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(Whirring)
(Rising instrumental music)
(Wind howling)
(♪ Holger Czukay: "Hiss 'n' Listen")
(Dissonant music)
♪ All the machines are standing still
♪ Hiss 'n' listen... ♪
(Children singing, distorted)
(Peaceful instrumental music)
(Louis) Can people have yellow eyes? I forgot.
(Mother) Not really yellow. Browny yellow, I suppose.
(Heart monitor beeping)
(Ventilator whirring)
(Peaceful music continues)
(Louis) F is a... Wait... F...
No.
(Music becomes melancholic)
(Screaming) No!
(Louis) I wish I had blue eyes cos I like the colour blue.
I like the colour light blue, but not really dark blue.
(Melancholic music continues)
(Narrator) There was once a boy who fell to earth
and found himself in a dark interior forest
of shadow and bone
from which he feared he might never return.
He made hundreds of these journeys
and came back less of the child he'd once been
and more like a pioneer of deep inner space.
(Melancholic music stops)
(Mother) Can you see me? Lou, can you see me?
Can you see me?
Louis, can you see me?
Lou, can you hear me?
(Animals barking and squawking)
(Mother) Can you hear me? Louis, can you see me?
(Echoing) Are you there? Are you there?
(Soft music, birdsong, bell ringing)
(Narrator) He writes,
"For over four years, I lived closer to death than life.
Most of my experiences come from the weird understanding
of the world I fell into
and how I found myself in a patchwork
of dreams and hallucinations.
When the normal healthy state of the organism was disturbed,
as soon as I fell ill,
another world began to appear
on the bridge between conscious and subconscious."
(Phone ringing)
(Louis choking and gasping for air)
(Church bell ringing)
(♪ Lonnie Donegan: "Love Is Strange")
(Bright, rhythmic strumming on acoustic guitar)
♪ Hey, Don?
♪ What, Phil?
♪ How would you call your baby home?
♪ Well, if I needed her real bad
♪ I guess I would call her like this... ♪
(Mother) Louis?
Louis, can you hear me, darling? Can you hear me?
♪ Baby
♪ Oh, sweet baby
♪ My sweet baby
♪ Please come home
♪ Yeah, that ought to bring her home, Don
♪ People
♪ Don't understand... ♪
(Song fades)
(Wind howling)
(Mother) Louis? Louis, can you hear me, darling?
Can you hear me?
Are you there?
(Door creaks)
(Wind howling)
(Mother) Are you there?
Lou?
Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?
Can you see me? Can you hear me?
Do you feel all right?
- Can you speak? - Hello.
(Mother) ...across the road.
(Louis) Don't film me doing that.
(Indistinct PA announcement)
(Grunts)
Go on, cross the road, Lou. Keep going.
(Indistinct PA announcement)
(Narrator) When the father proposes a journey
to the top of the world, to his son,
to what end neither is sure,
other than looking for a location
for a film that will never get made.
(Young Louis) We are going on holiday!
(Narrator) Perhaps he hopes
they will get to know each other better,
but he doesn't say, being a man of few words.
"No more road movie", he says.
A five-day journey overland
and by sea from London to the Arctic Circle.
(Young Louis speaking indistinctly)
(Narrator) A journey from celluloid to memory stick.
No more flights, no more driving.
(♪ Holger Czukay: "Ode To Perfume")
(Rhythmic electric guitar and percussion)
(Distorted voices)
Once he regarded driving like cinema,
as a form of forward projection.
These days, he prefers the sideways view of trains,
the blank gaze of the random travelling shot.
Technology and the subconscious.
(Song continues)
(Clickety-clack of the train)
(Train screeching)
(Song continues)
Journeys past, different times, in some ways easier,
before parenthood, before social media,
before anything smart.
(Radio chatter)
(Narrator) Just the empty road ahead,
when it was still possible to be between two points
and out of reach.
(Whirring and clicking)
(Whirring and clicking stop)
(Narrator) At the beginning of cinema,
one of its first practitioners said that it was
an invention without a future.
A remark later confirmed by another filmmaker
when he said that cinema and history
are made of the same material.
Similarly, artificial intelligence
learns only from the past.
Once, when talking to a chatbot,
the father said he had hoped for a more nuanced answer,
to be told, "I don't do nuance."
(Audience gasps)
He was interested to note that in 2017,
when two chatbots
were programmed to talk to each other,
they ended up abandoning English
and developing their own language
completely autonomously.
(Train whistle)
(Narrator) When asked what his film is about,
the father says nothing is written
beyond having a map reference for a location
regarding an old dead spymaster,
one of the most secretive men who ever lived.
- God bless you all. - (Reporters reply)
Plus literary gunslingers and gentlemen dopers
on mind-bending trips.
White man's DNA and all its inherited prejudices.
Time future contained in time past.
"The same old story", he shrugs.
What gets remembered and what gets forgotten.
And in terms of his son, what he doesn't remember
because of what the drugs did.
(Mother) Sweetheart?
Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you see me?
You can see me, can't you?
(Father) Lou?
(Mother) Come on. Come on.
Can you hear me at all?
- Can you hear me at all? - (Louis humming a tune)
(Mother) Louis?
Louis? Louis?
Louis?
(Wind howling)
(Bird singing)
(Mother) You're kind of...
Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
(Narrator) He was 12 when he started having seizures,
after a perfectly healthy childhood.
His mother's reaction was a combination
of panic and ignorance.
(Mother) Lou?
All she knew about epilepsy
was when the Simpsons went to Japan
and fell down convulsing
while watching Battling Seizure Robots on television.
(Mother) Can you hear me?
When she was asked to film the seizures
to help with a diagnosis,
she did as she was told, however harrowing that was.
(Mother) Lou, can you hear me?
(Narrator) He completely lost his life
on very heavy medication,
which stopped him from processing new information
and he even lost the memories
of the life before his epilepsy.
(Mother) Can you hear me?
Louis?
(Sombre music)
(♪ Harry McClintock: "Red River Valley")
(Gentle violin, acoustic guitar and banjo)
(Shrieks)
♪ From this valley they say you are going
♪ We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
♪ For you take with you all of the sunshine
♪ That has brightened our life for a while
♪ Then come sit by my side if you love me
♪ Do not hasten to bid me adieu
♪ But remember the Red River Valley
♪ And the cowboy that loved you so true
♪ For a long time, my darlin' I've waited
♪ For those sweet words... ♪
He's called Speedy the Snail and I really like him!
♪ But at last all my fond hopes have vanished
♪ And they say you are going away
♪ Must the past with its joys all be blighted
♪ By the future of sorrow and pain
♪ Must the vows... ♪
I just felt like putting spikes on her head.
♪ Don't you think you can love me again?
♪ There never could be such a longing
♪ In the heart of a poor cowboy's breast
♪ As dwells in the heart you are breaking
♪ As I wait in my home in the West ♪
(Angleton) I don't think I have any horns.
(Reporter) No? A scapegoat?
Well, I mean, it depends on... You said "goat".
Scapegoat.
I do not say baa-baa.
(Narrator) Two years before he died, the old spymaster,
lured by the white nights, the insomniac's friend,
and Europe's best fly fishing,
stayed in a remote hut in the Arctic Circle.
And in this high refuge he made a taped record,
a confession, a settling of accounts,
a dandy's revenge, a final act of contrition.
Upon being told his father possesses
a transcript of the tapes,
the son can't decide whether it is a true story,
the father is making it up,
or he has made it up but also believes it is true.
He says in terms of Through the Looking Glass,
Angleton regarded espionage as a wilderness of mirrors.
Are you still haunted by...? (Indistinct)
Am I still...?
- Haunted by... - Possibly, I don't know.
(Indistinct)
I do hear voices... (Indistinct)
(Phone ringing)
(Clock ticking)
(Bird calling)
One night, he told his mother everything looked distorted,
big and distant at the same time.
She asked his doctors
if it was a side effect of the drugs
and was told it was a type of focal seizure
called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
They had diagnosed generalised epilepsy
of unknown cause, but they said
you don't get both generalised and focal seizures.
So he was referred to another hospital for a second opinion.
The second doctor agreed with the original diagnosis
and told the mother to stop putting ideas into his head
because children were very susceptible to suggestion.
(♪ Holger Czukay: "Hiss 'n' Listen")
(Bass guitar twangs, rhythmic hi-hat ticking)
(Distorted voices)
(Narrator) Then the following year,
she was told by his doctors
that you can, in fact, have both types of seizure.
She discovered more is known
about the universe than the brain,
and the treatment of epilepsy is all trial and error.
She knew she was considered difficult.
She pointed out misdiagnoses,
clinical inaccuracies and examples of recklessness.
Even so, she supposed they knew what they were doing.
What she failed to see was the potentially lethal combination
of hubris and bureaucracy.
(Music continues)
(Phone ringing)
(Two-tone beep)
(Indistinct radio chatter)
(Narrator) His mother had no idea
when he started having seizures,
how dangerous epilepsy is.
Every time he turned over in the night,
she would be immediately awake,
waiting for the screeching mattress alarm.
And every morning she would look into his room,
fearing he had died in the night from SUDEP,
sudden unexplained death in epilepsy,
when people die in their sleep and no one knows why.
(Indistinct radio chatter)
(High-pitched alarm)
(Louis choking)
(Choking and shaking continue)
(Narrator) The doctors told her to time each seizure
and if one lasted more than five minutes,
she should give emergency medication
and call an ambulance.
When a seizure doesn't stop
it's called status epilepticus,
which can cause brain damage and death.
Louis has been in status epilepticus over 12 times.
Is that the harbour we're going on?
(Mother) No.
But did you see how much sand there was... in the truck?
(Mother) No, I didn't notice that.
- There was a whole hill. - (Mother) Ah, OK.
Yeah, we have one.
Don't look.
OK.
- Mum, did you see that? - No.
Good.
- What did it say on the back? - I didn't see it.
F is a... Wait.
F... No.
(Two-note chime)
(Over PA) The next station is Moulsecoomb.
Is there three lines?
(Over PA) This is coach number one of four.
(Mother) No, two. (Louis) Oh, sh...
(Mother) It doesn't matter. (Louis) Wait.
Now, it's... Uh, yeah.
Mummy, there you go.
(Mother) We're gonna pack up now because we've got to...
(Narrator) Two minutes of watching your child seizing
with no way of retrieving them
extends beyond time into a possibility of a loss
that might be forever.
(Church bells chiming)
(Chiming continues)
(Church bells ringing)
(Ringing continues)
(Ringing stops)
♪ People don't understand
♪ No, no
♪ They think loving
♪ Is beautiful and grand
♪ Baby
♪ Oh, my baby
♪ You're the one
♪ Your love... ♪
He says, "Whenever I had a seizure, I blacked out.
I would wake up knowing I'd had a seizure
but confused nonetheless.
My vision would be blurry.
I would always have a severe migraine
and feel an immense amount of pressure,
as if I was deep underwater.
My skin would tingle in a slightly painful way
and I would never be able to say what I was thinking."
♪ Oh, my baby, you're... ♪
(Narrator) "Once I asked to sit on my pillow
when I was trying to ask for a glass of water.
And once my mum asked me who she was
and I couldn't find the right words and just shook my head.
Someone who sacrificed her whole life
to take care of me
and I forgot her name because of a seizure."
(Mother) Can you hear me?
Have you got anything in your mouth?
Can you open your mouth?
Just check... Nothing in there.
Yeah?
OK, darling?
OK?
Can you hear me? You can hear me, yeah?
Can you?
- Yeah. Lou? - Yeah.
- You just had another blank. - Another one!
(♪ Holger Czukay: "Ode To Perfume")
(Soft electric guitar and percussion)
(Narrator) The old spymaster, James Angleton,
twins in the father's mind
with the writer William Burroughs,
another one who was after the big white whale.
Two chain smokers,
one a dope addict, the other a drunk.
Warped patricians infected by high-grade paranoia.
Burroughs was the perfect artistic product
of the Cold War: half spy, half scientist,
half astronaut
on that long journey through inner space.
Decorum and manners in pursuit of wildness.
(Burroughs) Every particle of this universe
contains the whole of the universe.
You in yourself have the whole of the universe.
I cut you up in a certain way, I cut up the universe.
(Burroughs) There are many ways cut-ups can be done.
One very simple way that I've used frequently is
just take a page,
cut it down the middle and across the page
so you now have four sections
and you rearrange the sections.
(Typewriter clicking)
(Wind howling)
If you have a pre-recorded universe
in which everything is already pre-recorded,
the only thing that is not pre-recorded
are the pre-recordings themselves.
So, with my cut-ups I was attempting to tamper
with the basic pre-recordings.
(Church bells tolling)
(Eerie instrumental music)
(Burroughs) When you experiment with cut-ups
over a period of time,
you find that some of the cut-ups and rearranged texts
seem to refer to future events.
Perhaps when you cut into the present,
the future leaks out.
But we simply accepted it and continued the experiments.
(Narrator) On the fourth drug,
he had yet another type of seizure,
one that came every 40 minutes on the dot
and each one lasted exactly one minute.
(Mother) He's having one. Lou?
Spot on. 40 minutes later.
Louis?
Lou?
Louis? Can you hear me?
(Father mumbles)
- Mm-hm. - You just had another one.
Another one.
(Phone ringing)
(Narrator) How long is a minute?
Time stretches and bends.
Some lasted a minute, some much longer.
And they took many forms,
like a malignant choreography of demons.
(Birds cawing and screeching)
(Clock ticking)
(Phone ringing)
(Narrator) After two years of worsening seizures,
Louis' doctors say there's nothing more they can do
and tell his mother to grieve for the child he once was.
His father says it doesn't take half a brain
to work out things are fucked.
He comes from a family of doctors
and dismisses the medical profession today
as being in the business of prescription
rather than care.
(Hippo groans)
(Narrator) He applies for an Irish passport,
which seems to make sense
as his great-grandfather, another Louis,
ran the lunatic asylum in Sligo.
(Over PA) Good evening, dear passengers.
My name is Simon and I'm your train manager.
On behalf of European Sleeper and my entire crew,
I warmly welcome you aboard this train
heading to Berlin Hauptbahnhof.
This train will make stops at Antwerp Centraal,
Roosendaal, Rotterdam Centraal,
The Hague Hollands Spoor,
Amsterdam Centraal, Amersfoort Centraal,
Deventer, Bad Bentheim,
before continuing to Berlin Hauptbahnhof.
We will provide you with further information
about the progress of our journey
through the night shortly before 10 p.m.
For now, we wish you a very pleasant trip.
(Announcement repeated in French)
(Narrator) Louis' state of erasure
found a distorted reflection
in the loss of memory
of the father's mother.
Hers was a different kind of forgetting,
the erosion of old age,
which raises the stark question:
what of it is worth remembering anyway?
(Louis humming a tune)
(Narrator) Stoical indifference has its virtues,
but is not of much use to anyone else.
His mother turned 100 recently.
No one recognised at the family party,
apart from a photograph of her wedding in 1947
where she could name everyone in the picture
with the exception of the man she'd just married.
(Announcement continues in French)
(Louis playing guitar and announcement continue)
(Narrator) As for the spook the father is interested in
and coincidences of geography,
he says you couldn't make him up.
A man whose middle name was Jesus,
a Cold War warrior and world-class fly fisherman.
Grower of orchids who, although a Yank,
was privately educated
in the town where the father was born.
In 2016 the father returned to live there
in the house built by his grandmother after the war,
a house of memory spanning three generations,
haunted in its own way
and reminiscent of the entombed world
of Edgar Allan Poe,
another one who had focal seizures.
(Ice-cream van jingle)
(Narrator) There, he tended his garden,
walked the dog and chased shadows.
As the world imploded,
he divided it into those that couldn't remember -
Louis, his own mother -
and those that couldn't forget -
the boy's mother.
Any sense of past and future,
relationships, things going on elsewhere,
was lost.
(Reporter) I notice on this Christmas Eve
that your family is not with you.
Is that a result of all these unhappy events?
Yes.
(Guitar being played)
(Narrator) The father shared Angleton's way
of reading the world as a literary text
and he tried to imagine
what a recording of the man's final confession
might sound like,
an analogue cassette version of Krapp's Last Tape,
recorded on an old Sanyo boom box.
(Recording playing)
(Narrator) Angleton avoided public statement.
An exception was when he was doorstepped by reporters
the morning after his fall.
The CIA...
(Narrator) Despite being visibly drunk,
his cunning never falters.
A civilised demeanour,
deflection laced with brazen lies.
(Reporter) Was your branch of the CIA
involved in the surveillance of American citizens
here inside the United States?
(Angleton) Absolutely not.
Now, could you be careful? Because I've just shaved.
I've been up all night, literally, on the phone.
What is it?
This man has more...
What is this?
(Reporter) An electronic device.
I see. I'm not familiar with them.
It's much more perfected
than anything we have in the agency.
(Reporter) Why did you resign?
(Narrator) Angleton and the father were essentially
in the same line of work.
Nicotine and alcohol their lifelong companions.
Both in the business of fiction,
the art of the lie and making stuff up.
They know that truth is a commodity, not an absolute,
a lesson the boy's mother was yet to learn
when it came to her son's healthcare.
(♪ Florida Normal And Industrial Institute Quartette: "Dis Train")
♪ Dis train don't carry no liars
♪ Dis train
(♪ My Lord)
♪ Dis train don't carry no liars
♪ Dis train
(♪ My Lord)
♪ Dis train don't carry... ♪
(Narrator) Hospital wards and doctors' waiting rooms,
Accident and Emergency,
blue-lit ambulances,
a life of endless waiting and panic
all became familiar to Louis and his mother.
They were told
they had to accept the side effects of medication
because uncontrolled seizures were so dangerous,
but the medication didn't even stop the seizures.
(Louis) I think I deal with epilepsy quite well,
even though it's been tough.
It's been tough on me.
I would say...
I would deal with it quite well.
Um...
Uh...
Even though it's quite hard to deal with it.
But I don't really complain about it...
...at all, I would say.
Um...
There's... um...
Uh...
(♪ Cab Calloway: "St. James Infirmary")
♪ Folks, I'm goin' down to St. James Infirmary
♪ See
♪ My baby there
♪ She's stretched out on a long, white table
♪ She's so sweet, so cold, so fair
♪ Let her go, let her go Oh, bless her... ♪
The devastating effect
of the medication on his cognition
was really shocking.
If he was told something,
he couldn't remember it three minutes later.
He couldn't get out of bed most days
and he was just watching the same cartoons
over and over again.
♪ Now, when I die, bury me in my straight-leg britches... ♪
He stopped being able to play the guitar.
He stopped being able to play tennis.
He stopped being able to do the things he loved.
The one thing he carried on doing, however ill he was,
was drawing and painting
and that's what kept him sane.
He would just go into this world for hours on end.
♪ Then give me six crap-shooting pall bearers
♪ Let a chorus girl sing me a song... ♪
(Louis) Well, this one is just about being held down.
It's about everything that epilepsy
has stopped me from doing.
So, it's kind of...
looking, like, longingly
at people living their normal life.
♪ Folks, now that you have heard my story
♪ Say, boy, hand me over another shot of that booze
♪ If anyone should ask you
♪ Tell 'em I've got those St. James Infirmary blues ♪
(Muted)
(Soft mechanical hum inside train)
(Mechanical hum continues)
(Narrator) The father shows him a picture
of the back of a man's head,
saying he died the month before your seizures started.
It is the only image he'd seen in a long time
which has aroused his curiosity,
maybe because the death
of this shape-shifting entertainer
at the start of that fateful year of 2016
foretold of chaos to come.
Maybe he likes the picture
because it is not an original but a fragment of a copy,
and there's always a chance it isn't him
but an impersonator or a double
or a fake or someone else who fell to earth.
And this fake, real image
of a fake, real man pleased him
in a way that also made him a bit anxious,
maybe even a little nostalgic
for when it was still possible to have such perfect hair
and look to the future
and still turn one's back on the world.
(♪ Adrianne Lenker: "Snow Song")
(Gentle acoustic guitar)
♪ When you walked in I just stood still
♪ I said, "I'm sorry, love I have no will"
♪ If I try to move I'll break and spill
♪ What's left of me my weight will kill
♪ If I die inside this bitter shell
♪ It will be upon a frozen lake
♪ My knees will break
♪ My breath will swell
♪ The snow around my blood will paint
♪ Lord, I know my timing's off
♪ And all the earth is ragged
♪ To the bone
♪ Oh, oh
♪ Tired is the burning sea
♪ That calls me to the bottom
♪ Like a stone
♪ Oh, oh
♪ And I'm
♪ Sinking alone... ♪
(Louis) When you have epilepsy,
it's easy to feel like you've lost everything.
And there's so much more to epilepsy than seizures.
Seizures are just the seed that branches out
into so many different traumas and problems.
It can change your whole situation.
♪ Now inside this blinded bend
♪ I'll pour the ink down through my pen... ♪
(Louis) I had to move to Rotterdam, for example.
I was moved away from my family,
my friends, just my home.
♪ My misery until the end
♪ Lord, I know my timing's off
♪ And all the earth is ragged
♪ To the bone
♪ Oh, oh... ♪
(Louis) My mum did extensive research for more cures
and she found cannabis medication.
We went to, um, Holland to get cannabis
and, although it was very hard to move away from my home,
um, in the end
it was right, it was worth it
because it cured my epilepsy.
It's... It helped me more than any other medication.
It had less severe side effects than other medication,
but it has a stigma attached to it.
You don't smoke it, you just take it in oils.
Very little THC in it, mainly CBD.
♪ I'm
♪ Sinking alone ♪
In kind of my final two years I was kind of known as
the hospital's most complex case.
They could not understand
why I was having these seizures.
Like, they said, like, to my mum
I will never be seizure-free, I will never kind of...
"You just need to get used to your son being disabled
and kind of not... maybe never leaving home."
(Soft mechanical hum)
(Birds chirping)
(Calm, atmospheric music)
(Mother) Can you squeeze my hand?
Lou? Can you squeeze?
OK, darling.
Come on.
Louis? Louis?
Louis?
(Guard on PA) Berlin. Berlin Central Station.
Please exit on the left side in the direction of travel.
(Indistinct PA announcement)
(Narrator) A brief stopover in Berlin,
where the father had lived in the 1980s.
It was strange finding himself back
in that formerly occupied city,
epitomising the dark dream of the Cold War,
where the fault lines of two civilisations met
at its dividing wall.
(Vehicles rumble past)
(Distant bicycle bell rings)
(Bicycle whizzes by, bell rings)
(Man) The present masters of the Soviet Union
have said to us,
"Peaceful co-existence until we bury you."
- (Interviewer) Mr Zapuder... - Zapruder, yes.
(Interviewer) Zapruder. Would you tell us your story?
(Zapruder) I was shooting. I heard a shot.
And he slumped to the side.
And I saw his head practically open up,
all blood and everything.
And I kept on shooting.
(Reporter) You have the film in your camera?
(Zapruder) Yes, I brought it.
(Interviewer) We'll get that processed.
Right now we have video tape.
(Narrator) Angleton underwrote the secret history
of the second half of the 20th century.
(Reporter) A stoic individual who admits nothing.
(Narrator) Plenty to confess after more than 30 years
practising the dark arts of CIA counterintelligence,
and, in its middle,
the black hole of the assassination
of the 35th president of the United States.
Lone gunman? Shooters on the grassy knoll?
Who knows? Probably Angleton.
He was finally hung out to dry in 1974
after the press exposed his illegal activities.
This at the same time
as the Watergate burglary scandal,
which led to the downfall of the 37th president.
(Reporter) The biggest White House scandal in a century,
the Watergate scandal broke wide open today.
(Narrator) Angleton later denied
meeting one of the burglars,
a CIA operative who had previously been sighted
behind the grassy knoll.
Secrets within secrets.
(Woman) Now, tell us if this is a coincidence.
(Narrator) The father comes across a photograph
of actor John Wayne in a military canteen,
taken when filming in the Philippines.
Standing in the background, a young marine.
None other than Lee Harvey Oswald.
(Man on radio) ...how and why we exist...
(Narrator) Angleton denied all knowledge of Oswald,
the so-called lone gunman, despite keeping a file on him,
and no doubt was familiar with the TV show Mission Impossible
which declared each week, "Capture will result in disavowal
of any knowledge of your actions."
(Reporter) Did you shoot the President?
(Oswald) No, they're taking me in
because I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy!
- Absolutely not. - Was the agency involved
in the kind of domestic surveillance
that has been portrayed in the news reports?
- Explain yourself. - The way it violated its charter.
My feeling is that it has not.
Are you suggesting that these years in the CIA
you have watched President Nixon, Secretary Kissinger
and now President Ford
take the United States down a misguided path?
As I told you earlier, Mr Shaw,
you kept me up too many hours
till 3 a.m. watching public television.
I don't know whether I like you
or don't like you, for that reason.
- May I ask if you...? - God bless you.
I don't know if "Merry Christmas" is...
It sounds ironic, but Merry Christmas.
- Merry Christmas. - Bless you.
All the best.
(Narrator) Angleton knew the secrets,
knew where the bodies were buried.
The CIA was supposed to mind foreign affairs
with no mandate for domestic issues,
which didn't stop him from running an illegal mail-opening service.
In fact, he told his son he worked for the post office.
He may as well have said that he was a doctor,
given the extent to which the CIA funded university and hospital research
into the effect of mind-altering drugs,
using unsuspecting human guinea pigs.
(Journalist) CIA documents describe experiments
in which certain patients were given LSD
for more than 75 consecutive days.
In order to overcome tolerance to the hallucinogen,
Isbell administered, quote, double, triple
and quadruple doses.
(Louis humming)
A few patients felt that, quote, they had become very large
or had shrunk to the size of children.
Their hands or feet did not seem to be their own
and sometimes took on the appearance of animal paws.
They reported many fantasies or dreamlike states
in which they seemed to be elsewhere.
Fantastic experiences such as trips to the moon
or living in gorgeous castles
were occasionally reported, unquote.
Isbell concluded, quote,
despite these striking subjective experiences,
the patients remained orientated in time, place, and person.
(Seabirds calling)
(Narrator) When asked about his worst experiences during withdrawal,
he said it was a toss-up between phenytoin and clobazam,
a benzodiazapene.
Coming off phenytoin, he had over 200 seizures in a fortnight.
His weight dropped to 45 kg.
He was too weak to walk and almost too tired to talk.
He says, "Withdrawing from clobazam
I was the most scared in all my life.
Not the most painful
but the most frightening experience.
Glitching out,
like when the TV picture goes all over the place.
When I moved my hands it felt like I had hundreds of hands.
Every time I opened my eyes
the pictures on the walls had been moved.
When I shut my eyes, I felt like my skin was expanding.
Other times, I felt like my body was shrinking.
Everything looked outlined in blue and purple
and pixelated, with snakes and clocks."
(Seabirds squawking)
(Narrator) The seizures and medical withdrawal
did at least bequeath him his art,
which became his lifeline,
offering a slow climb out of the pit.
It was as though the pre-recorded world of Burroughs
had decided to give him a break,
as in the seizures stop as suddenly as they started,
allowing him to move on.
They do stop.
Except no one moves on.
(Horn honks)
(Reversing lorry beeps)
(Narrator) In the stage of recovery,
which involves being able to return home
and resume his education,
the health service that had let him down so badly before
waits to do so again.
If the pre-recorded world
had decided to grant the young man a reprieve,
it was at the expense of a malevolent system.
(♪ Ernest Stoneman: "The Titanic")
(Cheerful harmonica)
(Old-timey voiceover) And now we see you on the steamer
bound for a foreign land.
(Harmonica continues)
♪ It was on Monday morning
♪ Just about one o'clock
♪ That the great Titanic
♪ Began to reel and rock
♪ Then the people began to cry, saying, "Lord, I'm going to die"
♪ It was sad when that great ship went down
♪ It was sad when that great ship went down... ♪
(Narrator) The father tells his son
that once there was analogue boredom
and now there is digital boredom,
a new kind of addictive boredom,
whereas old-style boredom was a state of transit.
He says once artificial intelligence takes over,
the whole lot will probably get wiped anyway
and it will be back to candles and matches.
♪ The water could not go through
♪ But God with his mighty hand
♪ Showed to the world it could not stand... ♪
(Narrator) Hand. Brush. Paper.
The reassurance of things, solid objects,
after his free-fall journeys.
A way of transcribing.
Whatever worlds he visited, they weren't digital.
(Peaceful acoustic guitar)
(Louis humming)
Mummy, don't look at it.
(Guitar music continues)
(Narrator) Sometimes he said he could smell things
that no one else could,
or had a strong sense of déjà vu,
or goosebumps,
or a sense of invisible weights pressing down on him.
Once, he said he was on the brink
of knowing all the secrets of the universe
but couldn't quite grasp them.
(Guitar continues)
(Narrator) The father remembered reading
that the problem with artificial intelligence
is that it doesn't get goosebumps
as it doesn't experience cold, fear or excitement.
(Guitar continues)
(Muted)
(Guitar stops)
(Narrator) The world we live in,
that grand post-digital mess,
seems much more in keeping
with something imagined by Burroughs -
mind control, electronic viruses,
deadly leisure -
than the Big Brother world of George Orwell,
which removed the pleasure principle from the equation.
And in pleasure, the dopamine high,
addiction and enslavement,
as Burroughs well knew.
(Ship horn blares)
(Narrator) In the meantime,
the image bank has exploded, with everything shot to death,
exemplified by the ubiquitous selfie,
desperate in its want to be liked and shared.
(♪ Holger Czukay: "Ode To Perfume")
(Slow, reverberating electric guitar)
(Percussion joins in)
(Funky beat)
(Distorted synthesisers join in)
(Song continues)
(Narrator) He says, "I take two types of cannabis,
Bedrolite and Cannabiszorg.
The Bedrolite is a dark black liquid
that looks like it has consumed
everything it has touched.
Not even light could escape from its darkness.
Cannabiszorg is pure CBD,
the liquid yellowish and transparent.
It looks angelic and completely pure.
I often think about how much I rely
on these two contradictory-coloured liquids."
(Song stops)
(People screaming)
(Guitar being played)
(Narrator) He says,
"When you tell people you have epilepsy,
you can see it scares them.
I guess because seizures
have long been associated with stigma
and still are."
(Church bell ringing)
(Narrator) "In the past,
I would have been sent to an asylum
or burned at the stake,
because seizures were taken for a sign
of demonic possession."
- (Siren wailing) - (Church bell ringing)
"Had I been born in Germany in the 1930s,
I would have been gassed
as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme,
with the forced consent of my parents."
And even in the UK during Covid
there were those with epilepsy and learning disabilities
who were given "do not resuscitate" orders
without their family's knowledge or permission.
(Peaceful guitar music)
(Narrator) The mother had been brought up
believing in the integrity of the National Health Service,
part of that postwar dream
of free healthcare for all.
Her grandmother had been a ward sister
who cared for children with polio.
And her father, an NHS doctor,
whose early death was seen as a great loss to medicine.
(Guitar music continues)
(Narrator) The ideal scenario was that a young man
who had suffered such tribulation
would be supported.
But doctors refused
to prescribe his medical cannabis,
saying it wasn't safe,
and discharged him from their care,
leading to years lost
in a hostile, bureaucratic wilderness.
(Guitar music continues)
(Narrator) Having made a life study
of voluptuously rotten systems,
the father is surprised to find his family infected by one,
leaving him wondering whether doctors were leaned on,
probably by the pharmaceutical companies,
which, as everybody knows,
are in a lethal, addictive business.
Endless questions unanswered,
round in circles, redactions, sleepless nights,
queasy free-floating dreams,
paranoia as contagious as any virus.
The father counts the parallels with Angleton's world,
watching the mother spun in an endless loop,
frozen with fear, fear of relapse,
fear of SUDEP, fear of Louis' doctors,
fear of making a mistake
which could lead to the death of her son,
and living every day with the memory of watching, helpless.
(Train screeching)
(Siren wailing)
(Narrator) The father tells his son about Angleton,
the holy ghost of spies,
who proudly claimed that he had half of Washington bugged,
later telling reporters
he didn't know what a tape recorder was.
(Siren wailing)
Despite his writer's block,
he believes the Angleton tapes are all in his head,
waiting to be transmitted
and the magnetic north will give him the answer.
(Phone ringing)
(Narrator) In terms of mind control,
Angleton believed the Soviets were years ahead.
The CIA hired shrinks, quacks and hypnotists,
formed unthinkable alliances,
studied the nuances of hostile interrogation
and the notion of programmed assassins,
asking themselves
how much was it possible to fuck with someone's head?
(Phone) You are number 20 in the queue.
(Ringing tone)
(Narrator) In terms of the wider surveillance network,
if the watcher watches, who watches the watcher?
Now we watch ourselves.
Freedom to act
has been reduced to freedom of choice and consumption
in which we end up only consuming ourselves
in an act of digital cannibalism.
(Muted)
(Background hum)
(Narrator) He notes the childish irresponsibility
of the internet robber barons
with their creed of move fast and break things,
and this, for some reason,
leaves him thinking of Grünewald's Crucifixion,
and the despair of the ninth hour.
It was said that Grünewald
was the most uncompromising of realists
whose Calvary stood at the opposite pole
from those debonair Golgothas
adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance.
And his lack of compromise let the observer know
that realism could be truly transcendent.
(Church bell ringing)
(♪ Slauson Malone 1: "Smile #2")
(Siren wail rising and falling)
(Bass guitar twangs)
(Wavering guitar joins in)
♪ Smile at the past when I see it
♪ Sometimes shit seem out of reach
♪ But when it do, I look down See the glass on the ring
♪ You look close, you could really see your past on repeat
♪ Tracin' every step back like I'm draggin' my feet
♪ You should get to know me
♪ The Devil dance, lean back in my seat
♪ She blow a kiss It hit the side of my cheek
♪ I wipe it off
♪ Lipstick probably still on my skin
♪ I'm just a victim in this world full of sin
♪ My mother try and keep me safe (haha)
♪ Mama try and keep me safe
♪ When I was eatin' from your beak
♪ I knew I'd grow to fly away on my own
♪ Always told me stay away from the stove
♪ And lit the fire just to heat up the comb
♪ Now I'm grown, uh
♪ I'm grown
♪ I made my own way
♪ Mm ♪
(Song stops abruptly)
(Narrator) He says, "My last seizure was some years ago now
but you live every day in the fear of it starting again."
He remembers little of the four years lost to epilepsy,
other than brief harrowing memories
and the feeling of watching himself
and death watching him.
As they near their destination,
the father starts to pick up on Angleton's voice,
but only strange names being transmitted
that mean nothing.
Flamingo zonker,
yellow goofus bug,
egg-sucking leech,
the grey ghost,
which he doesn't realise until later are fishing flies.
Coming through more clearly, Angleton tells him,
"On the river, you seek to imagine the world of the fish
while giving the illusion of a real fly,
and the fish believes, in that moment,
you are the fly."
(♪ Holger Czukay: "Hiss 'n' Listen")
(Dissonant music)
♪ All the machines are standing still
♪ Hiss 'n' listen... ♪
(Children singing, distorted)
(Narrator) In terms of unforeseen connections,
there is the Grünewald, the CIA and LSD.
In 1951,
more than 300 inhabitants of a small French town
were afflicted with terrible hallucinations.
One man tried to drown himself
because his belly was being eaten by snakes.
Another saw his heart escaping through his feet.
A third had the sensation of shrinking
and fire and serpents were coiled around his arms.
A once common disease known as ergotism was blamed,
caused by eating bread made with contaminated flour.
The monks who commissioned the Grünewald
cared for such patients
whose symptoms included convulsions,
lesions, gangrene and visions.
In the 1930s,
as a result of his research on ergot,
a Swiss pharmacist, more or less accidentally, came up
with the formula for LSD
whose supply was later monopolised by the CIA
for its secret biochemical warfare programme.
A rumour persists that the incident in the French town
was a CIA operation
that involved spiking the local baguettes.
(Mother) Lou? Lou?
Louis?
(Louis takes deep breaths)
(Mother) Can you wake up, Lou?
Wake up.
Can you wake up? Wake up.
Wake up. Wake up.
Come on.
- (Creature squawking) - (Birds chirping)
(Mother) Louis, can you wake up? Can you wake up?
Can you wake up? Sweetheart? Come on.
(Peaceful guitar music)
(Mother) Come on.
Come on, darling.
(Cowbells jangling)
(Narrator) He tells his son
there are too many knots and metaphors,
too much separation, overdependence,
entwinement.
Too many levels of consciousness
and, in all cases,
a suspicion that reality is the dream
and the dream is reality.
(Guitar music continues)
(Birds chirping)
Well, again, apologies for keeping you waiting.
(Narrator) For Angleton, patriot and paranoiac,
elegance and lucidity turned to alcoholism,
cancer and madness.
What he had once believed was a fight against the evil enemy,
he came to see
was just another form of useless control.
At the end of his life
he confessed the error of his ways, saying,
"Unlike George Washington,
the founding father of the United States,
who told his father, 'I cannot tell a lie',
the founding fathers of US intelligence
were fundamentally liars.
Outside of duplicity and betrayal,
the only thing they had in common
was a desire for absolute power.
If you were in a room with those then grand masters,
you were in a room full of people
that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.
I guess I will see them there soon."
Angleton tells the father
that any search for a meaningful or biblical truth
is futile.
And even after death
there is ambiguity
and one carries on making mistakes.
(Tinkling lullaby played on musical box)
(Mother) Sweetie, come on. Are you there? Are you there?
Louis? Louis?
(Bird of prey screeches)
(Lullaby continues on piano)
(Thunder rumbling)
(Dog barking)
(Thunder rumbling)
(Lullaby resumes on musical box)
(Lullaby resumes on piano)
(♪ Florida Normal And Industrial Institute Quartette: "Dis Train")
♪ Dis train don't carry no liars
♪ Dis train
(♪ My Lord)
♪ Dis train don't carry no liars
♪ Dis train
(♪ My Lord)
♪ Dis train don't carry no liars
♪ Don't carry nothing but the holy fire
♪ Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord
♪ Lord
♪ Lord... ♪
(Vocalising)
- (Plucking) - (Rain falling)
("Dis Train" continues)
(Song stops)
(Melancholic instrumental music)
(Narrator) Louis was quite familiar
with the hallucinations depicted in the Grünewald,
with its angels, monsters and demons.
For his mother,
the painting was a revelation
in its unvarnished depiction of suffering and truth
without which, she realised,
there can be no transcendence or forgiveness.
(Melancholic music continues)
(Narrator) He sent his mother a message.
"Yesterday,
we headed up the fell.
The climb was exhausting.
And I woke up thinking of what I'd left behind
and how my absence would be perceived
in this previous reality.
How it would be seen
in every other dream I'd woken from."
(Melancholic music rising)
(Narrator) Meanwhile, what would they find there?
The key to something?
Hope perhaps?
Or just more ambushes?
His father is reminded of watching westerns
when he was a boy, saying,
"My life is still conditioned by six-gun cowboys
hiding behind rocks,
whispering how it's too quiet."
Unlike in movies,
perhaps there is no character arc,
no redemption,
no closure,
just time running out.
For his son if they can no longer afford
the medication that keeps him seizure-free,
and for the rest of us
in our refusal to read the writing on the wall
when it is staring us in the face.
(Music continues)
(♪ King Krule: "My Rifle, My Pony and Me")
(Mellow electric guitar)
♪ The sun is sinking in the west
♪ The cattle go down to the stream
♪ The redwing settles in the nest
♪ It's time for a cowboy to dream
♪ Purple light
♪ In the canyons
♪ That's where I
♪ Long to be
♪ With my three
♪ Good companions
♪ Just my rifle, my pony and me
♪ Gonna hang (♪ Gonna hang)
♪ My sombrero (♪ My sombrero)
♪ On the limb (♪ On the limb)
♪ Of a tree (♪ Of a tree)
♪ Riding to (♪ Riding to)
♪ Amarillo (♪ Amarillo)
♪ Just my rifle, my pony and me
♪ Whippoorwill (♪ Whippoorwill)
♪ In the willow (♪ In the willow)
♪ Sings a sweet (♪ Sings a sweet)
♪ Melody (♪ Melody)
♪ Comin' home (♪ Comin' home)
♪ My sweetheart darlin' (♪ My sweetheart darlin')
♪ Just my rifle, my pony and me
♪ Hit it, Gal Go, hey ♪
(Soft, ambient saxophone)
♪ No more cows (♪ No more cows)
♪ To be ropin' (♪ To be ropin')
♪ No more strays (♪ No more strays)
♪ Will I see (♪ Will I see)
♪ Round the bend (♪ Round the bend)
♪ Oh, she'll be waitin' (♪ She'll be waitin')
♪ Just my rifle, my pony and me
♪ Just my rifle
♪ My pony
♪ And me ♪
(Song stops)
(Wind blowing)
(Trees rustling)
(Wind and rustling intensify)
Subtitling by MPS
(Wind and rustling subside)