The Conspiracy Theory as Allegory: Reflecting on “The Truck Guys”

Got Trucks?

I watch from my car as I see another pickup truck peel out from the parking lot. They are everywhere. And as the truck exits onto the highway, I wonder to myself: what if I created a conspiracy theory about pickup truck drivers, based solely on the “evidence” that pick-up trucks are everywhere?

It might be surprising, given this new film that I’ve made, but I hadn’t spent much time thinking about conspiracy theories until the pandemic set in. I was growing concerned about the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon and how they seemed to be becoming more mainstream. I was back in Saskatchewan, doing a practice-based postdoctoral research project about white, working-class, Christian, Anglo-assimilated settler culture—the culture I had been raised in. 

In the early days of the project, my process comprised reading, writing, conversations, and, most notably for the development of The Truck Guys, self-reflective and critical immersion in my environment. I wanted to understand, from a curious place, what this “culture” was? How, if at all, did this culture shape who I am today? How much have I changed in the time since I left?

From my basic knowledge of conspiracy theories, I understand that they are in fact made up by humans to explain some sort of phenomenon that they see around them. They see something around them and start to draw conclusions based on what they see. You connect the dots, and come to form a thesis to explain the world. You share this with others who, when they see the dots that you’ve connected and are amenable to your wonky logic, become believers too.

The idea of a conspiracy theory about pick-up trucks occurred to me when I was sitting in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, located on the southernmost outskirts of Regina, Saskatchewan. It was there, in the suburban development known as Harbour Landing, which is located no where near a harbour but rather than airport (the nearest body of water is Wascana Creek which gives way to Wascana Lake, the man-made lake at the center of the city with the Albert Street bridge, commemorated in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest bridge over the smallest body of water), that I considered making up a conspiracy theory.

Planes flew over me as I peered out toward the Wal-Mart sign. With little to do in lockdown, and eager to find any way to get out of my parents’ basement, I found myself on a days-long tour of the city’s parking lots. When I’d finish teaching my university classes on zoom, speaking to undergraduate and graduate students about visual culture and philosophy, and the politics of aesthetics, and the aesthetics of politics, I’d drive to the edge of the city and sit in the driver’s seat, bored out of my mind for the first time in my life.

To my happy surprise, from this boredom came imagination. And what came from me letting myself play was a way of making art that felt refreshing in its open-endedness, its indeterminacy. I felt like I was truly exploring, researching, without over-determining the results. Indeed, I didn’t know where any of this was going. 

It had been a long time since I’d played. As a child, I lived in a world of imaginary friends: I would sit outside all day sometimes, just talking to the trees in our yard, or in the park, who I’d determined had names and families and interests—like the four bushes in front of our house, the “tree band,” who made music for the rest of us to enjoy. As a preteen, my attention started to shift more to working tirelessly in school, as if called by some higher force to make up for lost generational time. If I wanted to get the higher education that my parents never had access to, I would need to get all of the scholarships. From puberty onward, when I should have been playing, I was reading, latching onto teachers, writing, compulsively doing homework and extra credit work, allowing myself to get lost in the structure and promise that school provided for me.

Now, in my early thirties, I felt quietly excited at the possibility of using my imagination again. Could I start creating, telling stories, making things up, instead of just researching in an academic context, writing things down only when I knew exactly what I had to say¹? What if I didn’t have the answers? Could “make believe” be a way in for me to gather new perspective?

In The Truck Guys, I created a narrator who wants to engage in philosophy and better understand the world around her, but who did not herself have access to a college education and is susceptible to misinformation campaigns and dark internet rabbit holes. She’s a bit of a know-it-all, and her feeling of knowing everything better than other people is what threatens her sense of mental health and connection to the world around her. 

When creating this character, and working to embody her through acting, I was imagining a kind of “Beta male Reddit bro” in a white woman’s body. She lives in a state of paranoia and fear, which takes a toll on her own nervous system and her capacity to be a person who contributes to society and community health in a positive way. What finally tethers her is the conversations she has with the anonymized, recovered Truck Guy, a man willing to share what he knows now: he passes on the knowledge he has based on lived experience, critical self-reflection, and time.

Trucks have been symbols of a certain kind of rural machismo, yet I know it isn’t only men who drive trucks.² On her podcast, Jewish lesbian comedian Julie Goldman ambivalently relays how she finds joy in driving a pick-up truck in Los Angeles—how driving her truck makes her feel strong, especially when she sees men. It gives her that ‘big-D energy’ that she, as a butch, queer woman wants to possess sometimes—a defence mechanism in the face of vulnerability. I imagine it would feel powerful, to be suspended above the average car, looming over them in your well-protected mass of metal. You and your truck like a big, metal womb.

As one of the trucks peeled out of his parking spot and entered in a mechanical dance with another truck that pulled in next to him, I noticed curiously that I was personifying the trucks and gendering them (“him”). I wondered if this was my first act of symbolic revenge; for so long, it is the truck guys who have gendered their cars, boats, and anything else they drive, as “her.” 

My imagination roamed. What if there was a secret cabal of pick-up truck drivers who were behind all of the world’s ills? It was a funny idea to me, at first. I saw it through the lens of my overly-intellectualizing yet also hyper-empathetic self, who finds refuge in the conceptual when the world gets overwhelming. Here is my artist statement; this is what the work seeks to explore. 

I saw my idea as a reversal of the logic of QAnon: if QAnon believers are those who lean Right, and buy into anti-Left theories, then what if I took the signifiers of those QAnon believers to create a theory against them? Was this a worthwhile strategy for transformative justice: to give them a taste of their own medicine? Through my process in the film, I’d make it very clear that this was a fiction I’d created, a winky joke meant to reflect a culture back to itself and subvert it. Here, take a look in the mirror. Isn’t what you believe so misguided and so silly?

I’d call the subject of my theory “The Truck Guys,” this group of men, who I imagined largely to be white, with their women helpers (“enablers, we called them”³), also primarily white, and whatever this group was up to was undeniably bad for society. As I played, I also found myself drawn to parafiction, a mode of “presenting fiction as if fact” that artists like Walid Raad and Jeanne Randolph have used to potent effects in their own meta, humorous practices. 

I also understood, though, that the stakes of working parafictionally today are different than they were in the 1990s or 2000s, when Raad was giving talks about The Atlas Group or when Randolph was starting to give her performance lectures that seek to evade academic understanding. With the rising discourse of “fake news” and “post-fact,” one of the questions in my mind was what, if anything, we can all still agree upon?

If it is raining outside, can we even agree on that? 

The “us” versus “them” mentality that gets ramped up with conspiracy theories raises the question of whether we can ever have meaningful cross-partisan communication, let alone see eye to eye. Where does this lead us as a civil society?

“To civil war,” I’d been hearing more and more people say.⁴

I wanted to build bridges. And yet I also understood the risks we run in having conversation with those on “the other side”—especially if it opens the door to hateful and dangerous views. Civil war might be one consequence of us not connecting or communicating across the divide.

As I reflected more on my idea for “The Truck Guys,” I felt affirmed that it met the criteria for a conspiracy theory: one starts to notice something, like a pattern (trucks are everywhere), and then one deduces meaning from the pattern they perceive (trucks must be organizing as some secret cabal), and in turn one draws some conclusion that involves othering a group of people and thus explaining a problem at hand (for example, this secret cabal of trucks have an evil plan to take down human society as we have come to know it, harkening the supplanting of liberalism, democracy, humanism, and tolerance by other forms, like fascism). 

Now, I had an antagonist to be righteously battled. I assumed this would be taken as a joke, understood by viewers as a parody. Just because trucks are everywhere, doesn’t mean they are organizing in some ritualistic, all-male underworld—like the vaguely masonic society of dads dressed as Easter bunnies in South Park,⁵ or the frat house with a giant pentagram in the basement in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,⁶ from which high-school girls keep disappearing.

But, as I continued to make the work, I myself started to understand that it was a joke but also not a joke. Was the premise of The Truck Guys as nonsensical as I first thought?

Almost every instance of hate crimes that have been done against people in my life, either because they are Muslim, Black, Brown, or queer or trans, have involved pick-up trucks. I know of many anecdotes that friends and loved ones have shared with me (but I will not share them here, because they are not my stories to tell); it only occurred to me later, as I delved in deeper to what pick-up trucks symbolize, that trucks have been involved in all of those hate crimes. The truck becomes a vessel that protects certain people—in the case of all of the aforementioned accounts, heterosexual white men—and allows them to enact violence against other people with the protection of distance. Ensconced in metal, they speed away, very rarely getting caught. 

There were also sociopolitical events taking place that would push me to question how much The Truck Guys conspiracy theory was a joke, or if it was tapping into something deadly serious. Early in 2022, two different events, both tied to the subject matter of my film project but in different ways, would happen right before my film premiered in Toronto in spring 2022.

First there was the “Truck Convoy,” also called the “Freedom Convoy,” which saw semi-trucks driving across Canada to occupy Ottawa. Whether this occupation was done out of concerns about labour, pandemic mandates, or white grievance continues to be up for debate, but one thing that is hard to deny is the fact that the protest was treated differently than any past protest in Ottawa, and that, had these primarily white protesters been replaced by primarily Indigenous or Muslim or Black or POC truck drivers, they would certainly not have been treated with the same leniency (an understatement!).

Next, there was the white supremacist terrorist who shot and killed as many Black American people as he could in a grocery store in Buffalo. If the young man’s racism could be thought of as a fire, then the fuel poured on top of it was the “Great Replacement Theory,” a conspiracy theory started by the French white supremacist Renaud Camus that basically says white people are being deliberately replaced by BIPOC people. Camus’s Le Grand Remplacement become a rallying call for FOX news host Tucker Carlson, whose widely broadcast rhetoric has been pointed to for directly instigating terrorism like the Buffalo shooting.⁷ This is only the most recent in a series of rage-filled conspiracy theories that fester from the wounds of white grievance: schemes disseminated by people with influential platforms.⁸

By rejecting the foundations of reason, these conspiracy theorists can get a whole subset of society behind them, believing in whatever they say. They can write their own narrative, one that reflects their political desires and needs. And in so doing, certain human lives become a casualty, as calls for violence, polarization, and hate of “the other” proliferate. 

As these events rolled out before my exhibition, I was reflecting once again on the culture from which I come. I wanted white settlers to cut the shit, and check their entitlement and self-pity. I came to Saskatchewan with a sense that I would empathize with the white working-class, but I was finding it harder and harder to do so. Instead, my energy understandably was going to those who were in the most need of social and political support—namely, BIPOC people and Muslims—who were still being inordinately surveilled and targetted by racists in a country that continues to be, in its DNA, racist, white-supremacist, and colonial in its very foundations. 

The Question of Radical Empathy

To empathize means to try and project oneself into another person’s experience in order to imagine how they feel. Empathy is an effort at understanding, and so it is always speculative, an impossible exercise but a nevertheless useful one. 

For the final days of my exhibition at Vtape, where The Truck Guys debuted, the exhibition’s curator Lisa Steele organized an online screening of the film, to be followed by a live Q&A between myself and Logan Williams. Logan is an artist, theatre practitioner, and my former grad student: we are white settlers from rural-ish backgrounds, and so reflected on The Truck Guys from our own POVs. We encouraged audience questions, and someone asked this:

Did making this work feel like a subversive action/activism to you? Besides trying to communicate across the divide, do you think we need to reason with those who have chosen to give support to an unreasonable and anti-social response to ‘civic responsibilities’? I can’t help but feel this is the slippery slope that leads to other injustices, or unjust policy or laws. Thinking of the U.S. most recently of course… but up here, in the simplest and most immediate of ways—how the anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers act aggressively even in the shopping aisles…

It was one of the thorny questions at the heart of the work, and so I responded as best I could in the moment: I hear you on the desire for communicating across difference being a slippery slope. I feel ambivalent about engaging in the work of reaching across the divide. 

Could radical empathy help with the resolution of conflict and the cultivation of healthier communities? How can we, as communities, organize best practices around radical empathy that provide opportunities for healing and repair while preventing any further harm?

Real-world events have heightened the stakes of what began for me as a parody and a parafictional film about a made-up conspiracy I created while I was bored in my car. Now, the idea of empathy that I had been exploring in theory as I made this film was put to the test. 

I am still interested in the possibility of radical empathy as a way to transform disconnected societies for the better, even as I struggle with what this looks like in practice. I do have many questions around how best to implement radical empathy in practice in our communities, and I would love for this film to start the conversation that can be continued with other people.

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After I made The Truck Guys, I started to see that the film could be an allegory for structural racism and xenophobia, including Islamophobia. The way that the narrator monitored “The Truck Guys” and fixated on their behaviour was not unlike how white settlers might surveil and enact violence against BIPOC people and Muslims and new immigrants and refugees.

There is also another register that the work exists in, a non-allegorical one, that makes viewers laugh. Storytelling, improvisation, and comedy are ways for humans to imagine the world differently, to release heavy emotions, and to see ourselves and others in new ways. It was interesting for me to see how people from diverse backgrounds found The Truck Guys funny, because it affirmed for me that the film was still coming across as a parody that allows people to think about real-world events in an un-real, fictional context that relishes in the absurd. 

Making The Truck Guys was the first time I played with improvisation and acting to develop the characters’ monologues. Late in spring 2022, I signed up for improv classes at The Second City as a way to step out of my comfort zone. It was the thing that scared me the most, and so I would do it as a way to grow. I also wanted to learn how to speak extemporaneously again. After years in academia, I had a tendency to overthink everything, and working with improvisation in a site-responsive way had proven to be a generative approach to storytelling. Now in my fourth level of improv classes, I am finding myself inspired by creating in a way that is fundamentally collaborative and founded on listening to other people. As my most recent improv teacher put it, drawing from principles of Chicago long-form improv, it is about “discovery, not invention,” about finding what is there, right in front of you, to work with and to transform.

Lauren Fournier (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, and professor currently based in Toronto.

1. And yet, his work was made possible because of funding from the university: I was living on a research creation SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship hosted by the Visual Studies Faculty at the University of Toronto. Lisa Steele supervised my project, meeting with me weekly over zoom—a generous act made all the more generous when I knew she’d recently retired.
2. I know there are women, non-binary, and gender-fluid people who drive trucks too.
3. Lauren Fournier, writer and director, The Truck Guys, video, 2022.
4. I’d even heard recently that the U.S. is already in the midst of a cold civil war. There are others who would say the civil war has already begun, and that it isn’t cold—especially not if you are a Black American at such risk of violence.
5. “Fantastic Easter Special,” South Park, Season 11, Episode 5, 4 April 2007. Written and dir. by Trey Parker.
6. “Reptile Boy,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2, Episode 5, 13 October 1997. Written and dir. by David Greenwalt.
7. David Folkenflik and Domenico Montanaro, “What the shooting in Buffalo has to do with Fox News host Tucker Carlson,” NPR, 17 May 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/05/17/1099587491/what-the-shooting-in-buffalo-has-to-do-with-fox-news-host-tucker-carlson.
8. Alex Jones is one of the best-known examples.

This article is published in issue 39.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue