I saw this film and there is something I still can't figure out--- Why the hell did the Parallax corporation want to assassinate Senators? What was thier purpose? What was thier ill intent?
Maybe I missed something but it seemed like all we found out was that the corporation was behind assassinations.
There are more Congressmen than there are Presidents, for one thing. And there are fewer Senators than there are House Reps -- one Senator can have more influence over legislation than one House Rep. (Joe Lieberman, who as an Independent can basically blackmail the Democrats into not screwing with him about Iraq, and in exchange he will vote with the party of other major issues).
Note: Senator Carroll, you'll remember, was identified as an Independent at the start of the movie. (I'm also reminded of George Wallace, who was paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 1972, two years before PV. His candidacy was a threat to the Nixon Administration because he was an independent maverick who threatened to split Nixon's base.)
And I'm sure Parallax didn't go after Senators exclusively. You can't knock off more than one Senator every couple of years without seriously provoking the FBI.
It all comes down to power, obviously. Assassins are usually hired to target powerful people.
This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity.
"It all comes down to power, obviously. Assassins are usually hired to target powerful people."
So it all really came down to 'power'? It just felt like while our main character exposed the assassinations and the assassins that they were seeking, they didn't really expose the official motives for the political assassinations.
Maybe those intentions are unimportant in the long run.
Except for people with a fetish for transparency, I don't see why we have to know the "reasons" these politicians were targeted. Pakula, in any case, isn't that kind of director -- remember Klute? We never do know what happened to Tom Gruneman, who was ostensibly behind the stalking of prostitutes. And All the President's Men is steeped in unresolved motives (Deep Throat, et al).
PV isn't the kind of movie that's going to get bogged down in explanations; besides, murder is murder, whatever the motive. And the more than I think about it, the more PV is a study in the metaphysics of power, since the very existence of an agency like Parallax (interfering with the normal functioning of democracy) suggests that you can never get to the bottom of who's "running" things. It's the oldest paranoid theme in the book.
This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity.
With regard to this question about senatorial assassinations, I am curious about the Senator (Bellingham or something?) on the airplane talking with his assistant when Joe Frady walked by. They were looking at a newspaper article with photos of Hammond and Carroll and making some comments about their politics, which I didn't catch. Carroll is now dead, and we know that Hammond will soon be killed. Now, is the Senator on the airplane the target of the bomb that the PV bad guy stashed on the plane? If so, why? It seemed that there might be some kind of political triangulation going. Again, the plot won't tell us why, but it is an interesting thing to consider.
shareI assumed they killed them for money. They were a corporation and their business was being hired killers. We weren't supposed to find out who wanted them killed.
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