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Trapped in an Imaginary House:
Mind Control in The Attic Expeditions
By Alex Constantine
The Attic Expeditions (2001)
Produced by Jeremy Kasten
Soon to be released by Blockbuster Video
"His name is Trevor Blackburn," the unorthodox Dr. Ek explains to a
colleague somewhere in the mental labyrinth of The Attic Expeditions. "He's
a convicted murderer and an acute schizophrenic." Trevor is also the
ultimate unreliable narrator, a man with no past, "still recovering from the
first [brain] operation. And his responses to implanting are uncertain."
It is never altogether clear whether Trevor is a seething, delusional
complex of homicidal pathologies, deserving of contempt, or a victim of
experimental psychiatry and mind control, a sympathetic lab rat. He is
incarcerated in a mental hospital of sorts, his memories of a prior life
erased, but Dr. Ek's institution, acknowledged openly, is a research
facility. The same could be said for Auschwitz. Is Trevor's psychiatrist a
sagacious scientist or a lobe-slicing fascist?
Blackburn is obsessed with unlocking the mystery. His recollection of
life on the outside has been wiped clean, but again, this lapse is open to
bipolar interpretations. Has the trauma of murdering his wife rendered him
an amnesiac? Or has he been "depatterned," a phrase coined by the CIA's Dr.
Ewon Cameron - the initials, E.C., phonetically, "Ek" - in the 1950s to
describe the forced use of drugs, hypnosis and electroshock as a means of
eradicating a subject's personality and memories? Has Trevor been treated to
E.D.O.M. (Electronic Dissolution of Memory, a technique perfected by CIA
psychiatrists in 1960)? And what about this "implanting?" Are even Trevor's
short-term memories invasive fabricattions, implants, an attempt to build a
new personality on the blank slate of a depatterned mind?
And then there are the ceaseless hallucinations, caused,
neuropsychiatrists say, by the flood of dopamine in the brain of the raging
schizophrenic ... or are Trevor's episodes a side-effect of hypnosis, or
telemetry chips bundled in his brain, ECT, infrasonic transmissions,
"medication" and recurrent brain surgery, or a combination of all the above?
Has his life been reduced to a virtual reality episode?
The helpless protagonist awakes one afternoon heavily drugged in an
operating room, stretched out on the table, surrounded by doctors and
nurses. Amy, another patient at Dr. Ek's sanitarium - the "House of Love" -
"slowly rides Trevor" while the doctors perform brain surgery on him. Is
this impossible memory real?
In this attic there are no ready answers. Dr. Ek: "The human mind isn't
properly equipped to understand the human mind." (José Delgado, the infamous
CIA/UCLA electronic mind control specialist, took this dictum a step further
in the 1960s, claiming that the human being has no right to his own mind -
the State reserves this privilege, he opined - a belief he put into practice
by surgically inserting implants in the brains of children and controlling
their behavior with radio waves.) But Trevor is locked inside his own mind,
a moth in a bell jar. "We're trapped in an imaginary house," another of Ek's
patients informs Trevor.
But is it psychosis or mind control?
For some, the imaginary house is religion. And Dr. Ek knows his way
around here, as well. He connives to steal Trevor's satanic verses, an
illuminated grimoire, on behalf of a criminalized, "incorporated" agency.
Once outside the warped sensibilities of the unreliable narrator, the
gas-lighting, mind manipulating operatives of this unnamed intelligence
agency (the Technical Services Division?) emerge from the control booth like
the Wizard of Oz.
"MIND CONTROL IS COMING," the New York Times reported in 1965.
And mind control has, in fact, come for MOST of us. Boobus Americanus lives
in an imaginary house, one said to have "moral authority" in the
geopolitical sphere, when in fact this is a nation that thrives on a
foundation of death squad politics, political assassinations, media industry
manipulation, federally-sanctioned drug operations, illicit wars, black ops,
etc., etc. It is evident that America is engaged in its own attic
expedition, and like Trevor, cannot find the exit door in the hallucinatory
reality of the "Dream."
Sunday, May 02, 1999
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Alex Constantine was the Attic Expeditions research director
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