I have always loved this movie, Out Of Time:
Matthias “Matt” Lee Whitlock (Denzel Washington) is the respected Chief of Police of the fictional small town of Banyan Key, Florida. He has recently executed a successful, high-profile drug bust that turned up $450,000 in drug money.
Although he enjoys his job, his drinking while on duty is an obvious character flaw, exacerbated by his pending divorce from his wife, homicide detective Alex Diaz Whitlock (Eva Mendes). Matt is currently seeing local resident Anne Merai-Harrison (Sanaa Lathan) – whose husband Chris (Dean Cain), a former professional quarterback turned security guard, abuses her.
Matt’s friend, Chae (John Billingsley), a medical examiner, jokingly wants them to use the $450,000 to go into business together. Matt, however, finds out that Anne has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Anne intends to reward Matt’s loyalty to her by making him the sole beneficiary of her $1,000,000 life insurance policy. Matt tries to find a way to give Anne some hope and suggests that she should travel to Switzerland to undergo a newly developed treatment. The problem is that Anne has been living beyond her means and does not have any money. Desperate to help her, Matt bends the rules and lends her the $450,000 so she can make the trip.
It is a small, low budget, tightly done rollercoaster ride of a thriller, following Denzel Washington as a small town Police Chief who “borrowed” some cash from the evidence safe to save the life of a woman in need, and suddenly two people are murdered, the money is gone, the DEA shows up wanting it, and all the evidence points to Denzel as the killer, making it seem as if he has been expertly framed.
This movie is great entertainment. But it is also a masterpiece of amygdala manipulation. It consists of a series of vignettes, each of which involves some piece of evidence about to emerge and implicate Denzel in the murders, and he has to find a way to cover it back up to buy time to figure out what has happened himself and set it all right without anyone knowing.
Every vignette involves a problem that flags the amygdala, an increasing threat of exposure to heighten focus on the threat, a temporary resolution to that specific problem just at the final moment, followed by another threat, and a repeat of the process. All of it builds up to the climax, at which point the entire threat is resolved, just in the nick of time, to maximize the amygdala joyride from the low points of maximal stress at top speed, to the high points of calm and relief.
All along the way, I noticed interesting uses of visual and auditory stimuli to heighten the effects. As an example, Denzel’s character resolves one potential means by which he was about to be exposed, when all of a sudden he is told the DEA is on the phone, and wants to talk to him about taking possession of the drug money that Denzel knows is gone. Denzel’s eyes shoot to the phone, and suddenly the camera zooms in on just the red light on the phone, flashing aggressively, signaling the new threat and it’s explosive nature. It is a small device that focuses you upon this new threat like a laser, and amps up its relevance with each blink of the light. I could almost feel my amygdala pulsate with the blinking of the phone.
The movie is immensely entertaining, but for those who write entertainment, it is also an interesting study in the use of various techniques that entertainment uses to flag threat, focus the mind upon it, amp up the threat posed and the stress it produces, resolve the threat to calm the amygdala, and then repeat the cycle, all to entertain a viewer. As the seat of concentration, angst, anger, fear, and relief, it is not surprising that even entertainment revolves around amygdala manipulation.
More and more I am thinking that the key to manipulating the human machine revolves around a simple understanding of how that little part of the brain functions. Grasp its operation and what it is cueing in on, and you can control what those around you think about, how they see it, and the conclusions they will draw from it.
The irony is, if you are a logical person, focused on big ideas and complex problems, you are on such a different frequency it is very difficult to grasp – unless you can turn the amygdala into a similar cause and effect mechanism, and contextualize it’s operation like the mechanistic problems you are designed to confront. I feel like I am heading towards that, and I am very curious to see what that final destination is like.
[…] The Amygdala in Entertainment – Out Of Time […]
You should make this a regular feature. Could be useful for some fashy goys out there that want to get into making films alternate from the mainstream, which aren’t terrible Hallmark “Christian” films. For the “alt-right” to succeed we have to move into narrative-form entertainment, and supplant (((Hollywood))). Two films I’d love to see you do articles on would be the first “Terminator” and the 1991 remake of “Cape Fear.”
As for TipTipTopKek, I haven’t seen “Out of Time,” but I would have to agree that the roles Denzel Washington plays are typical that of the “Magical Negro.” IE, a black character portrayed as being the smartest man in the room, in order to simultaneously assuage white guilt and increase white ethno-masochism. In a way, it could be argued that the characters that actors like Denzel Washington are more subversive than a clear radical like Samuel L. Jackson. Having said that, as far as “Magical Negros” go, I’ll have to grudgingly admit that Denzel is probably the best of the lot.
I’ll have to go back and rewatch them.
Ignore the race in Out of Time. It is just a great story, with some clever operating by Denzel. I like movies that show plausible ways to take almost nothing, and work it into what you need. Taken was the same thing. Liam Neeson shows up and has almost nothing to work with to find his daughter, but manages to create a step by step path to where he needed to go.