Manipulation and freedom: explain the story from a psychological perspective

Roger 2022-01-03 08:01:03

The essence of the story is: a woman enters a state of delusion after a huge disaster, and at the same time uses professional skills to successfully strengthen her delusion at work, and affect and destroy others intentionally or unintentionally.

Middle-aged woman Abbey and her husband Will are both psychologists. One day her husband suddenly committed suicide, and Abbey suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He not only began to deny reality, but also had bizarre delusions such as suspicion of alien kidnapping.

Hypnosis is one of her psychological counseling tools. She devoted herself to studying the cause of her husband's death, so she researched and tested it at any time at work. She selected a few patients who were weak-willed and easily influenced by others, and used hypnotic skills to successfully instill her delusional things (an owl in the middle of the night, aliens are coming to kidnap Earthlings, etc.) into the patients' brains.

Under her instigation and induction, the patients had successive reactions such as killing their family members and themselves, hysteria and paralysis, which further strengthened Abbey and other gullible patients' belief in the delusion of abducting aliens from aliens.

It is worth mentioning that Abbey is a manipulator who uses hypnotism. But on the other hand, she herself believes in the rhetoric of brainwashing patients, so she is also a victim while harming others.

And the boss behind all this manipulation should be Abbey's husband Will. Both of them are psychologists, and they belong to the same field of research. It can be inferred that Will is a person with a strong desire for control. In his early years, he fancyed Abbey's simplicity, credibility and ease of control. He first took her as a research assistant, then married, and let Abbey give him research services for the rest of his life. And his sudden suicide by shooting himself may be because a certain conspiracy was revealed, or his conscience suddenly awakened one day, and he did not want to be such a god and manipulator anymore.

After Will's death, Abbey's daughter Ashley went blind immediately, which should be regarded as a kind of hysteria, similar to the hysteria paralysis of a certain villager. Therefore, Ashley is also a person who is very easily influenced by the outside world, and has probably inherited his mother's gene of submissiveness and gullibility. Her disappearance may be because of being killed by her mother, or she may have escaped by herself. Another possibility is that she actively cooperated with her mother's delusion and died with her own life to serve her mother's delusion (thinking about the fear level~~~).

But Abbey's son Ronnie has a different sobriety than Ashley. He once reprimanded his mother face to face in front of the police, could he stop this farce? The subtitles at the end of the film also indicate that Ronnie, now 22, has been estranged from his mother and believes that her mother should be directly responsible for Ashley's disappearance. It seems that Ronnie inherited his father's sobriety, but fortunately he also abandoned his evil.

Therefore, this story has nothing to do with aliens and Sumerian civilization. Its essence is the story of manipulating people (Will, Abbey), being manipulated (Abbey, villagers, Ashley), and anti-manipulation and freedom from rebellion (Ronnie).

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Extended Reading
  • Colton 2022-01-03 08:01:03

    If it’s a pseudo-documentary, it’s the best one I’ve seen except for the beginning and the end

  • Samson 2022-03-27 09:01:09

    Mashup Pseudo Documentary…

The Fourth Kind quotes

  • real Abbey Tyler: [suppressing strong emotions] I believe the things I've seen, the presence I've felt inside of me, is beyond anything you can imagine. It was hopelessness. So, it cannot be God, but it can, it can pretend to be.

  • Sheriff August: Difficult to go back.

    Abbey Tyler: To go back?

    Sheriff August: Back over the line from fiction to reality. You can't just stop being insane whenever you want to. It's the the kind of thing that stays with you - forever.