70s Thrillers: Conspiracy & Paranoia: William Goldman - Marathon Man (1974, film: 1976)

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Talk and film with Scott Stelle, d.a.i. Tübingen.
 
Tom "Babe" Levy is an aspiring marathon runner who is haunted by his father's scandal-driven suicide. But an unexpected visit from his beloved older brother will trigger a chain of events that force Tom into a race for his life.
 
It's been said that genre films are especially good at capturing the political and cultural zeitgeist of the time. This quarter we will again look at the political conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, due to the political and economic similarities between that decade and our own. A feeling of general paranoia has been created by the Pentagon Papers and Watergate as well as Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations. Being spied upon and lied to by authority figures touch fantasy systems at deep and primitive levels of the mind.
 
Thrillers evoke this psychological tension and like detective fiction play with the distinction between appearance and reality. One quickly gathers from reading investigative journalism that law, commerce and politics undeniably deal with intrigue and lies, while thrillers ? though technically a fiction ? dramatically depict these worldly struggles in a more straightforward, true-to-life or humorous manner.
 
In English
 
Further dates: Fr. 5.12. Richard Condon - Winter Kills (1974, film: 1979)
 
 
Photograph by SENSLibraryLady via Wikimedia Commons