Keyword Hijacking Smackdown! Challenge for HMW (and poll)

[theeKultleeder]

The Good Dr makes a good point - for the string of movies/shows he cites... what about other types of movies? There are plenty of productions that run counter to his thesis.

So maybe its a trend line among many.

[orz]

The Good Dr makes a good point - for the string of movies/shows he cites... what about other types of movies? There are plenty of productions that run counter to his thesis.

But he has no standard or method for determining what is NOT keyword hijacking. Basically it's just any film he hasn't written about yet. Once he decides it's KH, it is. He will get upset if I say he claims that everyone in hollywood is "in on it," that every aspect of every movie is controlled by the CIA, but he effectively does claim that by implication.

[theeKultleeder]

I was referring to DrVolin. I assume you are talking about Hugh?

Anyway, Volin does almost the same thing: he strings together a series of movies that may have some common theme and claims that this is how entertainment has changed, maybe in response to propaganda needs.

And he makes a pretty strong case and some damn good points, but only for the movies he lists. There are many other movies that do not fit into his thesis and are therefore not on his list.

Oh, and I was responding to this:

This message starts to appear in the early 70s. It replaces the previous one that was disseminated in the highly engineered Jack Webb productions such as Dragnet (can anyone deny THAT one?). In a typical 60s police procedural, the message is that there is due process, and that because the government is made up of people like you and me, it can be trusted to look after our best interests. Even if in the short term it looks bad, we can trust that in the end, due process will see us through.

There is a sudden shift, in the early 70s, to a different sort of message. It starts with Dirty Harry. In Dirty Harry, John Milius asks us whether we are really confident that due process always works for us in the end. The answer he wants us to come up with is of course "no". 24 has nothing on the torture scene in Dirty Harry.

There follows a string of film and television productions in which the protagonists are increasingly helpless to control their own destiny, and who suffer only because they try to. This is a far cry from the message of the 50s and 60s that, despite all appearances to the contrary, despite what you may be feeling, you are in fact in control of your destiny, in a system designed to protect your ability to control your destiny. The object is the same (social control), but the strategy is different.

The culmination so far of this shift in message is CSI. Now, because of the X Files, we know that we'll only get in trouble if we ask questions. Because of CSI we know that we can run, but we can't possibly hide. They WILL get us if we misbehave, because they have the voodoo and we don't. So why don't we just recline in our vat of goop and let the wires pipe-in our pleasant artificial reality through our wide open ports? Orwell warned us, but we didn't listen. Now it must be too late to do anything but give in.



THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

[orz]

Ooops yeah i was still in rant mode, missed the DR.

[DrVolin]

Rest assured, I don't make the assumption that there is a monolithic, all powerful conspiracy out there, controlling everything we see and hear. There are competing interests with variable degrees of access to different forms of media.

I am not surprised that there are other signals out there carrying a quite different message from the one I outlined up there. Indeed, I expect it. But I observe, that at any one time, one kind of message seems to dominate the landscape, just as one group, or a temporary alliance of groups, is dominant. And all of them seem to have made the transition from information control propaganda, to receptor conditioning propaganda.

At the moment, the various oppositions are fairly dormant. Although the recent one-two punch of the leak about destroyed CIA videos and the unexpected NIE on Iran indicate a certain stirring of the slumbering beasts.

[theeKultleeder]

No, Dr., I did not suppose you were proposing a monolithic propaganda machine. One must be careful on this forum, though, because that is what some people do indeed see.

Dirty Harry sparked public debate, didn't it? Unfortunately most of the debate centered around being "tough on crime" - a campaign slogan that haunts us to this day. I think we lost a lot of ground in that era, in trying to truly "rehabilitate," rather than just warehousing people in dungeons. Of course the issue of crime is rooted in many sociological things that go beyond the scope of this thread.

The fact is, I like Dirty Harry! It is a great movie. And didn't the sequel have Harry hunting down vigilante cops? I also like X-Files. A lot. It is solid entertainment. If X-Files was intended to throw people off of the trail of high crimes, I have to ask: did it work?

When faced with solid evidence of high crimes and conspiracies, how many people say, "Awww shucks, you got that from watching the X-Files"?

[FourthBase]

If X-Files was intended to throw people off of the trail of high crimes, I have to ask: did it work?

When faced with solid evidence of high crimes and conspiracies, how many people say, "Awww shucks, you got that from watching the X-Files"?

Plenty. Along with the other usual epithets.

[orz]

But the x-files undoubtedly increased the level of interest in the paranormal/conspiracies. At the peak of it's popularity there was huge interest and I don't doubt that many younger conspiracy/deep politics/9-11 truth people first had their curiosity about such matters raised by the show.

[FourthBase]

No, Dr., I did not suppose you were proposing a monolithic propaganda machine. One must be careful on this forum, though, because that is what some people do indeed see.

Who?

But the x-files undoubtedly increased the level of interest in the paranormal/conspiracies. At the peak of it's popularity there was huge interest and I don't doubt that many younger conspiracy/deep politics/9-11 truth people first had their curiosity about such matters raised by the show.

Right, and one would assume that conspirators don't want to see an influx of people interested in conspiracies. Unless, of course, that influx is taking place in a giant poisoned well -- in which case, the more the merrier.

[populistindependent]

An interesting example of word replacement, or word substitution - avoiding the kwh terminology for the moment, which implies intention and focus - is in surnames. Until fairly recently immigrants to the US had a challenge - they needed last names. I thought of this because I am reading Rolvaag's classic novel - Giants in the Earth, the story of immigrants from a village in Norway set in the 1880's. They, the peasants, had no last names, and this was true in most places in Europe. The upper class had titles, of course.

Forcing people to have last names was always for the purpose of rulers indentifying and controlling the peasants, in my opinion, and to some extent has robbed us all of the ability to define and identify ourselves. The myth in America is that there is no peasantry and that there is this magical thing, the middle class, that is neither aristocracy nor peasantry. That disguises the fact that we are all peasants, and that most of us are descended from immigrants from small impoverished villages.

"Peasants with trinkets and pretensions and delusions" you might call us.

Look at the last names that people took or were assigned, just from England. The situation is similar with other nationalities. The last names came to identify people, but were words that already described something else, so we have one word meaning two different things. Notice how you keep the two meanings clear in your mind, and then compare that to how your mind handles the same situation when it happens with the modern phenomenon of brand names, movie titles and the like.

English surnames that also have another meaning, in these examples occupations:

Potter, Wheeler, Weaver, Barber, Cooper, Carter, Sawyer, Wagner, Carpenter, Archer, Farmer, Woodward, Cartwright, Cook, Smith, Miller, Taylor, Thatcher, Barker, Chapman, Clark, Parker, Fisher, Wainwright, Hunter, Turner, Mason, Butler, Baker, Hacker, Harper, Hawker, Whittier, Hooker, Gardner, Stewart, Brewer, Chandler, Fletcher, Fowler, Porter, Roper, Shepherd, Skinner, Tillman, Waller, Usher, Tucker, Webster, Hayward, Spencer, Tyler, Hooper, Keeler, Hacker, Fuller, Draper, Crocker.

[IanEye]

Dirty Harry on its own is a very powerful film.

Its power is lessened tremendously by the sequels however.

As a stand alone movie, Dirty Harry has a great ending, maybe the greatest of all Crime films.

When Harry takes off his badge, throws it away and walks off into the distance, the message is clear: Harry had to go outside the Law to get Scorpio, and now that Harry has gone outside the Law he can't be a cop anymore.

Thus we come full circle from the movie's opening, a montage of names of officers sacrificed in the line of duty. Harry too has been sacrificed and the audience is left to wonder, "if all the good cops are pushed out like Harry is, then only bad cops will be left".

If there had been a sequel showing Harry trying to live his life post cop career, that might have been interesting. Instead, we get the biggest (sorry) cop-out sequel ever. I actually prefer the films he did with the orangutang.

The whole Harry takes on the corrupt cops from within the system plot is a weak script.

Bill Hicks had a better riff on it:

"The prince of peace is back! But he's pissed off! (BLAM BLAM) 'Fuck you, Pilate!'"


oh and the director of Dirty Harry is Don Siegel
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0796923/

Siegel also directed The Killers, starring Ronald Reagan, Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin and John Cassavettes.
Amazing scene in that where the audience sees a rooftop perspective of the street below from a riflescope and then someone shot schoolbook depository style and then immediately cuts to Reagan arriving home, getting out of his car with a rifle and running inside.

Siegel's film Charlie Varrick is good too with Walter Matthau in the title role and a bizarre pro-Federal Reserve scene for no apparent reason...

[brownzeroed]

I think your definitely onto something, IanEye.

You could easily divide RI into three camps.
1)Dirty Harry
2)Serpico
3)Willow

French Connection can be an alternate.


You know what they say, don't you? If you love a man's garden, you gotta love the man! ~ Frank Serpico

[Et in Arcadia ego]

You forgot the Bad Lieutenant.

[brownzeroed]

I'll never forget Bad Lieutenant.