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* === The Manchurian Candidate ===The most thoroughgoing mention of brainwashing in popular culture was ''[[The Manchurian Candidate]]''.<ref name=manchuria>''The Manchurian Candidate'', dir. John Frankenheimer, with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, and Khigh Dhiegh, United Artists, 1962.</ref><ref name=marks2>"The story was about a joint Soviet-Chinese plot to take an American soldier captured in Korea, condition him at a special brainwashing center located in [[Manchuria]], and create a remote-controlled assassin who was supposed to kill the President of the United States." [http://www.djmsp.com/feedingtrough/reading/The_Search_for_the_Manchurian_Candidate.pdf The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control], by John Marks</ref> This was also the most controversial such mention, because the theme involved inducing a person not only to confess to a crime he had not committed, but to commit murder on command and then forget that he had done so.

* The fictional technique, which no one has been able to replicate, was described only as "part light-induced, part drug-induced." The character of the psychiatrist in charge of the brainwashing program cites the Brenman and Wells papers also cited by the CIA in its study of hypnosis in interrogation.<ref name=Brenman/><ref name=Wells/> This indicates the extraordinary depth of research conducted either by Richard Condon, the original novelist, or by the authors of the treatment and script. Remarkably, the premise of the film was that not only did the Communist psychiatrists hypnotize one man among several prisoners to be a conscienceless killer, but they ''also'' induced his fellow prisoners to plant a false story portraying him as a hero, and to repeat monotonously that they found him {{cquote|the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I have ever met in my life}} This although the character involved was in fact cold, spiteful, and misanthropic. But the film also suggests that any such conditioning might unravel under a stress that proves too great for the conditioning to override. In the film, the hypnotized assassin shoots and kills his father-in-law, and then shoots the wife he had married only days before. The simple shock of that loss causes him to remember at least bits and pieces of the truth, though only in strange and frightening dreams. More to the point, his former commanding officer and another surviving ex-prisoner start to remember the truth in ''their'' dreams&mdash;because the enemy psychiatrists had perhaps neglected the conditioning of the survivors, or perhaps simply overestimated the power of their own technique. The former officer is then able to override the conditioning and learn the full particulars. The shortcomings depicted in that film are consistent with the realization that the CIA eventually found themselves unable to develop a reliable technique for interrogation under hypnosis. === The Family Man ===In the more modern motion picture ''[[The Family Man]]'', a young woman pleads with her father, "Promise you won't kidnap me and my brother and plant stuff in our brains?" <ref name=famimdb>''The Family Man'' at the Internet Movie Database. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218967/quotes></ref>