On the edge of the mess – Weekend – Kommersant

The conspiracy thriller Rabbit Hole, which was invented by the authors of the strangest spy series The Patriot, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, is coming to Paramount+ streaming.

Text: Tatyana Aleshicheva

An older man with a wild look nervously drums his fingers on the wooden partition of the confessional and tells the priest that he just needs someone to listen to him, and if it turns out to be God, so much the better: “Maybe at least He will explain to me what is happening!” Once William Burroughs defined such cases: “The paranoid is the one who understands a little about what is happening, and the psycho is the one who has just completely figured out everything.” Apparently, the man in the confessional is halfway between the first and second states. His name is John Weir (Kiefer Sutherland), and, as we learn from his confession, he was a master of nasty tricks for others, until the same was arranged for himself.

Weir and his team of professional crooks are involved in corporate espionage. The last task assigned to him (for a lot of money) was to tarnish the reputation of an incorruptible official of the Treasury, and Weir masterfully concocted compromising evidence. And he immediately found himself in its center: shortly after the transfer of the material to the customer, Weir was accused of killing this official, and the customer jumped out of the window in front of his eyes. The sprinkled waterer has no choice but to go on the run – his face flaunts in all the news reports, the entire New York police are hunting him. He grasps at straws – trying to figure out who organized surveillance of him the day before, when, waking up in a hotel room with a pretty stranger from a bar named Hayley (Meta Golding), he found a camera filming their lovemaking – why? for whom?

The seasoned screenwriters Ficarra and Requa build the story on the principle of an unreliable story: and now we will show you how everything that you have seen before with your own eyes and considered authentic turns out to be false. At the end of each episode, they pull another rabbit out of the hat – once such a rabbit turns out to be Weir’s father (Charles Dance), from whom he apparently inherited conspiracy thinking. Just as his father once destroyed all the phones in the house upon learning about the clicks in the handset, so Weir himself avoids smartphones and computers, prefers to pay in cash and practically does not use the Internet. He is well aware of how information can be manipulated and even created using gadgets. What does the latest news report tell you? Perhaps it is a guide to an action that you will take, without knowing it, in someone’s interests? And all these gadgets that surround you do not at all make the world and its benefits more accessible – they make you yourself accessible! And at any time of the day or night and for all interested parties – governments, corporations, scammers and other sinister entities that rule the world.

Here we step into the territory of a viscous paranoid thriller, and screenwriters Ficarra and Requa do not hide their sources of inspiration, listing in an interview all the conspiracy theological New Hollywood classics of the 1970s: Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax Conspiracy, The Conversation – plus made in the same vein as David Fincher’s The Game, echoed by Kiefer Sutherland himself, saying that he watched Condor, Parallax, and Marathon Runner as a child, except that neither the directors nor the actor even mention one of the style-forming films of the genre, Klute, where the character of Donald Sutherland, who is Kiefer’s father, was at the center of a paranoid conspiracy, is in itself a reason for conspiracy theories. to the girl’s simple-minded men for a one-night stand, and dashed around New York with his face upside down.Considering that Kiefer partly inherited this face, Klute’s defiant silence becomes completely mysterious. Although, to the same extent, he inherits here for himself, namely, the image of special agent Jack Bauer from the TV series 24, popular in the 2000s.

In the 1970s, the surge of such cinema in New Hollywood was fueled by the zeitgeist of the previous decade’s high-profile political assassinations, followed by Watergate. At the same time, the British were occupied with their favorite subject of espionage and burrowed into the theme of the Cold War, filming Le Carré and conjuring the nuclear threat in the TV series “On the Edge of Darkness”. Having made a witty parody of the espionage genre in The Patriot, Ficarra and Requa now decided to dig up adjacent territory and took on a paranoid thriller. “In the past few years, we have been surrounded on all sides by conspiracy theories. This led us to the idea of ​​explaining how they work, and that perhaps some of them are true and some are not, ”the smart authors said in an interview. Judging by the fact that in their new series the reality surrounding the hero turns out to be a trick all the time, the principle “I don’t believe in fate, and myself even less” needs to be radically reconsidered and from now on only believe in yourself, while the sinister entities ruling the world are trying to determine our destinies.

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