When I was first introduced to the concept of a conspiracy theory, it was sort of benign.
Oh, spoilers for the main plot of Control.
That's not really true. The subject of these theories were typically rather dire, but the seriousness by which people took them was low. There was an archetype - the mad theorist living in a trailer out in the deserts of rural California, Arizona, or New Mexico, or perhaps in a grungy apartment in a big city like New York, with tons of locks on the doors, closed circuit cameras monitoring the entrances, a combination lock on the refrigerator, and, of course, the ultimate sign of paranoid madness, the tin-foil hat (though by then everyone was using aluminum foil).
I was born in the mid 80s, so by the time I had really any sense of pop culture or a sense of zeitgeist, it was the 1990s. The first time I was aware that the Cold War was a thing, it was when the thing ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (coming down to have breakfast in the kitchen before I went off to school as a first grader, I saw the headline on the Boston Globe). Without the Soviets to worry about anymore, we had this vast intelligence community that had been built up to operate in competition with another superpower, and ideas of the U.S. Government overreaching and turning its power inward became a more mainstream idea in the public consciousness.
To be fair, there have always been conspiracy theories about the American government, and some of those theories have proven true. When you look at things like COINTELPRO, a program that, among other things, tried to harass Martin Luther King Jr. into killing himself, it's really not irrational to treat the idea of illegal conspiracies in the government of the most powerful (probably) country in the world as, you know, credible. Hell, there are things the government has done overtly in living memory that would sound far-fetched if proposed on a conspiracy theorist's red-yarn-covered corkboard, like the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II.
But time can create a distance that makes these things feel less terrifying and more like a genre trope. Perhaps no event is more iconic to the conspiracy theory trope than the Kennedy Assassination. JFK's death at the hands of a sniper who was probably Lee Harvey Oswald shook the nation (no president since JFK has been killed while in office, though Reagan survived being shot). In the 60 years (as of November) since the killing, myriad theories have exploded surrounding it - was it really Oswald that killed him? Did Oswald act alone? Could Oswald have even done it? Why did Oswald, or whoever, do it? Who benefitted from Kennedy's death? Did Castro, or the Soviets, or the Mafia, or LBJ, or... I don't know, freaking time travelers arrange his death? Was it payback or the Bay of Pigs (either its failure or the attempt?) Was it to get us to fully commit to the Vietnam War? Was it because Kennedy had fucked the wrong woman?
Setting aside the Kennedy Assassination, which does legitimately have some frustratingly unanswered questions, though, a lot of these theories come out of nowhere in particular, or suggest things so far-fetched that they demand a much higher degree of scrutiny. You want to say that the military has conducted unethical medical research? That's a matter of historical record. You want to say that Washington and Hollywood are run by shape-shifting lizard-people... that I might need to check your work on.
But it's also these more outlandish ideas that become interesting fuel for genre fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, and the other types of speculative fiction inherently take an unrealistic idea and say "ok, but what if it was real?"
Science fiction typically justifies the existence of the impossible by setting itself in the future, where science and technology have progressed to make current impossibilities possible. Fantasy (or, what I'd term traditional fantasy) justifies the impossible more through the invocation of an archaic worldview - a prescientific understanding of the world where laws of reality were understood to be basically magic already - the will of gods or the like.
These are hazy lines to be drawn, of course, and I think you could categorize a lot of what has been termed "New Weird" fiction to exist under the umbrella of science fiction or horror (the latter of which seems to borrow a lot of its premises from fantasy but with a fixation of the terrifying) and indeed I think one of the central conceits of Cosmic Horror is that the rational, scientific worldview is just a more recent comforting myth to shield us from a reality that is apathetic to our understanding of it.
Cosmic Horror, of course, was developed in publications such as Weird Tales, and so the New Weird certainly declares its connection to this particular subgenre.
A screenshot of Control is listed on TVTropes page for the New Weird, so I don't think I'm out of line placing this game firmly within that genre/literary movement.
As a movement, though, it runs into a bit of the same problem that any alternative movement runs into - in opposing definition, it creates for itself a definition.
So, growing up in the 1990s, one of the great ironies was that the most popular form of Rock music was Alternative Rock. Nirvana was enormous, though it merely stood at the crest of a wave that really changed the face of the genre - gone were the endless hair metal bands singing about getting laid (not really gone, but dethroned) and now there were a bunch of scraggly-haired guys in whatever clothes they woke up in singing about dark subjects, often cryptically worded and even sung in a way that you couldn't really easily decipher the lyrics. (When Weird Al Yankovic asked Kurt Kobain's permission to cover Smells Like Teen Spirit, Kobain asked him if the parody would be about food, and was apparently happy to hear that instead it was about the fact that no one could understand what the hell he was saying.)
It actually wasn't until 1997, three years after Kurt Kobain killed himself (though that's another subject for conspiracy theories,) that I really got to know alternative rock as a genre, due to my father taking a sabbatical and our moving for a year to Palo Alto, where we listened to what I would later discover was the last year of KOME, a legendary alt-rock station in California's Bay Area. And I fell in love with it. I don't think I was a particularly depressive kid or anything (that would come later), but it just opened up a world of strangeness to me.
In Control, we play as Jesse Faden (or, possibly, we play as Polaris, the fractal blue-green presence that resides with her,) entering the Federal Bureau of Control searching for Jesse's brother Dylan. The two of them were involved in an incident when they were young - just 11 and 10 - that left their hometown basically destroyed, and them as the only survivors. Some government agency showed up and took Dylan, while Jesse for some reason was not taken and grew up presumably in foster homes.
When Jesse arrives, she's a truth-seeker, and it's clear that she approaches the FBC with skepticism and hostility - these are the people who took her brother, after all. But she also arrives at the moment of an enormous crisis within the FBC, and lo and behold, she is swiftly not just able to get inside, but becomes the Director of the FBC when she picks up the Service Weapon, an Object of Power that, handily, also functions as your main weapon throughout the game (and the only real "weapon" weapon, as other things are pure psychic ability).
Though Jesse's exploration of the massive and impossible Oldest House, the brutalist nightmare that is the headquarters for the FBC and somehow hides within New York City despite being taller than any other building there, is one filled with horror, Jesse frequently comments on how much she actually loves it there. We, the player, also, presumably, love it there. Why else would we be playing the game?
Another great example of the New Weird genre (one that I had not really previously seen associated with that term, though in retrospect it's crazy to think I hadn't) is the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, which has now been going for nearly 11 years. The podcast takes the form of community radio broadcasts from a profoundly strange town somewhere in the American Southwest, where, according to the creators of the podcast, "every conspiracy theory is true." Elder gods, literal five-headed dragons, vague yet menacing government agencies, the sheriff's secret police, the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home, and all manner of terrifying things haunt Night Vale, and initially, the host of the show seems to be part and parcel of all the horror, the show mining comedy from the casualness with which the host presents the town's news and culture.
But the weird thing is, over the years, the show starts to take on a different tone. The host of the show is revealed to be someone named Cecil Palmer (his name borrowed from his voice actor, Cecil Baldwin) and whose romance with the visiting scientist Carlos, which seems kind of creepy and one-sided at first, eventually blooms into a charming and endearing relationship. The people and monsters of Night Vale start to seem kind of friendly and benign as we grow accustomed to them. And there's almost a shift in the way that these figures are written - we start to see things like the City Council, which seems to be some kind of Cronenburgian flesh amalgamation, as if they were beloved local politicians. Do we just get conditioned to accept the weirdness on its own terms, are we seeing things as if we've been indoctrinated into accepting this stuff despite its horror, or are have the writers just fallen in love with their creation and now hold close what was once horrific?
The FBC is this particular work of fiction's iteration of the shady government agency. It's the off-the-books conspiracy-factory, where cover-ups and lies are presented to the public. It is the prototypical adversary of the conspiracy theorist.
And yet, Jesse's entrance into this world - someone who has been harmed by having her truth denied by society in a way that the FBC 100% intended it to be denied - sees her embracing it. The triumphant end of the story's main game sees her donning a nice suit and a professional tied-back hairstyle and embracing her identity as the director of the FBC. She has become the very thing that was keeping the truth from her.
Now, yes, there's dialogue that suggests that she'll be doing things differently - that her predecessor, Trench, who is revealed late in the game to actually be the source of the Hiss crisis (though you could argue that he wasn't truly at fault - he was just unlucky enough to be the first infected by it,) was too obsessed with controlling things (hey, it's the name of the game!) that he couldn't share responsibility and prevent this catastrophe, and that Jesse's going to be a more ethically, morally-guided leader.
But isn't this kind of the fantasy?
Do we believe in these complex, preposterous, scandalous conspiracy theories in part because... well, they're exciting, enticing?
Don't we kind of want to be in on it?
One of the hallmarks of the conspiracy theorist mindset is this sense of being above the masses. Yes, most people believe that vaccines are a well-understood, miraculously useful medical treatment, but we few, we very few, we band of brothers know that actually they're designed so that the pharmaceutical industry can give our children autism! Why would they want that? That's not important. The important thing is that you, ignorant fool, believe the "mainstream narrative" while my eyes are open to the hidden truth. And thus, I am better than you are.
But even then, no one will understand that hidden truth better than the people perpetrating it.
I don't want to paint with a broad brush here - there are plenty of people who have good reason to be skeptical of this thing or another. But I think there's a somewhat perverse thread (perhaps made of red yarn) underneath the conspiracy theorist's worldview, which is that there's a hint of jealousy.
And, look, Jesse Faden becomes something like a superhero. There are tons of portrayals of these secretive organizations actually being the good guys (I've never actually seen anyone espouse this theory, but I have to imagine that some people believe that the movie Men in Black was financed or in some way encouraged by the actual, real MIBs to make them look benevolent).
I mean, look at Harry Potter (I mean, you don't have to, given how its author's really reprehensible transphobia has kind of poisoned that well) and you look at a society of super-powerful individuals who could kill us all with ease but who hide their power not out of any concern for us, but only so that they won't have to solve any of our problems. Harry's initiation into that society is one of wonder and awakening. It's something that every kid reading those books wishes they'll experience, even if they know it's impossible. The fantasy genre trappings (a rare instance of a modern, real-world set fantasy series) dress it in comfortably familiar terms, but is the Wizarding World anything other than a global conspiracy?
Putting Jesse's awakening into a world of magic and wonder in the context of government bureaucracies and eldritch intelligences does, for now, put us at enough unease to recognize the horrifying within this particular story. But is that not just because of the relative unfamiliarity of the genre? If mid-20th-century brutalist architecture and "cassette futurism" are on their way to becoming familiar, comfortable tropes in the same way that looming wizard's towers and bubbling cauldrons already are, will we even recognize this as something sinister?
I think I've gotten a little sidetracked, but I do think that that yearning - to have special powers, or to have special knowledge, or to live in a world that is more complex and vast than it initially looks - lies at the heart of this conspiracy theory worldview. And yes, often it's a yearning for justice, but perhaps when actual justice is accomplished (or beyond possibility) the possibility of something enormous and unseen by the general public allows for the further, ultimate accomplishment of that justice. Jesse gets to take Control of the FBC. She holds the reins and the keys to all the truth now.
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