ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the depictions of brainwashing in American and British fiction and film since the early 1950s. ‘Brainwashing’ entered the language initially as a translation from Chinese and was then promoted by the journalist Edward Hunter as a threatening and alien technique of mind control inspired by the Russian behaviourist Ivan Pavlov then being practised by the Chinese Communists. Taking bearings from Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, the analysis focuses on formative novels like Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate and its movie adaptation, which transpose brainwashing to the US scene and which also set a trend in showing how the process could implemented through verbal triggers. Comparisons are drawn with science fiction movies like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where aliens attempt take-overs through mind control. A central figure in this discussion is William Burroughs, who applies a reactive model of the mind in his writings to dramatize techniques of manipulation by malign agencies. The chapter’s main emphasis falls on US material but also includes the examination of British works like Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File which applies sensory deprivation, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange which dramatizes the application of aversion therapy. The later material covered in this chapter includes fiction by Robert Ludlum among others, which retrospectively criticizes the covert practices used in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA programme.
