Mind Control Movies and TV

When a person's mind is taken over by someone else, or their actions are controlled through deception or false information. This list contains movies and tv shows in which mind control and brainwashing are demonstrated in popular culture. Fictional television shows such as “Dollhouse,” “Falling Skies,” and “Homeland” typically sketch the mind from a wholly individualistic perspective. Like a storehouse filled with memories, the mind can be induced to hold new thoughts, or replaced entirely, to produce a servile, brainwashed minion. As Walter Bishop, the lead scientist in “Fringe,” says in one episode, “The brain is a computer, it’s an organic computer. It can be hijacked like any other.” While the popularity of these shows is compatible with values held by much of the U.S. audience, cognitive research is demonstrating a more social construction of the self than these shows imply.

Ironically, a key feature that enables brainwashing in these shows is the transformation of the self into a collective. In “Falling Skies,” when children are linked by a harness, they share their thoughts. More famously, in “Star Trek,” the fictional alien race the Borg subsume those they conquer into a hive mind. This seems to mirror a fear Americans have of losing their individuality to collective thinking and acting. I think that cognitive research points to a more collective conception of the self. Some scholars, for instance, discusses frameworks that postulate human thought as a result of collective activity. Viewers have different perceptions of the negative and positive values of these shows. (Mind control is viewed in a negative light, and individuals are perceived to be weak if their minds can be controlled.)

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