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Dispatches from Conspiracy Occulture

“Mason Freeman reports from the thin places, where conspiracy, camp, and Gretchen Mol’s perfect face collide.”

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As the reviewer from New York Magazine wisely observed, An American Affair is worth watching for Gretchen Mol of the diamond face; a cinematic presence that, we might add, is becoming vanishingly rare in today’s films.

Actresses nowadays seem to be chosen deliberately for sub-beautiful faces—a kind of cultural leveling—unlike the golden era of cinema when, as Peter R. Mossback, our Athwart Historian notes:

“The Jewish-run movie industry still curated an eye for the European-American Nordic archetype, a physiognomy that carried both mythic and moral gravitas.”

Gretchen Mol’s perfect face and demeanor evoke that aesthetic tradition—one that Arthur Pfärtze, our resident Aesthetic Interpreter, warns is being:

“actively deconstructed by a culture allergic to visible hierarchies of beauty.”

Mol’s diamond face, then, is not merely personal beauty; it is an aesthetic cipher, signaling a deeper cultural memory in decline.

The film itself, as the New York Magazine reviewer put it, belongs to a genre we’d do well to archive:

“…a spanking new hybrid: the paranoid-conspiracy coming-of-age teen-sex movie.”

https://nymag.com/listings/movie/an-american-affair/

We at the Council recognize this hybrid as an emergent campy occulture, a lightly disguised initiation rite embedded in popular media. An American Affair succeeds not only as entertainment but as a vessel of conspiracy holy writ—its setting in Georgetown, Deep State D.C., placing it along the same metaphysical leyline where The Exorcist was set.

As The Rootless Metropolitan, our Travel Correspondent, reminds us:

“Georgetown remains one of America’s great thin places—where the visible world buckles under the pressure of invisible forces.”

Even our advisory panel for this column—Cliff Languor and Arthur Haus, the C-of-C-C Newsletter’s resident critics of film, art, television, and “Other Cultural Matters”—were unexpectedly enamored with Miss Mol and the film’s deliberate weaving of the banal and the conspiratorial. Haus quipped silently through text:

“The best use of CIA mise-en-scène since Three Days of the Condor —but with a better hairline. And second of all, Cliff and I take umbrage at that “ unexpectedly enamoured” remark. We’re not gay.

We therefore issued our highest commendation: three thumbs up—a Council euphemism and double entendre that, while paying homage to Gretchen Mol’s presence, also signals the triangulated viewing necessary for decoding the film’s aesthetic and esoteric layers.

But beyond its surface plot, An American Affair hints—intentionally or not—at deeper, interlaced conspiracies beneath the official conspiracy. While the narrative gestures toward lone operatives and domestic intelligence cabals, we see the spectral outlines of the broader Deeper State: the overlapping hands of the Mafia, Castro’s agents, Soviet operatives, and yes—even Israel.

At the time the film is set, it was an open secret (in certain circles) that President Kennedy was resisting Israel’s push to obtain nuclear weapons. For Israel, facing what it perceived as an existential crisis, Kennedy’s opposition wasn’t just policy—it was survival denied. There are whispers in the archives (some redacted, some too loud to ignore) suggesting that Israel’s leadership saw in Kennedy’s resistance a reason to join the growing roster of those with motive and means.

“It’s the old sleight-of-hand: reveal a plot just to distract from the deeper plot. The film is both decoy and declaration. The waspish-presenting operative husband, the CIA chief, the naive journalist parents—they’re the faces of an open conspiracy meant to screen the faces of the hidden one. You’ll see the CIA in the foreground. But in the shadows: the Kosher Nostra, Castro’s Havana handlers, Soviet dead drops, and somewhere deeper still—an Israeli doctrine of necessity.”

Thus, An American Affair operates as a cinematic glyph, simultaneously disclosing and concealing. It gives you the conspiracy you’re meant to solve, while planting the seed of the conspiracy you’re not supposed to notice.

In the end, An American Affair is less a film than an initiation—one more breadcrumb on the trail through what the Council calls the Occultural Ethicsphere, that strange overlap between beauty, belief, and buried power.

Stay for the conspiracy, yes—but watch for the face.

—Mason Freeman, Occulture Expert

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Council Ratings System: Three Thumbs Up