10:15:24

Hanky Panky, 1982. Secret military bases and dum networks under the Grand Canyon, USA.

Hanky Panky, underground military grid.

“Hanky Panky” is code for CIA. Another way of describing Mkultra and Voice to Skull programing: “Persuade him to commit suicide.”

In 1980s Hollywood movies, the deepest darkest secrets and truths were always presented as light-hearted and innocuous genre fare that could be defeated by normal, everyday citizens. On the one hand it is a good message—we should feel like that. But 80s entertainment culture was also one big distraction from the truth that was staring us in the face. I always thought Roman Polanski’s 1988 film Frantic was interesting for precisely the opposite reason: it is a film that chronicles how powerless an every man is when it comes to the shadow system. Action hero star Harrison Ford in his prime is helpless when his wife is kidnapped in Paris by drug traffickers. The entire movie depicts a great matrimonial devotion (or does it? Both his wife and the young French woman, who becomes his side kick, wear red dresses. One red dress is matronly, the other is short and sexy. The young streetwise French woman is a double of the wholesome American wife) as well as a great emasculation. A Hero’s Journey into the underworld/underbelly, I understand why Ford took the part, having been Indiana Jones for almost a decade. The Fugitive is an amalgam of Frantic and Indiana Jones—part helpless victim, part action hero and survivor.

Nothing was ever properly named in these films, or at all. They were shown but they were not named. We were looking, but we were not seeing. You never heard the word narcissist or sociopath or CIA or Mkultra thrown around 40 years ago, even in the crime genre. At most, you got the catchall description “government” or “secret government.” Things were just bad or good, but nothing had a name. Nothing had a name because we had the binary. You were on one side or you were on another. If you fell into the bad side, by accident or by design, you spent the entire movie trying to get out. Shadow governments/shadows worlds/shadow states were almost treated as comedic relief, or horror per the horror genre, or both (Evil Dead). Or maybe, as I’ve argued, it’s that people just weren’t afraid to die in 1980s movies because they didn’t die. The hero never died. Diegetic plot remained bound to the surface—the unspoken, the screwball, the triumphant ending—and thus could never be processed on the level of true reality. The deep state was like a thorn in the side of a character, a nuisance, a parable. The dark worlds and monsters that were revealed in the movies were confined to the screen. We were told they were not real.

But when the line between reality and fiction, fiction and nonfiction, movies and life, became completely blurred by the internet, disclosure and mass-awakening finally became possible. A tool of mass control and programming was turned into a tool of mass exposure and deprogramming, as we’re seeing with TikTok. True history has now become accessible to everyone.

By design the CIA is rarely named in the plot of movies. Reportedly, Hitchcock wanted to name his 1959 spy network movie, North by Northwest ,“The CIA Story.” But the CIA prohibited Hitchcock from doing this. The CIA and its covert operations could not be not in the public eye or in the American consciousness. Paul and Philip Collins explain that the CIA was all over the production of North by Northwest, the first major Hollywood production that was going to use the CIA’s name as part of its plot.

Since Hanky Panky does nothing with the information it pursues and uncovers (diegetically) or politically (as a entertainment product), this film can only be taken as a revelation of the method.

In Hanky Panky, the CIA has offices (a “caboose”) in the bowels of the circus beneath Madison Square Garden. This is code for: in the false matrix a clandestine world operates beneath our everyday world. For decades, this Mkultra world could rise to the surface at any moment and take your life away. This became terrifyingly evident with 90s movies like Enemy of the State. We were told there was no escaping the surveillance grid, the vigilante or non-compliant individual could be located and extinguished in seconds. This enormous global grid—aka PROMIS surveillance database—was being built while we were watching movies and living our lives, clueless.

I guess we didn’t learn our lesson with Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

“Who are you people that you can manipulate people’s lives?,” asks Hanky Panky’s architect (Gene Wilder) on the run.

Good question.

What was this shadow world really all about?

The movie won’t say. It won’t name the darkness that controls our world.

But we are learning now.