A Letter on Why We Made “The Minds of Men” as We Did
A letter Aaron wrote explaining why we made “The Minds of Men” the way we chose to:
Thank you for describing your personal journey with our film and its impact. Undoubtedly, the sizeable 223 minutes is a hurdle which drags upon its potential marketing and attention span with its audience, from a film industry standpoint.
Nevertheless, we told what we felt dramatically held together — there was a mountain of details even beyond what we showed, obviously. But even given the overwhelming scope, we never wanted to mute aspects of the story that lend towards its whole — the totality of it all, the scope, the organization and funding involved.
MK Ultra was absolutely massive (even analogous to the Manhattan Project, for example), and its true scale and impact into so many areas of life render this story utterly incomprehensible to us. I mean, who among us has any real perspective on the severity of meddling with the inner-workings of the human mechanism? Ultimately, it is the realization that the darkest and most abusive aspects of this have also led to less-dubious but more wide-reaching, structural-societal stepping stones that have built parts of a future that someone is purposefully and methodically attempting to direct.
Studying the damn brain and scripting the emerging computer so that its functions are compatible with the base-operations of biological communication, set-up a serious attempt to engineer a co-evolution between man and machine. This becomes the philosophical backdrop of our modern lives, with near-exclusivity of the techno dream for human progress. It projects entirely into our Hollywood science fiction dystopias and has become a dominant language of limited imagination with which we fumble in describing our visions of the future.
A paradigm patently preparing us all for a life online, and in consequence, to a constant “schedule” of behavioral modification — even now, already at this point in 2024 — nearly too slight to perceive and almost above the dignity of discuss or reproach. I mean, everyone knows how omnipresent the surveillance has become…
For these reasons — in respect of its totality, in respect of its continuation and advanced development both implied and described — for these reasons we never abridged the runtime of this film, instead giving each section of this history a chance to reveal its cumulative contribution. For these reasons, we decided instead to cite our sources and let people see the bulk of what we collected together. We made sincere efforts to cut the run-time and make it manageable, but it would have reduced the idea to mere myth without providing the steps of the formula used to reach a FOUNDATION, a minimum-floor of what happened. It works also as a 4-part series, but personally, I see it as a single film.
That approach — of over-whelming totality — isn’t appropriate for every kind of film, including some of the ones we’ve planned or begun work on, but for this subject matter, it seemed important to break from the MK Ultra that we thought we knew, and re-contextualize the reality of this leviathan undertaking for what it was, and has become.
We portrayed in documentary form some of the actual published academic research into these areas, studies which were routinely conducted in secret, but which typically had an above-ground layer corresponding to the specialization at each member’s respective academic or govt institutional environment in their experimental craft. This was a mega-project, but also a meta-project. In that way, it is arguably so much more expansive than the Manhattan Project, for the neuron of the brain is infinitely more complex than the atom of an exploding particle of otherwise inert matter.
When we explode, we become.
As to runtime — I can see the wisdom in the quote attributed to La Harpe:
“To teach well, we need not say all that we know, but only what is useful for the pupil to hear.”
And we strive to actually execute that idea.
In Liberty,
Aaron
