There’s a show called Mind Control that recently came out from the U.K., in which a mind control specialist, Derren Brown, plays with the concept of how suggestable we are as a species, and how puppetlike we in fact can be made, by him at least, within the space of a couple of minutes.
In his new show, sane, sober people have their mind read, hand over their car keys and wallet, and are willing to surrender diamonds for mere paper. I might have disliked him thoroughly if it were all “parlour tricks” like that, but he also brilliantly points at the collective mentality we have as a group: Groups of musicians are willed into playing a single song in unison by telepathic (really, rather empathic) means. And his greatest indictment of us as a sheep culture is showing how well-planted subliminal advertising works on the mind. If you haven’t seen this show, I urge you to. It will at first amuse, and then deeply disturb you. It’s a very strong cry in the wilderness for the divine, in a backhanded sort of way.
I think about that concept anyway a lot, due to my background, and I watch for shifts in world thought.
Recently, as a culture, we are particularly taken with physical death. There’s giant , pummeling obsession with death my country has developed since 9/11.
It was always sort of there lurking, particularly in the 1940s film noir days, but nothing compares with the recent CSI phenomenon and everything attached to it. If I were a psychologist from another planet I’d have to surmise that a shift has occurred. The question however, is what is its root, and when it actually began to develop as dominating theme that it is today.
I was measuring the ambient thought in my own experience and found the following, just in one days’ journey of time:
1) A marked increase in news reporting of death-related stories. But this has been going on for decades!, you might say, and you would be right. But the level of sensationalistic, emotionally cloying tone has increased dramatically in recent years. Since the murder of Jean Benet Ramsey was found so lucrative a few years back in terms of ratings, much more disturbing detail has been added to murder stories. Graphic descriptions, morbid absorption with perversions, pedophilia in particular, has become the rage. The state in which victims are found is tantalizingly flagwaved. Parents, particularly you will note, only attractive ones, are given considerably more air time.
2) Rape, a crime which used to be rarely uttered on the news due to its high shock level when I was a small child, has now become such a well-catalogued event on television that a judge in a date-rape case recently tried to rule that, prior to conviction, the jury was not to be allowed to hear or use the words “rape kit” or other descriptive phrases that have been commonly and firmly planted in our collective usage to mean an eventual, actual rape. He brought forth the idea that that would too quickly villify the defendant. The show Law and Order keeps this in high profile.
3) The “CSI factor”, now an actual term in the legal world, has reached a popularity so strong that not only are there three CSI shows and several others that hedge the subject, but actual average people are now participating in a reality show in which they are brought into actual homicide cases and compete with each other in sleuthing techniques.
4) The fucked up serial-killer tidal wave: It began in novels years ago but went from Silence of the Lambs into an explosion through Seven, The Cell, and now it’s all over TV too and they recently did the Zodiac killer, etc., etc., etc.
5) The obsession with death factors into our obsession with youth: Cosmetic surgery is at an all-time high. More than 100 shows a year are made around it — from makeovers like The Swan and all its spinoffs to the recent grizzly reality footage of Gene Simmons and his wife getting joint face-lifts and his childrens’ reactions. More face-lifts are done than ever before, more eye surgeries are performed on Asians than ever before, more liposuction is being performed than ever before.
6) The cult of physical fitness has become so powerful that not only is it finally affecting the FDA, it has had an alltime boom in newly created sports drinks. You might argue that vanity doesn’t really fuel the fitness industry so much as health, but again, that’s about … life and death, ne?
7) Physical vulnerability displays are at an alltime high: The doctor shows have come back with great success around Gray’s Anatomy. The last wave of doctor shows was in the early, pre-hippie 1960s. The phenomenon of watching snippets (pardon) of actual graphic surgery (no matter how authentically created by Hollywood’s wonderful special-effects teams) brings home to the mind the constant fallibility of the human body. One has to ask if this is healthy? Even when dialogue and interpersonal relationships are a focus on the show, this is the subliminal plane on which it’s placed.
Sex and the City spawned waves of televised sexual promiscuity in a ripple effect that factors into even the tidiest of shows. The sense that life is short and no holds should therefore be barred is an undertone in everything.
9) There’s been an equal increase in the holy and unholy, as well as the supernatural or mystical: Shows about God talking to Man (Touched by an Angel capped this and there were dozens more) and Medium and Ghost Whisperer and etc. pitch the afterlife as if it were a proven reality, while at the same time, vampire lore has developed so far as to be put into detective-story settings and children’s cartoons. Anne Rice bit the jugular and it’s been guzzling ever since. There’s even a doomed theme of death weaving through the Harry Potter series. And how large is that!?.
10) Hip-hop and gangsta culture were always down with death, and now a nation is hiding in hoodies and people like Julie Andrews are using the word “Bling.” Life is short, live fast: that’s the message. Guns are more used now than ever before on television, being viewed as the less violent alternative to seeing more shocking, direct physical gore. And this is long after the violence-on-tv crusading moms of the seventies have gone to their rocking chairs.
11) The evidence of attraction to Goth morbidity turns up in all kinds of places these days, not just television but everywhere — even to our high fashion runways. Black is again the new black. Corsets were evening gown bodices a couple of years ago. The rosary bead necklace and black crystals with heavy silver hardware is in now, with touches of vinyl everywhere. Right now we’re doing the Edgar Allen Poe romantic kind of thing even in the tamest of department store catalogs. Gothic crosses and skulls are out of clubs and on five-thousand-dollar couture.
12) One could argue that all this in 10 and 11 is just typical of a country that is known for being influenced by irreverent “youth culture.” But there it is: Youth. Remain young. Do not die. Do not grow old. Very Orlando, very Life Death Immortality Mortality.
13) “Animals are not your friends”: This message used to be “Wild Animals are not your friends” and people loved to be frightened by trained lions and tigers in circuses. Nature was previously expected to be in regular proximity to man, and only wilderness and incredible size used to factor in. Having subdued that as an environment and nearly exterminated most of our threats, there’s now an obsession with the Cult of the Shark, the Pitbulls are Vicious pitch, and the Killer Bees, Mad Cow, Bird flu, and other more indirectly related bug threats. This month was even Shark Month, and I had to flip past numerous pictures of people who previously had limbs.
14) They also actually showed a dead dog on TV (before it was euthanized) in a recent news program. I myself am appalled that that could be held commonplace prime time television — to show an animal alive and then calmly tell us all that it was killed? It went by without even the slightest whisper from the animal rights folks, because we’re a culture so primed for death.
15) Lacking threats around us that are tangible, there’s always ALIENS that could come and take over our bodies and hatch out of our incubating chests. This reached its pitch a while back with Alien, The Abyss, so many others I can’t recount, but there’s a gorier, meatier post-effect in stuff like Skinwalkers…. the sick factor is still there.
16) Vengeance films: There has never been such an acceptance of it. Korean films are king here, with Japanese a high second. Our films have taken notes from Ichi the Killer and Old Boy. Fatal Attraction was a more homespun American version.
17) Mob films: And while we’re on the subject of murderers, there’s the old standby, The Godfather, which was recently voted Number One Influential film on American culture. It is the most quoted, the most obsessed over, the most glamorized and romanticized. This brings in the specific element of cruelty. The horse head in the bed was an alltime high example, and it’s been echoed in so many forms — the latest of which is going to be the new series Damages (another Glenn Close work), which will likely involve dead dogs (see number 14).
18) Natural Disaster Films: There were a bunch of soapy versions in the 70s — Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, so many… But now they’re big special-effect thrill rides, far more realistically terrifying — The Perfect Storm came out and we’re STILL enchanted by them even as Global Warming (and the Amy Corp of Engineers) has given us the New Orleans flood, and the largest tsunami in history thrashed Indonesia. No people, really. They really ARE real. Hello~? They’re REAL. Now go donate some more money for cleanup.
19) Drugs: Never on TV have prescription drugs of all kinds been pitched so baldly at us — even with their hillariously rancorous descriptions of side-effects. The aging baby-boom population is growing old, and they are telling you daily that you are. Do you want to believe them? Should you? Oh nevermind, here, just take this. You want to stay young don’t you?
20) Non-death death, or rather, no birth: Never in our past have we been able to control the beginnings of life so completely. We can terminate pregnancies (don’t get me wrong, I’m no anti-abortionist), stop pregnancies with condoms, pills and devices, and now can even regulate women’s periods to the point of near elimination, something which I confess, gave me a bit of consternation.
21) We can clone, but choose not to thus far. And AI is still trudging along. There’s a pitch toward bodily perfection that hit a Robo-Cop tone (or maybe it was the Bionic Man or Woman) even without surgery. We aim eventually to rest in a state of perfection, un-aged, un-sexed, untarnished by even the most human of complaints.
23) I will not go into war and the celebration of war culture — because I have always seen that as too blatant a theme to be mentioned as a subliminal technique. Let’s just note quietly that Rambo and Saving Private Ryan were there for a reason.
24) I’ve also not discussed inclining suicide rates or the influence of willingly committed acts of self-sabotage like anorexia, which is on the rise.
In short, it would be prudent to realize daily that you need, as an average American, to
clear
your
mind
…of the CONCEPT OF YOUR OWN IMMINENT DEATH OR PHYSICAL DOOM on average, over 50 times per day.
Can you do it?
Are you aware that you must do it?
And most importantly, HOW?
Pick your weapon of choice, be it reason, prayer, Buddhist concentration, Hindu meditation, whatever you like.
Is man even actually material, here today, gone tomorrow? that’s up to you.
But know that what you’re up against is Madison Avenue and Hollywood, and not even what it used to be, and the collective THEY is watching how you react. They want to sell you death.
And my question for you to ask is: “Just why would they be doing that?”
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