Next time you pay a visit to he cinema be warned! Hollywood has long favoured subliminal messaging in films as a means to unknowingly scare, educate, manipulate, and titillate us.
From the spinning heads and speaking in tongues of The Exorcist to Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theory loving JFK, American films are riddled with subliminal messages but which movies really work the hardest to manipulate the mind?
Often referred to as “hidden communication in plain sight”, subliminal messaging was first introduced in the 1950s by greedy and underhanded American advertisers who desired to bleed an unwitting public dry in the name of rampant capitalism.
Subliminal messages are not visible to the naked eye of conscious thought but they are greedily absorbed by our slightly gullible subconsciousness, which gobbles them up before leaving them half-digested and rotting, to play merry bloody havoc with our mental processes.
Quite naturally, the art of subliminal messaging soon attracted hordes of Hollywood filmmakers who saw it as a very useful tool in their quest to fabricate realities, manipulate audiences and become as God.
Let’s have a sly peek look through the lens and take a trip through five films which contain messages we’re not supposed to know are there. Knock Knock!
Fight Club
If any movie likes to play acid mind games with your brain it’s David Fincher’s Fight Club. The psychopathic Tyler Durden, tenderly portrayed by Brad Pitt is a subliminal message all by himself. If you watch those split-second frames carefully, you can actually spot him three times before he actually appears in the film. To make things a little quirkier when Durden is not beating his mates black and blue in bare-knuckle boxing bouts or making bombs out of soap, he spends his time adding subliminal messages to movies in the cinema where he works as a projectionist. The messages in question are a grotesque and overblown image of a penis. What sort of statement Fincher was trying to make with this whacky playfulness we may never know. Viva la revolution.
The Exorcist
You would think a film based on a real-life case of demonic possession which depicts an angry projectile vomiting 12-year old who spits obscenities at Priests and can swivel her head and makes her face and eyes go a strange shade of yellow at will, would be scary enough without subliminal messaging right? Wrong! Hidden messages involving demons and other gruesome images are strategically placed throughout William Friedkin’s classic horror flick, and may have something to do with it being voted the scariest movies of all time, time after time. Just remember to leave the light on.
Gladiator
At first glance, Ridley Scott’s sword and sandals epic is the last place you’d expect to find the dark arts and black-hand of subliminal messaging. Think again. Just as Russell Crowe’s character, the memorably titled Maximus Decimus Meridius is about to be killed on the orders of the corrupt perfumed ponce Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), a word that contains enough conspiracy theories to populate a small country flashes up, and that word is “Kennedy”. The name of the assassinated American president flashes up again during the end of the film just before Commodus penetrates Maximus with some Roman steel and handicaps him ahead of their duel to the death. Thumbs up or thumbs down?
JFK
If there’s one director who’d appreciate the subtle nuances of subliminal messaging more than most it’s Oliver Stone. His 1991 award winning film JFK may play fast and loose with historical fact but it is crammed with enough subliminal messages, that guarantee by the time a movie goer has left the cinema, they’ll be convinced that Kennedy’s slaying in Dallas was masterminded by an elite group of Masonic, shape-shifting reptiles from the planet ‘Wrong’. Could it be magic?
The Lion King
Lastly, but not least, a list about subliminal messaging in movies wouldn’t be complete without a Walt Disney film thrown into the mix. In some quarters there is a belief that Disney films are hot beds of secret messages. It’s debatable if Disney has an overall plan to corrupt and confuse its audience or if these subliminal messages are just the product of bored and mischievous animators and filmmakers, but one thing’s for certain, a lot of people believe they are definitely there. In Aladdin for example, when he is trying to reach Jasmin on her balcony you can apparently hear him say quite quickly, “Good teenagers take off your clothes.” And next time you watch the Lion King, pay attention to the scene where Simba remembers his dad on a cliff top because the word “Sex” seems to form in the clouds above his head. It’s all Greek to me.
