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Brett's Arlington Road Notes
🕑 Added 2023-09-05 18:16:26 +0000 UTCArlington Road (1999)
Background
Release of the movie was delayed from May to July because of Columbine. As Pellington points out, Arlington Road not only dealt with spectacular violence but also “children and explosions.”
This was the debut script of Ehren Kruger, who is a massive sus-ball. He won the Nicholl
Fellowship Screenwriting competition from the Academy. Raised in Alexandria, Viriginia (Fedland), he wrote three of the DoD-supported Transformers films, the Dod-supported Reindeer Games, and the American versions of The Ring and The Ring Two. He did an uncredited rewrite on Mindhunters, a 2004 movie glorifying FBI profilers.
Director Mark Pellington, like David Fincher, Spike Jonze, and many others from this era, emerged out of the music video world. He strikes me, at least early in his career, as a hired gun mostly, not someone in on designing the psyop at a high level. A recent film he did, The Severing, depicts corpse-like people in a dingy warehouse setting dancing as if demon-possessed. It was choreographed by Nina McNeely, whose bio describes her an “avid believer in Magick.”
His first music video was for a Leonard Cohen song, and he directed the controversial video for Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” which depicts a kid committing suicide in front of his class.
He directed the video for “Butterfly” by Screaming Trees, which apart from the butterfly imagery plays like a serial killer’s diary. It shows the death of multiple women. One sequence has a woman hanging, suspended in mid-air (the butterfly-like weightlessness of the extreme trauma victim), seen only from her shins down, with the following on-screen titles: “shoved in tight spots, I close her eyes, I position her mouth.” At other times, words like, “intended victim,” “perpetrator,” and “mourner” appear on screen.
Pellington also directed the video for Alice in Chains’s “Rooster,” about the traumatic experiences of the Vietnam war on US soldiers. Captain Dale Dye was a technical advisor. Dye founded “Warriors, Inc.,” in 1984, which “specializes in training actors in war films to portray their roles realistically, and provides research, planning, staging and on-set consultation for directors and other film-production personnel. His company is the top military consultant to Hollywood.” And Dye apparently had no trouble mixing service to the US military and media-related jobs:
After retiring, Dye became a correspondent for the Soldier of Fortune magazine. He worked for the magazine for one year, during which he worked in Central America, providing guerrilla warfare training to troops in El Salvador and Nicaragua while reporting on conflicts in the region.[6]
According to Pellington, the Samuelsons optioned the script. They are from England. Their grandfather, G.B. Samuelson, was a director and producer in the first half of the 20th century.
Marc Samuelson, together with his brother Peter Samuelson, produced Playmaker (1994), a movie starring Jennifer Rubin and directed by sus-ball Yuri Zeltser which I discussed briefly in my Bad Dreams Monarch episode. In Playmaker, Rubin (quoting my episode)
stars as a struggling actress who is led to believe that she’ll become famous if she seeks out the services of a psychotic acting coach, played by Colin Firth, who spends much of the movie playing mind games and psychologically torturing her in his isolated mansion. She finds out that women who don’t take to his techniques are murdered.
They’ve produced multiple projects written by Anthony Horowitz, including The Gathering (a 2002 film starring Christina Ricci and dealing with themes of amnesia and child sexual abuse) and Stormbreaker (an MI6 recruiting tool for kids made in 2006).
Peter Samuelson got his break producing Revenge of the Nerds (1984). He is quite well connected, having once been the Vice President of Interscope and the Chair of the Executive Committee of Panavision. He founded the Starlight Children’s Foundation in 1982, and together with Steven Spielberg, and General Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf created the "Starbright World," an early virtual world for children with chronic illnesses. “Spielberg and Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. (Starbright's chair of fundraising)[6] made cameos in the game as E.T. and a teddy bear, respectively.” Samuelson has also taken an interest in the plight of foster children, which is the subject of an upcoming documentary titled Human Disruption. He recently produced a British movie starring Matthew Modine titled Foster Boy.
His Wikipedia bio says he “served on the initial three-person advisory board for Jeff Skoll's Participant Productions,” which is “dedicated to entertainment intended to spur social change.” Cultural engineering, anyone?
Co-producer Jean Higgins produced the show Lost, a Charlie’s Angels show from 2011, and the Marvel show The Inhumans.
Executive producer Tom Rosenberg, co-producer Richard S. Wright, and associate producer James McQuaiderecently were members of the production team on Peppermint, starring CIA spokesperson Jennifer Garner, which also included Sound of Freedom executive producer Christopher Tuffin on the production team. McQuaide also did visual effects for the film. Wright’s first production credit was an associate producer credit on Ruby (1992), about Jack Ruby.
Executive producer Sigurjon Sighvatsson is a bigtime Scandinavian producer and production executive whose career is peppered with bigtime susness. His most recent production credit is for the climate hysteria movie Exxtinction Emergency. Executive produced Destricted (2006), a compilation of “erotic art” films, including by Satanists like Marina Abramovic and Matthew Barney. Executive produced the Satanic-Illuminati film Lord of Illusions (1995), which is chock full of Monarch tropes. He produced Kalifornia, a breakthrough film for Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis about serial killer tourism. He also produced David Lynch’s Monarch film Wild at Heart (1990). Before that, he apparently worked for Fincher’s Propaganda Films producing an exercise music video starring Alyssa Milano and a Playboy VHS. He produced music videos, and he continued producing them into the 90s, perhaps also for Propaganda Films. CHECK He also produced gross Todd Solondz’s debut film, Fear, Anxiety, and Depression (1989).
Tim Robbins, like his ex-wife Susan Sarandon, is an arch-Hollywood liberal, though he often deviates from the Democratic establishment, e.g., supporting Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders and opposing Coof lockdowns on First Amendment grounds.
His father received a scholarship to UCLA and performed in the marching band only to drop out and join the Air Force, where he became a conductor and drum major. He went on to be a member of the early 60s folk group the Highwaymen, which was active in the Boston area during the Boston strangler saga. All of the members of the group went on to prominent positions, especially Steve Trott, who,
after graduating from Harvard Law, became a prosecutor in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. Later, he served as Associate Attorney General, the number two position in the United States Department of Justice during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan and in 1987 was appointed a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
His wiki bio says that he turned down the job of Director of the FBI to accept the appointment to the Ninth Circuit.
Robbin’s first every role, on three episodes of St. Elsewhere in 1982, was as a “domestic terrorist” bomber, who apparently injured himself as well because he’s in the hospital.
He also says that he researched the militia movement while writing his stage production Carnage, a satire on “televangelism” that appears to be a standard Hollywood smear against traditional American values.
In 1984, he was in the DoD collaboration Toy Soldiers, and in 1986 he’s in Tony Scott’s Top Gun.
Jeff Bridges of course is a multi-generational Hollywood superstar, the son of Lloyd Bridges and brother of Beau Bridges. Notably, he served in the Coast Guard from 1967-1975, attaining the rank of petty officer second class. He practices Transcendental Meditation.
Weird that Hope Davis was best friends with and grew up directly across the street from Mira Sorvino, since she resembles her so much that she could be her stunt double. Compounding this strangeness is that, in the movie, the woman who plays the grad student/crisis (Jenni Tooley) actor looks a lot like Hope Davis, and it seems like they made her up to resemble her even more closely, to the point that many viewers think that it is Hope Davis. Tooley plays a character named Butterfly in two Strangers with Candy episodes about a religious cult. Adding to the intrigue is this note from the imdb Goofs section:
The phone technician played by Sid Hillman, in the scene where he cuts Michael's phone lines looks surprisingly like his girlfriend Brooke (Hope Davis) with her head shaved.
Is this all part of some inside Hollywood joke?
Production designer Theres DePrez has 39 credits in this capacity, and several are sus, beginning with The Doom Generation (1995) and Path to Paradise, an apparent limited hangout documentary about the first World Trade Center bombing which features on its cover the towers with a fissures running down them. She did Todd Solondz’s Happiness, Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, the “gender queer” movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Black Swan.
Movie
Opening Credit Sequence (Monarch)[1]:
Flash shot of downward-pointing star from either upside down or backwards American flag in opening credits, followed by back-masked audio. The credit on screen is for Angelo Badalamenti. (See below for more on audio under The Method).
Followed by double-vision shot of neighborhood, suggesting the double or secret world underneath suburbia. Then it cuts to a shot of three little girls dressed in identical outfits: two spc4lit away, leaving the third to turn around as the camera seemingly attacks her, as if she’s the core personality and the other two are alters split off from her.
After this, I noted the spinning flower petal ornament, which then cuts to birds, and then to a kid seemingly in a cage, behind bars, with an angry dog snapping at him through the bars. Then it cuts immediately to what look like roses.
The not-so-underlying theme of organized abuse of children in the movie is already represented here and punctuated with Monarch tropes. Pellington says that he told Cooper, “I wanted the opening of the film — the opening scene in the titles — to be really evil and nasty and fucked up, and that’s all — I think that’s all I said.”
More Monarch
We never get confirmation as to just what happened to Brady. One could imagine that he was injured playing with some of mom and dad’s explosives, but it’s not at all clear how that scenario would make sense, since there’s no other suggestion of an explosion in the neighborhood. What’s emphasized is that he’s in a state of shock, a trance state, after a severe trauma. And later we’re made to understand that the family psychologically manipulates children as part of conditioning them into a life as covert operatives. Furthermore, since we know that Michael was cultivated as a patsy, it stands to reason that they harmed their son in part to manufacture the hospital meeting.
There’s another Monarch reference early in the film, when Oliver says, “Guess we’re no in Kansas anymore” (Wizard of Oz).
Michael is traumatized by the death of his wife, making him vulnerable to being tampered with.
90s “Militia Movement” and Beyond
In the first lecture scene, the Patriot Movement/1776 ethos is associated with fear-inducing images of terrorism. Same idea with Michael’s backlit “conspiracy board” in his office, with an eye right in the middle of it.
The “Roosevelt Federal Building” in St. Louis, supposedly blown up by former soldier and disgruntled (against the IRS) citizen, is obviously a stand-in for the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. (See under PATCON, Oklahoma City, and Andreas Strassmeir.) According to imdb,
In early drafts of the film script, the Oklahoma City bombing was literally referenced. By the time of the shooting script the location of the bombing referenced was changed to St. Louis.
The imdb Goofs section for the film notes:
The "St. Louis Federal Building" discussed at 21:00 in the classroom is actually showing the 25 June 1996 aftermath of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. 19 US military were killed in this attack.
This attack is often cited by conspiracists to prove that McVeigh’s fertilizer bomb could not have done the type of damage to the Murrah Building as claimed, since this much larger bomb did significantly less damage (and no structural damage) and caused only a fraction of the casualties.
Michael suggests the official story of the bombing doesn’t add up. “Does that sound like a guy on the edge or a guy who needed a push?” He says the guy blew it up with C4, which is a backhanded reference to OKC conspiracy theory: German intelligence operative Strassmeir and his Aryan Republican Army, probably along with other Fed insiders, used C4; fertilizer bomb in U-Haul not powerful enough. The imdb Goofs section notes:
The amount of C4 in the car trunk is not even close to enough to destroy the building. Also, more than one explosion is shown, including one a few stories up, impossible from a single car bomb in an underground parking area.
Absolutely an obvious reference to Oklahoma City as an inside job.
Note that, in “questioning” official narratives, he’s actually sowing paranoia around the Patriot movement and not the government, which is what the movie is trying to do as well (see under “What Is the Psyop?”). This scene—and indeed the Michael-the-history-professor-conspiracy-theorist subplot in general—can thus be seen as Revelation of the Method: it’s depicting, through Michael, the desired effect of the movie, which by implication means that the audiences are the patsies.
The scenario in which Oliver was arrested for pipe bombing a BLM building has shades of Bundy ranch. And as he and Michael part, Oliver says, “See you back at the ranch” to Michael, although of course they don’t live on a ranch.
Cf. the incident where Michael’s Fed wife was killed to Ruby Ridge. Events are here portrayed in a way that appears to offer a mild critique of the Feds while justifying the maximum use of force. The kid just picks up a rifle like someone trained for combat and starts shooting. The idea is to vindicate the Fed murders of children—again, more violence against children in this movie—at Ruby Ridge and Waco by portraying the situation as if the Feds didn’t have a choice but to put down these murderous brainwashed kids. At Ruby Ridge, the Feds were preparing an ambush and shot the family dog, which is when the boy supposedly shot back before the US Marshalls gunned him down, although the sequence of events is much disputed. Here, of course, the boy definitely shoots first. The most disgusting article of propaganda, though, is the death scene of Michael’s wife, where a woman carrying a baby blows her head off, the message being that the Feds may even need to kill babies if they’re being used as “human shields.” In actuality, Weaver’s wife was killed by a Fed sniper while holding their baby daughter.
The ”revelation” at the end of the movie—that some shadowy right-wing, anti-government organizationas infiltrated sectors of society and is operating like a government intelligence agency—is clearly a cover. The implication is that Oliver is actually a multi-generational intelligence agent and that the Feds are behind the “extremist” groups that they are using to discredit all constitutionalist/1776 movements and ultimately any conservative resistance to the New World Order.
When Oliver says, of “extremists,” “there seems to be one everywhere,” this statement can be read in this double way, like a lot of things in the movie: but the deeper layer of meaning seems to be that he knows they’re “everywhere” because he’s in on the false flag-patsy operation.
The whole neighborhood appears to be colonized by spooks, which is also based on real-life: clandestine services folk own whole neighborhoods supposedly, often with straw owners to manage the properties (think Cielo Dr.).
The van service as a front for intelligence operations is also standard stuff. Consider Urban Moving Systems (Mossad) and 9/11.
Oliver says to Michael, “You’ve checked up on us. Do you really think we’d leave anything to chance.” That does not describe any common paranoia regarding militia “extremist” types; it describes paranoia surrounding outfits like the CIA or the so-called Illuminati, which promote this kind of pseudo-omnipotent aura as a form of psychological warfare (a la Michael Aquino). Of course, the paranoia here is being deliberately cultivated in the audience, as Pellington admits.
More on the Militia Movement as Cipher for Fed Spooks
Brady “playing” over at his house is actually training his son to be a clandestine operative. “Secret handshake.” “That’s classified information, Mr. Faraday.” Golly, these right-wing militia types sure are acting a lot like Federal spooks. Even according to the official line, the right-wing terrorists were holed up in compounds like the one in Idaho near Randy Weaver, not living double lives in suburbia.
Boy Scouts as grooming organization for intelligence (coded, of course, as Spectre-like right-wing militia group).
Michael finds out that Oliver has been asking his son deep personal questions—so already tampering with his psyche.
Oliver’s “Grapes of Wrath” speech about the IRS persecuting his family seems like a classic cover story to misdirect anyone who finds out too much, in the same way that the deep state tried to implicate the Cubans/Soviets and the mafia, respectively, in the JFK assassination, in the minds of people who figure out too much.
Hope Davis character killed in a staged car accident, a common way of whacking people by the clandestine services, e.g., Anne Heche (and Alan Pakula?).
Insofar as she’s killed not just because she knows too much but to warn Michael, this is also a common tactic used by the Network. Rumor is that William Holden was whacked shortly before the assassination attempt on Reagan as a warning or as punishment (Holden was the best man at Reagan’s wedding and one of his best friends).
On the marquee of the movie theater shown at the end is “Dirty Work,” which obviously has a double meaning here. A flag then waves in front of the shot, indicating that the “dirty work” (i.e., black ops, false flags, patsy-creation) is being done by the Feds. The new media parrot the official line on queue, aided by crisis actors like the woman in his class who was also in on the op.
The Method
Film uses jarring audio effects on audience, for example in the credits and opening scene, where it is also depicting a trauma-induced trance state, partially from an external and partially an internal perspective (using said audio method). David Lynch’s frequent collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti, did the soundtrack.
Several eye closeup, voyeur/surveillance shots.
Note the flashing lights in the climactic scene at FBI headquarters.
Misc.
The bombing of the FBI building, said in epilogue news reports to be the biggest terrorist attack in US history, to some extent anticipates 9/11.
Note the smiley faces on the balloons at the birthday party.
On Oliver’s desk when Michael is rifling through his stuff is a magazine: The Futurist, issue title “The Cyber Future.”
What Is the Psyop?
ATF supervisor in charge of the Waco raid, Philip Chojnacki, is credited as a technical advisor on the film.It’s his only film credit.
First, of course, a brazen misdirection campaign, projecting the doings of spooks onto the Patriot movement, demonized as militia terrorists. This may very well be a direct extension of the PATCON (“Patriot Conspiracy”) op by the FBI (see below), an op likely designed to create a fake right-wing militia conspiracy against the government to justify a massive expansion of Fed police powers. Unfortunately, the bulk of the audience of this movie is so hopelessly psyop-naïve and so conditioned to be paranoid about the wrong things that they actually take this in earnest.
One might say this movie is a continuation of false flags like Oklahoma City, an attempt to pin the nefariousness of the deep state and their infiltration of society on 1776 “extremists,” in a similar vein as the Jan. 6 op. In playing havoc with reality, in constructing a Fed-inspired paranoia fantasy that projects the crimes and the overall pathology of the deep state onto the fake right-wing groups they control—in doing this, the filmmakers are employing the standard Satanic technique of inversion, which is right at home in the carnivalesque world of Hollywood.
Pellington admits that he’s trying to get people to fear that their neighbors might be the next far right terrorists. To people who rightly deride the scenario of the movie (militia people infiltrating whole sectors of society), he says that “the FBI would disagree.” So even if Pellington is not working with FBI “technical advisors,” he clearly wants to amplify Fed-approved paranoia.
Why does Hollywood stoke conspiratorial paranoia? The deep state and their Hollywood partners want you to believe in conspiracies, along as they’re narrating them.
PATCON, Oklahoma City, Elohim City, Andreas Strassmeir
The official story about Oklahoma City, not unexpectedly, is riddled with implausibility: the military was unable to reproduce anything close to the bomb crater and twisted support beams with a fertilizer truck bomb (physicist Samuel T. Cohen, who invented the neutron bomb, confirmed that it’s impossible, and he’s supported by Air Force Brigadier General Benton K. Partin); there was no toxic ammonia gas after the explosion; seismographs and witness testimony indicate two explosions; etc.
There’s an abundance of witnesses who saw McVeigh with one or more other men (who are not Terry Nichols). Multiple witnesses place him in the company of Andreas Strassmeir in the days and weeks leading up to the bombing, including during a visit by McVeigh to the Aryan Republican Army compound in Elohim City. Phone records also prove that McVeigh called the compound a few weeks before the bombing. Strassmeir, the son of German Prime Minster Helmut Kohl’s Chief of Staff, was likely a German intelligence operative. He says he came to the US to get a job with the US Department of Justice, aided by a retired Air Force colonel that Strassmeir described as “a former CIA guy my father had known.” In the 80s, Strassmeir was involved with the Texas Light Infantry militia, one of the primary targets of the FBI’s PATCON infiltration op. He was expelled because other members suspected him of being an agent.
More, from Wikipedia:
While working as a confidential informant (CI) for the ATF, Elohim City resident, Carol Howe informed her agency handler about Andreas Strassmeir and how he would frequently talk about "blowing up federal buildings" and using "direct action against the U.S. Government".[20] At the time, Carol Howe was unaware of Strassmeir's full name, and simply knew him as "Andy the German".
After the OKC Bombing, Strassmeir fled the compound with fellow Elohim City residents Pete and Tony Ward.[21]
Robert Millar quickly "expelled" Andreas Strassmeir from Elohim City soon after he became aware that the FBI was looking at Strassmeir for possible ties to McVeigh and the bombing.[22]
Notes from a 1997 FBI investigation state that sometime after the bombing, CIA pilot Dave Halloway flew Andreas Strassmeir out of the United States.[23] While that same report records that Strassmeir was flown to Berlin, many have speculated that he was instead flown to Mexico.[4] However, in a letter to the McCurtain Gazette from Strassmeir's attorney Kirk Lyons, he says his client's sudden departure from the U.S. was aided by members of Germany's elite counterterrorism unit, GSG 9.[21]
These same infiltration and false flag tactics have continued, of course, as evidenced, for example, by the Whitmer kidnapping plot and 09A.
McVeigh himself was very likely a sheep dipped covert operative. He allegedly dropped out of Special Forces training after a few days but wrote a letter to his sister that he was doing covert ops and told Terry Nichols the same thing, as well as death row inmate Paul Hammer, who wrote a book based on McVeigh’s supposed confessions. Hammer says McVeigh admitted to being a Fed operative, that he was recruited by a man he called “the Major,” and that even the Secretary of Defense knew nothing about the operation. McVeigh, says Hammer, deliberately got caught and believed his execution would be faked (cf. the Monarch movies Control [2004] and La Femma Nikita [1990]). Strassmeir, thought McVeigh, was working for “some other entity.”
Notably, McVeigh was paid visits by MK-doctor Louis Jolyon West, who also handled Jack Ruby and Sirhan Sirhan, likely inducing Ruby’s insanity. He was then handled by Dr. John Smith, West’s protégé. McVeigh was very likely under some form of mind control throughout his career as a covert operative. (Interesting that they had him staying at the “Dreamland Motel.” He also stayed at the “Siesta Inn” right before that.)
In-Development Reboot TV Show
Pellington says, “Could there be a better time” to do something dealing with “paranoia and conspiracy theory”? He says the edginess of the subject matter is tying up the production.
[1]The title sequence was designed by Kyle Cooper, responsible for the famous title sequence on Se7en. He’s designed the titles for hundreds of movies.
