Mind Kontrol Themes on TeleVision

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Postby nathan28 » Thu Apr 16, 2009 1:00 pm

MinM wrote:
AlanStrangis wrote:Don't forget Lost creator JJ Abrams's Fringe (though it's not specifically about mind control):

'Fringe' element haunts Fox shows
'Observer' spotted at games, in 'Idol' audience
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Eagle-eyed Fox viewers may have seen a pale, well-dressed bald guy showing up in the strangest of places.

The expressionless man -- who looks like a Blue Man Group star, without the paint -- has been spotted in the audience of "American Idol," on the sidelines at an NFL divisional playoff game, a Yankees game and a NASCAR race -- all live events broadcast on the network.

"Fringe" fans have quickly identified the man as the Observer, an enigmatic character who plays a part in the show's mythology.

He's never identified, and the sports announcers or "Idol" stars never acknowledge his presence onscreen. And that's the point, as Fox continues to roll out a mysterious viral marketing campaign meant to equal the character's shadowy ways.

Fox wouldn't comment on the campaign -- likely hoping to keep an air of ambiguity to it all. But internally, staffers have taken to calling it the "Where's Baldo?" initiative.

"Fringe" fans have also taken to posting the Observer's appearances on YouTube -- and Fox has not-so-mysteriously looked the other way.

Michael Cerveris, the actor who plays the Observer, will continue to show up in character at various televised events in the coming weeks.
'Fringe'-'Observer'


Holy shit, how decadent can we get? Do they really want me to start buying first prints of Evola and Guenon? Is the entire Western world going to turn into an ARG?

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Postby justdrew » Thu Apr 16, 2009 3:57 pm

the grandfather of all mind control themed shows:

Joe 90
Joe's adoptive father and computer expert, Professor Ian "Mac" McClaine, is the inventor of the BIG RAT, (Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer), a device that allows knowledge and experience to be copied from the minds of top experts in their fields to another person. Mac's friend, Sam Loover, a secret agent for the World Intelligence Network (WIN), persuades Mac to let Joe use the machine to work for WIN. After the requisite skill is transferred, and provided Joe is wearing special spectacles containing hidden electrodes, he is able to fly jet fighters, perform surgery, and so on, while appearing innocent in the eyes of his enemies.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_90

Of course Joe's more than willing, but as we would point out today, a nine year old adopted boy is in no position to give consent to such things.

Of course the show was just cold-war entertrainment
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Postby yathrib » Thu Apr 16, 2009 4:20 pm

"My Own Worst Enemy" sounds a little like a sanitized version of "A Scanner Darkly."
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Postby DrVolin » Thu Apr 16, 2009 4:45 pm

justdrew wrote:the grandfather of all mind control themed shows:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_90



And don't forget Captain Scarlet, in which the mysterons remote control replicas of people. That was my favourite of the Supermarionnation shows. There is a new all CGI version. My favourite Gerry Anderson overall was UFO/Space 1999. Lots of mind control themes there as well.
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Postby Penguin » Thu Apr 16, 2009 6:02 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pretender_(TV_series)

The Pretender is an American television series that aired on NBC from 1996 to 2000. The series starred Michael T. Weiss as Jarod, a genius and former child prodigy with "the ability to become anyone he wants to be," i.e., to flawlessly impersonate anyone in virtually any line of work.

Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) is a child prodigy who was abducted at a young age and raised in a think tank called The Centre, based in the fictional town of Blue Cove, Delaware. Jarod's mentor and father figure is Sydney, a psychologist working for The Centre who coached him through a number of complex simulations designed to challenge his intellect. When Jarod discovered that the Centre was using data gathered from his response to the simulations for nefarious purposes, he escaped. Since that time, Jarod has been on the run, despensing emotional justice to criminals who cover up their crimes by putting the criminals through similar (but staged) situtations, and The Centre is never far behind.

Miss Parker (Andrea Parker), Sydney (Patrick Bauchau) and Broots (Jon Gries) make up The Centre team charged with recapturing Jarod.


I remember watching this one back in the days when I had a telly.
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Re: Mind Kontrol Themes on TeleVision

Postby Truth4Youth » Thu Apr 16, 2009 6:06 pm

elfismiles wrote:In the "real world" we are told that there are "Sleeper Agents" working for Al-Qaeda. The mainstream use of that phrase, which has previously largely only been used among conspiracy researchers focused on MK-Ultra and beyond type strategems, seemed telling.


And in the greatest Charles Bronson movie of all time:

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Postby justdrew » Thu Apr 16, 2009 6:42 pm

DrVolin wrote:And don't forget Captain Scarlet, in which the mysterons remote control replicas of people. That was my favourite of the Supermarionnation shows. There is a new all CGI version. My favourite Gerry Anderson overall was UFO/Space 1999. Lots of mind control themes there as well.


the new Cap. Scarlet was fairly good.

but damn UFO (pronounced you-foe by the characters) - that was the shit. To admit the truth, my ufo interests have always primarily been about trying to re-enact ep 2 Exposed. In that ep a test pilot discovers SHADO's operations and threatens to go public, but instead he gets to join (or be killed). I guess the point is, this stuff does indeed shape impressionable young minds, especially those raised by a pack of wild televisions as I was. God only knows what's going to happen with a generation raised on first-person-shooters (may not be as influential really, as the STORY in such things is generally irrelevant and throwaway, and less imagination is actually used. That MAY be one of the main goals of media last couple decades, to stunt the range of possible imagination. Plus back then I only ever even saw about half the eps, and it's not like it was ever in re-runs, all I had was dim memories of the show for decades until I got the DVD sets a few years back.
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Postby smiths » Thu Apr 16, 2009 8:34 pm

well,
i hope i can be allowed a small diversion into books instead of TV shows,
but i have been meaning to ask for a while if anyone knows of any commentary or discussion about limony snicketts 'series of unfortunate events' books

i was interested when i read the first book to my seven year old son by the evil character, count olaf, having the all seeing eye tatooed on his ankle and eyes were everywhere,
olaf is attempting to steal the three orphans fortunes and his scheme in the first book is to marry the young girl in a staged wedding performance,

but i really began to wonder about it all by the fourth book when the hypnotist Dr Georgina Orwell hypnotises ten year old klaus and attempts to get him to kill someone,

now on book five the orphans are at a boarding school with a mad principle named nero and once again Olaf is trying to get them,

it would be easy to just throw them away but my son absolutely loves them and always wants us to go to the library and get the next one whenever we finish one

anyone know anything about it?
the question is why, who, why, what, why, when, why and why again?
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Postby DrVolin » Thu Apr 16, 2009 9:25 pm

justdrew wrote:To admit the truth, my ufo interests have always primarily been about trying to re-enact ep 2 Exposed.


I know what you mean. I didn't realize until much later how much of a role model Straker turned out to be for me. And two Space 1999 episodes had major effects on my personality formation and my career: Voyager's Return and Dragon's Domain.

Interesting looking film, T4Y. I'll have to check it out.
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Postby Stephen Morgan » Fri Apr 17, 2009 11:30 am

smiths wrote:i hope i can be allowed a small diversion into books instead of TV shows,
but i have been meaning to ask for a while if anyone knows of any commentary or discussion about limony snicketts 'series of unfortunate events' books


There's a film of that. Big Eye.

I recently watched a load of Babylon 5 and it's full of this symbolism. Mainly the fate of Talia Winters, the telepath, who was secretly implanted with a sleeper personality by the Psi Corp and whose real personality is destroyed when the sleeper personality is activated. Garibaldi also has his mind controlled into betraying Sheridan.

Sticking with sci-fi the recent ITV series Primeval has clones from the future with no will of their own who can replace people. Also the Claudia Brown character disappears at the end of the first series due to some unwise tampering with the space-time continuum and then reappears at the start of the next series with a new personality, walking in with the camera focusing on her ruby red shoes. This photo also reminds me of what the Control of Candy Jones says about mirrors:

Image

Also: Image

More images here.

There's also the film Cypher which is excellent and My Brother Tom which is available on Google video.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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Oh No! It's Mr Poe!

Postby annie aronburg » Fri Apr 17, 2009 11:54 am

smiths wrote:well,
i hope i can be allowed a small diversion into books instead of TV shows,
but i have been meaning to ask for a while if anyone knows of any commentary or discussion about limony snicketts 'series of unfortunate events' books

i was interested when i read the first book to my seven year old son by the evil character, count olaf, having the all seeing eye tatooed on his ankle and eyes were everywhere,
olaf is attempting to steal the three orphans fortunes and his scheme in the first book is to marry the young girl in a staged wedding performance,

but i really began to wonder about it all by the fourth book when the hypnotist Dr Georgina Orwell hypnotises ten year old klaus and attempts to get him to kill someone,

now on book five the orphans are at a boarding school with a mad principle named nero and once again Olaf is trying to get them,

it would be easy to just throw them away but my son absolutely loves them and always wants us to go to the library and get the next one whenever we finish one

anyone know anything about it?


The story is just starting to get good around book the fifth, smiths, so hang in there, wait until Sunny starts using nonsense words like "Bushcheney!"

My favorite "children's" books ever.

I have all the books on cd, in hardcover AND the Unauthorized Autobiography.

I cried at The End.

A child's' handbook of the illuminaughty if ever there was one, peppered with literary allusions that will delight dedicated readers for years.

Whatever you do, DON'T watch the movie.

READ the stories or listen to the audio books read by the author Daniel Handler (the occasional accordionist for the Magnetic Fields)

It's hard to believe he started the series before 9-11.

I keep meaning to start a thread in the books subforum about RI-themed books for kids. This series would be at the top of my list along with the His Dark Materials Trilogy and Flux and Fixed by Beth Goobie.
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.
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Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Apr 18, 2009 6:23 pm

That 1977 Charles Bronson movie, 'Telefon,' based on a 1975 novel is a decoy of the 1976 book about CIA hypnosis victim, Jessica Wilcox, also known by her professional modeling name, Candy Jones.

Her CIA doctor handler in Oakland would make triggering sounds over the phone to induce trance long-distance in Candy Jones while she was in NYCity. That same phone call-triggering device was recently used in a movie called 'The Kovak Box' made as a decoy of the murder of weapons expert, David Kelly, in the UK. Woo.

The first historical decoy novel on USG mind control is the 1942 novel called 'Donovan's Brain' written back when William Donovan was tasked with starting the Office of Special Services (OSS), the progenitor of the CIA.

The book was turned into a Hollywood woo woo horror movie in 1953 when the CIA's MK-ULTRA program officially began.

The protagonist who saves "W.H. Donovan's" brain in a tank and is then taken over by that brain is a character named "Dr. Patrick Cory." "Trick corps?" Get it?

And Dr. Cory limps just like Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (who had a club foot) when he's under the 'telepathic control' of "Donovan's Brain."

A truly historical OSS/CIA-Hollywood decoy.
And the fact that future First Lady, Nancy Davis Reagan, was in this decoy movie is just too ironic. Thirty years later DCI William Casey would be controlling her real life husband's brain to wage Nazi campaigns of torture and murder.

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CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Postby MinM » Thu May 14, 2009 8:35 am

Earth-704509
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Postby elfismiles » Mon Sep 28, 2009 3:53 pm

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http://hplusmagazine.com/print-issue-sale-now

YOU Are the Doll
At its best science fiction tv satisfies our desire for escapist pop while also holding up a mirror to the zeitgeist and especially to those deep fears and desires that elude the strategies of more conventional and realistic narratives
Written By: Erik Davis on Dollhouse
Date Published: September 21, 2009 | View more articles in: Art & Entertainment

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Battlestar Galactica, with its dark meditations on prophecy, war and Cylon identity, is the shining recent example, but seemingly cornier fare can also provide candy-coated conundrums that bear rumination, and that almost sneak up on you with their significance. Dollhouse, a Fox TV show created by Joss Whedon — the cult-show-breeding mastermind behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and the too-briefly-seen Serenity — is a glossy, jiggly, fisticuffs entertainment marked by many of the Whedon moves that made Buffy such a success: playful banter, accessible smarts and a pleasing air of unreality. At the same time, Dollhouse manages to sink its sexy teeth into some of the core anxieties — and possibilities — of our neurological century.

The show, whose first season was released on DVD this summer and which has been renewed for its second season despite mediocre ratings, centers on an illegal and quasi-mythical organization in Los Angeles that uses a fantastic neurological technology to provide programmable human “dolls” to wealthy clients for any number of tasks: sex, companionship, criminal deeds. Between assignments, the dolls — whose original selves have contractually agreed to offload their personalities and serve five-year terms of servitude before getting their selves back — live like contented lobotomy patients in the “dollhouse,” an underground facility that resembles an Ayurvedic spa, Santa Monica-style. A rogue cop is hunting the organization, which is also experiencing its own technical difficulties — most notably the pesky tendency of some dolls to grow towards self-awareness and occasionally explode with festivals of batshit mayhem.

On one level, Dollhouse is just the sort of goofy, cleavage-baring thriller you might expect to see on Fox on a Friday night. Hotties and motorcycles abound, edits are slick and fast, and the requisite chase scenes and bone-crunching ninja brawls are often executed in high heels, for which the show has a considerable fetish. Despite the intelligence and wit of many episodes, the narrative flow often feels more like a roller-coaster than an organic story, with abrupt and needless twists and turns that derive less from plot or character needs than the compulsion to yank the audience around. The acting is so-so throughout, with few of the actors rising to the challenge of embodying characters that are not really “characters” at all, but flesh-bots who oscillate between innocuous zombiedom and a revolving door of one-shot personalities.

Still, in spite of the show’s glaze of artificial popcorn butter — or perhaps, given the loop-de-loop logic of sensationalist popular culture, precisely because of its disarming layer of cheese — Dollhouse takes a reasonably meaty bite out of one of the more ominous and potentially liberating conundrums of 21st century life: the thoroughly constructed nature of human identity. The show frames this conundrum in terms of neuroscience and the pervasive pop metaphor of the mind as a programmable input-output device. Original personalities are “wiped” and stored on cartridges that resemble old 8-track tapes; other “imprints” are not only shuffled between the dolls but remixed into the perfect blend of characteristics for any given job. The show’s ambivalence about such “posthuman” technologies is captured by the character who does all the wiping and remixing: a smug, immature, and charmingly nerdish wetware genius named Topher Brink, whose simultaneously dopey and snarky incarnation by the actor Fran Kranz reflects the weird mix of arrogance and creative exuberance that inform so much manipulative neuroscience.

For a science-fiction thriller, there is not much emphasis on gadgetry. In one episode, the doll Echo, played by Buffy vet Eliza Dushku, is implanted with a “brain camera” that turns her into a remote surveillance device that allows the ATF to spy on the creepy religious cult she has been programmed to infiltrate (paradoxically — or perhaps allegorically — the device temporarily blinds her). But overall, Dollhouse is much less concerned about posthuman technology than it is about current social reality, or at least about how the late capitalist media culture that saturates our lives will transform through posthuman technology into a dizzying scramble of identity and desire.

That’s why Dollhouse can be read most basically as an ironic reflection of Hollywood itself, and especially the peculiar fate of actors living in LA. When not on assignment, the dolls, who are uniformly fit and attractive, spend their time doing yoga, swimming, sleeping, and eating five star food — presumably with vegan and raw options. “It’s important to exercise,” they murmur like Stepford wives. “I try to be my best.” This almost literally mindless maintenance of happy leisure — the ideal of SoCal’s hedonic “good life” — is then contrasted with the caricatured and often highly skilled roles these hardbody blank slates are episodically compelled to perform. The dollhouse can be seen as a Hollywood house of mirrors. In one show, we even glimpse the operation’s enormous costume room, a museum of fabricated identities that would be far more familiar to the actors on the show than to the vast majority of the punters watching the thing on TV.

On a deeper level, the business of the dollhouse — which one staff member sardonically describes as being “pimps and killers, but in a philanthropic way” — simply literalizes aspects of human power relationships that all of us are already familiar with in the mundane, not-quite-Sci-Fi world that we already live in, and that the show itself often self-consciously references. Lovers use one another to sustain fantasies of dominance and submission, cult leaders enslave believers, military organizations treat soldiers as pawns, and even the most successful pop music diva is — as one character proclaims — “a factory girl.” All of us are dolls sometimes, and dollhouse engineers other times. Cleverly, Dollhouse incarnates this fundamental split between masters and slaves in the panopticon-inspired architecture of the dollhouse set itself, which places the employees who run the show on a balcony that looks down onto the dolls flexing their muscles or sleeping below. The space has an open, airy feel, with few locked doors, and this deceptive informality disguises an invisible architecture of control.

The uncanniness of invisible control systems — whether in fictions of real life — helps motivate the paranoia that runs through the show. This stretches from the “gigantic multipronged conspiracy” of the international dollhouse organization itself — captured in one episode in the classic image of a wall covered with an octopus of documents, thumbtacks, and linking strings—to the fact that, in a BSG -like twist, we don’t always know which new characters we meet are actually dolls on assignment. Occasionally, these paradoxes take us into pure Philip K. Dick territory, particularly towards the end of the first season, when — spoiler alert — the cop pursuing the organization not only discovers that his lover is a doll, but watches her concocted personality get momentarily over-ridden by a more mysterious persona whose covert messages seemingly come from an unknown mole inside the organization.

Shadowy international conspiracies are the bread-and-butter of thrillers these days, but the undertow of suspicion that runs through Dollhouse ultimately turns on a premise that hits pretty close to home: the possibility that you yourself, dear TV fan, are more of a construct than you suppose. In one episode, a number of random people on the street are asked for their opinions about the dollhouse, which many discount as an urban legend. One complains that the organization, if it exists, takes away “everything that makes you more than a cluster of neurons.” But isn’t this the big question: what if we are just a cluster of neurons? And what does that possibility do to our understanding of morality and choice, fantasy and personality?

While Dollhouse mostly hints at the darker dimension of the neuron cluster, it also hints at some of the upside — not least of which is the functional immortality that might come with replicating that pattern of neurons, a revolutionary possibility that the show flirts with but, lamely, only barely explores. Many of the missions the dolls undertake also heal far more than they harm, and there are hints as well that the organization itself is not as nefarious as it first appears. Even the dolls are not totally mindless slaves — as the season progresses, a few begin to exhibit behaviors that go beyond their programs, some of which reflect deeply hard-wired traces of their original personalities and more interesting ones that suggest budding forms of self-consciousness and moral agency.

In one episode, the doll Echo is hired out as an art thief, and has an encounter with a Picasso painting whose cubist portraiture she interprets as signs of a broken self. But Picasso’s fractured perspectives could equally be seen as an attempt to expand beyond the conventional self and its “single vision” into a wider embrace and affirmation of the many identities that potentially flow through us — a flow that may soon become something more like a tsunami.

Erik Davis regularly posts to www.techgnosis.com. His most recent book was The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape.

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/art-e ... u-are-doll
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mk for kids

Postby sw » Mon Sep 28, 2009 4:53 pm

The Rats of NIMH

The Dark Crystal

Mulan

Not mind control....but my parts really identified with the angry little boy in the Christmas special...Little Drummer Boy. Obviously the end is not on target but the incredible depth of rage and painting a smile on his face and telling him to perform.
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