Conspiracy Ideologies in Films and Series: Explanatory Approaches and Opportunities for Intervention

Corona as a staged instrument of oppression, secretly kept vaccination deaths or politicians drinking children's blood: at the latest since the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic, conspiracy ideologies are booming and harm social peace and democratic will formation through their dogmatism. So-called conspiracy theories generate systematic distrust of legitimate political institutions and can contribute to social polarization, dangerous populism and extremist escalation. Conspiracy ideologies have always been a topic in movies and television series, as they have always dealt with the relationship between reality and illusion, truth and fiction, reality and dream, sense and madness through their cinematic means. Series and films not only serve as a discursive space for social self-understanding, but also, through their complex narratives, constellations of characters and aesthetics, offer catchy explanations for the emergence and spread of conspiracy narratives. At the same time, theymake suggestions, some of them astonishingly concrete, for dealing with such collective delusions. What can we learn from the fictional worlds of series and films for dealing with this very real contemporary phenomenon?