Comment by yubblegum
16 hours ago
The achiles heel of the documentaries as a form of propaganda & psyops (aka "narratives presented as reality") is that they have a profound dependence on aural cues for manipulating the audiance. It is difficult to be subtle regarding that intent when sound is involved.
So pay attention to the sound track and adjust your "suspension of disbelief" accordingly.
Yeah, the documentary was going hard on the dissonant horror movie strings right from the opening.
And near the end, that bubbly euphoric/revelatory ascending arpeggio was a common motif.
I am lucky that I am very sensitive to emotionally manipulative music in contexts where I don't want to be emotionally manipulated by music.
In general, it would help anyone to know more about the craft of how filmmakers get people to feel emotions.
Tantacrul (software project manager, UX guy, muso and YouTuber)’s “Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative” https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I is pretty good.
Heck yeah! Thanks. It's bad-tasting medicine, but Tantacrul makes me laugh, so I don't mind thinking about what this manipulation can do to me. Hopefully, I'll also pick up some resistance.
Fielder has said that setting the tone with music in documentaries is among the most important things he does. I also find that unsettling.
My favorute example of a "documentary" whose sound stage reveals it as a psyop very obviously is the 2007 "Zeitgeist: The Movie".
To be fair though it is A24 and I don't know if they're capable of making music that isn't extremely tense and eerie, it's all they do. So keeping in mind that the movie, clocking in at nearly 3 hours, would have been too dry and possibly still fairly unsettling without music, I thought the score was actually quite fun.
Nathan spent a good deal of time openly trying to decide if he was being deceived or not and while the music drove the tension, by the end of the movie it was clear that he had an open internal conflict about whether to trust her or not, and ultimately left that choice up to the viewer.