The Living Dead: Episode 2 - You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough

Description

Out of the carnage in Europe 50 years ago, the Allies selected certain memories. They used them to build the official version of the good war. This film is about how that happened. It tells why certain memories have to be buried and forgotten because they contradicted the optimism of the big historical picture. The Living Dead (subtitled Three Films About the Power of the Past) was the second major documentary made by the film-maker Adam Curtis.

You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough

In this episode, the history of brainwashing and mind control was examined. The angle pursued by Curtis was the way in which psychiatry pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially in order to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of social control. The work of Ewen Cameron was surveyed, with particular reference to Cold War theories of communist brainwashing and the search for hypnoprogammed assassins. The programme’s thesis was that the search for control over the past via medical intervention had had to be abandoned and that in modern times control over the past is more effectively exercised by the manipulation of history. Some film from this episode, an interview with one of Cameron’s victims, was later re-used by Curtis in his The Century of the Self. The title of this episode comes from a paranoid schizophrenic seen in archive film in the programme, who believed her neighbours were using her as a source of amusement by denying her any privacy, like a pet goldfish.

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