Conclusion

Abstract

It would be all too easy to state in conclusion that the thriller in 1970s America was — and that it has always been — a genre about conspiracy. An even more alluring conclusion, perhaps, would be to add a historical dimension and to say that the 1970s American thriller was dominated by the secrecy and deception which accompanied the Watergate affair and successive administrations’ pursuit of the war in Vietnam. What might encourage such a neat conclusion is that, firstly, there is a body of generic texts which seem to be united by key themes; secondly, there are some major historical events, happening almost contemporaneously with 1970s thrillers and sharing some parallels with them. The connection seems hard to avoid and, it must be said, such a connection has already been made on occasions in the foregoing chapters. In the contemporary history of the 1970s — that specifically hegemonic configuration of discourses that we have identified — it is true that conspiracy was prominent. The reporting of Watergate and Vietnam in the wake of a number of years of political radicalism provided fertile ground for the proliferation of conspiracy narratives which specifically located the source of conspiracies predominantly with either government operatives or agents of the political right. The reading formation of the period thus assisted in the creation of a body of texts which took a right-wing conspiracy as their theme.