Tonight we saw Robert Rodriguez’s gripping Hypnotic. Likely preparing to exit the theaters, it’s probably superfluous to provide a spoiler alert, but I won’t spoil it altogether, because the point isn’t to discourage viewing it — or to criticize the flick as anything other than the thoroughly-entertaining movie that it is. The film will captivate you and turn your mind inside-out on the way to surprises from beginning to middle to end.
What it won’t do, though, is accurately represent the science or application of mind-control. More Psychology Today meets Alex Jones’s Infowar (the latter being the more credible of the two) than reflective of any professional social sciences journal, Hypnotic is on solid ground when it hints at such abusive CIA mind-control programs like MK-Ultra and describes the potential power of hypnosis.
Where Hypnotic goes off the rails, though, is when ‘Construct’ is added to ‘Hypnotic.’ If a viewer were to experience his feet involuntarily leaving the ground at the point when the female protagonist explains that ‘The Division’ is staffed by people capable of not just hypnosis but hypnosis that creates ‘constructs,’ one would just be observing the degree to which the plot stops being grounded in reality.
I know, I know: it’s a movie, not real life.
The problem is that, in real life, our culture itself remains hypnotized by a concept pushed by idealists, politicians, globalists and the softer side of social sciences alike: the social construct. Social constructs do exist, but they simply don’t have the power assigned to them — any more than the characters in Hypnotic reflect any real-life ability to cause everyone around them to experience surroundings that aren’t really there.
Social constructs are inherent lynchpins in every ‘critical’ theory (think Critical Race Theory, or, alternatively, Critical Gender Theory [aka Feminism] or Critical Sexual Orientation Theory [one of the latest memes of which is that pedophiles are now simply YAPs, or Younger-Attracted Persons]), because the necessary component to suspending disbelief in critical theories is to assume that one’s circumstances or the circumstances of society in general are nearly infinitely malleable by environmental forces. The effort behind such assertions is to paint oneself or certain groups of people as being victimized by a social construct, usually created by some bogeyman ‘ism.’ And underlying these social-construct philosophies of victimization is failure to recognize who won the war in the nature-vs-nurture debate.
As ideas, social constructs are real, but social constructs don’t have the power to alter natural law. Half a century ago, it remained legitimate for undergraduate psych majors (I was one) to argue about whether personality characteristics were more shaped by nature (basically, one’s roll of the genetic dice) or by nurture (everything from parental discipline to peer pressure to educational indoctrination), but, despite the social science fields tending to be inhabited by people who desperately want to blame nefarious aspects of society for how things turn out for human beings, the actual science of social science never produced actionable empirical results supporting that belief; predominantly, research studies instead have pretty consistently demonstrated that human beings are far less affected by social shaping than by the characteristics they’re born with.
Nature has thus won the debate hands down, but that won’t stop the ankle-biting from raging on. Colleges and universities will never lack for students who want easy coursework but the freedom to retain a desire to feel like they’re going to have big impact on the world — and the same goes for those who make movies. The postscript at the end of Hypnotic hints at a sequel, so my only hope is that Hypnotic 2 is instead named Construct: the Hypnotic Illusion.