Nolan Notes (The Revelation of the Method)

Christopher Nolan, Part 1: THE REVELATION OF THE METHOD

0. Preface

THE METHOD:

a technique, developed in part out of covert military-intelligence mind control experiments, involving the integration of advanced psychological and neuroscientific knowledge (incorporating but transcending that which is publicly available or acknowledged) with audio-visual technology to manipulate the consciousness of the viewer, usually involving deliberately induced trauma to tear down or deprogram the psyche and make it receptive for subsequent reconditioning or reprogramming

As for the transition from military-intelligence mind control experiments to cultural engineering, consider the transition in Inception from extraction (“interrogation,” since some but by no means all of these human experiments were performed with a view toward improving interrogation, i.e., extraction, methods) to inception (cultural engineering).

How “scientific” is the Method? As Tesla (David Bowie) explains in The Prestige, “Exact science isn’t an exact science.” As the Tom Hardy character in Inception explains, “If you’re going to form inception”—that is, if you’re going to implant ideas and values in people without their realizing it—“you need imagination,” i.e.,  you need artists. It requires artists, artists like Cobb in Inception, a hybrid of the master manipulator/programmer with the artist and the secret agent. But, as the Hardy character continues, you start with psychological fundamentals—in the case of their target, the Cillian Murphy character, his relationship with his father (which is a major theme in the Batman films as well). And then you need technology, advanced tech like the dream invasion device that constitutes the plot conceit of the movie. (In Paprika, the partial inspiration for the film, mind control is made an explicit theme.) You may also need drugs, like the “sedatives” used in the film, to increase suggestibility. Encouraging people to take psychedelics, or smoke weed, and watch films is perhaps a real-world application of this.

The Prestige and Project Monarch:

Tesla’s machine uses electroshock to create alters (consider Ewen Cameron). Borden knew the Method before it was “scientific,” which involves forced dissociation (twinning). Art not so much becoming science but fusing with it. Nolan wanted to be a great auteur, as revealed by the lead character in his debut film, Following, and he ultimately failed but instead became, by his own estimation at least, something more: the artist/cultural engineer.

Our hypothesis:

Nolan is the prime example of such a figure, and through the body of his work he partially reveals both the Method and his place in the “CIA-corporate-military-entertainment-myth-making-mind-control complex” that developed and deploys it.

Psyop (psychological warfare) as main theme of Batman films.

(?): Kubrick is revelator of the Method.

Why reveal the Method?

1. An attempt by compromised but well-meaning artists to expose the illuminati? [Maybe there is some truth to this, but for the most part this is not a likely explanation]

2. To trigger “Manchurian candidates”? [Not likely]

3. To taunt conspiracy theorists? [Ridiculous]

4. The cultural programmers feel they are absolving themselves of responsibility for their crimes by “confessing” to them to a public that then tacitly consents by not rebelling. As Aldous Huxley explained in a Berkeley lecture, people will become slaves in large part by their own consent. [This fits in with the psychopathic mentality of anyone who would assault the psyches of masses of people and deprive them of personal autonomy, and there is probably something to it.]

5. It is a form of mass initiation, which is part and parcel of the programming. The various members of the audience, in proportion to their level of discernment and curiosity, are led along the yellow brick road of illuminati symbolism, unconsciously assimilating the warped values and consciousness of their programmers as their psyches are deconstructed and reprogrammed. [primary explanation]

.

1. Nolan a brilliant conceptual filmmaker at his best (e.g., Inception), a gimmicky filmmaker at his worst (e.g., Memento)

Memento made a big splash largely because of a gimmick in which the main story sequences run in reverse order. Related to this editing gimmick is a plot gimmick in which the protagonist (Leonard) has retrograde amnesia: victimized in an attack which left his wife dead, he can’t form new memories beyond what has happened in the last 20 minutes or so. Leonard thinks he killed one of the assailants but a second clubbed him on the head, causing the amnesia, and escaped. He’s supposed to be looking for this second killer, someone he thinks—based on his many notes he uses as substitutes for hard memory—is named “John G.” In the end, he finds out from Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), this shifty guy who keeps popping up, that he already killed the guy a year ago, that Teddy, who turns out to be an undercover cop, helped him do it, but that Teddy has been either manipulating him or providing therapy to him (depending on one’s perspective) ever since by tricking him into killing other people he thinks are the real “John G.”

Taking a step back, we can see many or most of the “psyop cinema” themes that dominate Nolan’s later work. Leonard is a victim of trauma. His mind has fragmented and he’s in a dissociated state as a consequence. And anterograde amnesia is a bit of a red herring; he also has a case of retrograde amnesia, as even his long-term memories are unreliable (“Sammy” is really Leonard). So he’s constantly being psyoped—by Teddy, by Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss).

If we think about cinema as a means of cultural engineering—basically, widescale, low-intensity mind control—then Leonard is a stand-in for the viewer, whose psyche has been incessantly assaulted by sex, violence, and madness, and at length de-cohered . He’s lost his linear processing, so to speak, and is now in a highly suggestible state, at the mercy of cultural programmers.

As explained in Inception, when you’re dreaming you’re in a highly suggestible state; your mental defenses are down. Well it’s a commonplace these days, particularly among people in Hollywood with at least a folk knowledge of depth psychology, that movies are collective dreams. We know that people watching TV are in a high-alpha-wave, low-beta-wave state, i.e., their critical mind is partially suspended and they are much more susceptible to suggestion.

But there’s this notion—and this will transition us into the next phase of our discussion—that the viewer wants to be deceived, that he wants to be manipulated, as there’s something in it for him. Leonard, we learn, is lying to himself—or psyoping himself through his amnesia—so that he can continue his never-ending quest for vengeance. In other words, he’s using trauma-based mind control tactics on himself as, arguably, countless millions of viewers have done over the years.

But this idea that the viewer is self-deceived shows up in other Nolan films, above all in the Prestige. As the Michael Caine character explains through narration at the end of the film, you don’t see the trick because ultimately you really don’t want to; you want to be deceived.

2. Archetype of the psychopathic super predator, the master manipulator (and the artist)

And the very act of revealing this to the viewer—or indicting the viewer with this charge—both reinforces its truth and gives the programmer all the more license to use and abuse his subjects. This is maybe the linchpin of the psychopathic mentality: the victim wants to be victimized and deserves the abuse.

In Following, Nolan’s 1998 debut film, this archetype is instantiated by Cobb. The protagonist in the film breaks into people’s homes to understand them, but Cobb breaks in partly to rob them but mainly to maliciously toy with them. This is the psychopath in the childhood of his development, if you will.

With the exception of the heavy in Tenet, though, I’m not sure we ever see this psychopath archetype completely detached from that of the artist. In the Prestige, Angier (Hugh Jackman) is a good candidate, a British aristocrat pretending to be a magician not only because he enjoys psyoping audiences and the world at large but because he genuinely thinks they enjoy it too. The Cobb character in Inception (DiCaprio) is similarly ambiguous: he’s a master of deception but is far from altogether malicious and deep down is motivated by his own emotional brokenness.

He’s also compromised, it turns out. He’s used by all these corporate power brokers as an “extractor,” an invader of dreams who extracts information about people without their knowledge and against their will, and the plot revolves around his next great trick—inception, or actually implanting ideas within his subjects without their knowing it (which of course is a metaphor for cinematic mind control).

This is the sub-archetype, if you will, of the manipulated manipulator, which, as we’ll see, may say a lot about how Nolan sees his own predicament in Hollywood: perhaps blackmailed, like Cobb, to use his manipulative talents in the service of a cultural agenda he is not altogether on board with.

[Joker]

[Ra’s too: he claims that the League of Shadows must destroy Gotham in the name of justice, and that the decadence and injustice, the corruption, of the city confirms this, but he also admits that the League of Shadows engineered the economic crisis that led to this mass demoralization.]

But Nolan, it seems to me, is—or certainly sees himself as—a combination of the two archetypes, the manipulator and also the artist, or the failed artist. Ironically, the key to understanding how Nolan himself may fit into the CIA-corporate-military-entertainment-myth-making-mind-control complex emerges most clearly in Insomnia—a film that really stands out in the Nolan catalogue for its linearity, its conventionality (it’s a genre piece), and its rather uninspired feel. It looks like a film that Nolan was kind of forced to make after Memento—an audition of sorts before he was allowed to make the bold, conceptual, cerebral films like Inception that define him as a filmmaker. So he had to compromise himself artistically, it seems, to break into the big time after his indy splash Memento.

And that’s actually what Insomniais about, moral compromise. The film is about what it represents (which is how revelation of the method works). In Insomnia, Al Pacino plays a detective who travels from LA to Alaska to investigate the murder of a teenage girl that may be the work of a serial killer. He comes along with his partner, played by Martin Donovan, who is under pressure back home to give evidence against Al to Internal Affairs for planting evidence on a suspect. While hunting in the fog for the killer, who’s played by Robin Williams (against type), Al shoots and kills his partner, which conveniently removes the key witness in the case against him in LA. Al himself doesn’t seem to know himself whether he did it on purpose, but he goes to great lengths to cover up the fact that he—and not Williams—was the shooter.

Ultimately, he becomes complicit in the crime of the killer. The detective becomes the criminal. Which hearkens to the original Nolan protagonist from Following, the wannabe artist, who’s a detective of human nature and then becomes complicit in the abuse and manipulation of human nature through the psychopathic Cobb.

But the Pacino character is plagued by guilt; he can’t sleep (hence, “insomnia”). Which by the way is very different from the detective character in the Norwegian version of the film on which this is based. That guy has no integrity; he’s a sick puppy. But Al seeks and achieves absolution finally through not only helping to bring the killer to justice (or killing him) but admitting everything about his role in the cover-up, even when he could have gotten away with it. He confesses to the plucky young detective played by Hilary Swank, who had been in awe of him until she learned that he was stained, so to speak. She’s willing to let him die with the secret, but he insists that she not cover it up; he doesn’t want to perpetuate this legacy of lies. He redeems himself in her eyes, in the eyes of idealistic youth (the next crop of filmmakers?) and then dies of his wounds in the fight, finally getting sleep.

It strikes me that this is an escape fantasy of Nolan’s. Nolan sold his soul, artistically and perhaps morally, to get access to the Method. And the fact that his next film, Batman Begins, revolves around a dark initiation into a superelite psychopath club—the League of Shadows—which is steering human civilization for centuries gives some credence to that notion, particularly as that film seems to be his first that uses sensory-assaulting audio-visual techniques. And as in Insomnia there’s a lot of moral ambivalence on the part of the protagonist, Batman in the latter case, who rejects the ideology of the League of Shadows.

But there’s a question as to why the Method is being revealed. We discussed how Kubrick is often hung with a halo, albeit a tarnished one, for trying to reveal to the public the nefarious goings-on of the super elite, that perhaps he was even martyred for it after making Eyes Wide Shut. Another theory is that the Revelation of the Method is part of the Method. On the one hand, you control people partially through securing their assent, explicit or tacit, to their subjugation. Aldous Huxley predicted that people would become slaves by consent, as it’s simply not possible to enslave an entire population indefinitely without a measure of consent. And then there’s the hypothesis that gradual revelation of the method is part of the process of initiation that is inherent in the method. The method reveals that the method is a method, that everything is a program, and those with advanced knowledge of that program are the programmers. So, in a very convoluted way perhaps, we can understand why the elite programmers might insinuate to people that they are being controlled through the very instruments—cultural programming tools like cinema—by which they are being controlled.

When we pan over Nolan’s entire filmography, however, I don’t think an either/or answer is very satisfying. I think both things are going on.

The Method is being revealed to people in a medium where they least suspect it (“movies are just entertainment”) in order to entrance them into submission. They won’t suspect it not only because they assume movies are just entertainment but because they are in the dark as to the very existence of the technologies and methods being deployed. This is what Tesla says about his machine in The Prestige: while it is too dangerous to use in other sectors of life (it would shake the foundations of civilization), it can safely be used in magic and entertainment precisely because people don’t believe those things involve reality in any substantial way. The Method can hide in plain sight, and the public’s inability to detect it is, from the psychopathic perspective, proof of their mental inferiority and as good as an endorsement of crypto-oligarchic domination over them. I think it’s also the case, as Halex Jones like to say, that “criminals love to brag.” They’re Bond villains. Also: the too-evil-to-fail model—the moral outrageousness of the enterprise is what conceals it.

The way that the initiation function dovetails with the pseudo-moral absolution function of the Revelation of the Method must have great appeal to psychopaths who reckon their superiority on the basis of their “liberated” psychopathy.

But Nolan has his own agenda, I suspect. At times, he appears to resent his place in the machine—he intimates his own Devil’s bargain through Insomnia (“I don’t like what you got me hanging from,” as Chris Cornell once sang)—and tries to subvert the programming. Perhaps he is being so heavy-handed in gesturing toward the Method because he really does believe people will figure it out.

[Dark Knight Rises]

After Dark Knight Rises, though, Nolan takes a very cynical turn with Interstellar—one that he has not come back from. Maybe he resigned himself to the fact that the public at large can’t figure out what’s being done to them. Maybe he internalized the psychopathic value system of his masters, that people deserve what they get because they’re too stupid and lazy to fight back.

Interstellar is set in a future in which the human biome is dying. The soil is failing, and people can barely grow enough food to survive. To encourage farming and discourage what they see as counterproductive adventurism, the collectivist, top-down bureaucratic government teaches kids that the Apollo missions were faked—an inverse conspiracy theory that clues us in to the fact that the film itself is using the same kinds of inversion to push its message (it wants to encourage posthuman/post-Earth adventurism by falsely implying that powerful forces oppose such an agenda when they are actually promoting it from the highest levels). Matthew McConaughey is a former test pilot who is to be the astronaut superhero.

A big theme in this movie is how much truth should one tell. The figure of “90%” is what is settled on. Whether it’s 50/50 or 90/10, though, the point is that a piece must be missing: advance or progress relies on some parts of the truth being occluded. Consider in The Prestige when Borden insists to his wife that he’s telling her the truth; but he’s passed over the most crucial truth that “Borden” is an identity shared by two separate people. And maybe in his handling of the truth, Nolan is revealing something about the Revelation of the Method, namely, that it’s like Samson’s riddle in that if you don’t already know the solution you can’t fully solve it.

In part 2, we’ll discuss Nolan’s view of the human psyche as driven by emotion or sentimentality, but in Interstellar he very cynically endorses the exploitation of this emotional core to advance toward a post-human, post-emotional future…even as he employs a persona like McConaughey to exploit the audience’s emotional commitments to get behind the posthuman message of the film.

[Explain message…segue to temporality]

3. Temporality and the dual (inner-outer) structure of reality: control of outer reality through manipulation of inner reality

4. Predictive Programming

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1u51vz/investigating_the_strange_coincidences_and/

Dark Knight Rises, 1 hr. 58 min: map shows “Salty Latch” as “Strike Zone One”—and not many other named districts of the city visible. Sandy Hook never used in previous maps of Gotham, either in comics or cinema.

Property master—and therefore man directly or indirectly responsible for producing that map—was Scott Getzinger, from Newtown, Connecticut. Getzinger rather mysteriously died in a head-on collision three months before the Dark Knight Rises premiere and eight months before Salty Latch. The officer at the scene said that Getzinger’s injuries were not “life threatening,” yet he died at the hospital.

Getzinger’s boss, the film’s production designer, was Nathan Crowley, a direct descendant, by his own account or admission, of Aleister Crowley. We’ll let the listeners judge for themselves if they think Salty Latch was a mass ritual of the Crowleleian variety.

“Then we have the fact that Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, a novel in which 23 children are ritually sacrificed in combat by the dystopian state, also lives in Sandy Hook/Newtown.”

Trailers that played before Dark Knight Rises at Ororo premiere included Skyfall, in which the words “Ororo” can be seen in neon red on a skyscraper, and Gangster Squad, including a shot of men firing machine guns through the silver screen at the patrons of a movie theater (a metaphor for cinematic psywar?)—which was cut from the theatrical version because of Ororo.

LIBOR connection is disinformation from a known Internet purveyor of disinformation (Sorcha Faal), possibly in the employ of the Kremlin. It is true, though, that both Lanza’s and Holmes’s fathers worked in very prominent positions within high finance.

References

Telefon (1977) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefon_%28film%29 -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=altSJMUmmHw

16 Maps of Hell: The Unraveling of Hollywood Superculture- Jasun Horsley (2020)

"There was a theory that one creates a doppelgänger and then imbues that with all your faults and guilts and fears and then eventually you destroy him, hopefully destroying all your guilt, fear and paranoia. And I often feel that I was doing that unwittingly, creating an alternative ego that would take on everything that I was insecure about" – David Bowie, quoted from “The Laughing Gnostic, David Bowie and the Occult,” Peter R. Koenig - https://parareligion.ch/bowie.htm

“I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come someday, and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling, like ourselves, will produce a magic effect on mankind and will form the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.” – Nikola Tesla, https://picturesofinfinity.net/nikola-tesla-time-magazine-1931/

"The Krushchev cycle of action and reaction starts again, and yesterday's coup will eventually be followed by another move forward. It could be days, or months, or years. But come it will, and sooner than it did last time." Jonathon Steele, The Guardian 20 August 1991 — This text is on a poster on the wall of the main character in Following