Media is Our Lens on the World

“Most people can see what they want to see in almost anything.” Douglas Rushkoff’s generalization sums up both the grand ambition and the essential problem of Programming the Nation?. The documentary begins with images designed to evoke anxiety and interest, the New York City skyline gives way to allusions to 9/11, with a soundtrack pocked with screams, sirens, and fading chaotic traffic. “As the dust settled,” observes filmmaker Jeff Warrick, 9/11 gave way to “questions and uncertainties [that] seemed to emanate from all aspects of society.”

So far, so broad. Warrick introduces his investment in pursuing some of these questions, as he has “worked in and studied advertising for years.” Looking back on that post-9/11 moment, when U.S. citizens were encouraged to consume in order to feel better, he’s wondering “if we were all being brainwashed, conditioned like rats in a maze, with the goal of making us think and believe certain things without any rational explanation or concern for the effects for the future.”

As he speaks, you see images that support what he’s saying: a t-shirt saying that “9/11 was an inside job,” a dramatically waving U.S. flag, a Times Square advertisement for the Army, a crowd of people, his own thoughtful face, Saddam Hussein on trial, a placard advertising “the American Dream” for $25 off, and yes, a rat in a maze. The film thus lays out and also uses its ostensible object of investigation. You’re solicited by images as you’re cautioned that you’re solicited by images.

If the strategy seems cynical on its face, a few minutes into the film, it looks both more earnest and more naïve. As Programming the Nation? goes on to trace “the history of subliminal messaging in America,” it walks through a standard timeline, with guides who have an investment in the subject (that is, they wrote books they would like to sell). Wilson Key (Subliminal Seduction and August Bullock (The Secret Sales Pitch) use Freud to frame their concerns with subliminal images (say, satan faces in ice cubes or penises in Disney movies and Marlboro ads). Eldon Taylor brings up Edward Bernays and propaganda, and William Poundstone describes the Vicary Experiment (also referred to as the Vicary Hoax: Warrick here notes that James Vicary held his 1957 press conference to “unveil the technique” in a “warehouse oddly lined with mattresses and chicken wire”). Such hoary cases, as well as the references to congressional hearings from the 1980s, suggest the research remains stalled, or debunked.

Warrick speaks with Queensryche singer Geoff Tate on the subject of subliminal lyrics and backwards masking (which raised notorious scares back in the day with regard to the Beatles (“Paul is dead”) and Judas Priest, with footage from David Van Taylor’s documentary Dream Deceivers). His interviews with a couple of academics are also unenlightening, including Bill Yousman (former director of the Media Education Foundation, who says that distrust in government and corporations usually produces rising fears of subliminal imaging) and Noam Chomsky (whose observation here is the most obvious one to make, that “the purpose of the ad is to delude and deceive you”). More than once, Rushkoff is introduced as a skeptic, not convinced that subliminal advertising is either pervasive or effective (he says of Key, “A crazy person writes a book about a fraudulent joke experiment and ends up creating such a stir that an agency is created,” namely, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, represented here by its logo).

The documentary’s own strategy appears a little vagarious or even accidental, with segments sometimes repeating information, introduced by general phrases (“The Science of Consumption,” “Subliminal Advertising,” “Subliminal Politics”) or maybe Warrick’s voiceover (“I felt a personal connection to these issues” or, “I tried to remain open minded as we returned to he experts for answers”). When he has trouble finding advertising executives or media producers who will confirm what he’s saying, or even speak with him at all, he concludes they have something to hide (he also remarks that Paul and Ringo “were unavailable for comment”).

And the very next section submits, by way of Bullock, that “Some borderline personalities are pushed over the edge” by some imagery: Ted Bundy, of all people, footage of an interview slowed and silenced, as well as accompanied by ominous music and text of another interview: ““There is loose in their towns people like me today whose dangerous impulses are being fueled day in and day out by violence in the media in its various forms, particularly sexualized violence.”

Sensational and limited as its insights may be, the film presents itself as an investigation. And in order to circle back to its post-9/11 imagery opening, that investigation shifts focus, from ‘70s-style “subliminal” images to recent imagery that’s not so much hidden as normalized. Thus, the documentary briefly raises the problems of product of placement and disinformation, including the military’s use of psy ops.

Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman asserts that trust in media is crucial, even as media are increasingly corporatized and consolidated: “Media is our lens on the world,” she says, then describes how media manipulate and are manipulated. Her specific examples is the propagandizing of “the Iraqi people” during the war (her interview accompanied by images of bloody victims and fires in the street, illustrating her point that such media efforts were contradicted by what Iraqis were experiencing, and so actually undermined trust in government and media). As you see a slow motion shot of tourists in DC, Warrick declares, “Call me crazy, but I started to wonder if similar psy ops were being used here at home, against us.”

Started to wonder? Coming at 90 minutes into the film, the remark seems behind its own curve. Goodman goes on to explain how “video news releases” by government or corporate sources are regularly passed on by networks to viewers as actual news, and Nick Begich (who also has a book to sell) alludes to the CIA and FBI’s uses of “mind control techniques.” As corporations encourage anxiety or desires, the government has been providing the means, apparently. When the film gets to the example of the 2000 Bush campaign’s use of “RATS” in an ad, consultant Alex Castellanos swears up and down it was a mistake. Aha, the film pounces, the ads ran in Florida: “Remember what happened in that state?”

It’s conclusions like this that make Programming the Nation? seem hopelessly naïve and a little crude, unconvincing precisely because it’s starting decades behind its own apparent audience, that is, people who watch TV and play videogames. (Where, for instance, is any mention of Naomi Klein or The Daily Show? Chuck D?). When, in film’s concluding moments, Dennis Kucinich notes that the Bush administration’s “weapons of mass destruction” campaign, engineered with media collusion, is now old news, you sigh: this is a place to start, not end.