Part 2: The Revelation of the Method and the Red Pill

November 2026

The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness.

-Matthew 6:22–23 (Orthodox Study Bible)

The Gnostification of Hollywood and the Revelation of the Method: Crowleyan Channels

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), De Palma (2016), Performance (1971), Lucifer Rising (1972)

Bowie brought a variation of Ziggy to the silver screen in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), a neo-gnostic tale about an ageless starman, alias Jerome Newton, who crash-lands on Earth while seeking water for his dying planet. By patenting inventions based on his alien technology, Newton soon attains great wealth as the head of World Enterprises Corporation, the real purpose of which is to build a new spaceship. His romantic partner tries to interest him in church, convinced when she looks up at the stars that “there’s got to be a God”; but the real object of this intuition, we are given to understand, is the starman himself, which is really a coded expression of apotheosis, or self-deified man. Over time, however, Newton’s psi-superpowers are gradually degraded by alcohol, sex, and television, and the ethereal alien comes more and more to resemble a dysfunctional human being.

“Leave my mind alone”

Inasmuch as the viewer is being exposed to the same spiritually stultifying sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll trash culture as the protagonist, portrayed by a man who in real life was a pillar of that culture, The Man Who Fell to Earth is very much an exercise in Revelation of the Method. The term was coined by James Shelby Downard to describe a type of “Masonic sorcery” by which the world’s rulers slowly make themselves known through “revelations” designed to shock and awe the masses.¹ In the context of cinema, the Revelation of the Method consists in depicting for the viewer the process that the film itself is attempting to perform on the viewer—more precisely, depicting it in such a way as to facilitate that process. This is what Brian De Palma, one of the grand masters of the Revelation of the Method, is talking about when he says, at the very beginning of Noah Baumbach’s De Palma (2016) documentary, that Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is really a film about filmmaking in which the director is “showing what we’re doing as we’re doing it.” Such recursion, wherein a work of fiction deliberately references the medium itself or the power of art/fiction generally, is part and parcel of the Revelation of the Method.

In one particularly telling scene in Man Who Fell to Earth, Newton is seated as usual in front of a wall of TVs, frenziedly indulging his addiction to hyper-stimulation, whereupon he cries out, “Leave my mind alone!” Powerful forces in business and politics, we learn, are “determining the social ecology of modern America,” engineering an anti-spiritual culture from the top down. All of which illustrates how Revelation of the Method is integral to the method of demoralization depicted within the diegesis of the film: TV “shows you everything,” Newton explains, but it doesn’t “tell you everything,” that is, TV shows you what it is doing to you, but it doesn’t give you the hermeneutical keys to understand and thereby arrest the process. For the Revelation of the Method is part of the Method.

“The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled”: The Accession of the Master Manipulator

Inception (2016), Following (1998), The Usual Suspects (1995), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Cape Fear (1991), Paprika (2006)

Man was created in the image of God, and the eye is the window of the soul. Therefore, the most efficient way to destroy man, to kill his soul, is to thoroughly ruin the image of God within him, and the most efficient way to do that is to replace God with Satan. This is the endgame of the hyper-Satanic toxic culture: the total inversion of the image of God and therewith the death of the soul. For if, as director Bryan Singer intimates in The Usual Suspects (1995), the greatest trick the devil has pulled so far is convincing people he doesn’t exist, Satan’s grand ambition is to fool people into believing he’s God.

Thus, the gnostification of Hollywood has been accompanied by the increasing prevalence of powerful villains and anti-heroes in whom qualities traditionally attributed to God are mingled with and subordinated to qualities attributed to the devil. The fully inverted form of this character I refer to as the dark self, taking a term from the Jungians. The Robert De Niro villain in Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear (1991), for example, is a typical instantiation of the dark self—a seemingly invincible and all-wise criminal brute who declares his consubstantiality with God, quoting the German mystic Angelus Silesius: “I am like God, and God like me. I am as large as God, He is as small as I. He cannot above me, nor I beneath Him be.” Compare the titular villain in Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), an ancient, superpowered mutant bent on annihilating and remaking the world, who, just like the alien abomination in Star Trek V, proclaims himself to be the god behind all religions: “I have been called many names over many lifetimes—Elohim, Shen, Ra.” In the trailer, he lists “Ra, Krishna, Yahweh,” but Krishna was dropped from the final cut when Hindu groups complained. A name of the true God (Elohim), however, was retained in association with a character which is a transparent type of the devil, because the function of this character type is to subvert the image of God through inversion. In other words, what the ancient Gnostics did unconsciously, as playthings of the devil (in the words of Epiphanius), Hollywood does consciously, as the devil’s eager slaves.

God inverted: the dark self

Singer is a devilish figure in his own right, credibly accused of leveraging his power in the industry to rape underage boys, just like the actor who plays “the devil” in Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), Kevin Spacey. Only at the very end of that film is it revealed that Spacey’s character is really Keyser Söze, a near-mythical, all-powerful crime lord reigning from the shadows but hiding in plain sight. Countless other productions remind us that this same force of evil rules over Hollywood. It is highly significant, then, that the film’s signature message (i.e., that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he doesn’t exist) is delivered by the character identified by the film as the devil, because this is the voice of the filmmaker and of Hollywood itself, which is a conscious medium of the devil. And just as Satan’s aim is the spiritual destruction of man, Hollywood’s secret goal is the death of the human soul. As the filmmaker reveals the lie he (hopes) he has successfully sold to the audience, he simultaneously identifies himself as the voice of “the devil,” whose power is invisibility via deception, and then immediately reenacts his own/the devil’s/Söze’s disappearing trick with the last cut—“and like that, he’s gone.”

Hiding in plain sight

More than merely psychopathic boasting or taunting, however, what Singer is up to is pure Revelation of the Method. The general purpose is to blur the line between fiction and reality within the mind of the viewer. To the extent this is successful, it induces a mild trance state, rendering the viewer much more suggestible. Or, one may say, it intensifies the mild trance state which, good evidence suggests, is induced merely by watching TV or listening to a story.

Once Robert’s body is sedated, his mind unknowingly trapped in their dream world, Cobb and his team conduct a series of mind games as they attempt to overcome his subconscious defense mechanisms. Finally, deep inside the third layer, they access his emotional core, the urgent need for approval from his cold and distant father, and they exploit this knowledge to make Robert believe that he is fulfilling his father’s wish by dissolving the company. The inner core of the psyche is constructed as a box within a box, a safe inside of the locked chamber where, as Robert falsely believes, his father lies on his deathbed. Inside the safe, beneath the father’s will, is a paper pinwheel Robert made as a child, symbolizing what for Nolan is the content of that core, the deepest mystery of the soul, namely, a fathomless but ultimately inscrutable sentimentality, usually revolving around childhood attachments and associated traumas. In other Nolan films as well, including his indie breakthrough Memento (2000), trinkets and souvenirs, invested with peculiar significance only those who possess them really understand, represent the mysterious nature of sentimentality and therewith the human soul.

Tapping into the emotional core (Inception)

The motif is central to his debut film, Following (1998), about a would-be novelist who can’t quite crack the code of what makes humans tick until he meets a sociopath, also named Cobb, who breaks into homes while the inhabitants are away, not so much to rob as to toy with and torment them. The possessions people cherish most, explains Cobb, are not the ones with the greatest monetary value but “things like snapshots, letters, or trinkets…little calling cards, notes”—items invariably housed in a “box,” for “Everyone has a box.” Cobb’s passion is tinkering with the contents of that box, symbol of the core psyche; and by the time the nameless protagonist gets tangled up with him, this Cobb has developed these mind games into a malicious science, calculated to deliver the maximum shock to victims, allegedly to prod them into self-examination. “Breaking in, entering someone’s life,” he teaches the protagonist, is the means of “finding out who they really are.”

Left to right: The failed artist / Cobb breaks in / “Everyone has a box” (Following)

Insofar as the home represents the soul and the box represents its inner core, the message is that one must torture the soul (to take a phrase from another Nolan film), i.e., to conduct harrowing psychological experiments on the viewer, to force the soul to reveal her secrets (to adapt a metaphor from Francis Bacon). The protagonist of Following, who’s really a stand-in for the young Nolan, fails to crack the code, unable to attain that intuitive understanding of the human soul that distinguishes the true artist. Instead, he discovers what for him—and for Nolan—is the next best thing: a Method by which he can at least mimic the true artist, the auteur, by pushing the audience’s psychological buttons and eliciting reactions. In other words, for knowledge of the psyche the Method substitutes the ability to manipulate its expressions, power instead of art (or fame instead of merit). Hence, in Inception, a recursive film about this filmmaking process, i.e., about the Method as practiced by Nolan himself, the protagonist, Cobb, sharing the name of the psychopathic cat burglar of Following, breaks into minds and tinkers with the contents. He has graduated, however, from merely experimenting with the mind, maliciously or not, to actually remaking it, at least to some extent, in a quasi-scientific fashion. That is to say, he represents a refinement of the Method and therewith the emergence of a figure Millary and I refer to as the master manipulator.

Master Manipulator as Demiurge

Dark City (1998), Memento (2000), The Matrix, The Matrix: Revolutions (2003), The Truman Show (1998)

Analogously, the heralding of Nolan, in the 2000s, as the next great filmmaker signaled the replacement of the auteur (the ideal self-image of the filmmaker-artist arising out of the French New Wave and New Hollywood) with the master manipulator. Accompanying the replacement has been the proliferation of high concept entertainment like Inception and a general trend toward more autistic styles of storytelling, rendering the traditional adult drama nearly obsolete. For the master manipulator is not a sifter of human emotions but a world-builder, that is, a cinematic demiurge, constructing intricate, immersive universes inside the imaginations of viewers, where they can wander forever, endlessly subjected to the manipulations and machinations devised by the architects of their synthetic dreams.

Of course, this is also a generic plot description for most of the late 90s surge movies, which announced the same transition from auteur to master manipulator, with the Gnostic demiurge as the dominant metaphor for the latter. In The Truman Show, the demiurgic part is played by a literal director/TV show creator (played by Ed Harris), whose name, Christof, associates him with the Christian God in order to deconstruct and subvert the audience’s image of God. If it seems paradoxical that films of this sort would simultaneously subvert the demiurgic figure that they also idealize, one must understand that we are dealing with an inversive hermeneutics that revalorizes Satan/Lucifer as the archetypal rebel/antihero. From the perspective of this brand of Luciferian gnosticism, in which the goal is to become the demiurge, one must first overthrow the old demiurge, symbolic of the old order, religion, etc.  

Certainly this is the message of Alex Proyas’s Dark City. Known as “the Strangers,” Proyas’s archons—a race of aliens, comprising a single hivemind, that wear human corpses as skinsuits—have imprisoned a population of humans within a synthetic space city, which the inhabitants believe is Earth. Every night, using their prodigious psi superpowers, the Strangers hypnotically sedate the entire population and remake the physical architecture of the sleeping city. With the help of their human collaborator, Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), they also remake the personal identities of anyone picked that night for experimentation, injecting them with a lifetime of fake memories. In this way, as they hypothesize, they will eventually ascertain the nature of the human soul, with its peculiar “capacity for individuality,” which they believe is the secret to rescuing their dying collectivist race from extinction. In the event, one of their experimental subjects, assigned the name John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), wakes up during the memory “imprinting,” thanks to the betrayal of Dr. Schreber, who sees to it that Murdoch, his memory wiped clean, develops superior psi superpowers and at length overthrows the Strangers. Having attained the same total control over the city, Murdoch does not, however, make any attempt to escape or lead the other captives back to the real world. Rather than escaping or transcending a world he now knows to be artificial, built to imprison and extract the very human soul, instead Murdoch remakes the city in the image of his own desires, becoming the demiurge himself.

Murdoch “reborn” (Dark City)

Reimprinted (Dark City)

The city is dark because the Strangers have literally blocked the sun from shining on it, symbolic of the archons withholding gnosis from the pneumatic elect. But, although Murdoch makes the sun to shine over his new dream city, this light is to be interpreted as the blinding light of Lucifer, for there is no indication that Murdoch has the least interest in enlightening these erstwhile denizens of the dark as to their condition. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the inhabitants of Murdoch’s city will be just as ignorant of their true origin and identities as they were under the dominion of the Strangers. For the first thing Murdoch does, after telekinetically erecting his sunshine city, is to enact a personal romantic fantasy, in which Emma (Jennifer Connelly), previously imprinted to believe she was his wife, meets him again for the first time, as it were, given the new identity of Anna. In a word, Murdoch’s new and improved demiurgic dreamworld is just as reliant on mass ignorance and powerlessness as the Strangers’ world.

Demiurgic renovation (Dark City)

The city, of course, like the Matrix, is intended to be a metaphor for our own reality, and all of these late 90s gnostic films were attempting to incept the idea that no such thing exists, i.e., that there is neither a transcendent dimension nor a stable objective reality at all. As such, they were vital in popularizing the now trite “simulation hypothesis,” paving the way for an era in which Elon Musk can declare with mathematical certainty that we live in a computer simulation, while other “Tech billionaires,” possibly including Musk and Sam Altman, are not only “convinced we live in the Matrix” but “secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.”⁵ The Promethean tech-gnosticism of the broligarchs and the Luciferian gnosticism of the Hollywood superculture share in common a fully immanentized ontology, in which the entire transcendent dimension—what the ancient Gnostics called the aeons (inclusive of the Godhead)—is eliminated or, rather, collapsed into the non-transcendent realm of this world, which both modes of neo-gnosticism reduce to an infinitely malleable prima materia subject to endless reconfiguration and thus also in principle total control. Hence, hi-tech futurism is almost constantly a feature of these narratives, notwithstanding substantial ideological differences between Hollywood and tech elites, the latter frequently serving as models for gnostic villains. It’s not possible to elaborate here on these differences, but suffice it to say that, in its transhumanist mode, the prima materia is information or data, while from the more decidedly occult perspective of Hollywood gnosticism, the prima materia is the stuff of the human psyche, or the means of perception. Thus, in their recursive depictions of world-building, Dark City and other late 90s gnostic films are in fact portraying, esoterically, the process by which cinema itself aspires to restructure the subjectivity of the viewer. In other words, they are performing Revelation of the Method.

Nolan, as we’ve seen, is doing precisely the same thing with Inception. Indeed, he frankly admits that the basic concept of that film, “that the world around you might not be real,” was “very much pulled from that era of movies where you had ‘The Matrix,’ you had ‘Dark City,’ you had ‘The Thirteenth Floor’ and, to a certain extent, you had ‘Memento’ too.”⁶ Like Murdoch in Dark City, Memento’s protagonist, Leonard, is an amnesiac man searching for the truth about himself. The gimmick that drew attention to the film, a plot running in reverse chronological order, was intended to generate in the audience a state of disorientation analogous to that of Leonard, who is searching for his wife’s killer and therewith the source of his trauma, aided only by a system of mnemonic devices. Yet Nolan also shows the audience, through Leonard’s interactions with people who actively deceive him, how dangerously suggestible a person is in this state of mind and how tampering with such mementoes, or signifiers of meaning, can alter that person’s entire reality. Compare this with Dark City. On the one hand, Proyas fetishizes Mudoch’s disoriented, amnesiac condition: he is able to become the gnostic superhero precisely because he doesn’t know who he is, in contradistinction to the others, imprisoned by their false identities. On the other hand, it is clear that this same blank slate condition is the basis for creating false identities, and the means by which Schreber develops Murdoch’s superpowers are identical to those by which the Strangers mentally imprison the city, namely, by imprinting false memories and controlling the environment that triggers them.

In a maze of memory (Memento)

Darker still, the only other character who gets wise to the artificiality of the city, Detective Walenski, is driven to madness and finally suicide when he comes to the realization that there is “no way out,” that is, that there is no transcendent realm, in accordance with the Luciferian gnostic worldview underlying the narrative. This non-existent transcendent realm is represented by Shell Beach, the paradisial place outside the city that everyone “remembers” but no one can reach—because it doesn’t exist. Nonetheless, the sunny mirage of Shell Beach makes life almost bearable, fostering a combination of nostalgia and hope. For just as the true order of the city, gradually revealed to the viewer, represents the demiurgic process of filmmaking itself, the truth about Shell Beach is a carefully timed revelation as to the manipulative function of these fantasies of transcendence in gnostic cinema at large. Indeed, the manner in which the Strangers use this supposedly delusional hope for transcendence as a tool of manipulation mirrors the manner in which Hollywood, subscribing to a fully immanentized gnostic worldview, stays one inversion ahead of viewers, as it were, cynically plying them with escape fantasies that tap into their most powerful emotions and hidden spiritual desires.

Escape fantasy or power trip? (Matrix Resurrections and Matrix)

Thus, by openly conveying a pro-demiurge message and exposing the classic Gnostic escape fantasy as a manipulative subterfuge of the world-builder/master manipulator filmmaker, Dark City provides the hermeneutical key to the meaning of these escape fantasies in other gnostic films. For example, while the Wachowskis invited viewers to see in the first Matrix film a classic Gnostic escape narrative—the “chosen one” (one of the gnostic elect) awakening to his imprisonment in a false reality (a computer simulation) and using the knowledge to escape into the “desert of the real”—subsequent installments in the franchise gave the lie to this transcendental interpretation, as Millary explains in “The Lego-Barbie Matrix: Hollywood Meta-Reflections on Feminism, Gnosticism, and Pop Culture” (appearing in CES 3). Revolutions (2003) ends with Neo (the “new man,” i.e., false Christ), in yet another perverted/inverted Christological trope, crucified so that humanity can be reconciled with the machines that built and maintain their VR prisons. Two decades later, Resurrections (2021) carried the franchise “beyond Revolutions’s theme of peace with the machines to a full-blown merger between the gnostic truth seekers and the demiurge.” Awash in tiresomely “recursive discussions about how to make a new Matrix story, the cultural significance of The Matrix, and what The Matrix is really about,” the ill-received fourth film unequivocally preaches that

The Matrix is not something to escape or even to be reconciled with, but rather now the primary tool of the heroes. If the conclusion of the original is a classic dissociative power fantasy, common in mind control-themed media, Resurrections lowers this fantasy to new depths of enslavement, with no pretense of escape.⁷

But, as Millary astutely points out, much the same message was already encoded, albeit more esoterically, in the famous ending of the original 1999 film. Insofar as it “glorifies Neo’s superhuman control over the Matrix, the ending functionally emphasizes the power trip of existing within the simulation (and vicariously, the audience’s experience of the groundbreaking hyper-stimulating cinematic experience) rather than true exit from it.”⁸ In other words, the original Matrix, like The Truman Show and many other gnostic films of the era, presented audiences, at the exoteric layer of the narrative, with a variation on the classic Gnostic escape fantasy even while hinting and more than hinting at the next layer, i.e., the immanentized power trip fantasy. The esoteric layer completely inverts the exoteric layer, spiritually, metaphysically, and otherwise. With Resurrections, the inversion is fully externalized, and the filmmakers thus expose that, from the first film on, they have been endeavoring to transform the viewer’s perspective, in stages, by means of deceptive techniques precisely analogous to those depicted. Nor are such techniques restricted to the villains or antagonists. Once the inversive hermeneutic is recognized, it becomes clear that Neo’s “awakening,” orchestrated by Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) and friends, is actually another elaborate deception. Modeled, as Millary indicates, on processes of mind control, this false awakening is merely a stage in his initiation, leading him and by extension the viewer not toward classic gnosis but toward the twisted and thoroughly anti-transcendental worldview of the filmmakers.

Red pill or blue? (Matrix)

Red Pill Programming

Total Recall (1990), The Matrix

The mechanism by which these inversions are achieved in the minds of viewers Millary and I call red pill programming. What it amounts to is an elaborate form of reverse psychology, wherein someone is induced to accept an idea, pursue an object, etc., because he is convinced that powerful agents are withholding it from him in their own interest, just as Satan induced Eve to eat the fruit by convincing her that God was jealously withholding the secret to godhood. Essentially the same technique, where certain behaviors are promoted by presenting them as edgy and taboo, is commonplace in marketing, and it’s been a standard tactic employed by post-1960s Hollywood to promote the sexual revolution and the drug culture. Hence, the red apple has been a longstanding signifier of both in popular media, often at an esoteric or pseudo-subliminal level. In more recent times, by contrast, the red pill trope has become almost exclusively associated with the online political right. This is a direct function of the cultural and political successes achieved by the postmodern identitarian left, as a result of which it has become increasingly taboo to espouse traditionalist and right-wing ideas (down to the biological distinction between men and women), ideas which in turn take on an air of forbidden knowledge. While it’s ironic how the red pill initiative, as I call it, has switched from left to right, the inversive tendency is built into the trope itself.

In fact, while The Matrix is usually credited with introducing it, the contemporary red pill trope appears, fully fledged, in a huge, gnostic-themed blockbuster released nine years earlier. Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick—who in his 1977 Metz speech declared that we’re living in a computer simulation—Total Recall (1990) presents the trope in a far more esoteric register, however. The protagonist is a man named Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a construction worker in a futuristic world who is enticed by the promises of a company named Rekall, which peddles the implanting of false memories as a form of recreation. Quaid is strapped into a hi-tech apparatus, drugged, and presented with images to aid in dissociation as one of the techs probes him with questions. All of which is obviously meant to evoke mind control. Indeed, the irregular “k” in “Rekall” is a not-so-subtle reference to MKUltra, just as the butterfly in the company logo apparently alludes to the Project Monarch conspiracy theory. In the middle of the procedure, Quaid bursts up and tries to tear himself free of the contraption, remembering, as he thinks, that he’s actually a secret agent whose memory was previously wiped. He comes to believe that Quaid was merely his cover identity, and that he’s been brainwashed by Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), the tyrannical ruler of the Mars colony, whom he must now defeat. Eventually, however, he comes to suspect that Quaid might actually be his true identity, and that he’s trapped in a delusional hallucination caused by a botched memory implant.

Left to right: Schwarzenegger MK’ed / “A symbol of your desire to return to reality”(Total Recall)

In the scene in question, Quaid is confronted by Dr. Edgemar (Roy Brocksmith) of Rekall, who tries to convince him to take a red pill in order to return to reality and avert permanent psychosis. The red pill, he explains, “is a symbol of your desire to return to reality.” This statement is the key to the entire red pill trope, the meaning of which clearly emerges by comparing this scene with the aforementioned scene from The Matrix. Whereas Morpheus and his red pill are, at least exoterically, unambiguous vehicles of gnostic liberation from a predatory false reality, Dr. Edgemar is an enemy agent, according to the diegesis of this film, and his red pill is actually a sedative. He’s playing to Quaid’s justified suspicion that he might be trapped in a false reality in order to gain control over him. Apply this added layer of suspicious inversion back to The Matrix and Morpheus is now to be interpreted as a programmer, Neo as his mind control victim on the ultimate “ego trip,” to take a phrase from Total Recall.

In yet another twist of inversion, Quaid finally learns that his own ego trip has been programmed by Cohaagen in an elaborate scheme to infiltrate the rebel faction on Mars. Inadvertently, Quaid has been doing the bidding of his enemy, as Cohaagen has managed to weaponize his “desire to return to reality,” i.e., the red pill. In doing so, he shunts the protagonist into what Horsley calls a “Second Matrix”: essentially, another artificial reality, outside and above the First Matrix, which is designed to trap anyone who begins to suspect the artificiality of the First Matrix. The presence throughout of Revelation of the Method almost goes without saying: Quaid is the viewer, being induced by cinematic programmers to dissociate into a (lower-intensity) ego trip fantasy, the better to refashion his mind. In the end, neither Quaid nor the audience knows what’s real; all that’s left is to embrace the ontological disorientation and be thankful for the impossible happy ending: enjoy the program—and the programming. The Illuminati symbols and images festooning the film and even the cover poster (pyramids, one-eye sign, and so forth), juxtaposed with mind control tropes, alert the careful viewer that the hidden hand stands in the background of this mega-production, tinkering with the mass mind.

In The Matrix, Morpheus promises Neo that, if he takes the red pill, he’ll show him “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The metaphor, of course, is taken from Alice in Wonderland. But Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole does not lead her to gnosis but to a bewildering, topsy-turvy inner world in which she becomes more and more disoriented—hence that story’s thick association with mind control, cinematic and otherwise. Inasmuch as the Wachowskis are responsible for establishing this Revelation of the Method association between Alice in Wonderland and the red pill, it’s appropriate that the red pill trope apparently emerged out of an MKUltra milieu.

when you take and you put up an image, and you put this image up and you say, “Here kids, don’t be like that; don’t take them red pills, kids.” They didn’t know there was red pills until you said – “now you can say no, you can say no”—”[but until you said I could say]¹⁰ no, I didn’t know I could say yes.”

The media, in other words, makes crime and violence alluring by portraying them as dangerous and forbidden—the same reverse psychology at the heart of red pill programming.

Practically from the moment he was arrested, every quarter of the media built Manson up into the national embodiment of the dark self: an evil hippie mystic, pronouncing himself to be Christ and the devil at the same time, and possessing mysterious powers over the mind. As such, Manson embodies the arch-master manipulator, capable of brainwashing otherwise normal people into committing ritual murder. This powerful aura with which he has been invested by the superculture explains why so many people have accepted the plausibility of the official narrative, namely, that a destitute, half-literate jailbird could accomplish in a matter of months what the CIA spent decades and millions of dollars trying and supposedly failing to accomplish, despite the services of some of the most renowned doctors and scientists and most prestigious hospitals and universities in the world. In CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), Tom O’Neill sounds the death knell on this fragile cover story, admirably exposing Manson’s entanglement with secret LSD studies and other clandestine activities. For example, Manson’s cult was being studied by David Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, one of the primary haunts of Manson and his girls in San Francisco. The Clinic was funded with CIA money, laundered through NIMH (National Institutes of Mental Health). Together with Alan Rose, who had been chief administrator at the Clinic and spent four months with The Family, Smith co-authored a study of the cult, which was published in the Clinic’s “house organ,” The Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, also co-founded by Smith with CIA funds.¹¹

The point, for our purposes, is that the same nexus of domestic psychological warfare that gave birth to the Manson-op simultaneously manufactured a phony “counterculture,” using red pill reverse psychology to promote drug culture, utopian ideology, and the sexual revolution. In other words, techniques of individual or micro mind control were being scaled up into techniques of mass or macro mind control, otherwise known as cultural engineering. The micro-to-macro continuity is partly explained by the fact that MKUltra-style mind control techniques as well as modern cultural engineering are founded on the principles of cybernetics, according to which both humans and communications networks are conceived as systems, essentially elaborate computers running on feedback loops. This is why Dark City, Total Recall, and other neo-gnostic films discussed below depict individual mind control, in more or less explicit and accurate detail, in the course of revealing the Method: the depicted techniques of micro mind control do not merely reflect the intended, macro-scale process of programming the viewer; the latter, mass mind control techniques are actually derived, to a high degree, from mind control experiments on individuals, not to mention large-scale psychological warfare campaigns like the Phoenix Program.

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Notes:

1. James Shelby Downard, “Sorcery, Sex, and the Science of Symbolism,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed, Jim Keith (Feral House, 1993), 59f. ↩︎
2. See Mark Paytress, Rolling Stones: Off the Record (London: Omnibus, 2003), 192. ↩︎
3. Mick Brown, Performance, Bloomsbury Movie Guide no. 6 (NY: Bloomsbury, 1999), 32. ↩︎
4. For “secret delights,” see Jasun Horsley, The Kubrickon: The Cult of Kubrick, Attention Capture, and the Inception of AI (UK: Aeon, 2022), 78. The term “alpha channel” comes from April DeConick, “The Sociology of Gnostic Spirituality,” Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 4.1 (2019): 9-66. ↩︎
5. Andrew Griffin, “Tech Billionaires Convinced We Live in the Matrix Are Secretly Funding Scientists to Help Break Us Out of It,” Independent, Oct. 30, 2017, https://www.the-independent.com/tech/computer-simulation-world-matrix-scientists-elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-a7347526.html. ↩︎
6. Geoff Boucher, “’Inception’ Breaks into Dreams,” LA Times, Apr. 4, 2010, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-apr-04-la-ca-inception4-2010apr04-story.html. ↩︎
7. Thomas Millary, The Lego-Barbie Matrix: Hollywood Meta-Reflections on Feminism, Gnosticism, and Pop Culture,” Cultural Engineering Studies 3 (Mar. 2026), 83. ↩︎
8. Millary, “Lego-Barbie Matrix,” 70. ↩︎
9. Quoted in Brett Carollo and Thomas Millary, “On Red Pill Programming,” Decoding Culture Foundation, 2026. An earlier version, titled “Rejecting the Revolutionary Red Pill,” appeared in IM-1776, no. 4 (Winter 2023), 54–64. The rest of this section is largely adapted from this essay. ↩︎
10. This part of the recording is somewhat unintelligible. The bracketed words capture the sense. ↩︎
11. Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 258. For the cult study, see 265–69. For NIMH funding, see 249, and see footnote 20 to Ch. 10, on 446. ↩︎