What did the president really know about a cushy remote getaway for the private-plane elite?
No, not that president and not that conspiracy — I’m talking about Paradise, Dan Fogelman’s crackling Hulu drama in which James Marsden plays a commander-in-chief with secret plans to ferry the privileged to a deep-in-the-mountain community when an apocalypse befalls Earth.
The show earned a surprise Emmys drama nomination this week, just as some figures on both the right and left were busy resurrecting their favorite real-world thriller: the tangled conspiracy theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Paradise is fiction. The Epstein saga is not. But both feel cut from the same cloth of powerful people and the secrets they keep from us.
Hollywood has actually spent decades on exactly this kind of story, chronicling conspiracies at the highest but darkest levels of government, crimes committed by the very people charged with protecting us. From the moment Warren Beatty started hunting around for a Senator-assassination coverup in The Parallax View back in the ‘70’s, we’ve been subject to a steady parade of buried files, vanishing witnesses and covert programs — and inevitably the lone heroes who root them all out. Mulder and Scully solved those mysteries the FBI didn’t want solved on The X-Files, Jason Bourne figured out what Conklin was actually up to at the CIA in The Bourne Identity, and most recently The Night Agent and Paradise had some very plucky marginal types figure out what’s really happening at The White House.
So when a story pops up like Epstein, with all its mysterious millions and powerful people in the (sometimes literal) background, with all its legitimately open questions about a suspect with White House connections dying in federal custody, we’re primed not just to see a news story — we’re primed to see a movie. Without them or even us knowing it, the entertainment industry has been readying us for this story for fifty years.
On their own, of course, most of these Hollywood government-coverup tales are harmless and even welcome entertainments, fertilizer for the human imagination. But pour on it the fuel of our polarized politics and algorithmic outrage and watch it explode. A story like Epstein is colliding with personal beliefs and prejudices (it’s hard to avoid the anti-elite and at times, frankly, antisemitic undercurrents here), along with Trump’s own history of Hollywood-derived conspiracy showmanship on QAnon and Obama birther theory, to detonate in, well, exactly the ways we’re seeing now.
Hollywood tells these stories by dramatic imperative — dangling that the truth is out there makes for much better storytelling than suggesting those mysterious lights were just illuminating the path of an airplane. So It feels too easy to implicate film and television in this factless frenzy. But it’s also a cop-out to exempt them entirely. As the film critic Laura Venning wrote in the journal Curzon last year, while movies like Oliver Stone’s JFK feel “akin to a guilty pleasure” and “you could certainly question whether there’s any harm” to them, a “decade ago the idea that a former President could instigate an insurrection over patently false claims that an election had been stolen from him would [also] have been unimaginable.”
Sometimes Hollywood stories do involve real criminality, as with All The President’s Men. More often though they have tilted toward JFK, cozying up just close enough to the truth to make us believe in non-existent cabals.
And nothing suggests a cabal like the news story du jour. The Epstein Files is fast-becoming the JFK of our time, only it’s playing out not in a lone Oliver Stone weekend movie-theater release but in our pockets and on our laptops, on airport cable-news broadcasts and bar-side phone-scrolling, the appeal of drama lapping the need for verification.
A convicted sex offender killed himself in 2019 in federal prison awaiting trial after a whole set of fresh revelations of alleged sex trafficking. That left both a black hole where the alleged perpetrator’s testimony would have gone and a juicy mystery left unsolved; if it wasn’t a suicide, as the government was saying, who might have wanted Epstein dead? Numerous investigations followed, with many Rolodexes and other material published to sate the beast. All accompanied by tell of elusive “files” that would supposedly implicate all kinds of powerful people on some mythical list.
With so many Internet sources to listen to and publish on, the public had a chance to be the hero of the story, all these hints of Gilbert Joubert Three Days of the Condor supervillainy just begging us to summon our inner Robert Redford to find him out. Thus began the years of theories that Epstein was murdered as part of a conspiracy to conceal the sex crimes of powerful people, fed by noticeable but mostly unremarkable anomalies, like the modification of prison footage. With his opaque history and sources of wealth, his super-powerful friends and his immoral appetites, Epstein became the perfect avatar for our at-home Hollywood heroism.
The story also uncommonly played to both sides of the political spectrum, the right’s suspicion of government and the left’s suspicion of the wealthy — a perfect horseshoe. As producers of The Fugitive and its Big Pharma bogeyman could tell you, a good conspiracy is made even better when it can be aimed at someone or some group already disliked. The Epstein Files became the ideal slate onto which both Democrats and Republicans could each project their supervillain fantasies.
Trump himself led the charge. In his first term he retweeted an outlandish theory that Bill Clinton was involved in Epstein’s murder — his and his allies’ go-to family secretly behind all kinds of killings (Seth Rich, Vince Foster). Trump at the time said that “I want a full investigation, and that’s what I absolutely am demanding.” J.D. Vance played along, during the campaign last year saying that it was “an important thing” to release the list, never mind if it actually existed.
But once a MAGA-driven phenomenon, the script has flipped. Democrats are hammering the president on the issue now, trying to rally support in Congress to force Trump to reveal more findings, a push that resonates with an increasingly conspiracy-minded segment of the left and its distrust of legacy media. The story is playing to their favorite supervillain: Trump. (That narrative was fed this week when the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump in 2003 had sent Epstein a birthday card with a lewd drawing that implied the two had a “secret.”)
Meanwhile the president himself has uncharacteristically gone from Mulder to Scully, casting himself as the skeptic in the primetime conspiracy-drama he once created.
“Their [the left’s] new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” the president wrote on Truth Social Wednesday, after telling reporters on Tuesday night “I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody; it’s pretty boring stuff” and after Attorney General Pam Bondi said a few days earlier the investigation was closed. The truth is not out there, and can we please go back to talking about Rosie O’Donnell?
One way to view this two-party interest is expediency — each side at one time or another believed the other had more figures on whatever list probably doesn’t exist. But the dual Democrat-Republican fascination with The Epstein Files also testifies to a truth Hollywood has forever known: a love of conspiracy stories tugs at us all. The Jason Bourne movies sold $800 million-worth of tickets in the U.S., and Democrats and Republicans each bought lots of them.
The rise of conspiracy theories is a massively complex topic, with studies suggesting a whole slew of social and technological factors. No batch of fictional movies, no matter how exciting, would directly lead to the rise of any conspiracy theory. But it’s easy to see how Hollywood has primed us to be ready to jump on one when it presents itself, especially if it comes at a moment already seeded with huge mistrust of elites and media and, yes, a growing culture of antisemitism. The anti-Jewish codings in all this are hard to avoid, with the longtime ridiculous and hateful caricature of Epstein as a Mossad agent running a blackmail ring for the Israeli government continuing to abide. Last weekend’s Elmo hackers demanded an Epstein file release even as they were saying “Kill All Jews,” among other antisemitic vileness and insanities, such as the idea Trump wasn’t releasing the list because Netanyahu told him not to.
Conspiracy theories are fun. The real world is monochromatic, straightforward, boring. Occam’s Razor doesn’t cut very deep. More complex hidden explanations are thrilling. (And, as with periodic events like Watergate or Iran-Contra, real just often enough.) True-crime podcasts and its unofficial streaming spinoff Only Murders in the Building have long realized this fact and savvily played to it, as have earlier 21st-century TV hits like Search Party and Veronica Mars. Like the people “seeking answers” on Epstein, these stories flatter their protagonists, and the audience: Only the sharp few have the vision to spot what’s really going on. And the real-world interest in conspiracy theories provides a feedback loop for Hollywood to make more of these stories see under: Ryan Coogler developing a new X-Files for these jittery 2020’s times — which powers and makes these real-world theories even more fun. Of course fun and true are two entirely different creatures.
In recent years the proliferation of digital content and those invidious algorithms have also personalized the phenomenon, turning us all into active amateur gumshoes, even if the truth we sleuth becomes nonsense like covid vaccines as government tracking devices and a Hillary Clinton-led sex ring run out of a pizza shop. Why watch Alan Pakula when we can be Alan Pakula?
One of the rare recent TV exercises not to indulge conspiracy-theory tropes but deconstruct and criticize them was Netflix’s winter limited series Zero Day, in which the British actor Dan Stevens played a villainous YouTuber peddling such theories. Asked how much tech platforms were responsible for these theories compared to politicians or the peddlers themselves, Stevens told THR “The system. The system is driving it. Those putting it out, those consuming it, everyone. It’s a triangle.” What he left out is that Hollywood may be yet another point on that geometry, with its enjoyable but potentially incept-y ideas of an alternate truth the government doesn’t want us to see.
To be clear: Hollywood can and should tell conspiracy-theory stories. They’re exciting entertainment, and that should always be the industry’s first objective. But that doesn’t mean they don’t influence the culture. Venning, the Curzon critic, was writing her essay on Fly Me To The Moon, last year’s Apple film with another harmless but still potentially insidious idea that a moon landing was shot on a sound stage. Nearly half of all people under the age of 45 now are at least unsure of whether NASA actually landed on the moon, according to a recent University of New Hampshire study, and obviously school didn’t teach them that. In the film Scarlett Johansson even has the cheeky meta line “I think we should have gotten Kubrick.”
As it happens, Kubrick himself sits at the center of Epstein conspiracy-mongering, with a running Internet theory that the sex-party scene in Eyes Wide Shut was an attempt by the late director to stealthily expose Epstein. You don’t want to know.
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