The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a PSYOP

Kind: captions Language: en You think you're just watching a blockbuster movie for entertainment. You're not. There is a 60,000page paper trail proving your favorite movies aren't art. [music] They are state sanctioned psychological operations. The most powerful studio executive in Hollywood doesn't work at Disney or Netflix. They work at the Pentagon. Hollywood sold you a lie and hid it in the credits. Number 12, the humane interrogator. Meet the parents. You might think that the CIA's only brush with Hollywood is in spy movies like Mission Impossible and Jason Bourne franchises, but you'd be wrong. Even a 2000's romcom like the Ben Stiller and Robert Dairo vehicle meet the parents has CIA fingerprints on it. For anyone who hasn't seen the movie, Stiller's character meets his longtime girlfriend's parents for the first time, only to discover that her dad and his potential future father-in-law is an ex CIA agent. In Hollywood, authenticity is currency. [music] The more real a movie feels, the more audiences will buy into the story. [music] And the more believable the story feels, the more profitable the movie becomes. And that's where Chase Brandon comes in. He's one of the most important figures when it comes to the shady connections between the CIA and Hollywood. He is a man so strange and interesting that you could almost picture a movie being made about him. A 35-year veteran of the CIA working undercover as a leading operative in the Clandiststein [music] service. He said of his role here, "It's not a career, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle." He's also a man whose claims to have seen definitive proof of aliens hidden inside the classified files on the 1947 Roswell crash. He later wrote the conspiracy thriller The Cryptos Conundrum and has an unexpected Hollywood link of his own. He is the cousin [music] of acting legend and men in black star Tommy Lee Jones. But that connection is a little more than trivia. As a senior staff officer for the CIA, he became the agency spokesman and the CIA's official liaison to the entertainment industry. As such, he's played an interesting two-way role, providing limited insider knowledge about the inner workings of the CIA to movie makers. In turn, he makes sure to shave down the hard edges of Hollywood's portrayal of the often controversial intelligence agency. >> [music] >> So naturally, when writing and then production was underway for Meet the Parents, Chase Brandon was the natural point of contact when it came to making Robert Dairo's CIA father-in-law character both funny and realistic. Chase happily answered questions that could develop the character and his backstory, up until one question that changed everything. What would a CIA torture manual look like? The plan was to have Stiller find one of these in Dairo's desk as the key clue to his former life, but Chase Brandon shut that down. He strongly suggested instead that the film show a quote panopoly of photographs of Dairo's character with different important public figures to reveal his CIA past. [music] Normally, when a change like this is made, it's out of a sense of making the movie more accurate. But that isn't the case here. The CIA has provably created manuals that provide instruction to kidnap and torture, such as the ones distributed to Honduran militants as part of the Contra War. This was confirmed by Freedom of Information Act documents released in 1997. So, this change wasn't just a helpful CIA employee trying to help a movie stick to the facts. This is a definite example of the CIA manipulating the writing of the entertainment industry to whitewash some of their most similar elements. If they're willing to do this for a single visual gag in a 2000's romcom, how far are they willing to go for movies that feature them and their interests much more heavily? Number 11, the CIA's own James Bond, the Ryanverse. The latter half of the 20th century was an awful time for the CIA in terms of public relations. Their predecessor organization, the OSS, were allowed as heroes for their work in World War II. But by the time Chase Brandon was attempting to massage the CIA's reputation in the movies, they were ankled deep in scandal. From unpopular regime change in the global south to rumors and allegations of involvement in drug trafficking states side, they were the dark shadow on America's wall. So where better than Hollywood to launder that reputation back into all American heroics? This is why in the 1990s we started to see a shocking number of movies produced with direct input from the CIA. Patriot Games, a 1992 American thriller starring Harrison Ford as heroic ex-CIA agent Jack Ryan, was adapted from a Tom Clancy novel. Its portrayal of the agency was deeply romanticized. It was almost a cinematic love letter to the CIA. Tom Clansancy was a good friend in a direct correspondent with the CIA. So, Jack Ryan represented something that the agency had long dreamed of. The agency's answer to James Bond. A marketable symbol to improve public sentiment and drive recruitment. Chase Brandon incidentally hated James Bond, saying of Bond, "You're not doing your job. The whole point is to not be obvious." And yet, the CIA threw their weight behind Patriot Games. They granted multiple visits to the Langley headquarters for research, and the production team were not only authorized, but actively encouraged to film there. It is the same kind of deal you'll see in productions like The Recruit and The Oscar-winning Argo, all of which feature CIA agents in prominent, heroic roles with CIA permission. And while Patriot Games wasn't the culture-defining hit the CIA had hoped for, it was a down payment on a long game of impressive cultural influence. Jack Ryan may not have the global name recognition of James Bond, but the Ryan verse has stretched [music] across 14 Tom Clancy novels, as well as spin-offs following Jack's son. [music] The Verse has seven different movies where he's been played by a variety of actors as well as an extremely successful multi-season Jack Ryan TV show from Prime Video starting in 2018. It probably won't surprise you then that this all makes the CIA agents look like superheroes. And we haven't even gotten to the literal superheroes the US government helped to shape yet. Number 10, the Chase Brandon era, The Recruit. Chase Brandon's work as the CIA's shadow producer didn't end with Meet the Parents. Not even close. His real power as the CIA's man on the inside of Hollywood began in 1996, where he helped produce over a dozen movies and TV shows, all while making sure they portrayed the CIA in the most glowing light possible. To your average screenwriter working hand-to-mouth, he might have seemed like a dream correspondent. He claimed to have a wealth of experience carrying out foreign assignments involving international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics trafficking, and weapon smuggling. Now, that's the stuff action movies are made of, providing you're willing to keep towing the line, especially when you look at the timeline of Brandon's career. Some have speculated his so-called covert undercover work may have overlapped with the CIA's most controversial operations in 1970s [music] South America. the same operations that he would later spend years quietly trying to erase from Hollywood storytelling. Brandon himself claims to have been a technical adviser on multiple Hollywood productions, including The Recruit, Enemy of the State, Mission Impossible 3, The Born Identity, and of course, Meet the Parents, as well as its sequel, which we can't really say by name on YouTube. But there's substantial evidence to show that Chase Brandon was a lot more than just the technical adviser on the recruit especially. In her book, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes film and television, Trisha Jenkins, discovered that Brandon was basically the brains behind the first full draft of the script. The supposed head writer, Roger Town, was a little more than a puppet who made minor contributions. One leaked [music] exchange between the two during the writing process had Brandon saying, quote, "Okay, Raj, your time to rock and roll with the Medford speech, I'm even going to give you the opportunity to describe him." Incidentally, there's clearly some kind [music] of running arrangement here. One of town's other writing credits was the 1999 TV thriller In the Company of Spies, also made with considerable CIA involvement. You could argue that Chase Brandon simply had a passion for writing and filmmaking and that his official CIA involvement on those movies was mostly incidental and that skepticism might carry water if the CIA hadn't attempted to hide the extent [music] of Chase Brandon's involvement. The website spyculture.com has performed extensive investigations into Brandon's film industry influence. It even dug up back issues of What's News at CIA, the AY's own internal magazine, where Chase Brandon's name is redacted. But you can still make out that it is his name under the redaction bar. In terms of the long shadow that Chase Brandon's career cast over Hollywood and by extension, the public perception of the CIA, his role can be seen as a remarkably strategic investment by the agency. But this whole situation of paid influence over movies is so much bigger than just the CIA. It's a hidden in plain sight conspiracy that stretches over multiple branches of the US government. The CIA's power and influence is actually just a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the raw power of the Department of Defense. Number nine, the blacklist 13 days. One of the tensest [music] periods in not just American history, but the history of humanity is the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The knifeedge tension of diplomacy versus nuclear annihilation was famously portrayed in the 2000 Kevin Cosner thriller 13 days. And that's a movie that you almost didn't get to see. The Pentagon tried to punish it for not supporting their narrative. We have seen the ways a powerful American governmental department can slide their propaganda into a movie. Here is what happens when you don't play ball. Making a movie like 13 Days presents [music] two huge challenges from a filmmaking perspective. The first is the amount of military hardware you need to accurately show the apocalyptic cold war tensions. The second is that because of how fast military technology progresses, a movie set in 1962 is absolutely a period piece. [music] To maintain immersion for history buffs, a film like this has to get the hardware right. That means period accurate vehicles, weapons, and uniforms down to the smallest detail. And [music] for that level of authenticity, studios often turned to the Department of Defense, drawing on both active expertise and museum collections of retired military equipment. Before communication broke down, the Pentagon provided some of the ships, aircraft carriers, and planes from [music] the time, including the USS Enterprise and the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Other contributions from the Department of Defense include a preserved F8 Crusader and Lockheed U2 spy [music] plane. The problem was the DoD didn't like how the movie expressed certain [music] uncomfortable truths, like the Joint Chiefs of Staff pushing for a nuclear first strike. A move that could have resulted in the end of all life and civilization as we know it on the Earth. [music] Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, but the US military did not want the public to know that it was not among those cooler [music] heads. The DoD pushed for the scene's removal from the movie, but the creators showed some moral backbone and didn't budge. This act of principle [music] was swiftly punished by the DoD, pulling out all of their support for the film and [music] their physical resources with it. However, despite this clearly being an effort to make the filming collapse from within, the team behind 13 Days showed themselves to be shockingly resourceful. They used the Philippines as a stand-in for Cuba, including areas around Clark Air Base. It once belonged to the US and it's now operated by the Philippine Air Force. The base also happened to have a range of older non-operational aircraft on site, which made it useful for recreating the film's period look. They aged and refurbished the equipment and tied them to the back of moving trucks to make them look functional, and it [music] worked. While not a box office success, the movie was wellreed. Incidentally, a chance to screen the movie on a US military base in Germany was denied [music] for the same reason the DoD pulled out their assistance. Strangely, Kevin Cosner did still get to give Fidel Castro a private screening of the movie in Cuba. While 13 Days is a perfect example of the rejection playbook, it is actually just one of dozens of iconic movies that the Department of Defense refused to support. These are just a few of the most insane examples. The Army initially rejected Forest Gump for several reasons, including the insinuation that a man with a mental disability would be sent to fight in Vietnam. This is the polar opposite of real life where the military actioned project 100,000, one of the military's greatest shames in a war full of them. They took mentally disabled people and then put them into units that basically [music] treated them as cannon fodder. Staying with Vietnam, they also shot down the chance to work on Oliver Stone's platoon for displaying US war crimes [music] and incidents of fragging, US soldier friendly fire, which were proved to have occurred. an officer and a gentleman was spiked by the US Navy for making it look bad. The production drew so much concern that when the film received assistance from the Canadian Navy, US Navy officials reportedly made calls [music] encouraging them to pull out too. The military left Die Hard 2 because the backstory of its Norieesque [music] villain reminded them a little too much of the Iran Contra fiasco. Both Independence Day and Mars attacks lost support for not showing the US military as looking strong enough [music] against technologically advanced alien invaders. And they also declined to support Commando, the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, one of the most over-the-top entries in the genre. The concern was that the backstory of Schwarzenegger's character John Matrix, a former US special forces operative, left too much room for interpretation about what his unit might have been involved in before the events of the film. As a result, the official reason given for the rejection was the movie quote implied that the US Army has or had a special unit trained solely for the purpose of committing murder and pillage. All of this might have you wondering what is the military's actual return on investment for doing all of this? Well, the CIA and the DoD put so much effort into influencing movies or freezing them out when they don't play ball. How does it actually benefit them when it all goes to plan? The answer is that the benefits are massive with a capital M just like a certain MCU. Number eight, the Captain Marvel effect. In 2019, after the bombshell of Avengers Infinity War, all eyes were on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But one final piece had to be set in place before the box office smashing conclusion of Endgame, introducing the last core member of the team, Captain Marvel. And after making almost a billion dollars over its budget, the movie proved not only to be a huge success, but also for its secret stakeholder, the US Air Force. The titular Captain Marvel is Carol Danvers, a female Air Force pilot given god-like powers after accidental contact with an alien. So naturally, the US Air Force poured considerable time and resources into the movie. The cast received flight training from the late Major Steven Kinjun Delbano of the Thunderbirds. Additional support came from several major units, including the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base in California and the 144th Fighter Wing at Fresno Air National Guard Base. Other bases and squadrons also featured in the making of the movie. But this deal went both ways. Brie Larson, who played Captain Marvel, took part in a promotional tour of Nellis Air Force Base alongside cross- promotional activity across [music] official social media channels. In the US, Air Force recruitment advertisements also ran in cinemas before the film during its billiondoll theatrical run. We now have the hard data to know that this whole song and dance worked incredibly well for the Air Force. It saw the highest boost in female applicants in 5 years. Disney won big for the Department of Defense on this one. But what if we told you that the company's connection to official US government forces went back decades? In fact, the first prominent member of the Disney Corporation to be in bed with the US government was Walt Disney himself. Number seven, special agent Walt Disney. Walt Disney wasn't a puppet of the Department of Defense or the CIA. Instead, he was the first Hollywood insider deeply connected to the FBI. He even snitched on fellow animators and business rivals during the FBI's Red Scare Hunt for communists in the Hollywood system. Disney's official FBI file obtained thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request reads, "In part, because of Mr. Disney's position as the foremost producer of cartoon films in the motion picture industry and his prominence and wide acquaintances in film production matters, it is believed that he can be a valuable assistance to this [music] office and therefore it is my recommendation that he be approved as an SACE contact. He was first recruited in 1940 and would later be given the ceremonial title of special agent in charge contact in 1954. In exchange for insider Hollywood intel, positive coverage in his films, and free access to Disneyland whenever they pleased, which was genuinely one of the perks, Disney was given access and the right to film an FBI headquarters. [music] The connection was really no surprise given that Disney sent a kind of fan letter to the bureau all the way back in 1936. This mutual fandom seemed to go both ways. There is an extremely creepy photo of FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover at a New Year's Eve party in 1937 [music] where he's wearing a cardboard Mickey Mouse Clubhouse mask. And if that sounds extreme, it escalated again 4 years later during a 1941 [music] animator strike. After Disney fired staff involved in unionization efforts, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover allegedly provided support [music] that critics say helped pressure and intimidate the movement. The goal was to destroy the movement so Disney could get his employees back to work. Of course, government [music] agencies are extremely particular in how they like to be portrayed in the media, and even Disney slipped up. The FBI was displeased with their more humorous portrayal in the Moon Pilot and That Darn Cat, two Disney productions, and kept Disney on somewhat of a shorter leash after that. Still, he happily towed the line all the way up to his death in 1966. If this was the level of government influence during the golden age of animation, it raises a broader question about how much creative control exists in today's era of gritty post 911 realism. And nowhere is that debate more intense than in [music] films dealing with the death of Osama bin Laden. One of the most consequential realworld events ever dramatized in modern cinema. Number six, the Zero Dark 30 bribery. The 2012 political thriller Zero Dark 30 is a controversial movie to say the least. The box office smash hit about the manhunt for Bin Laden was criticized for using real audio from people killed in the 9/11 attacks. Its narrative was said to support torture as a technique for getting information out of detainees. But most of all, there were the sinister and possibly illegal underthet deals with members of the CIA for insider informatio