Conspiracy

you?re essay will have as its central texts a film of your choice from an assortment of five conspiracy films?The Manchurian Candidate (1962), State of Play, All the President?s Men, and Wag the Dog. Conspiracy films, by their nature play on widely held fears. As you develop your ideas, if you are looking for suggestions, consider how historically specific anxieties put pressure on or redefine our sense of democracy. How do such narratives shape or reinforce our relationship with government? Along with your film, you will also be finding critical sources to help you establish your own argument. Sources can be used as background information to enrich your analysis, as a model or as supporting evidence for one of your claims (as we already established in Unit 2), or as a counterexample that you use to distinguish your argument from those of others. Another challenge?and also a great opportunity?is that you?ll work more independently in this essay: choosing the film you will discuss (from the list above), developing an analytical question, and finding at least five analytical academic sources of your own. You have the chance to take this essay in the direction that interests you most (within the broad themes of the course), shaped by your own intellectual inquiry. Your essay will be between eight and ten pages long.