My first experience with subliminal messaging was a few years ago when my family and I watched a documentary on The Beatles. The movie was about secret messages that The Beatles reportedly put into their music. Upon playing specific songs backwards, you could hear the verbal backmasking messages being played. The movie producer portrayed a long drawn out story about The Beatles and how they wanted to convey a message that Paul had been killed and replaced by another man. The producer suggested that without Paul, the band would no longer be the popular loved band it had once been. Playing a specific song backwards it said, "Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him (Gilbert, 2010)." This is not a definitive form of subliminal messaging, although it does pertain to the ideology of it. This experience furthered my interest in the subject matter and later led me to discover other works that were related to subliminal messaging.
When I got older, I read a book by George Orwell called 1984. The book is based around the government and their controlled messages to the public. The government coerces the public into compliance by brainwashing, oppressing the public via surveillance, and demanding conformity. In the book, the Inner Party elite persecuted any individual who performed independent thinking, known as a "thought crime." The famous "2+2=5" is from this book. This book enables readers to empathize with the idea that we are all subject to our government's direct and indirect control (Orwell, 1949). Again, this is not a legitimate scenario of subliminal messaging, but it is based around the ideology of it. .
Sometime later, I discovered another example that embraced the ideology of subliminal messaging. The first movie I watched with small subliminal clips that were noticeable throughout the movie was, Fight Club. In the movie, there are flashed images of Brad Pitt and some pornographic images (Milchan, et al.
