An Essay on Manipulation

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An Essay on Manipulation

On 30 October 1938, the then 23 year old Welles managed to literary horrify the whole America. Why? Not only because of the already mentioned media naïveté of the then Americans, but (most of all) because his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds was based on the most radical possible combination of fiction and facts (always a winning combination!), which could not fail. On top of it, this adaptation also properly dosed but also skilfully inducted the most powerful of all dramatic effects – the effect of the betrayed expectation. Hit by this mixture of the aggressive author’s invention, the surgically precise procedures via which it was operationalised, the strong media pressure and the absolutely “unbearable” effect of the collective psychosis as they had never felt before, the poor Americans believed that they were doomed. They could simply not doubt what the radio “told” them: that the Martians had just attacked them. And that it was quite clear that the century had come to its end.
The final result of the manipulation with facts, which Welles opted for then not only impudently but also irresistibly from the author’s point of view (not to say ingeniously), could be no different than what it was: real, realistic, almost palpable. According to the effect that it had caused – panicky. Enormously panicky!
The panic that occurred even during the broadcasting of the radio adaptation was massive. And fierce. The news of its magnitude was spread around the world in a flash. And it was told for a long time, much longer than Wales himself, then a young and promising genius, could even dream.
Its power – or its fame, no matter – is also visible in the unusual event that happened several months later. When one of the most skilful manipulators in the history of the media and mass communication in general, the diabolic German/Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), not without envy because of its planetary media glory, decided to use a bit of its shiny aura. I dare guess that it was him, Goebbels, was the factotum who decided to advise his repulsive Boss in one of his hyper-theatrical public appearances (which regularly hypnotised the German masses, so that the Boss and the company could freely manipulate the mass hysteria which was activated in this way) to also mention “by the way” the American “case” with the Wales’s invasion of Martians. Of course, both Goebbels and his repulsive and hysterical Boss shamelessly used the whole story, telling the German citizens the tale of the eschatological fear that was caused with the Americans by – who else – the Germans. The greatest among all nations. The super humans, whose Teutonic origin, actually, could not be from this world. It was maybe Martian.
I will remind you that it was on this topic – diabolic and very real/truthful theme of manipulating the manipulators – that Orson Wales himself, a bit later, made his most important movie “The Citizen Kane” (1941). The leading world filmologists and film critics often consider it the most important film in the history of the world cinematography.

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As a I write this text, my mind keeps on slipping the bizarre etymological manipulation which is immanent to the term that I deal with.
Namely, the root morpheme of the word manipulation directly leads us to something that should be done by hand. Even to the hand itself (manus in Latin) undoubtedly the most significant tool that is “natural” or given by nature. Pages and pages of great essays have been written on this crucial tool that we have by Focillon (in his “Praise to the Hand”), and Krleža (in his “Foreword to Podravje Motifs”, for example), and Ranko Marinković (in his anthological short stories joined under the common title “Hands”)… But also with so many other writers of format and calibre. Those that my students like to call capital ones.
Yes, but the manipulations that I write about in this text are still not done by hands. Nor are the hands the ones that initiate them or move them. They are most probably induced and materialised by some hidden and small glands, pushed in the deepest depths of our secret physicus. Those endocrine points of our anatomy, which – maybe – manage our unconscious being. Including the one that Freud and Jung call the collective unconscious.
Is it the hypophysis? Or maybe the pancreas, that Krleža so hellishly writes about in his short story A Cricket under the Waterfall?

Skopje/Pula, October 2009

Translated by: Elizabeta Bakovska

2018-08-21T17:22:52+00:00 March 1st, 2011|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 76|0 Comments