Psyop Cinema
patreon
Brett's Chapter 27 Notes
🕑 Added 2022-10-20 02:31:49 +0000 UTCChapter 27
This movie is a psyop: synchronicity trumps conspiracy
Arnon Milchan’s daughter one of the producers. Arnon, a covert Mossad operative, produced The King of Comedy.
This movie is a psyop, designed partly, I suspect, to trigger incel types (see below), but having other facets as well. Start with the strange fact that the actor who plays John Lennon is Mark Lindsay Chapman. If you can possibly believe that this is a coincidence/synchronicity, then consider that Mark Lindsay Chapman was slated to play John Lennon in the 1985 TV movie John and Yoko until Yoko insisted that he be replaced, since the name similarity was in bad taste (Yoko who used her dead husband’s bloody glasses in an art display around this same time). Even then, they cast another person named Mark, Mark McGann! In Chapter 27, Jared Leto, who shares the initials JL with John Lennon, plays Chapman, filling out the implied identification between Lennon and Chapman, who I’ll argue here, as I did on my premium Chapman episode, was a Manchurian candidate programmed with trauma-based, dissociation-inducing mind control techniques. A defense psychiatrist put forth a related theory, that Chapman had identified himself with Lennon in order to commit suicide-through-homicide, to unconsciously avert actual suicide, I guess.
At any rate, this doubling/twinning theme (which, I think it’s hard to deny, is being deliberately played to by Hollywood and whoever is making these casting decisions)—this doubling or twinning theme is a staple of trauma-based mind control programming (which is the use of trauma to create alters, or “doubles,” that can be programmed and split off from the memory of other alters)—this theme comes up again and again in the Chapman-Lennon case.
Synchronicity is one of the big themes of the film, as it’s a cascade of synchronicities involving The Catcher in the Rye, the Beatles, Charles Manson, Rosemary’s Baby, and more that convinces Chapman, in the movie, that his plan to kill Lennon is part of some great cosmic drama in which he’s the hero. So the many “coincidences that can’t be coincidences” are chalked up to synchronicity, not conspiracy. Synchronicity trumps conspiracy, just as psychology trumps conspiracy elsewhere in mass media (e.g., Fincher’s Mindhunter).
A kind of Samson’s Riddle quality to this movie; that is, if you know the Manchurian candidate thesis with respect to this case, you can detect where the movie is playing to it or off of it, whereas if you don’t, you probably won’t suspect it.
Media-crime-conspiracy feedback loop: introduction
In the Frontline documentary, Chapman says that, in the lead up the murder, “It was like a movie. It was like I was in a movie.”
Chapman was frequently triggered by movies. When he traveled to New York in October-November 1980, a month before the murder, he intended to kill Lennon but called it off after watching Ordinary People in a movie theater and thinking he saw a subliminal message to stop.
He supposedly took a trip around the world in 1978, using funds no one has been able to account for, after watching Around the World in 80 Days. Which sounds like media-aided mind control to me, since this trip was most likely intelligence related. He visited Beirut, I believe, which he had previously visited, in 1975, while working for the YMCA’s International/Abroad program, which insiders like Philip Agee and one of Fenton Bresler’s sources, a former CIA case officer (a handler), have fingered the YMCA as a front for international intelligence operations. Chapman also worked for World Vision, a Christian evangelical organization that did covert work for the CIA in southeast Asia during the Vietnam era.
Chapman’s wife, Gloria, whom he married in 1988, said that one night they were watching the movie Network, and, I assume, at the part of the movie where Peter Finch tells everyone to get up and turn off the TV and scream “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”—I assume that’s where, as Gloria says, he threw out the TV. “He said he didn’t want to be manipulated by it any longer,” Gloria said. So it’s macro, mass media mind control or mass media used in micro, individualized, MK mind control, but he was obviously reacting to something. In a psychotic episode shortly after his conviction, he also went on a rampage against the TV and radio in the prison.
Narration from early in film: “What I really love about a song and a book [my emphasis], if it’s really good, I mean, if the writer is really talking to you, then you feel like they’re this really great friend of yours, and you can just call them up on the phone whenever you want.”
A pretty good internal description of a parasocial relationship. Given that the filmmakers were obviously aware of the Manchurian candidate thesis re: Mark David Chapman, this piece of narration seems like a coded message (again, Samson’s Riddle), externally pointing to the supposed parasocial relationship that Chapman had with Lennon that led him somehow to murder him, but internally to the idea that at least some popular art is deliberately cultivating these parasocial relationships for purposes of both macro (cultural engineering) and micro mind control. Popular art is deliberately trying to cultivate unwholesome, parasocial relationships, perhaps not just to make money but also the “influence” the listeners/viewers.
Apart from probably deliberately triggering incels, the movie seeks the gain mass identification with Chapman, in the way that Chapman was supposedly identified with Holden Caulfield thereby facilitating mass mind control through media (Chapman being a micro-mind control victim subjected to techniques involving artist media, novels, music, and probably movies). This approach, by the way, completely validates Chapman’s view of himself—or one of a revolving series of self-understandings—as the modern-day Catcher in the Rye. We might well ask why Hollywood loves to validate the perverted self-image of spectacular criminals. In our sixth Fincher episode, for example, we point up how the show Mindhunter is producing Manson family propaganda that completely validates Charles Manson’s own account of the crimes for which he was convicted.
We are definitely not here to validate the worldviews or alleged worldviews of psycho-killers, but to come to grips with Chapman’s murder of Lennon, why and how it occurred and what it has to do with the ongoing incel-manic psyop, there’s a few more things that need to be said about The Catcher in the Rye.
In the Frontline documentary, Chapman, referring to Mr. Antolini’s speech in the novel, says that he has “fallen,” as Holden feared doing, and yet he “will never grow up.” This is an excellent encapsulation, on a micro (individual) scale, of what afflicts incels and indeed the incel generations: that is, they are all corrupted and even traumatized through mass media cultural engineering ops, but unlike their predecessors, they don’t achieve maturity through lost innocence. Chapman said his greatest fear, which he suspected was true, was that not only was he the Catcher in the Rye of his generation, but that, as such, the Catcher in the Rye of his generation is psychotic. Catcher in the Rye could be considered an early article of post-WW2 cultural nihilism, the kind of nihilism that would only become truly popularized after Vietnam.
The popular, quasi-official narrative is that Chapman was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and identified with the protagonist Holden Caulfield. This obsession was hybridized with his supposed obsession with John Lennon, and these twin obsessions led him to murder Lennon because Lennon had sold out the hippie ideals of the 60s and become, as Holden would say, “a phony.” The trigger phrase, which we’ll come back to and which stitches together these supposed twin obsessions, is “The phony must die, says the Catcher in the Rye.”
Furthermore, there’s the relationship between Chapman’s supposed murder of Lennon in December 1980 and John Hinckley, Jr.’s attempt on Reagan’s life in March 1981. Hinckley was, according to the official version, obsessed with Taxi Driver, identified with Travis Bickle, and then developed a fatally parasocial relationship with Jodie Foster which led him to shoot Reagan, or so the story goes. Hinckley was also an avid reader of The Catcher in the Rye (it was on the coffee table of his hotel room when the police raided it after the shooting), and he was actually in the crowds gathering outside the Dakota in the days after Lennon’s murder. On an audio tape, recorded New Year’s Day 1981, he indicated that Lennon’s death had pushed him over the edge of sanity:
John Lennon is dead. So what the hell (does life) matter ... I still think about Jodie all the time. That's all I think about really, that and John Lennon's death. They were sort of binded together before Dec. 8, they been binded together since last summer really. John and Jodie and now one of them is dead. It was such a shock to me. It just blew my mind. Now Jodie is the only one in the world that matters.'
'I can't go the whole year 1981, I hate the, I don't care anything about the decade the '80s or the future or anything because the dream is over now just as Lennon said 10 years ago, but it's really over now. Jodie Foster is the only dream now.'
Chapter 27 plays into this feedback loop in myriad ways, for example, by deliberately invoking Taxi Driver in several spots in the film.
Several Taxi Driver references:
From imdb: “Lindsay Lohan puts sugar on her jelly toast. Just like Jodie Foster did in Taxi Driver.”
He poses/practices in the mirror of his hotel room, in obvious imitation of Travis Bickle. Yet Chapman is even sharper, more “trained” than Bickle (and certainly not awkward like Arthur), another indication that he’s a Manchurian candidate.
In Taxi Driver, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), tells Travis that he’s a “walking contradiction,” like the lyric from the Kris Kristofferson song “The Pilgrim Chapter 33”: “He’s a walking contradiction/Partly truth and partly fiction.” Chapman is a walking contradiction in some of the ways often pointed out about Travis (e.g., they both profess to hate sexual degeneracy but Travis goes to porn theaters and Chapman solicits a prostitute); but I’m thinking here especially of the “partly truth, partly fiction.” This is also a revelation of the film’s method, which is a variant on a method we’ve talked about with regard to David Fincher’s Zodiac and other films, which involves artfully combining truth and fiction to convince the viewer that it’s all truth. This film uses the technique as well to disorient the viewer.
Disorientation
Chapman portrayed as something of a fantasist, or an unreliable narrator, as Holden is according to the (false) conventional literary interpretation of The Cather in the Rye. It’s therefore impossible, since the film reveals no real background on him, for the audience to know when he’s telling the truth or not. For example, many audience members probably assume he’s lying when he tells Jude and her friend that he’s been all over the world. And it’s telling that they would want to mislead the audience on this point, since Chapman’s world travel on behalf of the YMCA and World Vision points toward intelligence work.
Conversely, when Chapman alludes to his own alleged family trauma in the opening narration, the audience is probably inclined to believe it—nay, to take a cue from the fact that he won’t even talk about it and assume that he suffered horrific childhood abuse—when, in reality, Chapman did not suffer any extraordinary amount of childhood trauma. He his dad was emotionally distant, never said “I love you,” and hit his mom on a few occasions. His mother, who later divorced the father amicably, said that the incidents Mark describes are real but that he has exaggerated the degree of violence and distress. But this little suggestion helps to misdirect the audience from the more likely sources of the sort of trauma that could damage a personality in the way that Chapman’s clearly is damaged, namely, trauma-based mind control as well as his teenage psychedelic binges (which may have been how he got caught up in Manchurian Candidate programming in the first place).
This misdirection-through-orientationtechnique is reminiscent of the way that English teachers have, for generations now (don’t know if they still read The Catcher in the Rye in high schools), flouted Salinger’s authorial intention and used the novel—that is, artfully misinterpreted the novel—to encourage kids to assimilate to the prevailing, “phony” social system. (For example, Mr. Antolini is presented as the voice of reason, whereas Salinger, I think, pretty clearly wanted to suggest that he was probably a real pedophile and was in any case behaving inappropriately before Holden stormed out.)
Dissolving the fiction-reality boundary
Keeping the audience disoriented like this is also consistent with (a) the application of micro mind control techniques (e.g., the physical and temporal disorientation of a mind control subject) to macro mind control (cinematic cultural engineering) and with (b) the magical goal of breaking down the barrier between fact and fiction, opening up a portal from which to invade the real world (through the viewer) and manipulate reality through fiction. (macro mind control analogue of Catcher-in-the-Rye derealization programming that MDC was exposed to)
The film signals its intention to dissolve the boundary between fiction and reality in the opening sequence by mingling real news footage with live-action fiction, for a story which is supposedly about life imitating art in a morbid way. The same mingling of news and fiction recurs at the end—and remember that the news is pushing a fictitious narrative anyway.
Again, the movie portrays Chapman as he saw himself, as the Holden Caulfield of his generation. In doing this, there’s an irresponsible lack of any real context or grounding, similar to the state induced in many mind control victims. And Monarch, as I’ve explained, is very much about fetishizing and glamorizing the internal states of mind control slaves. The program operating on Chapman, or one of them, was arguably built around an obsession with attaining fame, with “changing the world.” In a recording made not long after his arrest, I believe, Chapman says that Lennon and the Beatles were “probably the cultural experience, musically and culturally. They changed the world as we know it. And I changed them.” This is the same programming behind real and fictional figures, Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, Hinckley and Chapman and school shooters.
Chapman says, in the lead up to the murder, that he wanted to “disappear into the ink of the book,” of The Catcher in the Rye. Which really alludes to the desire of the schmuck/incel/nobody killer for through-the-looking-glass fame/infamy. Also remember his narration at the end of the film, “Now I am sitting right here, talking to you,” confirming that this is being told from his perspective, the perspective of a person who was himself allegedly motivated by fiction and the desire for fame, now leveraging that knowledge of the power of fiction to gain fame by breaking down the barrier between reality and fiction and becoming fiction, becoming legend. Either he’s a Manchurian candidate, I would say, or else he succeeded in gaining the quiet admiration of the entertainment industry, like Rupert Pupkin earned a not-so-quiet admiration.
Monarch and more feedback loop (“Wheels,” etc.) [revise from Chapman notes]
Opening credits (confirm) feature images of a carousel, alluding to both carousel from ending of The Catcher in the Rye and to the carousel in Central Park, just a few hundred yards from the Dakota, that Chapman watched, in continuing imitation/synchronicitous experiencing of the events in the novel. Yet the carousel never figures directly into the plot of this one. Spinning, though, is a major Monarch motif (technique of dissociation) and the prototype Monarch film Hide and Seek opens on a shot of Dakota Fanning spinning on a merry-go-round, with a vacant, traumatized look on her face. (Dakota Fanning??? Chris Knowles territory)
Chapman himself obviously detected a major synchronicity at work at this moment, though, while he was watching the carousel, because in police custody, he quoted the following lyrics from “Watching the Wheels,” the best remembered single on the album Double Fantasy that he had just released the previous month, his first album in five years. Chapman is recorded quoting the song:
People say I'm crazy
Doin' what I'm doin'
Well, they give me all kinds of warnings
To save me from ruin
I'm just sittin' here watchin' the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer ridin' on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
Obviously, Chapman could read himself into the lyrics, both before and after his arrest, but you can also easily read the deep politics version of events into it to, with Lennon being “crazy” to return to public life, that he was ignoring “warnings” to “save” him “from ruin.” Then there’s the mind control associations with merry-go-rounds and spinning. Hide and Seek, one of the ur-texts of Monarch cinema, begins with Dakota Fanning spaced out on a merry-go-round. And I’ll say no more about a possible “Dakota” synchronicity here. Maybe Chris Knowles can pick it up from here.
As I discussed in my premium episode on Chapman, you can also read these lyrics and the next stanzas as referring to his dropping out of music scene, or, alternately, as having eerie resonance with idea that he was assassinated by the deep state, particularly since Lennon had alluded to the potential of being assassinated (saying he has to play things a bit silly and gauche because people like Gandhi and MLK got killed) and was long paranoid because of the intense surveillance and covert political opposition he encountered in the US. Regarding which, consider this lyrics:
When I tell them that I'm doin' fine
Watchin' shadows on the wall
More to be said regarding the title of Lennon final album, Double Fantasy, even though I do cover all this in my Chapman episode.
Double Fantasy was supposedly used by Lennon because it’s the name of an orchid he saw at the Botanical Gardens in Bermuda. In retrospect at least, it resonates with the double, supposedly fantasy-driven murder attempts on Lennon and Reagan and with the notion that trauma-based mind control (which involves creating alters or “doubles”) was involved. Also, there’s a normie idea, originating with one of the defense psychiatrists in the case, that Chapman identified with Lennon. He signed off his last day of work, “John Lennon,” but he drew two lines through the name—so homicide and suicide…that’s was a rather wild theory of one of the defense experts.
Weirdness abounds around “Watching the Wheels,” though. More:
Wikipedia:
The photograph on the cover [of the “Watching the Wheels” single] was taken by Paul Goresh, a fan of Lennon who also took the infamous photo of Lennon signing the copy of Double Fantasy belonging to Mark David Chapman shortly before Chapman murdered Lennon. Both photos were taken at the same place, in front of the Dakota building, which was the site of his 1980 shooting. Later, Chapman was recorded in police custody reciting the line "People say I'm crazy" from the song….
Consider also the helter-skelter slide shown in a store window in multiple shots, the helter-skelter keying both to the spinning motif and the Beatles-Manson-Polankski-Dakota synchronicity stream (below). And consider that John and Yoko were returning home from working on Yoko’s song “Walking on Thin Ice.”[1]
Chapman says the Dakota was “like something out of The Wizard of Oz, the home of the great, the powerful.” As he says “the great, the powerful,” the shot is of the Neptune figure on the iron work fencing in front of the Dakota, which is/was actually on the building. Cf. this figure to The Nome King from Return to Oz, who is the dissociative fantasy world double for doctor/programmer (the same actor plays both characters). The Neptune figure, seen repeatedly in shots throughout the film, represents the programmer (according to Springmeier’s account of Monarch mind control, the programmer inserts himself into the dissociative fantasy worlds that are created to capture the psyche of the mind control victim); and Chapman is drawn to this building for a reason that he later senses, during the final stakeout of the building when he’s talking to Jude and the bearded fan, Paul Goresh. There is a similar figure to the Neptune figure on the television early on, a scene from the 1979 Jack Frost film. At the end of that clip, the little Jack Frost asks the Old Man Winter figure, “What sign?” He's asking about the sign given by nature mentioned by the Old Man Winter guy, but it’s suggestive given not only all the other MKUltra and twilight language material but because, just before this, before Chapman fell asleep, he was watching the network sign-off, the Star-Spangled Banner, which—according to a video which may be a clever fraud—subliminal messaging was inserted into Star-Spangled Banner.
“Everyone is cracked and broken. You have to find something to fix you, to give you what you need, to take you away and make you whole.” Looking at Wizard of Oz postcards as he delivers this monologue. Monarch to the gills: dissociation fantasies to escape from trauma, fantasies which are then manipulated to control the mind. He walks away and grabs the “Savoy” magazine with the magical, alluring Cinderella figure on the cover.
Lays out the Wizard of Oz postcard before the murder, consistent with facts of case. Gaines says he left “a still photograph from The Wizard of Oz, showing Judy Garland, as Dorothy, wiping a tear from the cheek of the Cowardly Lion.” Chapman wrote “To Dorothy” on it. He says in the movie that this and the other items left behind would “tell people who I was, who I had become.” Later, standing in front of the Dakota waiting for Lennon one last time, he identifies with the Tin Man, a figure that comes up specifically in Springmeier and Wheeler’s description of various forms of Monarch programming: “It was like this crazy stage had been set up, and all the actors coming and going. I was merely an image, a tin man, playing a Beatles fan, an autograph seeker.” Clear Samson’s Riddle/conspiracy crypto-signaling here: he was not really a Beatles fan, not really a fame-seeker. Another possible clue that this movie wants to identify Chapman as the Tin Man is in the postcard: the Tin Man has glasses, just like Chapman, although the Tin Man is rarely depicted this way, as far as I can tell.
And just one more Wizard of Oz connection, if I may. Chapman said that, as Lennon was walking by him in that final encounter, he heard the words “do it, do it, do it” repeating in his head, apparently a command hallucination but also possibly a programmed command or even a sonic weapon designed to beam auditory hallucinations (such technology certainly exists today and probably did then). Supporting the “programmed command” hypothesis, there are a couple of Lennon songs where these words, “do it, do it, do it,” are repeatedly endlessly. One of them is called “Do the Oz,” which mostly just repeats the lyrics “Do the oz, do the oz” and “do it, do it, do it.”
Inverted/perverted use of Biblical passages. Some of this at least is actually taken from real life, e.g., the Bible in which Chapman had added the word “Lennon” to “Gospel According to John.”
Springmeier reports inversive/perverse use of Scripture in Monarch programming, which could very much apply to Chapman (consider his messianic fantasies and comparing his defense of The Catcher in the Rye, his abandoning his defense to promote the book, to early Christian martyrdom. At a macro/cinematic scale, cf. the misappropriation of Scripture in Fincher movies (Alien 3, Se7en, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, House of Cards).
Beatles-Manson-Polanski-Dakota synchronicity stream…more (pseudo-)sychronicity:
Blurting out “Helter-Skelter” like “eureka,” it suddenly occurs to him, standing there with Jude and Paul Goresh, that there is something portentous about the fact that John Lennon is living in the same building where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed, a film directed by Roman Polanski, whose wife was killed by members of the Manson Family, Manson supposedly being inspired/triggered by Beatles music. Remember again the helter-skelter slide shown in the film during flashbacks of Chapman.
The unstated continuation of the synchronicity is that, if the Manchurian candidate thesis is correct here, Lennon was killed partly by his own music, since Lennon and Beatles songs were likely used as brainwashing and triggering devices in Chapman’s programming. Hence, his statement, in narration: “Sometimes I felt like the Beatles music was made just for me.” So did Charles Manson! A psychotic, parasocial relationship with Lennon and the Beatles similar to Manson but also emblematic, by analogy, to the “macro” parasocial fan obsessions that are also deliberately cultivated to engineer the consumer tastes and habits, if not the religious convictions and social mores, of droves of impressionable youth.
The other unstated continuation is the movie itself and its deliberate playing into the media-crime-culture-conspiracy feedback loop by cross-fertilizing the Chapman-Hinkley-Taxi Driver connections with the so-called “Rosemary’s Baby curse,” which is based on all the bad things that have happened to people directly or indirectly involved in the production, including Lennon, who, as Chapman thinks he realizes, kind of completes the circuit by dying after allegedly helping to inspire the murderer of Roman Polanski’s wife. Everyone knows what happened to Polanski, how he was probably a—very deserving—scapegoat for organized debauchery and pedophilia in Hollywood.
In real life, Chapman experienced a deep sense of synchronicity on the day he killed Lennon. People, part 2: “It’s like history and time were coming together and I was part of it. When you’re involved in this kind of thing you just sense these things…you just know.” Chapman saw The Catcher in the Rye as prefiguring the murder of Lennon (he listed “40 parallels” to a psychiatrist examining him in jail).
The movie could have, if it wanted, used the fact that Chapman, according to Jim Gaines’s People magazine series, “got within a foot of Mia Farrow” on the day of the murder, who starred in Rosemary’s Baby. I don’t know if Mia was living in the Dakota at the time of the murder, but that’s almost the implication—which would be a another freaky synchronicty/pseudo-synchronicity.
Another synchronicitous or pseudo-synchronicitous detail that Chapman probably didn’t appreciate is that, in real life, he also spotted Lauren Bacall, who did live in the Dakota and who was in a movie shot earlier that year and released in May of 1981 (a few months after Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan) called The Fan, about a deranged celebrity stalker who starts murdering people over his obsession with an older actress, played by Bacall (cf. Hinckley’s obsession with Jodie Foster).
Interestingly, there’s a German movie titled The Fan, released in 1982, about a crazy girl who has an unwholesome obsession with a male pop star, and in the trailer—I only watched the trailer—she says, “Every song is like he wrote it for me. It’s as if he knew me inside and out. As if I knew him inside and out. …It’s as if we’d known each other forever.” Very much echoing Chapman’s fictional narration in Chapter 27.
Chapman says, “I hate the movies. They’re phony.” Yet he makes an exception for Rosemary’s Baby (“It’s not too phony, I guess”—which in conjunction with him saying that everyone in the building is rumored to worship Satan, seems like a wink at Satanism in the entertainment industry), and also for The Wizard of Oz, a Monarch programming trope (about which much more presently).
Chapman says that “everyone who lives here is rumored to worship Satan.” This seems like a hangout: Hollywood Satanic insider politics being deliberately mythologized and mystified by this film, in the way it’s been done so often regarding the Cielo Drive event, starring the Manson Family.
More mind Control/Conspiracy subtexts
The doorman on the night of December 8 was apparently a backup doorman and was not identified in the media until the 1987 People magazine series by Jim Gaines. Which is odd because Rolling Stone’s supposedly definitive article on the murder published soon after named just about everyone remotely involved. I’m not sure if that one did, but other articles actually misidentified the doorman. Gaines described Perdomo as an aging “anti-Castro Cuban,” which very likely means he’s the same Jose Perdomo first identified in a 1981 book—note the year—titled The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro by Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner as recruiter of CIA Operation 40 hit squad composed mostly of Cuban exiles that is entangled in the Kennedy assassination. CIA operative and participant in assassination Frank Sturgis (of Bay of Pigs-Kennedy assassination-Watergate fame) told the authors that Perdomo died of “natural” causes in 1974. Oh, and by the way, Perdomo, according to Jim Gaines, discussed the Kennedy assassination with Chapman that night.
Chapter 27 not only depicts Perdomo suddenly pinch hitting for the regular doorman but, just before him there’s another “new” doorman, also Cuban-looking (although I don’t know if that is based in reality or not). A point is made of Chapman not recognizing either of them; and there is an obvious contrast between their friendliness and supportiveness of Chapman’s pursuit of Lennon versus the standoffishness of the previous doorman. Movie goes out of its way to exaggerate just how helpful and encouraging these new doormen were. It’s as if they want Mark to stick around. Bresler (163), in contrast to the film, has Perdomo there in November, during Chapman’s previous trip, and it’s Perdomo (not the “unhelpful” doorman from the movie) saying that Lennon is away, which Bresler thought might be a standard ruse to dissuade overeager fans. If this is all accurate, it actually underscores the conspiracy winking of the movie, as if they’re trying to make it even more obvious (but never saying it out loud) that something is fishy about Perdomo pinch hitting all of a sudden.
Remember Neptune/programmer figure associated with Dakota. Chapman was programmed to come to the Dakota and therefore had handlers prepared to direct him once he arrived. Chapman himself said (People, part 2) that his “strategy” was to get close to the doormen. They may also possibly be there as failsafe assassins (a procedure used in the Kennedy assassination).
Notice the words “Find your way out of the maze” on the paper placemat in the diner where Chapman and Jude sit. Monarch mind control cues. In this conversation, he’s telling Jude about the infinite possibility of the human mind. This alludes (a) to Monarch victims’ dissociative power fantasies that compensate for extraordinary powerlessness and (b) the real programs that merged MKUlta mind control techniques with programs to enhance cognitive and other abilities and engineer “super soldiers” (this is also where mind control intersects with the human potential movement, a la John Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats).
Notice the guy dealing drugs in background outside Dakota in scene preceding shooting. (In real life, drug dealers did operate around the Dakota.)
When Chapman overreacts to Goresh (over the latter saying he doesn’t sound like he’s from Hawaii)[2], does he think the guy is onto the fact that he’s an intelligence agent, or that he means to kill Lennon? Later he says to the guy, when he’s trying to make up, “You just never know who you’re talking to.”
The Climax: command hallucinations or MK-programming/sonic warfare (more Samson’s riddle)
After getting the autograph from Lennon, Chapman tries to convince Goresh to stay, as the part of Chapman that doesn’t want to kill Lennon is looking for ways to sabotage the part that does (this is based on Chapman’s own account). When Goresh leaves, he begins a struggle with what are apparently internal voices or command hallucinations but which, again, may be programmed commands or even the result of a sonic weapon.
To escape the inner conflict, Chapman dissociates, as he appears to have been trained to do, imagining himself as the Catcher in the Rye, the protector of innocence. He repeats the dissociative trigger phrase from The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.” And it is in this dissociated state that he hears the final trigger/twilight phrase, “The phony must die, says the catcher in the rye,” and resolves to kill Lennon.
Notice how important it is to him to be alone. Chapman, in real life, insisted, probably in all earnestness, that he wouldn’t have done it if people had been around, and he passed up an opportunity to kill Lennon earlier that night, when he got an autograph. That may have been how they programmed him, to carry it out when no one was around. But, of course, CIA assassin Perdomo was there, and somehow that didn’t prevent him from going through with it! Go figure! What happened was that Yoko got out of the car and was 30 or 40 feet in front of Lennon, already entering the building, when Lennon, who had been fumbling to gather cassette tapes from the night’s recording, walked out. The fact that he and Lennon were virtually alone confirmed for him that it was “meant to be.” But, again, what about Perdomo? He was there; he was the only other witness. Why wouldn’t his presence stop Chapman? He was friendly with him as he was with Judge and Paul Goresh, even carrying on a conversation with Perdomo that very night, as we mentioned, about the Kennedy assassination!
No witness to the crime? As Chapman tells it, Yoko got out of the car first and was 30 or 40 feet in front of Lennon, effectively leaving them alone and reinforcing in his mind that it was “meant to be.”
If you already know “Samson’s riddle,” if you know the Manchurian candidate thesis ahead of time, then this looks for all the world like Monarch-style, trauma-based mind control at work: Chapman was trained to dissociate in response to traumatic stimuli and then, in that dissociated state, his internal fantasy worlds (elaborated from The Catcher in the Rye and The Wizard of Oz, as with so many other mind control victims) are manipulated to get him to perform tasks that he would not perform in a non-dissociated, non-entranced state of consciousness.
Additional Movie-real life comparison
Lindsey Lohan plays Jude, who was apparently a real person, named Jude Stein…but the synchronicity (“Hey Jude”) is remarkable…or is Jude really her name?
Chapman did reportedly brag to a cabbie (the night cabbie) about being present at a recording session with John Lennon. But the same cabbie, in real life, described multiple stops with Chapman carrying something in a satchel. He seems to bring up the Lennon thing to support his cover story that he was distributing cassettes from Lennon’s recording session.
The prostitute scene described by Chapman somewhat different from that described in all the sources, where Chapman did not have intercourse with her as is seemingly implied. Movie preoccupied with erotic subtexts (see under Books below), in any case, and trying to emphasize sexual dysfunction in Chapman.
In real life, Chapman did go into a bookstore on the day of the murder (People, part 2):
On the way he went into a bookstore and bought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. He inscribed the book on its title page: “To Holden Caulfield, From Holden Caulfield.” Beneath that he wrote, “This is my statement.” You see, I was thinking I would turn into Holden right afterwards. I pictured that. I would just become Holden. And then I began thinking, “That won’t happen, that’s an unreality.” Toward the end, particularly that day, I thought I was going [to go] into a fetus position, like a cocoon, where everything would be shut off.
Chapman actually did (supposedly) meet 5-year-old Sean Lennon outside the Dakota with Jude and another girl:
He got to the Dakota just before noon and saw the same two women he had met on Saturday. He hadn’t been waiting long before a station wagon pulled up to the archway. In it were Sean Lennon, then 5, and his nanny. The girls knew him and they said, “Oooh, it’s Sean.” The girls introduced me to him and the nanny. We said, “Well, Sean, how are you doing?” and I think I shook his hand…. He had a cold and I said, “You better take care of that cold.” He didn’t say much to me, you know. Pretty shy…. He was the cutest little boy I ever saw It didn’t enter my mind that I was going to kill this poor young boy’s father and he won’t have a father for the rest of his life. I mean, I love children. I’m the catcher in the rye. (ibid.)
As in real life, Chapman includes a letter from David Moore (named changed here to “Bob Despres), the Geneva-based YMCA official whose letter of recommendation allowed Chapman to get accommodations all over the world during his 1978 world tour.
Autograph scene also similar to real life:
It was midafternoon when the interviewers left. Goresh asked them if Lennon would be coming down, and they said no, he wouldn’t. All of a sudden John came out with Yoko…and Paul started pushing me. He says, “Go. There he is.” And Paul started taking his pictures. And I went up to him and I said, “John, would you sign my album please?” He said, “Sure,” and he signed it and he looked at me very earnestly and very sincerely in my eyes and started to hand me back the album—He said, “Is that what you wanted? Is that all you want?” And I said, “Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot.” I was just overwhelmed by his sincerity. I had expected a brush-off, but it was just the opposite…. I was on cloud nine. And there was a little bit of me going, “Why didn’t you shoot him?” And I said, “I can’t shoot him like this….” I wanted to get the autograph. Ibid.)
It's Jude that he begs to stay with him (in movie, Jude got weirded out by the synchronicity rant), and then photographer Paul Goresh, on whom the bearded guy is based.
Chapman invokes the Devil here, as in real life, to psych him up to kill Lennon.
The (fake) “Savoy Fantasy” magazine cover:
Allusion to a Playboy magazine interview conducted in September 1980 but not published until January 1981. The fictional Lennon interview is advertised “AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: JOHN LENNON AND YOKO ONO ON MONEY, FAME AND ROCK & ROLL.” So this is an anachronism…but also a synchronicity, because Chapman was supposedly (at some point or other) put off by Lennon’s remark in the mid-60s that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, and that Playboy interview really does contain the blasphemous, inflammatory comparisons with Jesus referred to by Chapman in the movie:
PLAYBOY: "What about the people of your generation, the ones who feel a certain kind of music and spirit died when the Beatles broke up?"
LENNON: "If they didn't understand the Beatles and the Sixties then, what the fuck could we do for them now? Do we have to divide the fish and the loaves for the multitudes again? Do we have to get crucified again? Do we have to do the walking on water again because a whole pile of dummies didn't see it the first time, or didn't believe it when they saw it? You know, that's what they're asking: 'Get off the cross. I didn't understand the first bit yet. Can you do that again?' No way. You can never go home. It doesn't exist."
The “Savoy Fantasy” article is a composite of this and theEsquire article Chapman actually did read in New York (or maybe in the plane en route). This article is falsely cited as helping to inspire him to kill Lennon: the article does indict Lennon for basically being a sell-out, but Chapman was, according to the official story, on his way to kill Lennon anyway.
Both Amanda Carroll (the name of the cover girl, ) and Charles McCarry (“PLUS FICTION BY: CHARLES E. MCCARRY AND EXCERPTS FROM HIS NOVEL ‘DEEPER THAN THE OCEAN’) in the art department for film, but there is an author named Charles McCarry, active during the time in which the film is set, who was also a CIA operative.
“BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN: MASHA & NATASHA”: allusion to Cold War politics driving mind control research that created Manchurian Candidates like Chapman?
Also notice for an “UPDATE ON MARIJUANA: MYTH VS. FACT.”
Numbers
There are 26 chapters in The Catcher in the Rye, so the title here signals that Chapman really is the Holden Caulfield of his generation, writing the 27th chapter “in Lennon’s blood,” to quote Robert Rosen’s Nowhere Man (192).
Chapman said in court, “I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round” (professional fights had been reduced to 15 rounds decades earlier and were normally 12 rounds by 1980).
Chapman was staying on the 27th floor of the Sheraton in NY before he killed Lennon (see Bresler, 197). Is that in the movie?
John Lennon was obsessed with the number 9 (see “Book of Numbers” chapter in Rosen’s Nowhere Man, or Strongman’s book); hence, “Revolution #9,” the words “number nine” repeated endlessly on White Album. It was December 9 in London when he was killed.
Books
In assessing the importance of these visual cues, consider how much this is a movie about books, about “the power of fiction” (check), to quote the Frontline documentary. Note that, according to Bresler’s book (147) and based on court records, Chapman got the idea of killing Lennon during September or October of 1980 while reading Anthony Fawcett’s John Lennon: One Day at a Time.
World According to Garp seen repeatedly (in both bookstores, with Chapman’s books). Cf. erotic themes of Professor of Desire, by Philip Roth, seen in both bookstores. There’s a book called Virgin Planet visible, an erotic … by Poul Anderson. There might also be a book called The Sexually Active Man Past Forty. There’s a Tom Wolfe book.
In his last trip the bookstore, DEBORAH GOLDA AND ME is visible, and then, more prominent, part of a title that reads SOVIET SATELLITES. I went searching for this title and discovered that the full title is JEWS IN THE SOVIET SATELLITES...and it is clear that the filmmakers blacked out the words "JEWS IN THE." Presumably they wanted the careful viewer to notice this. It seems important because both books, as well as the Philip Roth book, are about Jews and Jewishness.
Madam Sarah, about Sarah Bernhardt (a kind of prototype of the Hollywood starlet and thus of the Monarch actress); something on Cocteau, a occultist and filmmaker; Moby Dick; River Horse (?); On Persephone Island by Mary Taylor Simeti [anachronistic: published in 1986]
Misc.
When Chapman buys Double Fantasy, you can see “Frank Zappa” on an album divider in the record shop (can see “Humble Pie” as well”), as soon as he walks in.
[1]May mention evidence from Yoko’s former assistant, May Pang, and John’s former lover when he and Yoko were broken up that (a) Yoko regularly hypnotized John and that he acted strangely afterward and (b) that she and John saw a UFO together.
[2] In reality, according to Goresh, Chapman became aggressive and suspicious when Paul asked where he was staying.
