
fundraiser. |
Employees from the Parallax Corporation plant a rifle in the rafters above a giant auditorium
where Hammond was shot. |
Joe then runs for the exit to avoid being blamed for the murder, but the Parallax employees
shoot him, killing him. |
In the next scene, the group of men from the U.S. Government-appointed commission for the
Carroll assassination declares that the Hammond assassination was the work of a lone gunman: Joe Frady. |
Thus, Joe has been framed. He is now a patsy. And, it's apparent that he was caught in the
crossfire from two political candidates: Senator Gillingham and John Hammond, each of whom hired the Parallax Corporation to kill his political opponent to win an election. |
The plot of "The Parallax View" was structured in such a way as to show how patsies
are created. They are men who try to stop assassinations but are framed as the murderers who committed them. |
In order to learn this immutable fact, we must witness the process in which these men are
framed. That is the reason for showing Joe Frady's undercover investigation. |
The archetypal figure known as the patsy is also part of the thesis statement of this film.
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The thesis is that there is an alternative theory for the view that a lone gunman is
responsible for political assassinations. |
This theory is the Parallax view--the view that assassinations are a business tool, and that
the conspiratorial idea of using assassinations for political gain is necessary to protect family, God, and country. |
Screenwriters should study "The Parallax View" as an example of how to merge
character and plot. |
In this film, character and plot become one through the use of the archetypal patsy. |
To define an archetype, a writer must show the process in which a character becomes an
archetype. |
Remember that each process has a beginning, middle, and end. |
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