I think I’ve figured out what makes films like “Erin Brockovich” so successful, beyond the underdog fighting the system and winning. I think it feeds into our national paranoia. We are cowed by the bigness of corporations, their control — through lobbying and soft money — over politicians, the food supply, medical care, just about everything.
We are powerless, literally, to control our electric, gas, even water supplies, which will dwindle to a trickle this summer, they say, because the snow pack is only whatever percent of normal. Do we believe that? Or could it be tied to the gigawatts of electricity needed to pump water over the mountains to slake our thirst and keep our desert gardens green.
I’m not even talking about water quality — chromium 6, arsenic, pesticides from agricultural runoff. Things we would like to blame on bureaucratic bungling, we secretly believe to be sinister plots. Is our governor turning gray with fright because he’s losing votes, or because his campaign was fed as much by utility companies as agribusiness? Is he for real, paralyzed by fright? Or could he be an automaton, unable to move without continuing infusions of power?
And does paranoia have to be imagined or can it be based on fact? Every year as the ides of April approach, humorist Dave Barry lampoons the IRS. This year he takes it all back in a paean to the tax gods because, guess what, he has been chosen for an audit. Coincidence, maybe. Paranoia, for sure. “The IRS wants me to produce every document that has ever existed, including the original Magna Carta,” he writes.
So instead of poking fun at the IRS, he says what fine folks they are: “They’re regular people just like you, except that they can destroy your life.”
This is funny only if you are on a fixed income, never itemized deductions, and never won anything on a game show or in Las Vegas. And speaking of Las Vegas, “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt tells Bryan Lamb on “Booknotes” this week about Frank Sinatra’s paranoia, agreeing to an interview only if he was not asked about Las Vegas and the Mafia. Hewitt’s book will probably be as successful as “60 Minutes” because we’re all paranoid about big-time crime from “The Godfather” to “The Sopranos.”
PBS just aired Bill Moyers’ documentary, two years in the making, which chronicles abuses by chemical manufacturers and industry regulators. This feeds my personal paranoia about pesticide residue killing us softly. Organophosphates live longer than we do. They’ll still be around, even the banned or regulated ones, to plague our great-great-grandchildren. Moyers had his blood tested and discovered it contained 52 chemicals. Malathion — sprayed on his home as the government promised it was safe (and who could stop them anyway?) — dioxins, PCBs, a veritable toxic soup coursing through his veins. Better living through chemistry? He thinks not.
David Willman’s recent articles documenting cozy relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA feed our paranoia about the safety of drugs touted by our doctors and advertised on national TV. Many have side effects worse than the condition for which they’re prescribed. And those are just the ones we know about. I wonder if Willman will be chosen for an audit by the friendly folks at the IRS.
It’s my guess nobody understands the pervasiveness of paranoia better than Tom Sawyer, whose novel “The Sixteenth Man” has attracted as much attention from the government as from book sellers. His fictionalized account of how the assassination of JFK might have involved everyone from the Mafia to the military, prompted a call from the FBI. The special agent said he was curious about Sawyer’s sources for the book and wondered how he spelled out some of the Mafia figures in detail. “I couldn’t believe they were asking. I told him I just tried to imagine them as real people. It came to me by osmosis over 38 years, and by making a living making stuff up [TV scripts for ‘Murder She Wrote’ and others]. It was all fictionalized, the senators, the military. I probably know less than Oliver Stone.”
He didn’t share with the special agent that the story (also an opera and an episode of “Murder She Wrote”) came from his own paranoia. He says he really believes the assassination was a coup, a huge cabal, and that both Kennedys were done in because “they just stepped on too many toes.” After he hung up the phone, he was suspicious the call was a phony. “So I pressed star 69 [to redial the last incoming call], and it really was the FBI.”
Sawyer says he learned in Hollywood that people rarely say what they mean. So fictional characters should never say exactly what they’re thinking. And does this apply to characters from the FBI? The IRS? How paranoid is this? He shrugs. “I consider it protective paranoia.”
Tom Sawyer tells more about “The Sixteenth Man” on “Connie Martinson Talks Books” airing in April on local Channel 3.