Generational Detectives

Introduction This article examines American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (2024), a four-part documentary released on Netflix. Directed by Zachary Treitz, the documentary follows young photojournalist Christian Hansen as he tries to solve the mysterious death of Danny Casolaro. In 1991, Casolaro was found deceased in a hotel room while tracking officials in the CIA and former Reagan White House. He had planned to write an explosive book about what he termed “The Octopus”, an octuplet of overlapping conspiracies that transpired in the 1980s. At the time, local officials ruled Casolaro’s death a suicide, but many suspect that someone murdered him for nearing a dangerous truth (McConnachie and Tudge 128). The series follows Christian Hansen between 2013-2024 as he traces his predecessor’s footsteps in a real-life film noir. He compiles forgotten documents, contacts old sources, and narrates his quest for a truth that has been buried for more than 30 years. However, American Conspiracy is not just about Casolaro’s death. In my view, it is also an artifact of generational conflict between the Millennials (born between 1982 and 1996) and the generations that preceded them (Traub and Donner 975). These include the Silent Generation (born before 1945) and the Baby Boomers (1946-1964; Vogels). I argue that the documentary depicts Millennials attempting to understand the world they have inherited—a world riven by neoliberal austerity (Cairns 125), the 9/11 attacks (Ng et al. 282), and the 2008 financial crisis (Barnes 34). These and other crises have led to wealth inequality and a disenchantment with democracy (Barnes 34; Bennett Inst. 2). While the series does not explicitly reference neoliberalism and democratic disenchantment, etc., it lends itself to this decoding, because it interrogates the Reagan era and foregrounds the unresolved crimes of the past, making generational conflict a key to the latent meanings of the text (Hall 507). American Conspiracy therefore cultivates suspicion of the “parent culture”, and specifically those who held power in the 1980s federal government (Clarke et al. 100). Moreover, the documentary showcases the “generational detective”, which is a temporal analogue to Fredric Jameson’s “social detective” concept (qtd. in Tait 9). Beyond asking “Was Danny murdered?”, it also asks: “What have our elders wrought?” The four-part series operates in the conspiracy theory tradition (Knight 1; Popp 256), but it also conveys the tropes of film noir (Dixon 1; Woltmann). Among the most conspicuous is the body double, which occurs when Hansen literally plays the role of Casolaro in dramatised scenes. Other noir tropes include Hansen as a lone detective consumed by an indifferent world; individuals cannot be trusted; information gathered is questionable; the narrative is convoluted; confirmed and suspected murders occur; the ending is neither happy nor satisfying; and a scam sets the story in motion, namely the theft of legal software in 1982. But it is also a true story, which places American Conspiracy into the rarer category of “documentary noir” (Carey). According to Jeffries, this genre entails the filmmaker embodying the role of investigator after authorities have proven ineffectual in the face of crime (301). In the following section, I will briefly outline the documentary narrative and then explain the method used to analyse the text. The third section relates the findings, which hinge on American Conspiracy serving a dual role as documentary noir and a generational detective story. The final section links this series to a “media subculture” of conspiracy theorists active in YouTube videos, podcasts, and social-media threads (Higdon and Lyons 40). This group is a “counterpublic” that espouses left-wing conspiracism (Sienkiewicz and Jaramillo 268) – an ideology otherwise known as “parapolitics” (Jimmy Falun Gong). Studying this subculture is important, because it suggests that conspiracy theory becomes a popular epistemology at a time when disillusionment with politics is at its highest among younger adults (Bennett Inst. 1). When questions are left unanswered from the past, and noir-like endings remain unsatisfying to the generational detective, suspicious media texts emerge in the culture and nourish conspiracy theories for another generation. From the Shadowy Reagan Era to Streaming Detective Story American Conspiracy comprises four episodes. It is disjointed and scattered in presentation, though this tracks with its attention to a convoluted story. As Dan Rather states in an old newscast repurposed for Episode 1 (“The End”), it is a “complex and confusing, still developing case” (00:39:11). It begins in the early 1980s, when a computer company, Inslaw, develops software for the criminal justice system. This PROMIS software could find similarities in criminal cases tried across the country, which would help the government build cases against career criminals. Inslaw soon sold PROMIS to the US Department of Justice (DOJ). Afterwards, however, the DOJ cut off payments, costing Inslaw millions of dollars. Casolaro caught wind of the PROMIS affair and began investigating the story. Episode 2 reveals that the DOJ stole PROMIS in 1982 for the benefit of a Reagan associate named Earl Brian. Allegedly, Brian helped transfer $40 million to Iran in 1980. The funds came with the demand to detain 52 American hostages until after the presidential election, thus compounding a hostage debacle that made incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, appear weak. After Reagan won the 1980 election, Brian was supposedly repaid for his “October Surprise” role by gaining access to PROMIS. The October Surprise is only one arm of the Octopus, but there is not enough space to explain the other seven. In fact, even the documentary ignores most of the Octopus’s anatomy, focussing on three limbs only: the Inslaw case, the October Surprise, and the strange activity that took place on the Cabazon Reservation in Indio, California. The remaining arms of the Octopus are an Australian bank called Nugan Hand, the 1980s Savings and Loans scandal, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the Iran-Contra affair, and the covert adventures of two CIA agents: Frank Terpil and Edwin P. Wilson. A mysterious figure involved in the intrigue is Michael Riconoscuito, who claims to have tampered with the PROMIS software in the 1980s to turn it into an espionage tool. Riconoscuito speaks of the convoluted story in Episode 3 (“The Game”), saying: “I’ve got a matrix-like analysis [of the case, but] it would take days to go through it” (00:14:35). At another point, an exasperated Hansen says to the camera: “It never ends! It never ends” (00:23:47). As in film noir, Hansen and Casolaro embody the “hard-boiled detectives unravelling labyrinthian mysteries” (Dixon 1). As in conspiracy theory, the resolution is endlessly deferred (Fenster xvii); Hansen is never able to prove that someone murdered Casolaro, and Casolaro was unable to link all the conspirators in his lifetime. Method Netflix categorises American Conspiracy as “True Crime”, which Punnett defines as “nonfiction narratives of criminal events that actually happened” (qtd. in Maher and Cake 97). This may be sensible enough, especially given the genre’s “widespread popularity amongst subscribers of streaming services” (100). I argue that the series is too connotative to be tidily contained this way, however. I believe American Conspiracy addresses a larger question without realising it, which I expose through a “symptomatic” reading of the series (Althusser and Balibar 28). Texts are not only polysemic, but they include unconscious claims and silences that symptomatic readings can identify. A similar approach is Ricouer’s “hermeneutics of suspicion, [which] assumes that the manifest or surface meaning of a text is a veil that masks its true agenda” (Culver and Vuleta 11). To interpret the documentary, I draw on semiotic analysis (Barthes ix; Brown 113; Dunleavy 167). Attributed to such scholars as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1931) and Roland Barthes (1915-1960), this method works well for the series, because it allows me to single out visual signifiers on the screen. I next determine the “underlying meaning[s]” the signifiers have for the documentary as a whole (Titscher et al. 126). Semiotics can be used in conjunction with the broader method of textual analysis, which is useful for interpreting Hansen’s statements. Textual analysis traces back to such academic traditions as the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s (Dworkin 121). The method looks for “underlying ideological and cultural assumptions of a text” (Arya 173), or what Phillipov calls finding “a vocabulary to describe the elusive” (221). This is my general aim when interpreting American Conspiracy as a case study of both documentary noir and generational conflict. The Semiotics of Conspiracy Theory, Young Adulthood, and Media Technology Jameson argued that the conspiracy text was both a detective story and an “unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what ... forces confront us” (qtd. in Tait 2). I agree with this assessment and claim that American Conspiracy adds an additional generational layer. The series is an expression of Millennial investigation from an age cohort who grew up in the triple shadow of neoliberalism, the War on Terror, and the 2008 financial crisis. American Conspiracy is an unconscious prying open of the adult generations’ floorboards to search for the proverbial bodies. Noir provides a useful lens to explain what is going on. Generational detectives navigate an alienating world due to neoliberal precarity, and they face constant uncertainty in the form of conspiracy theories that never seem to resolve. In other words, noir is spilling over into their real lives (Dixon 153). A prominent signifier in the series is geographic sprawl, which suggests that the conspiracy is as wide as the country. Casolaro lived in Fairfax, Virginia, and he died in West Virginia. The PROMIS affair took place in Washington DC, and Riconosciuto hid evidence in the Pacific Northwest. Casolaro went to New York City to pitch his book, and a related murder took place in San Francisco. The sprawl accords with Jameson, who argues that films such as The Parallax View depict the detective “mapping the ... social totality” (Tait 43). He traces this trope back to Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, “which propels us from one empty hotel room to another across continental North America” (Jameson 122). This is an overlap between conspiracy and noir. As Dixon writes, “noir is a state of paranoia, a zone in which nothing seems stable ... and [a] world [that] is a constant battleground” (viii). In Episode 4 (“The Monster”), Hansen questions how he can return to his normal life after peering into this abyssal network of corruption and murder. Jameson likens this phenomenon to a peek below the surface – a conceit that stretches from Dante’s trek through the underworld to Marx’s exposure of “the hidden abode of production” (176). But instead of infiltrating Hell or the “Satanic mills” of industrial England, Hansen steps into a Reagan-era scandal (Linebaugh and Rediker 250). Jameson further states that the “promise of a deeper inside view is the hermeneutic content of the conspiracy thriller” (123). Incidentally, Freud and Marx were graduates of the “school of suspicion”, according to Paul Ricoeur (Felski). This is due to each thinker’s interest in uncovering “self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible ... truths” (Felski). Marx exposed the commodity fetish, and Freud the subconscious desire. A textual analysis shows how this applies to American Conspiracy as well. Hansen admits in Episode 4 that the decade-long investigation was transformative, saying: “it changed me. And it changed the way I think about reality ... and think about history ... . This is the surface, but what’s going on in the shadows” (00:46:54). Hansen is awakening to truths concealed by the parent generation. Young adulthood is another prominent signifier in the documentary. When Hansen first learns about Casolaro in 2013, he is 25 years old. While the director (Treitz) does not say, he appears to be the same age. The two are also younger than the participants in the on-camera interviews. Markers of youth often surround Hansen, including photos from what appears to be college get-togethers, as well as footage of him skateboarding down the street (Atencio et al. 154). A scene in Episode 4 shows a young Hansen explaining the case and repeatedly saying “like” in between sentences – another giveaway of youth (Hill). Relatedly, Hansen has embraced digital media technology in his quest. The opening and closing scenes of Episode 1 depict a conversation through an iPhone. An external hard drive appears on a desk, an iMac computer looms in the background, and hi-tech video cameras and production equipment drift into scenes. The semiotic reading of this technology overlaps with the semiotics of young adulthood. This is because young people have especially embraced digital media in a way the Baby Boomers did not (Prensky 1). As Jenkins et al. claim, young people “have been the lead adopters of mobile, social, and gaming media” (viii). Vogels finds that 93% of Millennials own smartphones, compared to 68% of Boomers and 40% of Silents. Roughly 100% of Millennials use the Internet, and 86% use social media. Additionally, Millennials believe the Internet to be a benefit to society more than any preceding generation. Hansen and Treitz take this youth-coded gadgetry straight into the Casolaro case, thereby linking the concepts of suspicion, youth, and technology in the film. The documentary synthesises new media technologies with film-noir tropes of the 1940s and 50s, with Treitz even citing Hitchcock as an inspiration for his work (McGovern). While Hitchcock may be more of a noir “stylist” than a founding noir director, he worked in the genre in such 1950s classics as Rear Window and Vertigo (Olsen). Hitchcock used “intentionally mechanical” camerawork to bring his vision to life, with the camera circling actors and following them down flights of stairs, among other motions (Olsen). In American Conspiracy, media technology also takes on a conspicuous role: Hansen’s iPhone acts a key to the intelligence underworld; a covert camera shows the filmmakers visiting a home; and a handheld camera follows Hansen through a police station. As the two Millennials set off into the backwaters of Reagan-era scandal, they arrive on doorsteps of elderly couples. They situate greying interviewees before their own cameras. A semiotic reading suggests this is a generational autopsy of the 1980s, the era in which the filmmakers (and other Millennials) were born. Conclusion: The Persistence of Conspiracy In this concluding section, I connect American Conspiracy to a media subculture that uses conspiracy theories to excavate the origins of our political conjuncture. This subculture is sometimes known as the “para-political” left, which shares content on digital platforms and social media. It is loosely confederated, critical of capitalism, and (at times) internally combative. Podcasts in this milieu include American Exception (2021), Death Is Just around the Corner (2018), Ghost Stories for the End of the World (2020), Media Roots Radio (2010), ParaPower Mapping (2023), Programmed to Chill (2021), Subliminal Jihad (2020), and True Anon (2019). In February 2024, Hansen and Treitz appeared on True Anon, one of the few artifacts from the subculture to have attracted scholarly attention (Chase 214). Para-political podcasts share similarities with true-crime content creators. For instance, the conspiratorial hosts interact with fans and followers on social media, as true-crime podcasters do (Boling and Hull 97). True-crime hosts create a “discourse community”, which becomes recognisable to followers who use the same terms and phrases (van Driel 150). Whereas a true-crime fan might understand an in-joke or “specific lexis” (164), para-political enthusiasts might use the term “noided” – a play on the word “paranoid”. Both podcasting genres also present evidence to the audience (Morton 240), which “hails” listeners as members of a jury or investigative panel (Althusser 108). But on the other hand, the para-political subculture, to which Hansen and Treitz are marginally connected, is different. Mostly young to middle-aged men seem to make up its opinion leaders, which might translate to a majority-men listenership. This would clash with the majority-women consumers of true-crime fare (Boling and Hull 106). I make this connection between American Conspiracy and the para-political subculture because both expose aspects of the parent culture. The podcasts discuss topics such as the CIA and the JFK and RFK assassinations. They are similar to past noir authors who, for example, used literature and film to unmask that “bright, guilty place” of Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century (Davis 18) and evince a point that Kellner makes about the hit TV show, The X-Files, which he sees as an artifact of “generational war” (226). Kellner argues that the cohort of its creator, Chris Carter, has an “unhealed wound” from the Vietnam War, adding that it “keeps festering and generating tales to capture its hideousness and horrors” (216). He goes on to say that The X-Files depicts the “older generation [as] tremendously compromised and arguably corrupt, especially those in the military, political, and corporate bureaucracies” (226). It is up to the younger heroes to restore the moral order. While Chris Carter may no longer be doing this today, the para-political left carries the torch, using conspiracy theories to medicate their own “unhealed wound”. Shareable digital media and conspiracy theories have become fronts in a generational conflict. With different levels of political radicalism, suspicious Millennials negotiate neoliberalism and unresponsive government – a real-life film noir of “doubt and fear and uncertainty” (Dixon 1). They embody the earliest origins of noir, forged in the “depressingly stark 1930s ... [when] even the seemingly protected middle classes were facing economic insecurity” (Palmer 389). Like those noir writers, they too expose “capitalism’s unsavoury undercurrents” (390). This media subculture likely embraces conspiracy theory as it does because traditional political processes have left them feeling alienated. Because political and economic problems persist, particularly for young adults in America, the age-old practice of conspiracy theorising will also persist. As Fiske and others have pointed out, marginalisation has long been the crucible for conspiratorial belief (192). Since the wound has not yet healed for the generational detectives, conspiracism will remain an attractive panacea. References Althusser, Louis. “Selected Texts.” Ideology: An Introduction. Ed. Terry Eagleton. London: Longman, 1994. 87-111. Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: Verso, 1979. Arya, Aneri. “An Overview of Textual Analysis as a Research Method for Cultural Studies.” International Journal for Innovative Research in Multidisciplinary Field 6.3 (2020): 173-177. American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders. Dir. Zachary Treitz. 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