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One thought kept going through my head when I watched the film ‘Altered Minds’—Boy, I wish this film was around when I was a psych major! The psychological thriller about family secrets, the CIA, psychiatry, brainwashing, and repressed memories is the perfect source for psych majors looking for material for a midterm or finals paper (it is available on demand on all major cable, satellite, and telecom carriers).
It is the kind of psychological thriller that makes me extremely curious about what was going on in the mind of Michael Wechsler when he wrote and directed the film. So, I reached out to him and he agreed to an interview. I bring you the interview in two parts. The first focuses on why he wrote the film and what he learned about brainwashing and psychological manipulation. The second focuses on family dynamics, family secrets, and whether all families have skeletons in their closet they keep from one another.
PART ONE
What inspired you to write and make this movie--was there an inciting incident or had it been brewing within you for a while?
“It was both a combination of an inciting incident as well as “something” that had been brewing in me. The story of Altered Minds came to me piecemeal, not through a single “narrative” epiphany but rather a series of serendipitous discoveries.
When I was in film school, I gravitated to the DSM to find interesting illnesses for my screenplays. I remember discovering the FUGUE state wherein the patient suffers from amnesia and goes off to live a different life, not remembering their former one. It’s often caused by a traumatic event, and the character will snap out of the new life usually by some recall of that trauma—forgetting the second life they forged. This extreme form of traumatization and disassociation became one of the first scripts I ever wrote, and the passion to write about fractured characters began.
Trauma has been the main character in my stories because it had been an antagonist in my life since it struck during early childhood. So should be no surprise that before writing Altered Minds, I knew that the story would involve a protagonist who was suffering from PTSD, and that the overall goal by the end would be a resolution of understanding the nature of the disease through some discovery. Because I love tomes about dysfunctional families, I set the film within the context of a family gathering and decided that the traumatized hero would be trying to prove his model father was hiding some sinister secrets involving abusing the family. So my overall narrative obsession was there from the get-go, but I still needed a story “hook.” I still needed to know what our protagonist was accusing his father of doing, and those things had to be somewhat incredible in order to play up the mystery.
The “inciting incident” came with the discovery of a series of videos on Youtube that featured victims of the classified MKULTRA government funded and CIA operated mind-control projects. These were real life Americans who were finally given a chance in 1996 by President Bill Clinton to tell the true stories of their abuse at the hands of a one of the most nefarious programs in the history of the US government. I felt like I had my smoking gun for my hero, and it was perfectly outlandish so the audience wouldn’t believe my hero at first, but over the course of the movie, could start to question whether the father was culpable of such sinister motivations. The discovery of the videos was the “Ah ha” moment where the story found its footing.
What did you learn about brainwashing and manipulation when you were writing the film that you didn't know before?
I knew brainwashing and manipulation were real facets to powerful organizations and extreme groups; ie, cults, some organized religions, and criminal organizations, but government exploiting mind control? Never. Until I watched those videos, I thought mind control experimentation was science fiction in the most unbelievable sense. I was familiar with it from the thriller The Manchurian Candidate, but I think, like most people, I found the concept too far-fetched to be taken seriously. It was part Twilight Zone and part Phillip K Dick. So when I saw those testimonies, I knew I had to investigate and do my research. The more I read, the more I realized that these victims were the tip of a very big iceberg of government corruption and ritualistic abuse on a level that seemed impossible. Besides feeling sick and ashamed for these victims, I felt a greater responsibility for telling this story and making it feel real for the audience. Many who have seen the film were as ignorant as I about the mind control experiments, but after seeing the film, they not only believed it happened but wanted to learn about the specific nature of them.
Most of what our Altered Minds protagonist, Tommy, discusses is broadly based on the types of programming (via disassociation) that the government psychiatrists performed on their unwilling “patients.” The title Altered came directly from the term “Alters” that was used to describe the end goal of many of these experiments: psychiatrists would aim to split the personalities of their “patients” by torturing them physically and psychologically to the point where they were able to split them into multiple personalities called “Alters” that would then be vulnerable to whatever programming aims were at hand. I used the vernacular of the doctors and layered them into the son’s accusations because I felt like I had to stay true to history.
The original title of my film was The Red Robin and that was a direct reference to one of the earlier projects of MKULTRA—Project Bluebird. I read that in some experiments the “patients” were asked to kill small animals to prove that they had been successfully “altered” and were capable of following orders no matter how morally questionable. I cribbed some aspects of these horrible experiments, again to lend a sense of veracity that measured up with historical recountings. Another aspect that was inspired by true stories involved the background of the children in the film. The actual siblings in my story are nearly all traumatized war orphans who were adopted by their psychiatrist father. I made this choice because many of the victims of MKULTRA young children who had already been physically abused and traumatized which made them perfect candidates for mind control. So all of these and other aspects that were true to the actual experimentation that took place found their way into my script.
Are there themes in the film that would be especially appealing to psych majors?
As a psychology major, one is learning about different pathologies that afflict not only individuals but families, and I think Altered Minds themes cover a lot of ground from the pathology of secrets, PTSD, family repression, all the way to the double lives.
To me, I think one of the greatest mental health challenges facing our country is post-traumatic-stress-disorder. PTSD isn’t just prevalent in our veterans (though that’s who deservedly get the most press attention) And I think there’s this misconception that PTSD is only for MAJOR life earthquakes. The truth as I know it is that trauma can be caused by even seemingly smaller life-events. It all really depends on the resilience and makeup of the individual and how they react to things. What may seem small to one person can be monumental to another. There are so many people walking around with some degree of PTSD that would benefit from knowing that they are still reliving the incident, and could take concrete steps to deal.
So I think the representation of PTSD in my film is interesting because it was my best attempt to represent a few individuals responses to trauma. In the case of the film’s family, PTSD has burrowed itself so deeply, it has literally hidden memories which it reveals in quick glimpses or visual ticks experienced by different characters. The underlying life event that caused the PTSD was so traumatic to the family that they repressed the memory, and in the case of our protagonist, have literally rewritten the history of what happened to them. Though again, PTSD will be different for each individual, I was trying to capture the sensory experience of what its like to be traumatized by giving the audience both auditory and visceral moments of the repressed memories seeping out in a very non-linear and seemingly random way. I think that understanding trauma means knowing what it can look, feel and sound like to its victims. To one character in my film, trauma is reliving a nightmare he can’t explain over and over. To another, it’s imagining that the domicile is filled with sinister elements conspiring to take over his mind. I think tomorrow’s psychologists, in order to comprehend what trauma means, need to see it for all its colors and dimensions. I hope Altered Minds gives them a range to experience.
I also think the film really excavates the dangers of those big secrets that can completely destroy families such as the one in my film. To look at the news today means inevitably reading a headline about a celebrity whose chickens are coming home to roost, or a famed athletic figure whose style of coaching below the belt is finally catching up to them. These kind of double-life pathologies seem to happening with more and more regularity that I wonder if this is a lot more commonplace than we’d like to think. How many people out there are presenting one image to the public while living another truth behind closed doors? I find this kind of character fascinating. How do you reconcile two lives that are seemingly at odds? How do you live with yourself? To me, the double-life may not constitute a psychological illness, but I think the underlying motivations to live in two places at once begs psychoanalysis. If I was a psychology student, I would want to understand the mechanisms behind a person who represents himself one way that is very different to the life he/she is really living. Psychology isn’t just about understanding the dynamics of the more common mental afflictions, but also about understanding about the spectrum of all human behavior.
What statement does the film make about mental health and psychopathology?
The movie definitely suggests that trauma left untreated is a ticking bomb. You could replace the word trauma also with secrets. For me, psychology is about arriving at some version of the truth that brings a feeling of self-knowledge. The best movies with strong psychological components I think aim to shed light on the powerful workings of our minds and how a diseased mind can literally destroy a person’s ability to live life. Altered Minds also suggests that children often inherit the afflictions and trauma’s of their parents. I’m not talking about genetically(though there is truth to that). Not only is the father (played by Judd Hirsch) suffering from childhood trauma, but his choices as a result are what eventually result in the traumatization of his children. Am I suggesting that a traumatized parent will pass it on to his/her children as happens in this film? No, but I do believe that parents who suffer will impact their children with their pain. There is something to be said about the lineage of trauma and I think the film definitely aims to highlight that.
Do you believe people can truly overcome horrific childhood trauma?
Regardless of the trauma one experiences—in childhood or adulthood—I think the human mind is resilient and can be taught to cope. The mind is very stubborn and holds onto very negative traumatic experiences but I believe that people can overcome the majority of suffering caused by the trauma through various techniques. For some, it’s meditation, others biofeedback, talk therapy and medication. Does it mean you can be “fixed?” I don’t know. I think life happens and the brain decides to process a certain away and that’s called wiring. I do believe we can rewire our brain so that those traumatic experiences are processed differently and don’t impede us in the present the way they did before. Overcome maybe too strong a word. Learning to live with the trauma so that it doesn’t overcome you or destroy you is possible.
Part two of the interview--coming soon!
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