Secret Societies

Before Dan Brown's 2003 novel and its 2006 film adaptation, secret societies were largely B-movie territory: disposable thrillers about skull-and-bones fraternities, conspiracy yarns for the paranoid fringe. The Da Vinci Code mainstreamed the whole genre. It made the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei and the Knights Templar into dinner-party conversation, turned Louvre floor plans into clue maps, and sold the idea that a medieval religious order might be sitting on a secret that could rewrite Western civilization. The novel is not subtle and the film is blunter still, but the scale of their cultural impact is not in doubt. Every Illuminati thriller made since owes them a licensing fee.

Eyes Wide Shut is not a conspiracy thriller. It does not solve its secret society or explain the orgy at the masked mansion in the hills. That is the point. Kubrick's last film uses the trappings of the genre, the cloaked figures, the candlelight, the password, the ritual, and strips away the resolution that genre demands. The order Bill Harford stumbles into is frightening not because it has a plan, but because it has power and he does not. The threat is social and economic before it is occult. Kubrick understood that secret societies are, ultimately, about who belongs and who does not, about the violence of exclusion dressed up in ceremony. No film has made that point as coldly.

Warren Spector's 2000 game handed the player a place inside the machine. As JC Denton, a nano-augmented UNATCO agent, you uncover the Majestic 12, the Illuminati and several competing shadow factions all running the world from different angles. Deus Ex worked because it took the conspiracy seriously enough to make each faction internally coherent, with genuine ideological positions rather than just mustache-twirling evil. Bob Page wants control; the Illuminati wants balance; the NSF just wants to survive. The player has to decide which nightmare is least bad. No other game has replicated that moral texture in the secret-society space, though Deus Ex: Human Revolution came close by updating the allegory for the corporate augmentation era.

Channel 4's Utopia (2013-2014) begins with a manuscript, a graphic novel called The Utopia Experiments, and a group of conspiracy theorists who discover the manuscript is real. The network pursuing it will do anything to get it back. Dennis Kelly's series is deliberately, almost brutally, extreme: the violence is sudden and specific in a way that most British television refuses to be, and the shadow organization at the center of the story, the Network, has a plan for humanity that is genuinely unsettling rather than a cartoon. Utopia understood that the horror of a secret society is not the secret, it is the patience. These people have been waiting for decades. They have prepared. When the story reaches its philosophical core, you find you cannot dismiss their reasoning, and that is the most disturbing thing of all.