Long before WikiLeaks, visible news story holes, contrary reports, debunking satire and a broad subsection of society began programming their own media, people had already grown accustomed to the manipulative handling of their psyches and opinions in the same way they had learned to master shortcuts on the remote control. Swayed by a glut of domineering choices, many choose their news source as either a perceived lesser evil or material that fits with deep-rooted anxiety.
Prior to filmmaker Jen Senko's documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, her father Frank Senko, as befits the film's charming old home movie footage, used to be a fairly apolitical but liberal, affable chap - at best a Kennedy Democrat. But at some point in the 1980s, in a Republican age that acquiesced in the "Reagan Democrat" years of pulling the masses from left to right and putting an end to the FCC's Fairness Doctrine policy, Frank changed. Re-schooled by right-wing Talk Radio during his car commute and Fox News in the comfort of his own home, Frank began to rail against the left, gay people, black people, Hispanics and feminism. The mounting red mist extended in later years to maledictive email rants to increasingly frustrated family members.
Using her father as a case study, Jen Senko decided to make a documentary that examines what Hillary Clinton once famously described as a "vast right-wing conspiracy". As a direct result of her kickstarter fundraising effort, identical cases of devolving, "brainwashed" dads, privy to the same influences and behavioral traits as Frank, were brought to her by a flood of distressed kin. Through the deluge came added material and definable reasons for a generation of altered, aging, pride-injured right-wing white men.
Brought to life by Bill Plympton's patchwork of buoyant, imaginative animation that is in some places delightfully puerile, The Brainwashing of My Dad is otherwise divided up into stock footage story enhancers, co-producer Matthew Modine's narration and Senko's interviews. Among the expert interviewees are cognitive linguist George Lakoff, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and polymath Noam Chomsky, each of whom reveal key points in the growth of conservatism and Fox News, including the national 1960s/70s fear of the Radical Left, the rise of the Nixon TV groomer, soundbite pioneer, propagandist and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, the Lewis Powell Memo, the Telecommunications Reform Act, a multitude of think tanks and last but not least, "feminazi" spewing Rush Limbaugh and his Dittoheads.
The falsities of Fox News aren't so surprising, but the close analysis of its very systematic and ruthlessly driven development is gripping. Those on the right might label The Brainwashing of My Dad a "vast left-wing conspiracy". Elsewhere, Jen Senko's film presents a wholly credible take on the modern media turning our minds into mush.
