Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

Following the development of so-called “truth drugs” for use with traumatized soldiers during the 1940s, the notion that the mind contained everything that had happened to the individual and that this could be fully accessed became widespread. In the 1970s, “truth drugs” were being used to gain convictions in criminal trials, causing serious miscarriages of justice. With the proliferation of film and video technology, the mind became compared to a machine. As Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters made clear, the “inability to come up with the details of an experience is explained away as either a failure of the recall techniques or the result of a mechanism in the brain that wilfully denies access to that information.”⁶² There was, and still is, the insane logic by some therapists, and therefore their clients, that repression due to child sexual abuse must have occurred if it cannot be remembered. According to this belief system, unless one has remembered abuse, one is living in denial and is not fully human. Metaphor is replaced with a literalness that is extreme. “Practitioners” use the results of imaginative reflective exercises, using imaginary videos, offering fantasy, movie-type scenes of abuse. These are concluded to be evidence of abuse, with particular films used to “spark” feelings and memories. Film becomes part of the collective memory, film narratives constructing individual narratives. Media culture creates the way we construct memory. In one controversial case, a fundamentalist Christian police officer, sentenced to twenty years in prison after a conviction for allegedly sexually abusing his two daughters, claimed that “it’s almost like I’m making it up; I’m trying not to…It’s like I’m watching a movie.”⁶³ Many of those encouraging the recovery of repressed memory, for both the abuser and the abused, claim that the revelation of child sexual abuse is “like watching a movie about someone else’s life.”⁶⁴ There is the confessing of this “most evil of sins,” which then offers the opportunity for forgiveness, the most grace, and guaranteed eternal paradise—fundamentalist Christian revivalism corresponding with the extraordinary growth of claims of child sexual abuse. The influence of film is remarkable. The eyes are believed to be working as a lens, the brain literally functioning as a magical recorder of every event that can be replayed, that must be