The Psyop Theory of Film Criticism
Sean Haylock Interviews Brett and Thomas
An interview conducted in late 2024 by Sean Haylock.
A major theme of your analyses is the disturbing tendency of mass media productions to valorize experiences of trauma, dissociative fantasy, and psychological disintegration, even to retail a worldview wherein those experiences hold the promise of liberation and empowerment.
There are schools of thought that would attempt to account for such a cultural pathology as the product of an ideological turn with a definite historical source, fingering a culprit such as nominalism in metaphysics, or capitalism, or liberalism, or Cultural Marxism. Your own approach differs significantly. Theory is not absent from your work, but it is parsed through particular claims about historical context and the provenance of the film under consideration. Can you comment on why a conceptual genealogy is inadequate to your task? Have you ever been tempted by something as simple as “decadence” as a sufficient explanation for the peculiarities of a film?
Brett: The more or less respectable “theoretical” approaches you mention suffer from the usual problems with doctrinairism. They don’t account for human agency as a historiographical factor, for example, at least not in any meaningful or coherent way. Big, impersonal forces hold all the explanatory power. Obviously, then, the notion that organized malevolence and conspiracy play a determining role in human affairs is off the table. And who funds these scholars and their departments? Let’s face it: academia, not unlike the news media, is programmed to be stupid in a lot of ways.
For one thing, no academically respectable “theory” can admit what the real regime is, that we are living under a cryptocracy, a ruling class or cabal exercising real political power sans the burden of being identified as the rulers. The cryptocracy is global, but in America it is managed by an equally unaccountable and mostly invisible “deep state.” The most visible component of this deep state is the massive administrative state in DC. In a word, what “theory” usually takes to be history and real historical data points are precisely what the regime offers them as fact.
So these doctrinaire or otherwise reductionist approaches are just not up to the task of analyzing the origins and purpose of our traumagenic media environment, or what we call the MK-Culture, because the MK-Culture is not truly an impersonal and organic outgrowth of market forces and the whims of human creativity and of whatever else. Whatever organic factors may be conditioning it, the MK-Culture is in fact a synthetic creation, designed to restructure human beings at their very core through what are essentially trauma-based mind control techniques, just scaled up and applied at low-intensity to the whole population.
Since the era of the phony counterculture and of the Phoenix Program, everyone has been subjected to an intensifying, coordinated campaign of moral terror, through the media but also in real life (“serial killers” and other “lone nut” types). It was obvious to me even as a teenage victim of this MK-Culture that the intent, or at least the inevitable tendency, was to shock every last moral sensibility and remove every last barrier to complete moral turpitude via “the arts.” While at one time this seemed like the most natural thing in the world to me—for accelerating moral decline to culminate in some kind of Y2K event—at some point, I realized the historical contingency of this degeneration. Communism had to terrorize the human soul because otherwise no one “consents” to live in these abortive “utopias” devised by godless madmen. Only the “Communist man” enjoys being subject to Communism, and only something like an MKUltra mind control slave enjoys eating da bugz inside a coom pod ensconced within a 15-minute smart city while binge consuming hyper-Satanic entertainment (à la the latest Grammys and Olympics ceremonies) sponsored by what Jasun Horsley (in his book 16 Maps of Hell) memorably calls the “CIA-corporate-military-entertainment-myth-making-mind-control complex.”
The stages of this process map onto the stages of individual trauma-based mind control. First you have to depattern the victim, as MK maniac Dr. Ewen Cameron explained, and then he can be reimprinted with a new identity. Dissolve and coagulate, in occult terms. On the collective level, we arrived at this sorry pass, in which most things in the mass media are psyops, because of a long campaign—a Very Long Sixties, if you will—of calculated cultural demoralization, the most obvious example of which is the sexual revolution, brought to you by the usual suspects (Carnegies, Rockefellers, Tavistock, etc.) and aggressively promoted, decade after decade, by virtually the entire entertainment industry. The coagulate phase, following the expected dissolution of Christianity as the last impediment to the new man and his brave new world, is globalist technocracy, supported by a post-Christian religion of the future (as Fr. Seraphim Rose calls it), a transhumanist religion that will oversee the elimination of man as a species.
If some of your readers scoff at the notion that our culture is shot through with psychological warfare activity, I would simply refer them to the chilling YouTube video produced by the 4th PSYOP Group out of Ft. Bragg titled “All the World’s a Stage.” While normies can get quite pushy about telling you how insane it is to imagine that the media is a circus of psyops, this video explicitly brags about the fact and uses it to awe or frighten the viewer. The commander of the outfit himself bragged, in an interview about the video, that psyops are “literally everywhere, every day, in every component of our lives.”[1]
Which theories are taking this into account? How?
Man is made in the image of God, and the psychological warfare being waged against us through the culture is therefore meant to destroy us by destroying the image of God within us, by dragging the image of God in the public mind down to point that God and Satan are indistinguishable. But this is “theory,” is it not? The highest “theory” of all, in fact: theology. And, yes, we apply, in varying degrees, depth psychology, deep politics, continental philosophy, religious comparativism, and more. But none of the other hermeneutical tools we bring to bear, formal and informal alike, would be very effective without something approaching a proper theological foundation. I have been a film enthusiast since my teen years, but it was really only after my exposure to Orthodox theology, following some negative spiritual experiences, that I really got a solid clue as to what’s going on under the Silver Lake in Hollywood—and how my own soul has been damaged by long exposure to some of the worst it has to offer.
Thomas: I have often felt that sufficiently careful attention to the messaging and subtext of given films is lacking in much conspiratorial analysis of pop-culture. Even before getting into stranger realities, such as esoteric symbolism and predictive programming, there is often much to learn from a deep politics perspective simply through moment-by-moment close attention to what a film is trying to make an audience feel about its characters and subject matter. I have been delighted to come across a few comments online from people who have listened to Psyop Cinema and find the podcast infuriating because they claim we are insane right-wingers and yet talented at close reading films.
Combining such close readings with a couple other informational categories goes a long way toward overcoming the mystification of film and filmmaking that often obscures the deep politics angle. One such category is careful study of a director’s career (and that of others involved in a film’s production), that filmmaker’s own account of the movie, and the many public comments these individuals make indicating their larger worldview. Another category relates to associations between Hollywood and US military/intelligence, including the question of whether a film has received production assistance from intelligence agencies or a branch of the military and the question of whether figures significantly involved with the production have had career associations that indicate complicity with such ongoing entertainment industry infiltration.
The blend of these analytical approaches helps to illuminate a clear picture of what a film is saying, why those who crafted it wanted to put forth that message, and the larger pattern of what themes are propagated by the entertainment industry. Given the mountain of evidence demonstrating the long history of government interference in Hollywood (for more on this, check out the Decoding Culture Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit that we work for), this approach often yields results related to conspiracy, showing film to be a frequent vehicle of propaganda for the ideologies that have produced what we refer to as “MK-Culture.”
I am confident that the examples you give of impersonal historical forces (nominalism, capitalism, liberalism, Cultural Marxism, etc.) do play a role the formation of pop-culture. But it is unfortunately easy to emphasize such forces in a manner that minimizes the analytical approaches I have just mentioned. Although, in this cultural moment, it is less common for people to entirely dismiss the realities of organized elite criminality and more likely for someone to adopt a poor theory of such criminality (such as QAnon on the right or BlueAnon on the left). Another frustrating posture that I have often witnessed is for someone to hang on to a “normie” framework by the thin and dwindling thread of acknowledging the existence of conspiratorial realities while refusing to engage in any sustained or developed analysis of those realities, allowing them to retreat as soon as possible to their previously preferred framework.
If conspiratorial realities of the kind we identify in our work are real then it is clearly the case that this should heavily inform our frameworks for understanding culture and politics. I hope to make this as difficult as possible for people to ignore. Similarly, I hope to overcome a romanticization of movies that would see the messages put forward by films and filmmakers as far more inscrutable than they truly are. Plenty of cases of genuine complexity and ambiguity exist in interpreting the medium, but this should not prevent us from utilizing our best tools to shine a light into pop-culture darkness by applying the proper deep political context and then asking the obvious question – “Who made this and why?”
Like many who have worked in a Humanities Department, there is a bête noire that I expect to find lurking near to any attempt to analyse an artwork: the critic as censorious scold. For approaching half a century, the prevailing mode of literary criticism, at least in an academic context, has been the critic leveraging her ideological commitments (postcolonialism, feminism, environmentalism) to upbraid or applaud a text’s politics. How mindful are you of walking a tightrope in so far as you approximate a “hermeneutic of suspicion”?
I have something specific in mind when I ask this, namely your notion of “revelation of the method”, which you’ve shown can yield some insightful readings, but which I perceive a danger in: it would allow you to resolve any ambiguity in a film (any indication that a film’s sympathies do not lie wholly with the cultural projects you are critiquing) as counting against it. A truthful portrayal of reality in a film then serves only to shore up your conviction that it is motivated to deceive.
Are there films that you admire aesthetically but abhor morally? How much does the admiration force you to rethink the abhorrence, or vice versa?
Brett: First off, let’s be clear about what we mean by “Revelation of the Method” (a term apparently coined by James Shelby Downard and developed by Michael Hoffman). Revelation of the Method in cinema amounts to showing the viewer the process to which the viewer is being subjected, usually through the experience of the protagonist in the film with whom the viewer is made to identify. A “truthful portrayal of reality” does not have to demoralize and psychologically devastate either the protagonist (or other characters) or the audience. Nor must such a portrayal invite the audience, by means of powerful audio-visual and narrative techniques (the Method), to identify with a psychologically unstable and demoralized character and to dissociate accordingly. Revelation of the Method is a real occult technique designed to break down the barrier, within the viewer’s mind, between fiction and reality—which amounts to a form of dissociation in which the viewer is highly susceptible to suggestion. The problem here isn’t just that these types of films overwhelmingly tend to subvert Christianity and traditionalism; the use of cinematic Revelation of the Method is bad religion and raises profound questions about whether the medium itself tends to be psycho-spiritually harmful.
If I understand you correctly, though, I think your question is aimed at a more general problem of circularity in our hermeneutic, as you see it. Any “ambiguity” as to the messaging and content of a film, I think you’re suggesting, can easily be read by us as morally/culturally harmful and negative. I’m glad you asked this question, because this is precisely where deep politics and plain old journalism must enter into one’s “theory,” that is, if one really wants to know what’s going on (if the theory already knows, there’s no point in searching). Take Steven Spielberg and his pal Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), both of whom are renowned for making “family friendly” entertainment, some of it positively adored by many conservatives. One does not need to rely on speculation, however, to discover where these men’s true sympathies lie, namely, with the sexual revolution and most other psyops ardently promoted by New Hollywood. Spielberg, however, believed in being cautious with audience sensibilities. Here’s an example.
Producer Julia Phillips, who worked with Spielberg on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, wanted to craft a publicity campaign for the film inspired by the notion, popularized by a Time magazine cover, that “God is dead,” suggesting that UFOs will replace God. Here’s the excerpt from page 278 of her “tell-all” autobiography, You’ll Never Each Lunch in This Town Again (Random House, 1991):
The year we started shooting Close Encounters, 1976, Time magazine ran a black cover with the question IS GOD DEAD? Not a question to ask me; IS GOD ALIVE? was more to the point, and then, looking around at the state of the world I’d add, AND WHY IS HE SO MEAN? Nah, he/she/it had never existed.
“If God is dead, why not UFOs?” reads a quote of mine in the Washington Post. This makes Steven furious, not because I have offended his personal beliefs, but because he worries that I might have cut into the commerciality of the project. [My emphasis]
After gaining information about a filmmaker’s actual ideological and spiritual leanings, the next step, for a researcher like myself, is to go back through the person’s filmography and discover where these messages seep out in the most unconcealed way. And indeed, the early Spielberg/Zemeckis collaboration 1941 (1979)is an open celebration of the sexual revolution that is chock full of Revelation of the Method. The opening scene is a tour de force of it! A Japanese submarine commander plans to attack “Hollywood” (as the only “honorable” target in all Los Angeles), and as the submarine surfaces it symbolically penetrates a buxom blonde swimming nude in the Pacific. Remember too that Close Encounters sympathetically depicts a man who abandons his family to ride on a UFO with his implied mistress. Spielberg just uses gradualist methods to demoralize and reengineer the collective value system. And this gradualist approach actually complements the shock cinema tactics of the 70s and beyond, because many people are not going to subject themselves to the latter.
I’ll give you another Spielberg example. There a 1978 “story conference” transcript, which was evidently first published last year,[2] in which Spielberg is discussing Raiders of the Lost Ark with George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan. Lucas, whose name comes up in a recent tranche of Epstein documents, suggests adding a backstory in which Indiana Jones had a previous “affair” with the film’s love interest “when she was eleven.” Kasdan replies, “And he was forty-two.”
Lucas and Kasdan trade a few more casual remarks before Spielberg chimes in, “She had better be older than twenty-two.” There isn’t the least indication of disgust or outrage on Spielberg’s part, just the obvious concern that American audiences aren’t quite as debauched and perverted as the New Hollywood set. Spielberg was awake to the danger that a few clowns can give away the whole circus (to paraphrase a line from Apocalypse Now).
All that being said, one reason there are ambiguities, even with a filmmaker like Spielberg, is because there are ambiguities. One of the basic tenets of our approach is that humans have agency and they are dynamic, i.e., they change over time. We do abundant justice to all this nuance in the course of the show, even when it comes to filmmakers whose messaging we generally revile.
Are there films we admire aesthetically but otherwise deplore? Of course, although my own continuing admiration for dubious projects (Badlands, for instance) is no doubt a product of my own warped aesthetic sensibilities, as I too am a victim of the toxic MK-Culture. As Plato observed long ago, art has a profound effect on the human soul, and this is especially true when music is combined with moving images. In principle, it is possible to admire the skill with which the artist affects the soul in abstraction from the actual effect on the soul. But that’s way too simplistic. I’m reminded of Machiavelli’s remark about Agathocles: “It cannot be called virtue”—by which Machiavelli means skill or ability—”to kill one’s fellow citizens, to betray one’s friends, to be without loyalty, without mercy, without religion; by such methods one can acquire power, but not glory.” Art should not make people ugly, so maybe what we are dealing with in Hollywood are crimes against art. The semantics are not so important to me, though, because I am not a partisan of “art,” and I spend a lot of breath railing against the “cult of the artist” that has been the de facto pop religion in our culture since the Beats.
Thomas: As noxious as I might find the academic discourses you mentioned, including their specific conclusions within media analysis, at least they do not deny the clear moral and political dimensions of art. The most contemptible woke critic is in some respects less disingenuous than anyone spouting the “it’s only a movie” posture. So, the tightrope that you mention is not something I find myself particularly concerned with. At times when our analysis of a film has been dismissed as moralistic scolding, I’ve mostly been amused by what appears to be desperate denial that the art in question has demonstrably corrosive and manipulative effects to which its defenders have fallen victim. Although, as much as we’re enemies of the cult of the artist and wish for people to become less spiritually invested in contemporary media, if I did not have a large degree of love for the medium of film it would be much more difficult to do this work.
I find it relatively easy to make these distinctions and carefully tease apart a film’s aesthetic value and moral worth (or its lack of these things) along with the way in which these categories may or may not overlap in each movie. I’m also interested in a broad shift away from kinds of 20th century filmmaking that displayed a tremendous degree of talent but were insidious in their subtle manipulations, toward recent filmmaking that is less effective in its manipulations but more degrading in its combination of moral degeneracy and aesthetic worthlessness. However, even as regards the former category, it is certainly the case that some films (particularly within more supposedly ‘transgressive’ styles and genres of moviemaking) become significantly less impressive once you’ve realized the thinness of their underlying worldviews and the ease in which cheap manipulative shock can masquerade as profundity.
But my goal is not to advocate for filmmaking to become an uninspired vehicle of propaganda for my own worldview. The project of cultivating a sophisticated and discerning Christian aesthetic sensibility for our present cultural moment is open-ended. Most approaches veer far too closely toward one of two traps. The first pitfall is a naïve willingness to embrace Hollywood propaganda as long as that propaganda is crafted with sufficient competence – along those lines, I once saw a tweet from a popular right-wing Christian account claiming that the films of Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve (two of the most psyop-heavy directors working today!) represent the positive side of Hollywood. The other trap can be represented by the enterprise of evangelical Christian filmmaking, which has well-earned its dismal reputation, manifesting propaganda as flat, unconvincing, and stylistically-repellant as late 2010s/early 2020s woke-media. I am happy to admit that there are no easy answers to this predicament, but cultivating a deep sense of the dangers of filmmaking as it has existed until now seems like a good start.
Both of you are converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, and I’d venture that’s not incidental to the subjects you focus on or the interpretations you generate. You have influences and interlocutors who confess different faiths or have no particular confessional faith themselves. Do you see the major fault lines in modern culture as theological in nature? Is a keen awareness of contemporary political structures enough to break the spell of the overculture?
Can cultural criticism (done rightly) be a vocation?
Thomas: Regarding the relationship of Eastern Orthodoxy to our topics and approach, it was largely our search for clarity around these subjects that drew us to the Orthodox Church. We were struck by the immense insights of Jay Dyer’s work on Hollywood conspiracy (and much of his other geopolitical analysis) and were also compelled by Dyer’s apologetic case for the Eastern Church. With my interest in Orthodoxy piqued, I was then stunned by the insights from recent luminaries of the faith, particularly Blessed Seraphim Rose, concerning the reality and characteristics of religious engineering in the modern world.
I certainly believe that if one digs deep enough into the political and spiritual ailments of contemporary civilization, one will bump into metaphysical questions to which only Orthodoxy provides ultimately consistent answers. So, I find it unsurprising that many of those who listen to our podcast or that we have spoken to on the show are Orthodox. But I also think it perfectly reasonable that many others adhere to different forms of Christianity, or to another spiritual perspective altogether. The political, spiritual, and aesthetic evils we critique are selling lies that are incoherent by nature. Therefore, I think it is perfectly natural that individuals from a variety of worldviews are questioning these malevolent ideologies and often providing valuable insights in critiquing the superculture. This in no way compromises our particularist theological commitments or implies any ultimate syncretism of ‘positive’ worldviews (a concept that is itself a spiritual trap that if consistently followed leads right back into the demonic paradigms we seek to undermine)
If we are correct about the ultimately Satanic spiritual source of cultural engineering, then awareness of deep political structures can at best act only as a steppingstone toward the true source of clarity and healing, which is Christ and His Church. In many people’s journeys, the study of deep politics and the path to that Church may never intersect. But given the spiritual maladies uniquely prevalent in these times, I expect that the process of detoxification from cultural engineering has a role to play in the salvation of many. There are modern saints who incisively, explicitly, and unapologetically spoke to the reality of organized political and cultural deceptions. Such saints were drawing on the ample scriptural and theological basis for the necessity of calling out such evils. As researchers, we hope to contribute in whatever small way we can to this task.
You’ve mentioned the likely debilitating effect of traumatic media on your own sensibilities. I doubt anyone who is honest, self-reflective, and under forty could dispute having suffered a similar aesthetic dissolution themselves. This reminds me of another critical trope of yours, the alchemical maxim “dissolve and coagulate” (also borrowed from Hoffman?). I take it that’s not only something observable in Hollywood’s (alarmingly prevalent) valorization-of-trauma narratives, but also a process you see at work in audiences through their exposure to those narratives, indeed in any population subject to psychological operations. To what extent do you think the modern media consumer is damaged goods, immunized against consciousness-raising?
Brett: First, I don’t think all psyops revolve around trauma or a scaled-up version of trauma-based mind control. That’s the hallmark of the MK-Culture, however. You can get a sense of the results (in a typically Revelation of the Method fashion) in a movie like American Ultra, which may have received direct support from the CIA (according to one of the leading researchers in this field). Every subsequent generation beginning with Gen X has become increasingly infantilized, dependent, and immersed in ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which they can imagine themselves to possess ever greater superpowers to compensate for their personal helplessness and powerlessness. I don’t mean to ignore other contributing factors—political factors, social factors—but there is no question that the traumagenic media culture has played an enormous part in this. If that’s what you mean by “damaged goods,” then, yes. But I see no reason to be fatalistic about the situation: getting people to believe in their own helplessness is really crucial to the psychological warfare, and, anyway, I think young people have developed a lot of other resources to compensate, including a savvy in information processing their fathers and grandfather largely surrendered, after WWII, to the Walter Lippman Atlanticist media and its phony Overton windows.
The expression “consciousness-raising” smacks of the New Agey, “Second Matrix” strategies of cultural resistance that—it’s clear now—failed so miserably (by design) with the counterculture, as if the proliferation, or “democratization,” of psychedelics and newfangled spiritual techniques will doom the CIA-corporate-military-entertainment-myth-making-mind-control complex. I suspect that’s not what you mean, but I hasten to clarify anyway! We need moral and intellectual sobriety and an end to the Dionysian madness. And I think you’ll agree this can come—and hopefully is in the process of coming at this very historical moment—only through Jesus Christ.
[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/news/what-is-psyops-army/
[2] https://indiefilmhustle.com/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-story-conference-transcript/