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One's dead and the other one ran away
To be honest, I didn't think The Mind Benders (1963) would be very good; I just thought it would have Dirk Bogarde in it. I was half right. Written by James Kennaway from his novel of the same name and produced and directed by Michael Relph and Basil Dearden in a speculative extension of their social problem cycle, the film opens like a spy thriller and closes like a parable and moves in the meantime through romantic drama, psychological horror, and science that would be more comfortable as fiction, rather as befits a story about the destabilization of personalities and the unacknowledged multitudes we contain. Of all the things it is, none of them are shlock.
The sign on the side of the shedlike research laboratory at Oxford reads "Isolation," but the modern viewer will recognize the stuff of its experiments as sensory deprivation, the kind which starts with frogman immersion in a float tank and ends with disorientation, hallucinations, and ultimately, if the subject is kept long enough in the weightless, silent, drifting, lonely dark, what Dr. Henry Longman (Bogarde) is quite sure would be "a sort of soulless, mindless, will-less thing . . . a kind of sea anemone." He speaks from grimly self-mocking experience, having bottled out of his scientific responsibilities six weeks ago to bury himself in the escapism of family life and a second honeymoon with his beloved wife Oonagh (Mary Ure) while his colleague Professor Sharpey (Harold Goldblatt) went on with his pet project alone, at least until the old man threw himself from a train with a thousand pounds of foreign interest in his briefcase. There's nothing strange in scientists who sell out their countries, but even to a man as professionally cynical as Major Hall of MI5 (John Clements) there is something weird in the fingersnap conversion of a ban-the-bomb boffin into a paid-off traitor and the answer seems to lie in the bleak metallic ripple of the isolation tank. His interview with Longman is a masterclass of impassivity, stonewalling off the nervy scientist's impassioned defense of his colleague until, as he has been trying to pretend wasn't inevitable from the moment his friend and fellow researcher Dr. Tate (Michael Bryant) showed him the notice of Sharpey's death in the paper and let him know that a certain Major had been asking for him, Longman consents to return to the lab and endure the kind of open-ended isolation that should file the case of Sharpey once and for all under the heading of "Z for zombie and not T for traitor." What he does not consent to is to be zombified himself, eight hours into the experiment when his boredom, irritation, confusion, arousal, weeping, screaming, and delirium have given way to a disintegration that the Major recognizes with chilling expertise: "It's fantastic! It'd take months of solitary confinement to reduce a man to this state, even if he were kept awake half the time with lights and all the rest of it. You've come into my country, don't you see . . . You could persuade Longman into anything now." Gentlemanly as an Avenger with his three-piece suit and his umbrella, Hall is Doctor as well as Major; he's the man from MKUltra. The true test of brainwashing is the depth of the affected belief. With Sharpey, it was his unworldly and indisputable patriotism. With Longman, it's Oonagh. Through twelve years and four children, he's loved her without reserve or second thoughts, and now with the help of a reluctant but complicit Tate, Hall is going to convince him otherwise. "Strictly Frankenstein country," Longman observed of the hollow, low-lit hangar of the tank as he laid out the parameters of the experiment with mock-military crispness—before bolting out of the room to be sick—"and this happens to be fact." It is rather like watching a monster assembled as the sodden Longman sways under the lights between the bad cop of Hall and the good cop of Tate and the cross-talk of their poison-dripping that will turn the next six months into a nightmare of alienation and cruelty. And what did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?
All of these elements make for perfectly cromulent spy-fi, albeit more in the line of John le Carré than The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It's disturbing enough to contemplate foreign powers infiltrating the hearts and minds of our brave boys of the West; it's far more sinister to watch that infiltration being practiced and refined beneath the dreaming spires of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Nothing in Major Hall's "whole chilly paraphernalia of treason" is colder than this concentrated act of betrayal, a terrified and trusting man eviscerated of the core of his life by the very people he made promise to return him safely to it, a woman in the tender dusk of a trysting place whispering suddenly to the emptiness behind her husband's eyes, "For God's sake, where are you?" But even the human cost of spycraft is less the theme of The Mind Benders than it is a jumping-off point for an exploration of what a once bright-eyed Sharpey called, in the 16 mm research film that served as our endearingly amateurish infodump on isolation, "the physics of the soul," and if we like to think of those equations as warm ones, they can also be damn near absolute zero. By the end of the film, we have been inescapably reminded that a person doesn't need to be brainwashed to act out of accustomed character or make decisions in ignorance of the reasons. They only need to be human.
The key is Tate, who spends half the movie looking like no such thing. It's not that he's dull or invisible; in fact he's one of the first characters introduced after the ominous, abstract credits, waiting on the platform at Paddington to catch the fatal train with Professor Sharpey. He's slight, fairish, still boyish despite the worried creases under his eyes—he has a windblown, undergraduate look, especially when perching on furniture or cycling around Oxford, often to the Longmans' tall house in Norham Gardens where he used to lodge before he moved out to his barge on the Isis. He can be socially stiff, as if he's never gotten used to his own authority, and he can also show a disarming sense of humor, as when he sighs after a brisk dismissal from Major Hall, "I'm just used as a skivvy around here." Because of his association with the Longmans, he's often present in domestic scenes as well as scientific ones. When he hails the children from the front gate, they incorporate him familiarly into their game of Kon-Tiki as "just another bloody barracuda." Oonagh comes downstairs to meet him still knotting the cord of her bathrobe, her thick blonde hair tousled fresh out of bed; she lights him a cigarette and settles beside him on the floor to talk with soft, deep joy about her idyll with her husband, comfortably, not sexually teasing at all. Longman even has a nickname for him, just as he has one for Oonagh, "Tatty" and "Otter." He looks like a confidant, a reflector, a foil; he might provide exposition, but he'll always be interesting, a little edgier, more evasive, more obtuse than strictly required while he's doing it. He's never gone into the tank. Compared to the other male principals, he doesn't have the impenetrable resolve of the Major or the quick-joking resilience of Longman, but all the same he doesn't strike the viewer as such a milquetoast that he wouldn't stand up for his vulnerable, unsuspecting friend, especially not when the matter under debate is the artificial induction of a violent loathing for an equally unsuspecting, anxiously waiting wife. Both sides of the fourth wall can feel betrayed. Tatty could have made an actor if he hadn't been a don, cradling the dazed, rubber-suited sea anemone that used to be Henry Longman protectively against the "bloody man" that threatens to drop him back in the tank, sounding so embarrassed by the obligation to disclose a friend's sexual secrets, so apologetic about smashing the illusion of Oxford's grand romance, led on by the rapped, impatient cues of his co-interrogator until his voice drops as low as a lover's itself in Longman's ear, an intrusive thought in the mask of the sorry truth: "He's never loved her at all. Have you, Longman? You've never loved her, have you?"
I double-checked and Stanley Milgram's "Behavioral Study of Obedience" (1963) had not yet been published when The Mind Benders was released, so it must have been something in the zeitgeist that makes Tate's compliance in this improvised atrocity look at first like an obedience experiment with the brakes off. No sooner has he rejected the Major's proposal with an admirably reflexive "No, that's—" than the Major pulls the sunk cost fallacy on him: "He had the courage to go back in that tank to clear Sharpey . . . This could prove him right or wrong in one." The military man stresses the urgency of their opportunity, the reversibility of the programming, the sympathy of his own qualms which he's repressing for the greater good: "I like nothing in this business, but we've still got to do it. We must." It's all as smooth and fast as a confidence trick. Even as they pull a table and chair and a glare-faced gooseneck lamp into the traditional setup of the third degree, Tate is still protesting, "You're rushing me into this . . . I can't do it," while the inflexible Major assures him, "Yes, you can. You're the only one who can." Agitated, uncomfortable, for a moment flung up against the black iron fixtures of the tank like a prisoner himself, Tate with his rolled-up shirtsleeves and his disordered pale hair looks as though he would rather be doing anything else in that instant and he does as he's told. Who is he to argue with the embodiment of his government telling him it's necessary, it's right? Who isn't he, with the happiness and sanity of his two best friends at stake? Is he really just that pliable under his bicycle clips and his cheerful coffee-making, no eight-hour soaking of the spine required?
The answer, when it comes out on the same crowded Guy Fawkes Night as an attempted infidelity, an abortive deprogramming, and a successful childbirth, is sillier and sadder and nastier than anything Milgram concluded from his study at Yale. Early in the film, the technician Norman (Terry Palmer) buttonholed Tate with a bootleg of classical music for Oonagh, slyly overriding his superior's objections, "If you think that I think that you don't want to see Oonagh Longman, Doctor, you're wrong." We couldn't tell then if the abrupt silence in which Tate left—with the tape—meant a palpable hit or a joke off the tiresome mark. In the concussive aftermath of the recorded interrogation whose playback was supposed to roll back Longman's brainwashing and instead provoked a denunciation of his heavily pregnant wife even more vituperative and elaborate than the relentless, needling abuse to which he's been subjecting her since the spring, it becomes clear that cheeky Norman had the right of it, even if Tate couldn't admit it to himself then. He's in love with Oonagh Longman. He was in love with her at the time of the experiment that twisted her husband from her. Now it's no mystery why he acquiesced so readily to breaking his friends' marriage, insinuated an availability on the part of the woman he wanted and all but pleaded to hear his rival renounce his claim; why even as Oonagh recounted her horror stories he insisted absurdly there was nothing to be undone. As the evidence of the interrogation unspools in the shadow-lit ghost ship of the isolation lab, Longman's gasping and sobbing on the soundtrack, but Tate closes his eyes as though his brain is the one being hung out telltale to dry. Trying to face up to Oonagh afterward, he's not rejected so much as he's dismissed utterly, his protestations of remorse and devotion coolly read for the irrelevancies they are; she leaves the lab to retrieve her husband for herself, without any further blundering from mind benders who don't even know their own minds. "You are a baby . . . a baby." It sounds like an epitaph. After that there's no point in dissembling for Major Hall, for whom he bitterly sums up the total inadequacy of his position: "Oh, not that I've done anything about it. Except murder her husband." He looks more than ever like one of his own students in his pullover and corduroys, his exposed immaturity. The Major's professional assessment that "[he] didn't go into this thing with any conscious idea of doing Longman harm" only makes him twist his hand farther over his face, staring into the smears of the window's glass as if he might see himself in it clearly for once. "That makes it worse, don't you see? I can't even recognize my own motives. I hate that sort of person." The Major smiles then, not unkindly, and bears out the truth of Oonagh's parting words: "Then you hate the young."
I like Tate, even though I'm not sure I'm supposed to: he's such a fool and he does so much damage and just about his only hope for the future is his last scene with Hall, which for all its deserved self-laceration may be the first time we've seen him not lying to anyone, starting with himself; it makes me think he might grow up after all. (I can't tell if Kennaway felt the same. Of all the characters present for the Walpurgisnacht of the deprogramming attempt, Tate is conspicuously absent from the healing epilogue of the morning after, even though he lives literally next door. Unless he's going to quit teaching and never leave his barge again, he's going to have to look some of these people in the face sometime. Maybe his author didn't know what he'd say to them, either.) But he's also recognizable in the wincing way of mirrors, far more so than Longman in many ways. Most of us don't have our brains rinsed to guacamole by utilitarian agents and self-deceiving scientists. Like Tate, we do it to ourselves. Without him, you have a cutting-edge but familiarly cautionary tale of irresponsible science redeemed at the eleventh hour by the enduring human soul. With him, you can never forget that the human soul, whatever its endurance, is an incredible mess of fantasies, impulses, and biases that can be hacked even inadvertently by the right triggers at the right times and frankly that scares me a lot more than the most creepily lit float tank. Look out the window, for God's sake. Read the news. Everyone in this story is real; that means they're no more rational than the rest of us.
I can't watch it very often, but I have admired Kennaway's debut novel-to-film Tunes of Glory (1960) for years; it's patterned so beautifully against itself. The Mind Benders is either more experimentally structured or just slightly untidy, but its script is so intensely intelligent that I don't care if its sudden gear-shifts are really a flaw. I love its handling of characters like Oonagh, who could so easily have been an object and has odd currents of her own, or the leopard-printed college widow Annabelle (Wendy Craig), who lives on the barge next to Tate's and is said to be "part of a gentleman's education—Eton, Oxford, and Annabelle" and is absolutely not up for having an affair with Longman because drunken midlife crises are one thing, but brainwashing is out of her emotional pay grade. I love that the moment of truth in this movie is actually a long, sweaty, touch-and-go night of the sort that might bond even strangers to one another until it means everything for one person to ask, "Are you the doctor?" and the other to answer, "Well, if I am, there's going to be one hell of a scandal because I'm going to be struck off all the lists." I enjoy the pains taken to treat a subject as topically sensational as brainwashing in terms of serious science, not paranoid fantasy: nobody can smash the links with a deck of red queens. This film still looks to me on some level like the direct precursor of much less grounded takes like Simon (1980) and Altered States (1980). The opening titles claim it was "suggested by experiments on 'The Reduction of Sensation' recently carried out at certain Universities in the United States," which makes me wonder if the university where my grandfather taught psychology was one of them. My mother was taking part in perceptual experiments around the same time. I don't know if any of them made the world look as volatile in black-and-white as the photography by Denys Coop, where campus tours can give way to shadows as double-edged as unexamined desires. Norman Bird turns up for a couple of seconds as a cabbie, Roger Delgado as an Arctic scientist, and an uncredited Edward Fox as a nosy student. I suppose if I want to see more of Michael Bryant, I should finally get around to watching The Stone Tape (1972). I really need to remember that the quality of films with Dirk Bogarde in them cannot be accurately estimated from their titles. This country brought to you by my motivated backers at Patreon.
The sign on the side of the shedlike research laboratory at Oxford reads "Isolation," but the modern viewer will recognize the stuff of its experiments as sensory deprivation, the kind which starts with frogman immersion in a float tank and ends with disorientation, hallucinations, and ultimately, if the subject is kept long enough in the weightless, silent, drifting, lonely dark, what Dr. Henry Longman (Bogarde) is quite sure would be "a sort of soulless, mindless, will-less thing . . . a kind of sea anemone." He speaks from grimly self-mocking experience, having bottled out of his scientific responsibilities six weeks ago to bury himself in the escapism of family life and a second honeymoon with his beloved wife Oonagh (Mary Ure) while his colleague Professor Sharpey (Harold Goldblatt) went on with his pet project alone, at least until the old man threw himself from a train with a thousand pounds of foreign interest in his briefcase. There's nothing strange in scientists who sell out their countries, but even to a man as professionally cynical as Major Hall of MI5 (John Clements) there is something weird in the fingersnap conversion of a ban-the-bomb boffin into a paid-off traitor and the answer seems to lie in the bleak metallic ripple of the isolation tank. His interview with Longman is a masterclass of impassivity, stonewalling off the nervy scientist's impassioned defense of his colleague until, as he has been trying to pretend wasn't inevitable from the moment his friend and fellow researcher Dr. Tate (Michael Bryant) showed him the notice of Sharpey's death in the paper and let him know that a certain Major had been asking for him, Longman consents to return to the lab and endure the kind of open-ended isolation that should file the case of Sharpey once and for all under the heading of "Z for zombie and not T for traitor." What he does not consent to is to be zombified himself, eight hours into the experiment when his boredom, irritation, confusion, arousal, weeping, screaming, and delirium have given way to a disintegration that the Major recognizes with chilling expertise: "It's fantastic! It'd take months of solitary confinement to reduce a man to this state, even if he were kept awake half the time with lights and all the rest of it. You've come into my country, don't you see . . . You could persuade Longman into anything now." Gentlemanly as an Avenger with his three-piece suit and his umbrella, Hall is Doctor as well as Major; he's the man from MKUltra. The true test of brainwashing is the depth of the affected belief. With Sharpey, it was his unworldly and indisputable patriotism. With Longman, it's Oonagh. Through twelve years and four children, he's loved her without reserve or second thoughts, and now with the help of a reluctant but complicit Tate, Hall is going to convince him otherwise. "Strictly Frankenstein country," Longman observed of the hollow, low-lit hangar of the tank as he laid out the parameters of the experiment with mock-military crispness—before bolting out of the room to be sick—"and this happens to be fact." It is rather like watching a monster assembled as the sodden Longman sways under the lights between the bad cop of Hall and the good cop of Tate and the cross-talk of their poison-dripping that will turn the next six months into a nightmare of alienation and cruelty. And what did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?
All of these elements make for perfectly cromulent spy-fi, albeit more in the line of John le Carré than The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It's disturbing enough to contemplate foreign powers infiltrating the hearts and minds of our brave boys of the West; it's far more sinister to watch that infiltration being practiced and refined beneath the dreaming spires of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Nothing in Major Hall's "whole chilly paraphernalia of treason" is colder than this concentrated act of betrayal, a terrified and trusting man eviscerated of the core of his life by the very people he made promise to return him safely to it, a woman in the tender dusk of a trysting place whispering suddenly to the emptiness behind her husband's eyes, "For God's sake, where are you?" But even the human cost of spycraft is less the theme of The Mind Benders than it is a jumping-off point for an exploration of what a once bright-eyed Sharpey called, in the 16 mm research film that served as our endearingly amateurish infodump on isolation, "the physics of the soul," and if we like to think of those equations as warm ones, they can also be damn near absolute zero. By the end of the film, we have been inescapably reminded that a person doesn't need to be brainwashed to act out of accustomed character or make decisions in ignorance of the reasons. They only need to be human.
The key is Tate, who spends half the movie looking like no such thing. It's not that he's dull or invisible; in fact he's one of the first characters introduced after the ominous, abstract credits, waiting on the platform at Paddington to catch the fatal train with Professor Sharpey. He's slight, fairish, still boyish despite the worried creases under his eyes—he has a windblown, undergraduate look, especially when perching on furniture or cycling around Oxford, often to the Longmans' tall house in Norham Gardens where he used to lodge before he moved out to his barge on the Isis. He can be socially stiff, as if he's never gotten used to his own authority, and he can also show a disarming sense of humor, as when he sighs after a brisk dismissal from Major Hall, "I'm just used as a skivvy around here." Because of his association with the Longmans, he's often present in domestic scenes as well as scientific ones. When he hails the children from the front gate, they incorporate him familiarly into their game of Kon-Tiki as "just another bloody barracuda." Oonagh comes downstairs to meet him still knotting the cord of her bathrobe, her thick blonde hair tousled fresh out of bed; she lights him a cigarette and settles beside him on the floor to talk with soft, deep joy about her idyll with her husband, comfortably, not sexually teasing at all. Longman even has a nickname for him, just as he has one for Oonagh, "Tatty" and "Otter." He looks like a confidant, a reflector, a foil; he might provide exposition, but he'll always be interesting, a little edgier, more evasive, more obtuse than strictly required while he's doing it. He's never gone into the tank. Compared to the other male principals, he doesn't have the impenetrable resolve of the Major or the quick-joking resilience of Longman, but all the same he doesn't strike the viewer as such a milquetoast that he wouldn't stand up for his vulnerable, unsuspecting friend, especially not when the matter under debate is the artificial induction of a violent loathing for an equally unsuspecting, anxiously waiting wife. Both sides of the fourth wall can feel betrayed. Tatty could have made an actor if he hadn't been a don, cradling the dazed, rubber-suited sea anemone that used to be Henry Longman protectively against the "bloody man" that threatens to drop him back in the tank, sounding so embarrassed by the obligation to disclose a friend's sexual secrets, so apologetic about smashing the illusion of Oxford's grand romance, led on by the rapped, impatient cues of his co-interrogator until his voice drops as low as a lover's itself in Longman's ear, an intrusive thought in the mask of the sorry truth: "He's never loved her at all. Have you, Longman? You've never loved her, have you?"
I double-checked and Stanley Milgram's "Behavioral Study of Obedience" (1963) had not yet been published when The Mind Benders was released, so it must have been something in the zeitgeist that makes Tate's compliance in this improvised atrocity look at first like an obedience experiment with the brakes off. No sooner has he rejected the Major's proposal with an admirably reflexive "No, that's—" than the Major pulls the sunk cost fallacy on him: "He had the courage to go back in that tank to clear Sharpey . . . This could prove him right or wrong in one." The military man stresses the urgency of their opportunity, the reversibility of the programming, the sympathy of his own qualms which he's repressing for the greater good: "I like nothing in this business, but we've still got to do it. We must." It's all as smooth and fast as a confidence trick. Even as they pull a table and chair and a glare-faced gooseneck lamp into the traditional setup of the third degree, Tate is still protesting, "You're rushing me into this . . . I can't do it," while the inflexible Major assures him, "Yes, you can. You're the only one who can." Agitated, uncomfortable, for a moment flung up against the black iron fixtures of the tank like a prisoner himself, Tate with his rolled-up shirtsleeves and his disordered pale hair looks as though he would rather be doing anything else in that instant and he does as he's told. Who is he to argue with the embodiment of his government telling him it's necessary, it's right? Who isn't he, with the happiness and sanity of his two best friends at stake? Is he really just that pliable under his bicycle clips and his cheerful coffee-making, no eight-hour soaking of the spine required?
The answer, when it comes out on the same crowded Guy Fawkes Night as an attempted infidelity, an abortive deprogramming, and a successful childbirth, is sillier and sadder and nastier than anything Milgram concluded from his study at Yale. Early in the film, the technician Norman (Terry Palmer) buttonholed Tate with a bootleg of classical music for Oonagh, slyly overriding his superior's objections, "If you think that I think that you don't want to see Oonagh Longman, Doctor, you're wrong." We couldn't tell then if the abrupt silence in which Tate left—with the tape—meant a palpable hit or a joke off the tiresome mark. In the concussive aftermath of the recorded interrogation whose playback was supposed to roll back Longman's brainwashing and instead provoked a denunciation of his heavily pregnant wife even more vituperative and elaborate than the relentless, needling abuse to which he's been subjecting her since the spring, it becomes clear that cheeky Norman had the right of it, even if Tate couldn't admit it to himself then. He's in love with Oonagh Longman. He was in love with her at the time of the experiment that twisted her husband from her. Now it's no mystery why he acquiesced so readily to breaking his friends' marriage, insinuated an availability on the part of the woman he wanted and all but pleaded to hear his rival renounce his claim; why even as Oonagh recounted her horror stories he insisted absurdly there was nothing to be undone. As the evidence of the interrogation unspools in the shadow-lit ghost ship of the isolation lab, Longman's gasping and sobbing on the soundtrack, but Tate closes his eyes as though his brain is the one being hung out telltale to dry. Trying to face up to Oonagh afterward, he's not rejected so much as he's dismissed utterly, his protestations of remorse and devotion coolly read for the irrelevancies they are; she leaves the lab to retrieve her husband for herself, without any further blundering from mind benders who don't even know their own minds. "You are a baby . . . a baby." It sounds like an epitaph. After that there's no point in dissembling for Major Hall, for whom he bitterly sums up the total inadequacy of his position: "Oh, not that I've done anything about it. Except murder her husband." He looks more than ever like one of his own students in his pullover and corduroys, his exposed immaturity. The Major's professional assessment that "[he] didn't go into this thing with any conscious idea of doing Longman harm" only makes him twist his hand farther over his face, staring into the smears of the window's glass as if he might see himself in it clearly for once. "That makes it worse, don't you see? I can't even recognize my own motives. I hate that sort of person." The Major smiles then, not unkindly, and bears out the truth of Oonagh's parting words: "Then you hate the young."
I like Tate, even though I'm not sure I'm supposed to: he's such a fool and he does so much damage and just about his only hope for the future is his last scene with Hall, which for all its deserved self-laceration may be the first time we've seen him not lying to anyone, starting with himself; it makes me think he might grow up after all. (I can't tell if Kennaway felt the same. Of all the characters present for the Walpurgisnacht of the deprogramming attempt, Tate is conspicuously absent from the healing epilogue of the morning after, even though he lives literally next door. Unless he's going to quit teaching and never leave his barge again, he's going to have to look some of these people in the face sometime. Maybe his author didn't know what he'd say to them, either.) But he's also recognizable in the wincing way of mirrors, far more so than Longman in many ways. Most of us don't have our brains rinsed to guacamole by utilitarian agents and self-deceiving scientists. Like Tate, we do it to ourselves. Without him, you have a cutting-edge but familiarly cautionary tale of irresponsible science redeemed at the eleventh hour by the enduring human soul. With him, you can never forget that the human soul, whatever its endurance, is an incredible mess of fantasies, impulses, and biases that can be hacked even inadvertently by the right triggers at the right times and frankly that scares me a lot more than the most creepily lit float tank. Look out the window, for God's sake. Read the news. Everyone in this story is real; that means they're no more rational than the rest of us.
I can't watch it very often, but I have admired Kennaway's debut novel-to-film Tunes of Glory (1960) for years; it's patterned so beautifully against itself. The Mind Benders is either more experimentally structured or just slightly untidy, but its script is so intensely intelligent that I don't care if its sudden gear-shifts are really a flaw. I love its handling of characters like Oonagh, who could so easily have been an object and has odd currents of her own, or the leopard-printed college widow Annabelle (Wendy Craig), who lives on the barge next to Tate's and is said to be "part of a gentleman's education—Eton, Oxford, and Annabelle" and is absolutely not up for having an affair with Longman because drunken midlife crises are one thing, but brainwashing is out of her emotional pay grade. I love that the moment of truth in this movie is actually a long, sweaty, touch-and-go night of the sort that might bond even strangers to one another until it means everything for one person to ask, "Are you the doctor?" and the other to answer, "Well, if I am, there's going to be one hell of a scandal because I'm going to be struck off all the lists." I enjoy the pains taken to treat a subject as topically sensational as brainwashing in terms of serious science, not paranoid fantasy: nobody can smash the links with a deck of red queens. This film still looks to me on some level like the direct precursor of much less grounded takes like Simon (1980) and Altered States (1980). The opening titles claim it was "suggested by experiments on 'The Reduction of Sensation' recently carried out at certain Universities in the United States," which makes me wonder if the university where my grandfather taught psychology was one of them. My mother was taking part in perceptual experiments around the same time. I don't know if any of them made the world look as volatile in black-and-white as the photography by Denys Coop, where campus tours can give way to shadows as double-edged as unexamined desires. Norman Bird turns up for a couple of seconds as a cabbie, Roger Delgado as an Arctic scientist, and an uncredited Edward Fox as a nosy student. I suppose if I want to see more of Michael Bryant, I should finally get around to watching The Stone Tape (1972). I really need to remember that the quality of films with Dirk Bogarde in them cannot be accurately estimated from their titles. This country brought to you by my motivated backers at Patreon.
no subject
I don't know if I should tell you that the CIA regards extreme prolonged sensory deprivation as a basic tool in their toolkit.
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I do know that. Major Hall doesn't know the euphemism enhanced interrogation, but he's certainly done the work.
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Lock him up real tight
Throw away the key and then
Turn off all the lights
Kidnap the Sandy Claws
Throw him in a box
Bury him for ninety years
Then see if he talks…
- The Nightmare Before Christmas
no subject
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.
*flails with little cardboard sign*
BAN THE BOMB
ALSO NOTHING WRONG WITH MUPPETS
Edit: Muppet Treasure Island is now brought to you by Disney+ and has forty percent less current-event topicality and instead of chilling mental disintegration at the hands of a shadow government there are Muppets
no subject
ALSO NOTHING WRONG WITH MUPPETS
I MEAN I AGREE WITH BOTH OF THESE THESES
Edit: Muppet Treasure Island is now brought to you by Disney+ and has forty percent less current-event topicality and instead of chilling mental disintegration at the hands of a shadow government there are Muppets
I actually haven't seen Muppet Treasure Island since it was in theaters. It had Tim Curry and Muppets. Why would I not?
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(If I had a favorite film I think it might be Muppet Treasure Island, nearly entirely on Tim Curry and Rizzo the Rat.)
I want to be clear that this is a very good film review for reasons other than it stops me watching the film! Just in case you wondered!
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That seems very fair to me. The existence of The Muppet Christmas Carol still causes all members of my family to exclaim occasionally, "Light the lamp, not the rat, light the lamp NOT THE RAT!" Sometimes around holiday candles.
I want to be clear that this is a very good film review for reasons other than it stops me watching the film! Just in case you wondered!
I appreciate the explicit confirmation!
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There is a real possibility that The Muppet Christmas Carol was my introduction to Michael Caine. I regret nothing.
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I grew up on the 1951 fim with Alastair Sim, so he's always been my iconic Scrooge, but I have all of these detailed memories of Caine and now I'm really hoping my family didn't throw out our old videocassette. [edit] Confirmed! They did not!
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True, that.
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It got my attention.
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P.
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Thank you! I love when things are more interesting than I think they will be.
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Thank you! I was so glad of the kind of movie it actually turned out to be.
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Milgram conducted his initial round of experiments in 1961, but I have no evidence that Kennaway—who had been following research on sensory deprivation since the '50's—knew about them. There had been earlier sociological work on authority and obedience, like Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. (My grandfather helped with the statistics for that.) Brainwashing was a hot topic thanks to the Korean War; the Eichmann trial had resurrected the specter of just following orders. And everyone was worrying about double agents and traitors. 1963 is the same year Kim Philby defected to the USSR and John le Carré published The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. And the previous year had seen The Manchurian Candidate. I think it must just have been a time for thinking about why people do things, and how you can get them to.
(The best way, of course, is to have it be something they already want or feel obliged to do. Hall really needs to say almost nothing in order to induce Longman to run the isolation experiment on himself: "All you've told me so far is guesswork . . . You should also remember that I hold a great deal of evidence against Professor Sharpey." Longman's senses of friendship and grief and justice and guilt do the rest: "Two and B, Intention: To find out what happened to the man who went into the tank while his colleague went on picnics." It's just a matter of waiting and letting him talk himself round. I really do find Major Hall a frightening character, such a genial elder statesman of counterintelligence with none of Tate's excuses of self-deception. For queen and country, he can compartmentalize and take other people to pieces, even if he likes them, and know he's doing it. It's remarkable that he's bothered by the harm done to Oonagh, but I think it's because he hadn't factored collateral damage in.)
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Yeah, the thing I'm thinking, reading this, is how there are no disinterested agents in anything, ever. Maybe not all the players have a hidden interest of the nature of Tait's, but everyone has something.
Everything is so connected; everything has a past with roots that move underground to all sorts of places ...
Did you read Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil? The second book featured an attempt to break the protagonist in an isolation tank--that was my first experience of the concept.
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Everyone does. And all you can do is try to be aware of what that something is. I was asked once what my blind spots were and the expected, obvious funny answer was "How would I know?" but I still think it's my responsibility to find out. It's part of being a person. Just because there's increasing evidence that we make all sorts of decisions at a practically autonomic level doesn't mean I just get to throw up my hands and blame the rest of it on determinism.
Everything is so connected; everything has a past with roots that move underground to all sorts of places ...
I was saying to
(I don't know when Tate fell in love or fantasizing or whatever you actually want to call it with Oonagh, but I am confident it can't have started when he was living with the Longmans because he's a bad enough conscious liar—even if just by omission, it's obvious that he's doing it; it's part of what makes his performance in the interrogation so shocking, but he had a major assist from his subconscious there—that it would have come out at the time and been dealt with and forestalled half the film's plot. I think he really was the safe friend Oonagh treats him as in their first scene together, which explains why she's so unforgiving with him at the end. He was a kind of family. She trusted him. With her husband, with herself. He betrayed them both. Longman finally restored to himself can tell Major Hall that the ordeal was worth it for Sharpey's sake and I believe he means it; as noted to
Did you read Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil? The second book featured an attempt to break the protagonist in an isolation tank--that was my first experience of the concept.
I read Enchantress from the Stars! I have it mentally filed around the same time of elementary school as Monica Hughes' Devil on My Back (1984), although we didn't own a copy until years later when it was reissued with an afterword by the author and art by Leo and Diane Dillon. I don't think I knew there was a second book. I may never have read anything else by Engdahl. Do you recommend it?
I have no idea where I first encountered the concept of isolation/sensory deprivation. Given the quantity of science and psychology lying around the house I grew up in, it may not have been in fiction.
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Regarding The Far Side of Evil, the short answer is yes! But reread Enchantress from the Stars first to reacquaint yourself with the protagonist and the setup (or maybe don't! Your memory is remarkable).
The long answer is that it's less timeless than the first book. Instead of the ethnographer-woman visiting a generic-European medieval world, she visits an authoritarian Cold War era planet, a planet at the crisis point where they're either going to destroy themselves or reach out into space. In that setting, the attitudes and preoccupations of the early 1970s (nuclear destruction, totalitarianism, racism, mind-altering drugs, isolation tanks) are much more evident. Weirdly, I have no memory of how it actually **ends**; what I remember are the scenes between the protagonist and her interrogator--those were all *excellent*. The various things they tried on her have stuck with me ever after, and I've gradually learned, as I grew up, the real-life analogues that the author was drawing on.
In the first book the protagonist "broke cover." In this one, she's in the position of needing/trying to maintain cover when one of her colleagues wants to, so that's an interesting switch in perspectives. But the fact that I can't remember the end leads me to believe it may be a bit of a letdown.
The edition I read had beautiful illustrations by Richard Cuffari.
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I like her a lot! The plot would still work if she were just a patient Griselda, but it's so much more vivid that she's not. We don't have to take anything about her importance to Longman (and vice versa) on faith; it's there in their deep physical familiarity which is not complacency, the way they don't even need to finish one another's sentences to be on the same wavelength. Longman comes down the stairs slowly, holding the day's paper that Tate showed him by way of breaking the news, and as soon as he says the words that smash the spell of their six-week escape from the world, "Sharpey's dead," Oonagh answers him, quick as if she'd read the article herself, "He killed himself." They listen to her bootleg reel-to-reel of Sibelius afterward and she's the first person to voice what all of them are thinking and not saying: that one way or another the isolation research killed him. She's not simple. She's just direct. Hall tries to put her off hearing the playback of the interrogation, thinking it will hurt her worse, and she tells him plainly, "I have to know." I had never seen the actress before and her career appears to have been tragically short, but she has an extraordinary face, blonde and deer-browed; she does look like the wild thing that Longman affectionately nicknames her, but she's not some creature of intuition, she's a scientist's wife and she's not decorative. Tate has good taste, falling in love with her! Just terrible implementation, like any ability to keep it to himself.
But reread Enchantress from the Stars first to reacquaint yourself with the protagonist and the setup (or maybe don't! Your memory is remarkable).
I might as well, if it's not in storage. I remember enjoying it. (Thank you.)
Instead of the ethnographer-woman visiting a generic-European medieval world, she visits an authoritarian Cold War era planet, a planet at the crisis point where they're either going to destroy themselves or reach out into space. In that setting, the attitudes and preoccupations of the early 1970s (nuclear destruction, totalitarianism, racism, mind-altering drugs, isolation tanks) are much more evident.
I can see how that would happen. On the other hand, allowing for the difference of a functional space program, it sounds like too much of it might have come around to being relevant again.
I'm trying to remember whose theory that was, that at a certain point of technological development civilizations either leap forward into stability or self-destruct. It was taken for granted by a lot of science fiction; by a lot of scientists, too. It wasn't Fermi. It might be Sagan or Hawking. Crud. My father would know. [edit] He says it was Fermi. Whoops.
The edition I read had beautiful illustrations by Richard Cuffari.
That's an eerily evocative cover and makes me realize I've been seeing his art since childhood without ever making the connection of the name: he did the original dust jacket art for L'Engle's A Wind in the Door (1973) and Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard (1974) and I suspect a bunch of other children's/YA titles that aren't coming as immediately to mind. It's an incredibly recognizable style.
—Oh, my God, he illustrated the sequel to Robert Newman's Merlin's Mistake (1970) which I hadn't even known existed. The first novel is delightful off-kilter Arthuriana: the title character is the glasses-wearing godson of Merlin who intended to endow him with all the knowledge necessary to make him a great magician and instead forgot how time worked and endowed him with all future knowledge, so that as Tertius ruefully explains, he could talk your ear off about nuclear reactors but he can't cast a wart cure to save his life. I always thought it was a standalone. How on earth do I find a copy?
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Tate has good taste, falling in love with her! Just terrible implementation --This made me laugh.
Re: The Far Side of Evil and what you say (it sounds like too much of it might have come around to being relevant again.) --Yes, quite.
Richard Cuffari: Yes, I was fascinated by his art, especially his art for The Perilous Gard. I stared and stared at his art of the Lady. I kind of didn't like how he did lips? There was something about how he drew them that caused me to focus on them too much. And yet I loved his style overall. Maybe I actually liked how he did lips. Well anyway: I always pored over his illustrations.
For The Far Side of Evil, though, I think he missed the cue that the protagonist was meant to look Black, or at least to have African-quality hair: She's described as having hair that floats around her like a halo. Yes, you can imagine Caucasian-quality hair doing that if you imagine a person in the water, and that's pretty much what he draws, but dude! There are people whose hair floats around their heads without being underwater. I read the books as a middle-schooler, I think, and even at that age this thought occurred to me.
(But the illustrations are still beautiful)
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I'm glad that's come through. I knew this review had wound up more thematically focused than anything else—Dirk Bogarde barely exists in it, even though I watched it for him and he gives a tremendous performance—and although
It is more the case, anyway, that the synergy between Oonagh and Longman is what saves him. "There are some instincts in Longman, like everybody else," she says clear-eyed to Major Hall, "that are indestructible, no matter what you, or Tate, or science may do to him." I like that even if that's true, it's not a simple flick of a switch either way. The brainwashing doesn't look at first like it's worked; neither does the deprogramming. Maybe it's less what Longman hears on the tape than what Oonagh says to him about it afterward. Mostly it's what they go through together, where there's no one moment where his conditioning is shown to break. At the start it's a stranger's rough and impatient concern for another hurting human creature; by the end it's the unconditional care of the man who loves her and who cries to be back with her, knowing for six terrible months he wasn't. (Why didn't I realize before this is one of those year-wheel katabasis stories? Only this time Eurydike goes down for Orpheus, and this time she gets him back.) I love this imperceptible, indisputable changeover. It's much less magic than psychology is often treated in this or really any other genre.
--This made me laugh.
I really think the last character I saw fail his emotional intelligence save so hard and so consistently was Gilbert Norrell. I do wish him well; I just think most of us hope to get better at self-awareness without needing to start at quite that level of yikes.
I think he missed the cue that the protagonist was meant to look Black, or at least to have African-quality hair: She's described as having hair that floats around her like a halo.
That reminds me of Le Guin writing about A Wizard of Earthsea and how exactly one cover artist in the dozens and dozens of editions ever seemed to take seriously the description of Ged as brown or copper-colored; it was the original first edition and then after that everyone seemed to assume he was maybe just a very tanned white guy? It's amazing what people can miss in-text if they see their expectations instead.
(I had what may have been an opposite case of that in Patricia McKillip's The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976). Because of how a character was described—
"The Morgol of Herun welcomed them into her courtyard. She was a tall woman with blue-black hair drawn back from her face, falling without a ripple against her loose robe of leaf-green cloth. Her house was a vast oval of black stone. Water from the river flowing beneath it fanned over stone fountains in her yard, formed tiny streams and pools where fish slipped liked red and green and gold flames beneath the tracery of shadows from the trees."
—I assumed at once she was her world's equivalent of East Asian and I'm still not sure to this day if she's meant to be. But she has koi ponds!)
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And I think blue-black hair and koi ponds would have triggered the same thought in me re: Patricia McKillip's character ... and now my mind is turning to the question that I can never let go and yet never answer for myself in any satisfactory way--never even articulate properly--which has to do with mixing elements of culture, which is what we do when we're inventing societies that aren't just actual societies under pseudonyms, and what cultural elements mean or do in an invented society that's different from what they mean or do in real-life societies ... if anything.
One thing I like about really good fantasy secondary-world writing (for instance, what Sofia Samatar does, or what Rose Lemberg does [not that I've read a lot in her world, but what I have read]--or what Rebecca Fraimow did in the New Gehesran story) is how there are very identifiable cultural *feels*, and yet the cultures in no way read as this-world cultures wearing masks.
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Also, I hope you find Merlin's Mistake! It sounds great, and it sounds like Richard Cuffari was really a hot item right at that time, as The Far Side of Evil was published I think in 1971, and The Perilous Gard in 1974.)
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I was vaguely thinking it had come out of Sagan and Shklovsky's Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), but my father says firmly there was a famous conversation in which one of a group of scientists were wondering aloud why we haven't heard from extraterrestrial life if it's so likely to exist and Fermi responded bluntly, "Because they discovered nuclear weapons," which he considers the oldest statement of the theory.
Also, I hope you find Merlin's Mistake!
Thank you! I am sorry to have been unclear: The Testing of Tertius (1973) is the sequel I'm looking for. I grew up with a copy of Merlin's Mistake in the house and it took until the last ten years for me to find another person who had even heard of it, who turned out to be
and it sounds like Richard Cuffari was really a hot item right at that time, as The Far Side of Evil was published I think in 1971, and The Perilous Gard in 1974.
The Michael Whelan of his day! (I know Michael Whelan was active in the '70's. He was just inescapable during the '90's.)
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The Testing of Tertius (Merlin's Mistake Book 2)
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Cool!