9:23:23

Part 1

“This is no simulation!”

-Being John Malkovich, 1998

Silence of the Lambs (1990). Poster in Buffalo Bill’s basement

In the Line of Fire (1993). Mitch Leary’s assassination wall

“In the 1950s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), under Harry S. Truman, began the MKUltra Project, which was officially sanctioned in 1953.

Despite its official sanction, it was illegal because the principal aim of MKUltra was to experiment on the brains of unwilling human subjects: primarily U.S. and Canadian citizens.

By the time MKUltra allegedly ended in 1973, torture, deaths and the sexual abuse of children had entered the experiment.

Of course, animal experiments came first. The first successful operations to control the behavior of dogs with brain implants was recorded in 1964.

By the time Michael Chrichton's novel, Terminal Man, was released in 1972, the CIA had spent 8 years building upon their success.

Imagine half a century of progress since then.

The year following the release of the feature film, THE TERMINAL MAN, began the Church Committee and Gerald Ford's United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, both of which exposed the Horrors of the MKUltra Project, among other things involving the CIA and military (The U.S. army's Edgewood Arsenal human experiments, being only one).

This to a nation already reeling from the exposure of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman's Tuskeegee Experiment (An experiment in racial genocide that Truman shared with other countries who wanted to rid themselves of their "undesirables": most notably, Guatemala), already broke in 1972 by Jean Heller of the Associated Press, and ended by President Richard M. Nixon.

The complete knowledge base of MKUltra.

Article in Newsweek.”

-Feoamante.com

“One of the weirdest chapters in U.S. history was approved on April 13, 1953, and any time anyone says anything about ‘the good ol' days,’ when things were just better, simpler, and kinder, well, point to MKUltra and say, ‘Check out this madness!’ When then-CIA director Stansfield Turner testified about the program in 1977, he said (via the Smithsonian) that the bottom line was to develop ‘the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior.’

Operating under the umbrella of MKUltra were as many as 162 sub-projects, with as many as 80 different organizations involved in research. Unfortunately, a lot of what went on within them has been lost: In 1973, the majority of the documents associated with MKUltra were destroyed in a massive (and not-at-all-suspicious) purge.

Traces of some survived, including documentation on Sub-project 42 — also known as Operation Midnight Climax — and sub-project 68. That, says McGill University, was the work of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who performed experiments so horrifying he's been called ‘Scotland's Mengele.’ Being compared to the Nazi's most notorious doctor probably isn't the life goal of most medical professionals, so let's look at what he did to deserve this dubious title.”

-Grunge.com

___

Here are some films about MKultra and government assassins. This is not an exhaustive list. Image montage in this post is mine.

The IPCRESS File,1965 (The hypnotic power of ‘IPCRESS’ - the ‘Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress’)

A Clockwork Orange, 1971. Ludovico technique aversion therapy.

The Stepford Wives, 1975. Sketches for Joanna Eberhart’s clone.

The Game, 1997. The Game is about Mkultra *deprogramming*, I think. I now believe all of David Fincher’s movies are about Mkultra, especially Fight Club and Zodiac, which I write about extensively in my book Time Tells, 2023.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004. “Hollywood imagines brainwashing to be one of two things: torture, or, as here, a kind of sci-fi magic.”

Part 2

“Hey, who’s being brainwashed here?”

-“Silence of the Lambs, an analysis,” Hamish Spencer:

“Beyond the well established and endlessly discussed ideas about transformation, there is another compelling interpretation of the moth/butterfly symbol and it has to do with mind control experiments. These mind control experiments are not science fiction. The US MK Ultra program really existed – here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

‘In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the Department of Defense had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD. Much of what the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission learned about Mk Ultra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General’s office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973.[47] However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of Mk Ultra.[11]’

So the American government has, in the past, illegally conducted mind control experiments on unwitting civilians.

The conspiracy wikia on Monarch Mind Control lists the following:

‘The Monarch Mind Control designation was originally applied by the US Department of Defense to a sub-program under the CIA’s MK-Ultra Program. However, the techniques employed in the Monarch programming system extend back further under various names, such as the Nazi marionette programming. (refer to operation Paperclip).

Monarch Mind Control is a form of mind control which creates a mind control slave by utilizing the human brain’s trauma response of dissociation to create a form of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) wherein various triggers can cause the slave personality to surface and respond to commands given by the master (‘Handler’ in Monarch parlance).

Despite the intuitive connection between the Handler and a King or Monarch, the Monarch in this context refers to Monarch Butterflies, not to a Monarchical form of government.

Silence of the Lambs, FBI training ground mottos, Quantico

Mind control experiments are, almost by definition, not something you would go telling everyone about. In fact, there are very few proven cases of MK Ultra mind control and the very existence of the Monarch program can be largely attributed to alleged survivor Cathy O’Brien. In her book Trance Formation of America (1995), she describes horrific, systematic trauma based mind control on a wide scale including women and children programmed to be sex slaves.

The idea that a totalitarian state could control people like Pavlov’s dogs had appeared in 1940s novels, notably Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ But it took Mao’s China and the forced ‘confessions’ of American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict to make brainwashing an everyday concept.

It is thought that MK Ultra and its purported sub program called Monarch (after the butterfly) were devised in the 1950’s in response to some very disturbing film, seen by the world, of US POWs seemingly ‘Brainwashed’ into renouncing their country, shortly after their capture.

Whether or not you believe something like MK Ultra and Monarch could possibly happen today, it’s fair to assume that astute novelists and filmmakers like Thomas Harris and Jonathan Demme would have been aware of these concepts and/or events, in the late 1980s.

Of course, Silence of the Lambs wouldn’t be the only film to deal with themes of ‘Brainwashing to create the perfect killer’. There are many others – The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme went on to direct the remake in 2001) , The Bourne franchise, The IPCRESS file, Iron Man 3 and Universal Soldier to name a few. Silence of the Lambs differs from these other films, only in that it presents this frightening scenario in a much more subtle and therefore unnerving manner. Much like brainwashing itself.

Wuchowski’s on the true “hidden” meaning of The Matrix (1999)

Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo “Butterfly” Bill spreading his wings of trans-formation. Mannequins (alter personalities) surround him—all of which are said to be Mkultra symbols. Buffalo Bill also uses Night Vision goggles to stalk Agent Sterling in his dark basement at the end of the film. Night Vision goggles are a military invention and used by soldiers in covert operations and combat. In Q post 142, in 2017, Q refers to Jason Bourne as “(CIA/Dream).” Interestingly, Ted Levine, who plays Buffalo Bill says that John Malkovich turned down the part, instead choosing to act in In the Line of Fire and Being John Malkovich.

The notion of trauma-based mind control, as represented by the transformation from grub into chrysalis and butterfly, is central to the understanding of the deeper themes of the Silence of the Lambs. This uncomfortable yet strongly implied counter-narrative asserts that; rather than catching them, the FBI and CIA used trauma-based mind control programs to, in fact, create serial killers like Hannibal the Cannibal, Multiple (Personality Disorder) Miggs, Bufallo Bill and the others as cold, programmable assassins to use for their own unstated purposes.

In many ways the entire film can be viewed in terms of a staged event, drill or training run. The notion of film itself is of course an abstraction of life – All the world’s a stage, said Shakespeare. Here we have many levels to the drama. We start with Clarice’s initial FBI training and the various drills and simulations she sees or takes part in, and progress through her ‘other’ training at the hands of Jack and Hannibal as the story of her transformation unfolds. History tells us that staged events and agents provocateurs are often employed by intelligence services like the FBI. The FBIs COINTELPRO program saw agents pose as political radicals to disrupt the activities of political groups in the US, such as the Black Panthers, Ku Klux Klan, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Training is, of course, part of becoming an FBI agent and the ‘training montage’ is a common time-saving device, particularly in action movies. But this doesn’t feel like an action movie. The repeated references to training and staging (verging on over-use) appear to be pointing at something much deeper. It may be argued that they reflect the Director’s views on training the mind or brainwashing. There is a certain Kafkaesque horror in not knowing what is real and what is not. The shock for us, the savvy viewer, is that Clarice will be traumatized/trained, via an extremely elaborate series of horrific but staged events, to be the FBIs next programmable killer. Perhaps not surprisingly, almost everybody missed that bit. Frankly, part of us would probably rather not know.”

——

“Nazi Marionette programming” makes me think of Being John Malkovich (1999), a film, I now believe, is a false flag for CIA mind control, transhumanism, and Mkultra alters. Craig Schwartz is literally a puppet master—a mind control handler—who discovers a portal into the mind of real-life Hollywood actor John Malkovich. Shwartz sees the world through the metaphor of marionettes, which he makes himself, and which are doubles for the people in his life, whose strings he pulls. The entire film, like The Matrix, is a coded transhumanist narrative.

Here are some promotional posters for the film. The symbolism is not subtle. It’s human minds that are being puppeteered—controlled—yet the source of that control is obfuscated and concealed.

The Criterion’s all-seeing poster is also not subtle—a mix of big brother and Illuminati symbolism. The posters look like CIA mind control diagrams.

I hated Being John Malkovich when it came out. Over the years, I attempted to write about the alias identity and doubling themes that were present in all of Charlie Kauffman’s work, but couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. I didn’t quite have the language, a language that was intentionally withheld from public consciousness. My training was theoretical (philosophical) and interpretative. I understood that something was wrong on the level of representation, and morality, but I did not have access to the bigger picture. I have always been obsessed with the theme of doubles, alters and multiple personalities—in horror and drama; in Victorian literature; in Brian De Palma’s early films—but felt there was something I didn’t understand about the true meaning of these films: their actual source material. There were gaps in my understanding and knowledge that I couldn’t account for or make fit. In my books, I analyzed the theme of doubling from a literary, cultural, and psychological perspective. I did not know enough about the deep state apparatus, and therefore could not apply the influence of covert history to cinema, or aesthetic theory, or the collusion between Hollywood and secret intelligence agencies. As I fill in the gaps, as I do research, as I rewatch these movies now, I have finally unearthed a language for what things really mean, for what we’ve all been living with and watching for a century. I have new eyes, new ears, new optics. But if we don’t know the terminology, if we don’t understand what we are seeing, if we are not allowed to speak it or name it, how can we understand it, much less combat it?

Kaufman also wrote the screenplay for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a memoir by 70s game show host, Chuck Barris, who wrote about being a CIA hit man in 1984 and then denied it in press interviews. George Clooney directed the film in 2002.

On Theeringer.com in 2019, Lindsay Zoladz addresses the internet theory that Being John Malkovich and Jordan Peele’s Get Out are connected: “I believe that Get Out and Being John Malkovich occur in the same universe. I’m calling it ‘The Mind Control Universe.”

Hamish Spencer’s analysis of Silence of the Lambs is important because it looks at the film from the perspective of staged events, narrative optics, simulation, and behavioral engineering, rather than as simply a “thriller.” The film is about being programmed, argues Spencer, to think and act a certain way, much like Peter Weir’s Truman Show. Life as social engineering.

Spencer: “With artful use of camera techniques, symbolic associations and (sometimes glaring) plot-line inconsistencies it would seem that the filmmakers are going to great lengths to pose the unconscious question – ‘What is real and what is not?’…Clarice passes a room containing two senior looking agents. It’s clear they’re on the Buffalo Bill case. On the chalkboard behind them we see the words Skins and Signature and also the phrase Blue eyed boy now. Bill has blue eyes, but why the word ‘now’? This could be interpreted on many levels – Is it a reference to the creating of an engineered master race as explored in ‘The Boys From Brazil’, a nod to Jane Elliott and her ‘Blue Eyed’ experiments in hierarchical social control or a simple question as to whether Bill is a patriot or a rogue operative? Note Bill’s proficiency with night-vision, the Nazi ephemera, US flag , maps and propaganda posters in his dungeon. Of course, the real-life Buffalo Bill was many things but notably his Wikipedia entry begins like this:

‘William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody (February 26, 1846 – January 10, 1917) was an American soldier…”

——

If reality were to be exposed for what it truly is, for what it truly has been, it would it impossible for the people controlling it to get away with what they are doing. In the Line of Fire’s (1993) Mitch Leary is a similar invention, with a similar clandestine trajectory: patriot turned government programmed rogue assassin. The FBI want Gary and Buffalo Bill—both trained and lethal—dead because they’ve outlived their purpose. Spencer posits that Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism may actually be an allegory for turning against one’s programming—to eat one’s own, so to speak. In Jacob’s Ladder (1990), there is the government drug “ladder” experiment given to Vietnam soldiers, which turns them into murdering, cannabalistic monsters.

In The Terminal Man (1974), a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, hopes to cure his violent seizures by agreeing to have a series of experimental microcomputers implanted into his brain. The surgery fails, the violence now triggers a pleasurable response in his brain, which has become “addicted to the electrical impulses.” He also “suffers” from the “delusion” that computers will rise up against humans. Listing a number of men whose “brain trauma” resulted in repeated killing sprees—Charles Whitman, Richard Speck, Lee Harvey Oswald—the government doctor, who conducted the failed experiment tells a TV reporter: “We’re trying to correct this violent behavior with surgery. Now I don’t think that’s a despicable thing. I think that’s a noble goal and an important goal.” The dubious reporter replies, “Isn’t that mind control?” The implication here is that these so-called famous serial killers, a notion widely implanted into the public consciousness, are in fact shadow government creations. Reportedly, Kubrick loved the Terminal Man, which failed at the box office and came out a couple of years after A Clockwork Orange.

Hamish Sherman:

“But could there be a symbolic meaning to [Thomas] Harris’ choice of name for his iconic character? Like the ‘alien hand’ of Dr Strangelove, is Hannibal’s Cannibalism a symbol of harm directed towards one’s own kind in the form of illegal military operations? (Note Lecter’s penchant for consuming ‘state employees’ – census taker, EMTs, Police etc.) It could be argued that Harris was indeed taking a metaphorical swipe at programs like MK Ultra that seek to use trauma to control a civilian person’s mind so they can be used to commit further atrocities in the name of the state.

The moment Clarice arrives at the Baltimore State Forensic hospital, she’s informed by Dr Chilton that Lecter is:

a. A Monster

b. Their most prized asset.”

Silence of the Lambs promotional poster.

Corey Feldman, film premiere. Butterfly shirt print which looks like a tattoo.

Billy Porter, red carpet. Porter tells ET that butterflies are a symbol of the transgender community

Robbie Williams, 2016. Butterfly onesie.

80s child actor (Family Ties) Brian Bonsall in 2009 with butterfly tattoo on throat. Arrested on battery assault.

Like the perfect celebrity, and child actor, who doesn’t know they are totally controlled and prgrammed to perform a role, the perfect assassin, notes Sherman about Clarice Starling, is one who “doesn’t know that’s what she is.” The true origin story is a cover, an alias. Conspiracy Theory’s (1997) programmed assassin Jerry Fletcher does not know who or what he is either. He has been programmed to play a conspiracy theorist.

The faulty programming of child actors of the 1970s and 80s often resulted in glitches. Many child actors woke up and began to rebel (drug addiction, crime, media scandals), which led to (programmed?) death (suicide). “[Hollywood is] a whorehouse and people go mad,” John Cusack told The Guardian in 2014, after the release of Maps of the Stars. Such glitches of rebellion and malfunctioning in programming rarely occurs anymore. We no longer see celebrities “lose their minds” or rebel against anything. Why?

Mkultra mind control is said to be able to erase and modify memories, bringing to mind the crisis at the heart of Nolan’s Memento (2000). The film’s amnesiac is tattooed with cryptic commands he can neither remember or decipher. It seems celebrities can be replaced now. With what? Clones?

Sherman:

“Let’s not forget, it’s the always-ambiguous Jack Crawford who reminds Starling about the phone call to Hannibal [at the end of the movie]. By now some viewers and readers will be all too aware that Jack is the ringmaster in this serial killer/covert assassin circus and that he’s teed up this call with Hannibal as one final piece of trauma to control Clarice’s mind and keep her under his thumb. Consider the seemingly incidental trauma that Clarice has endured in order to advance her career and arrive at this point – murder, unending sexualization, semen, suicide, corpses, rotting corpses in bathtubs, kidnapping, human liver consumption, insect insertions, hospitalized psychopaths, escaped psychopaths, craniofacial removal, her first ‘kill’ etc. Now, whenever Jack needs Clarice to kill someone, all he need do is cast that person as another of Lecter’s evil offspring…

We’ve been subjected to the same trauma and manipulation as Clarice over the course of the film and, as a result, are in a fragile and suggestible state of mind ourselves. If we’re not careful we’ll come away, as millions of us did, safe in the knowledge that psychopaths are awful and the intelligence services do great work in catching and containing them. To do so is to completely miss the film’s subversive central theme. We missed it because we were victims of it – brainwashing. The surface narrative is there – yes. But the masterful use of symbols, staging and innuendo discussed in this presentation tell almost the opposite story, one of state-sponsored mind control and assassination. Only careful analysis can prevent our perception of events being hijacked.

But ‘where are the Lambs?’ I hear you ask. The Lambs, dear reader, are us. Childlike, kept in the dark, unaware of the malignant forces that seek to control our fate, silently screaming. A Starling may have tried to save us once but we were too scared to even run away. If we’re not slaughtered in the spring we’ll grow into sheep. It is our failure to comprehend the hidden agenda that lends its horror to the movie and to life itself.

Perhaps, if we’re smart enough and brave enough, we’ll lift the wool and unravel the knotted story-lines that wind up the city – they’re right there in front of us, just take a good look.”

——

I felt sad after reading Sherman’s essay, as though life itself has been one long false memory we have been forced to wake up from. But wake up we must.

The CIA and FBI have played a profound and secret role in our world, our culture, our politics, our bonds of affection. As one YT commenter put it: “We know nothing.”

9:28:23

9:22:23