Strings Attached

Have You Ever Wondered…

I’ve been dealing with a lot of personal stuff lately and have had neither time nor energy to go to the movies as frequently. After about a month without watching anything on either the big or the small screen, I started wondering:

Am I a movie critic if I don’t write about movies?

And the answer: I don’t know.

When I started this particular endeavor, I, undoubtedly, was more of a traditional film critic. I watched movies and gave my opinion. However, over last two and a half years my interests shifted. I started seeing myself as more of a culture writer, perceiving the movies that I consumed rather through a political and social lens and commenting on them from that perspective.

This is why I didn’t write about Oppenheimer, Dune 2, or other big blockbusters from year – I just didn’t have anything to say about them that a) hadn’t been said better by other critics, or b) had caught my attention enough to warrant a long-read. That is not to say that I didn’t like those movies, I just didn’t feel that my opinion would add to the conversation.

So, where does this leave Wax Cinematic?

Exactly where it is right now, I guess. You’ve probably already noticed the shift in content and frequency of publication, and I hope you liked my previous couple of essays.

I also might start posting shorter essays or editorials that are only tangentially related to movies, as my stray thoughts about media have to go somewhere. But no worries, I’ll get back to movies eventually, especially because I’m starting a post-grad in Film and Photography Studies in September and will, of course, inform you about everything I learn and new perspectives I gain on film and visual media in the process.

For now, instead of wallowing in my impostor syndrome, I started watching the second season of Disney’s Loki. I liked it, it’s engaging, the characters are well written, the acting is great throughout, and the resolution is very satisfying and just bonkers enough to be kind of genius. Great fun all around!

Have you ever noticed how a lot of the agencies that handle supernatural stuff on TV or any other media feel … old? How a lot of them sport 1960-ies or 1970-ies interior designs, use old-timey technology and communication methods?

Why is that?

Chapter One: Masters of Time and Space (… and everything in-between)

The obvious answer: it feels like magic must somehow mess with technology older than the cathode-ray tube. In a way, it makes so much sense to show the opposition between the old and the new, old-world magic struggling against new technology, breaking it in the process. This feels right in a way that I can’t exactly pinpoint.

The other obvious answer is that a lot of government agencies in the real world are woefully underfunded or allocate their budget towards a bloated bureaucracy rather than towards any innovation. The fact that most administrative services in any given country haven’t been reformed since the 70-ies also might have something to do with this charming retro aesthetic.

However, when I think about this particular trope, I don’t imagine some kind of magical DMV. I’m thinking about agencies like the TVA from Loki or the FBC from Control; agencies that have an enforcing power like the FBI or DEA. Those are definitely not underfunded, and in addition to bloated bureaucracies, these agencies have secrets to protect and agents to arm in pursuit of their respective responsibilities. Their jurisdiction also extends to pretty much anywhere they have to go to fulfill their heroic duties.

After all, their respective mission statements can be summed up in one single word – protection.

Protection of you, the citizen, the innocent soul, not in the know of the terrible things “they” will do to you, if not for the bulwark of the intrepid agents from … the agency, the bureau, the administration. Oh, the things they’ve seen, the atrocities they’ve witnessed – if you only knew.

The myths surrounding the establishment and subsequent exploits of the FBI alone, as well as their blatant lies and copaganda, are fascinating to examine in their own right. Those fictions, with their satisfying stories of self-sacrificing loyal heroes and cool-headed agents fighting dangerous and mysterious enemies from without and sometimes even in their own ranks, have a special place in science-fiction, urban fantasy and especially in speculative fiction – in short: they’re just made for narrative media.

There are plenty of stories to choose from when analyzing the concept of an all-powerful agency exercising control over any and all supernatural time and space phenomena.

We have the plain old FBI with their numerous divisions for investigating supernatural or extraterrestrial activities, like in the X-Files and Fringe, or other sub-divisions of the US government or military, like in Star Gate or Warehouse 13. There are several fictional government-adjacent agencies who have some relationship with the government, but mostly govern themselves, like the Redwood Bureau, the SCP Foundation or the Men in Black.

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as Agents K and J

The list goes on: whether it’s the Office of Incident Assessment and Response (this one’s British), the Time Variance Authority (TVA) or the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), they all have roughly one mission statement. It’s even in the name of the aforementioned SCP Foundation: Secure. Contain. Protect.

Despite all of their perceived differences, despite some of them being sanctioned by the government and some by a plethora of other mysterious overlords, human and otherwise, despite their seemingly different chosen field of study – all of them seem in a constant state of war. War against aliens, Objects of Power, unknown terrestrial entities or even time itself. An eternal struggle against a never-ending flood of world-shattering, potentially world-ending, events; and apparently, only varying degrees of violence, inhumane callousness, internal and external red tape and secrecy galore can save us – the civilian population – from all of these horrors.

Chapter Two: Out of Time

When I sat down to write these here ramblings, I realized that I’ve consumed a lot of “agency fiction” over the years and how much I love it. Men in Black was my favorite movie for a long while, and Control is definitely in my top-ten video games of all time. A lot of my enthusiasm for this genre stems from a warm and fuzzy feeling that I can only describe as “inception nostalgia”. A nostalgic feeling for a time or thing you haven’t experienced, but is there nonetheless. Like someone or something has implanted you with false memories. An uncanny, mysterious feeling of excitement for men and women in smart suits, sunglasses and wibbly-wobbly jargon. A lot of it has also to do with how this media is presented – either visually or in audio format.

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny as Agents Mulder and Scully

In non-visual media the old-timey feel of the respective agency is expressed through dialogue, the way internal documents are written or the description of outdated technology, which is miraculously still functional and in use. In movies, TV shows and video games, this is mostly expressed through production or level design.

In Control, a video game heavily based on a lot of agency lore, from Twin Peaks and X-Files to the SCP Foundation, our protagonist Jesse Faden enters the Oldest House, an innocuous New York brutalist skyscraper, only to find within it the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC).

With that Jesse enters not only the wacky world of Altered World Events (AWEs), Objects of Power (OoPs) and mind-controlling mold, but also a boring office building with bulky cathode-ray computer monitors and a confusing filing and memo system delivered via 60-ies pneumatic tubes. Within its white winding corridors, we find rows upon rows of desks arranged in a tayloresque open floor design from hell, sprinkled throughout with some cubicles and, of course, offices reserved only for the department heads. There’s no natural light, no clocks and seemingly no escape.

These retro aesthetics are not just for show but woven into the narrative of the game itself. We find a memo stating that the Oldest House, being a “Place of Power”, can and will not tolerate any modern technology and makes any device which emits anything other than radio waves either disappear or explode.

All memos are taken from the Control Wiki

Although the aesthetics encountered in such places vary in their “oldness”, it remains clear that, in order for agency fiction to work, the agency in question has to feel somewhat out of time to the characters. I found that a lot of it alludes to the very distinct styles of the 1960-ies and 70-ies, about which I’ll talk a little later, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be those decades.

For example, the very old computers of the Office of Incident Assessment and Response (the British one) from the podcast The Magnus Protocol run on a “modified version of Windows NT 4.0”, which is, for some reason, the only system the Office’s bespoke program, which scours the internet for … relevant stuff, runs on. I guess, some supernatural entities are just life-long nineties kids.

Warehouse 13 sports a weird mix of old-timey and modern technology that has more of a Victorian-inspired steampunk vibe. The agents use stun guns developed by Tesla and communication devices developed by the father of the television Philo Farnsworth. All the while Artie, the oldest agent of the Warehouse and in-house grump, is an accomplished hacker who both maintains an air-tight security system and hates computers at the same time. However, Artie’s story and a lot of the series backstories harken back to the cold-war era, so that the agency is very much grounded in those decades.

Due to its singular authority over time itself, the headquarters of the TVA are located somewhere outside of time and space. Its interior design could be timeless, not beholden to any architectural trends known to humanity.

However, patterned walls and carpets in warm yellows and oranges adorn the offices and holding cells, while socialist mosaic murals show heroic scenes from the TVA’s creation. In its atrium, it houses cyclopean statues of the Time-Keepers, reminiscent of Soviet era statues of Lenin. Ageless agents (seriously, they don’t age) sit on modernist chairs, wearing slim-fitting suits with skinny ties and typing away on stylized cold-war switchboards, saving the world from anyone who falls out of (time)line.

All images from Loki taken from this article

Replete with the obligatory pneumatic tube communication system, the TVA’s interior is heavily inspired by 1960-ies and 70-ies architecture and design, with some socialist authoritarian brutalism thrown in for good measure.

Groovy!

Chapter 3: The Times They Are A-Changin’

During the late 40-ies and throughout the next four decades the Cold War ravaged our collective imagination. The Soviets were out to get us, every day could be our last, and either we succumbed to our fears or “learned to love the bomb”.

Riding the Bomb from *Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1964*

In short, people were scared shitless for decades. Manipulating a frayed mind is not very hard, and so powerful grifters like senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover terrified the American people with false and sometimes ridiculous fearmongering claims, accusing civil rights and labor union activists, Hollywood creatives and left-wing thought-leaders of being Soviet spies or just run-of-the-mill communists out to threaten the American way of life.

By the end of the 50-ies, however, McCarthy’s credibility and social status were vastly diminished, which left Hoover to continue the fight against the rising tide of change.

J. Edgar Hoover (center) tests a gun. *(Jeffrey Markowitz / Sygma via Getty Images)*

And, oh my, what a tide it was.

By the 1960-ies, in the time where the US was still segregated, Black civil rights movements began to expand on their work from the 1950-ies. Several non-violent groups started organized sit-ins in segregated spaces, like the Greensboro sit-ins in February to July 1960, which in and of themselves kicked off an entire sit-in movement, organized by the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 more than 200.000 people gathered for the “March for Washington”, where civil rights icon Martin Luther King held his “I have a Dream” speech to world-shattering effect. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed, which was followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. *Library of Congress. Getty Images.*

While not at all perfect and far too slow, the civil rights movement was making enormous strides in comparison to prior decades. Women’s rights movements were also not far behind. Due to more (white) women entering the workforce, the privilege rift (the wage gap, unpaid care work, etc.) between men and women became painfully obvious. In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a vastly influential feminist text, encouraging women to go beyond established gender roles and find new outlets for their ambitions.

Despite their almost non-existent intersectionality, as they were comprised of mostly white middle-class women, the women’s rights movements of the 60-ies and 70-ies still achieved a great deal of change leading to the constitutional amendment in 1972, which states that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”. In 1973, the recently overturned Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling confirmed a woman’s right to obtain an abortion.

This is not to say that there weren’t any Black women’s liberation movements. (Women's Liberation group marches in protest in support of Black Panther Party, New Haven, November, 1969. *David Fenton / Getty Images*)

Amidst the screaming youths, the rock-n-roll, the hippies professing love to all mankind, and young people looking forward, imagining a brighter future for all, not just for the chosen few, the aforementioned “chosen few” were trembling in the bespoke suits, while tightly gripping their monocles. You see, the fight for civil rights can’t always be peaceful, there always has to be a fair share of violence involved when fighting against a powerful hegemonic establishment. The suffragettes burned churches, the Black Panther Party was an overtly militant group that defended the American Black population by any means necessary, and the Stonewall riots were, well, riots.

These instances of violence, born out of the desire for freedom and change, terrified the mostly white, male and straight establishment. So terrified were they that the police response to anything civil rights related was always, and still is, unapologetically brutal and cruel.

As with the fears stirred by the Cold War (which was not over by this time), Hoover used these new fears of radical civil rights activists for a decades-long crusade, under the charming motto “Discredit, disrupt, destroy”. By means of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which was highly illegal, Hoover and his G-men relentlessly pursued Black civil rights activists, feminist organizations, anti-war activists, environmentalists, Native American movements and any organizations the FBI deemed subversive (granted, they also surveilled the KKK). Smear campaigns, infiltration, unceasing surveillance and even assassinations were just a few tools in their arsenal of evil.

For decades, Hoover waged war on change itself, using his FBI, an agency he built around his conservative ideologies and hang-ups. In his almost 50 years as director of the Bureau he meticulously crafted the image of the FBI in the public eye. His agents were smart, professional and rational, cool-headed in every situation. They wore suit and tie and deployed only the most cutting-edge forensic technologies. They were the best America had to offer, and their moral compass was legendary. The agency was wrapped in mystery, secrets were (and are) its bread and butter, and, quite frankly, it was just cool as shit.

In other words, the FBI itself is an incredibly potent meme.

Ultimately, the Bureau’s eternal opposition to change, its struggle for the status quo, combined with its larger-than-life public image, wormed its way into the collective subconscious, rearing its multifaceted head in works of fiction, where several shady agencies continue to fight in an eternal battle against unknowable, terrible and subversive forces from without.

Chapter 4: A Timely Death

From the heavily redacted files we find strewn about in empty offices of the FBC, we learn that it’s constantly struggling to protect the outside world from “Objects of Power” (OoPs) – seemingly everyday objects imbued with some kind of destructive supernatural power, which randomly bind themselves to the people who find them, lending them “parautalitarian” abilities, basically superpowers like flight or super speed.

OoPs on the loose, with or without someone to bond with, are extremely dangerous, and their discovery always leads to death and destruction before the said object can be found and contained by Bureau personnel. Those objects and their less potent cousins Altered Items are then squirreled away in the endless bowels of the Oldest House, where they’re studied, catalogued and contained.

In an internal educational video, head of research Dr. Darling posits his theory as to why OoPs exist. He thinks that they are mere representations of everyday items, created by the sheer force of human collective imagination. Meaning, the creation of an OoP or a Place of Power is the result of society “knowing” and imagining. Think a slide projector that transports its users into other dimensions, a safe that shields you from harm, or a turn of the century carousel horse which lets you dash around. The existence and perceived meaning of these items are made literal by us thinking of them in a certain way.

Dr. Darling played by Matthew Porretta

By containing these objects and hiding their existence from the public, by way of shady cover-ups, the Bureau is ostensibly trying to protect us from our own imagination. How nice of them.

The FBC is not unique in its mission of controlling and containing urban legends, though.

Almost all supernatural iterations of the FBI or the military do ostensibly the same, with Agents Mulder and Scully going against shapeshifting aliens and vampires in X-Files or Agent Dunham dealing with a plethora of mad scientists as well as time and dimensional travel in Fringe.

Similarly to the FBC and the SCP foundation, Agents Bering and Lattimer from Warehouse 13 hunt down culturally significant artifacts and sometimes people. Under the motto “Snag it. Bag it. Tag it.” they pursue objects such as the comb of Lucretia Borgia, which turns middle-aged women into murderous “cougars”, or a chair belonging to James Braid, the father of hypnotherapy. At the end of season one H.G. Wells makes an appearance as a jolly evil time traveler, whom the agents try to snag, bag and tag throughout season two. In episode 2 entitled “Resonance”, they even confiscate a piece of music which contains the concept of “being loved”. Groundbreaking sci-fi authors and the concept of love itself? Now, this is some quality “collective imagination hunting”.

The TVA puts its own spin on “Secure, Contain, Protect” with its all-time charming slogan “For All Time. Always” (not ominous at all) and has dedicated itself to hunting down and exterminating “time variants”. These are normal people who, unknowingly, deviate from the “sacred timeline” and by destabilizing it risk the utter destruction of the universe. The aforementioned timeline is so fragile that all variants have to be eradicated immediately and without question, using brute force and other unsavory methods.

Time, it seems, being one of the largest pieces of collective imagination, also has to be heavily controlled by a shady agency.

Chapter 5: “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times…

… it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”

But wait … Aren’t the protagonists of these stories somewhat rebellious?

Agents Mulder and Scully were not only shunned by the FBI, but they also uncovered a huge conspiracy within its higher echelons. The Redwood Bureau is just outright evil and, together with the agents in Matrix, one of the few instances of an agency modeled after the FBI always being shown as in a negative light. At the beginning of every episode Agent Conroy, a rogue agent, explains that he “escaped [the bureau] to leak their reports to the unsuspecting public” and that should he get caught, he’ll surely never see the light of day again.

Most of the time, we’re not supposed to root for the agency anyway, but for the protagonists, who expose their bosses and bosses’ bosses for being corrupt – kind of echoing what happened to Hoover and his legacy, long after his death.

In Control Jesse discovers that the former director Zachariah Trench was responsible for the crisis that has befallen the FBC when Jesse first arrives. In Loki, the eponymous God of Mischief has to grapple with the truth that the Authority’s mission statement might be a huge lie, covered up by upper management.

Director Trench played by James McCaffrey

In addition to the overall conflict of the agency with its chosen evil, our heroes have to deal with an internal conflict stemming from corruption, a generous yardage of red tape, excessive compartmentalization and so, so many secrets. Our protagonists, on the other hand, are different: dreamers, who go against the grain with their idealism and propensity for defying authority. Despite their antics, however, they manage to hold on to their positions due to some extraordinary skillset or knowledge that no-one else possesses.

Whether they’re pariahs who work for the agency at the beginning of the story, are freshly transferred or just happen to wander in, they are an external force. A force which is capable of exposing the internal struggle within the agency. Most times, at the end of their story they supplant the existing power structures by becoming directors themselves or by generously giving power to the people or someone they trust within their inner circle. By getting rid of their old bosses and their crusty methods, the young and shiny protagonists swear to do everything differently – flat hierarchies, no red tape, no secrets.

On the surface, that makes for a great message. A fresh-faced optimist takes on the establishment and wins, their rebellion against the status quo complete.

If you think that this sounds too good to be true, well yeah, the status quo has many faces.

Control demonstrates this quite well.

The story begins when Jesse wanders into the Oldest House in search of her long-lost brother Dylan, who was abducted by the FBC after an incident with a powerful OoP, in which the Faden siblings were heavily involved when they were children. Jesse managed to get away at the time, but at some point, resumed her search for her brother. As soon as she enters the offices it becomes clear that the building is on lockdown due to some kind of invasion, and now Jesse has to contend with an alien invading force, which makes it that much harder to find her brother.

Jesse reaches the director’s office, guided by the janitor Ahti, who’s convinced that she’s his new assistant, where she witnesses the suicide of acting director Zachariah Trench. After looking at the corpse for, like, five seconds, Jesse picks up his service weapon and is transported to a white space, which we later learn is the astral plane. There, beings that call themselves the Board congratulate her for binding the service weapon and becoming the new Director. Yay!

In the blink of an eye, Jesse becomes the most powerful bureaucrat in the Bureau. The Oldest House doesn’t hesitate either, adorning every wall in the extensive office space with Jesse’s portrait, J. Edgar Hoover style. Throughout the game, Jesse becomes all the more powerful, binding several other OoPs. By the end of the game, she literally can fly and hurl vending machines at her enemies. What makes her different is that additionally to her obvious parautalitarian abilities, Jesse is also humble and nice, refuses to let people call her “Director” and quickly gets friendly with key personnel. She’s the cool boss.

Judging by how the game progresses, the quests we’re given and the people we have to talk to and befriend, it’s immediately obvious that Jesse is no grunt. While she destroys the office interior during her fights or flies high above the cubicles, it’s made abundantly clear that Jesse would never work in one of those. She has stuff to do, a Bureau to save, extraplanar entities to punch and red tape to tear.

Near the end of the game, in a nightmarish parallel reality, Jesse wakes up behind a desk in one of the open floor offices of the FBC. She was just hired, and everyone is mean to her, while she performs menial tasks which respawn endlessly. The level is in black-and-white, and every round of the menial task becomes more surreal, with reality glitching around Jesse, until she finds a way out by finding out the truth about director Trench. In the short time as an office grunt performing mundane tasks I, the player had a fascinating reaction to this perceived humiliation: How dare they? I’m the Director! I’m exceptional!

Speaking of office personnel. While Jesse is binding OoPs and punching walls, the normal people, who make the FBC run by performing those unimportant tasks mentioned above for a living, are floating in mid-air, possessed by the invading power and reciting a Dadaist poem. As they hang between life and death, neither here nor there, they can’t be saved and pretty quickly become background noise to our adventure. There’s no quest objective to try to save them, and the issue is never resolved throughout the game, leaving us with a vague hope that they might be saved after the game ends.

The Poem in Question recited by Sean Durrie as Dylan Faden (This is heard pretty much everywhere in the game, recited by the many voices of the FBC employees.)

There are some chosen ones, mostly the military wing of the FBC and some researchers, who were saved by equipping a McGuffin which shields them from the evil airwaves. But, let me reiterate, 90% of the people working at the FBC are mindless zombies, and saving them is NOT a priority.

At the end of the game Jesse fully embraces her role as Director of the FBC and swears to do it better – no red tape, no compartmentalization, no secrets. However, the mission statement of the FBC, its methods and treatment of the public as well as its own personnel, are never in question. From the get-go, Jesse doesn’t really care about the office grunts, she doesn’t consider the possibility of disbanding the Bureau or releasing their secrets to the public. When she gets the chance to at least reinstate the Investigations Unit, the equivalent of internal affairs in the FBC, the unit which tried to investigate Trench’s descent into madness, but was thwarted at every corner – she … doesn’t.

The existence of shady government agencies and their obvious good for humanity is never questioned in their respective stories. The TVA persists after Loki ends, but under new management, and the FBI (real and fictional) still stands strong, regardless of the metric tons of uncovered corruption within the agency.

Turns out the fresh-faced idealists were never rebels, but the same establishment in newly minted, limited-edition sneakers.

Kendall Roy played by Jeremy Strong, *Succession*

Chapter Chapter:: It’s Our Time

If Matrix has taught me anything, it’s that shadowy law enforcement agencies are evil and those sleek, professional, cool-headed agents are villains.

However, what Men in Black inadvertently taught me is that those sleek agents are designed to appeal to us. I even have a soft spot for Agent Smith, the obvious villain of the entire Matrix trilogy. While the aliens in Men in Black and the rebels in the Matrix represent chaos, the agents are pure order. They are stable, they don’t waver in their beliefs, never change their minds – strong, reliable, professional.

Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith, Robert Taylor and Paul Goddard as Agents Jones and Brown

Being a political activist on the other hand, fighting for human rights or even just supporting a cause that goes against the establishment, is hard. There’s often in-fighting as to how to take action “correctly”, you have to be ready for new information and new ways of thinking all the time – you sometimes have to course-correct and admit that you were wrong. There’s a torturous instability in that, even if you’re sure that you’re on the right side of history.

“Agency fiction” is comfort food. The protagonists are always right, even if they’re terribly wrong. In Warehouse 13, for example, agents Bering and Lattimer invoke their status as Secret Service agents numerous times to circumvent basic human rights, including invoking the Patriot Act. But they’re cool and nice, have great chemistry and are very good-looking – and most of all, they’re doing it for the greater good.

Doing it for the greater good - in style! (Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly as Agents Lattimer and Bering)

Protagonists like Scully and Mulder, Jesse Faden or Agent J show us that you don’t have to fight and that you totally can change an oppressive system from the inside without dismantling it. And why would you dismantle it? It’s for the greater good!

At the core of all these narratives is the simple assumption that, we, the public, can’t handle the truth – can’t handle monstrosities lurking in our midst, can’t handle the discomfort of minorities existing and our responsibility for their plight. With terrifying ease and pleasure, we gave away our power to shadowy G-men for nothing but a whiff of perceived safety and for the privilege to look away. Now, we have to contend with a world where we’ve shunned our civic duty for too long, a world created by Hoover and his fight against civil rights and change itself.

The fight continues to this day, as the FBI still uses the same COINTELPRO tactics against Black Lives Matter and Anti-Zionist movements have seen government harassment for peaceful sit-ins.

There’s nothing wrong in finding comfort in these orderly narratives. I love and recommend all of the pieces of media I examined here. But, after we’ve had our fill of comfort and quiet, let’s get up from our collective couches and get our power back, shall we?

It's time to look our real enemies straight in the eye and illuminate their empire of lies. There are no monsters lurking on the edge of our perception, there are no evil gangs of civil rights activists, there are no woke mobs roaming the streets – there are, on the other hand, police violence, anti-democratic billionaires vying to take away our most basic civil freedoms, and patriarchal hyper-capitalism which only works due to worker exploitation and literal slave labor.

There’s another tide coming – don’t look away.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

Control. Directed by Mikael Kasurinen, Remedy Entertainment, 2019. (Video Game)
Loki. Created by Michael Waldron, Marvel Studios, 2021. (TV Show)
Warehouse 13. Created by Jane Espenson and D. Brent Mote, Universal Cable Productions. Syfy 2009-2014. (TV Show)
Redwood Bureau. Presented by Josh Tomar, Eeriecast Productions, 2021. (Podcast)
Men in Black. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, Columbia Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Parkes/MacDonald Productions, 1997.
The Matrix. Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Groucho II Film Partnership, Silver Pictures, 1999.
The Magnus Protocol. Rusty Quill Ltd., 2024. (Podcast)

Secondary Sources:

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Doubleday, 2017.
Uetricht, Micah, and Beverly Gage. "J. Edgar Hoover Shaped US History for the Worse." Jacobin, 30 Dec. 2023, jacobin.com/2023/12/j-edgar-hoover-fbi-palmer-raids-red-scare-civil-rights. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.
Hoban, Virgie. "‘Discredit, Disrupt, and Destroy’: FBI Records Acquired by the Library Reveal Violent Surveillance of Black Leaders, Civil Rights Organizations." Berkely Library, 18 Jan. 2021, www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/fbi. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.
"Outline of U.S. History/Decades of Change: 1960-1980." WikiBooks, Last Edited: 28 Oct. 2022, en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Outline_of_U.S._History/Decades_of_Change:_1960-1980. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.
Foster, Hannah. "COINTELPRO [COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM] (1956-1976)." Blackpast, 14 Mar. 2014, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/cointelpro-1956-1976/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
McLeod, Katie, and Tamsin Rose. "Rights Groups Condemn ‘Police Repression’ at ‘Peaceful’ Pro-Palestine Rally in Sydney." The Guardian, 22 Nov. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/22/nsw-premier-defends-police-conduct-after-dozens-arrested-at-pro-palestine-rally-in-sydney. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.
German, Mike. "The FBI Has a History of Targeting Black Activists. That's Still True Today." The Guardian, 26 Jun. 2020, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/26/fbi-black-activism-protests-history. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.
Pilkington, Ed. "Fears of Renewed FBI Abuse of Power After Informant Infiltrated BLM Protests." The Guardian, 14 Feb. 2023, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/14/fbi-abuse-of-power-alleged-informant-denver-blm-protests. Accessed 17 Apr. 2024.
Noe, Rain. "The Sets of Loki: Mad-Century Modernism." Core77, 16 Nov. 2023, www.core77.com/posts/126276/The-Sets-of-Loki-Mad-Century-Modernism. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
"COINTELPRO." FBI Records: The Vault, vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.