About this episode
The episode previews a deep dive into the film Suddenly and its connections to assassination legends and psychological profiling.
A preview clip from Brett's recent deep dive into the 1954 film Suddenly, starring Frank Sinatra as a mob hitman hired to assassinate a US president. The full Patreon-exclusive episode is a supplement to both our Joker Cycle series and our recent episode on The Manchurian Candidate. Brett uncovers the source of the legend that Lee Harvey Oswald viewed the film a month before the JFK assassination, exposing how that legend has been deliberately amplified by intelligence assets and professional psyop’ers with a view toward bolstering the lone gunman theory. According to another legend, Sinatra had the film pulled out of circulation after the assassination—a carbon copy of a popular legend about The Manchurian Candidate. Brett explains how these legends have been used to apply a soft version of the “copycat” thesis to Oswald, as well as how the film’s portrayal of the psychopathic assassin instantiates an early form of the profile, popularized in later films like Taxi Driver. Media depictions of the profile, as explained here and throughout the Joker Cycle series, function not only to explain away assassinations and other deep states crimes but, via the dynamics of cybernetic…
People in this episode
Host: Thomas Millary
Guest: Brett
Topics covered
- film analysis
- assassination theories
- psychological profiling
- media influence
- historical context
- JFK assassination
- Hollywood legends
Keywords
- Suddenly
- Frank Sinatra
- Lee Harvey Oswald
- JFK assassination
- psychopathology
- copycat thesis
- media depictions
- Cultural Engineering Studies
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Suddenly, The Manchurian Candidate
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