"Suicide Revealed"

Conspiracies, especially government conspiracies, are a common base topic for documentaries and docuseries. The Netflix original docuseries Wormwood focuses on the top secret 1950’s CIA experimentation of using LSD as a truth-serum during the heat of the cold war. The producers used many film techniques including multiple frames, the grainy quality of old film, and a mix of flashback story scenes and current interview style scenes. But almost most importantly I saw that the show relied quite a bit on long scenes of silence. In a show with prolonged silences, I noticed right away that what was spoken was incredibly important. There were several words that were repeated numerous times, through visuals across the screen, cut-scenes, and in just general dialogue throughout the episode. From the very beginning where a scene including “my father died” was replayed three times and the word “father” flashed across the frame at least three times, I knew there couldn’t be a coincidence. Other highly emphasized phrases were, “massive,” “suicide,” “atrocity,” “accident,” “truth,” “apology,” and “revealed.”
The episode opens with main narrator Eric Olson telling the story of the morning he was told his father was dead. He talks in great length about how much importance his father’s boss placed on the jump or fall being an accident. That sets the repetition for the episode up. We see the words “fall” and “jumped” flash by in newspaper clippings, medical reports, and just handwritten. The amount of emphasis we immediately see with these words already leads us to think that these aren’t necessarily true. Eric also states that that was the only explanation he got for most of his youth. I believe that the minimalistic dialogue paired with repetition for emphasis helps play up the point the documentary is trying to make. The government said nothing but accident, accident, accident for twenty years. Then when they were caught red-handed they said nothing but sorry.
Another often repeated word in this episode is “truth.” When Eric uses it, it is always in the context of wanting to find out the truth. We hear “truth” a few times in the flashbacks also referring to finding out the truth, except through the illegal means of slipping scientist LSD as a test. In the present setting of the episode we see truth as just a battle of the Olson’s trying to find it and the government trying to hide it.
Had we not had these emphasized phrases throughout the episode, a lot of crucial points could have been lost to the other unusual film techniques. The flashback scenes were shot in dark lightening and often unbalanced to show the effects the LSD was having on the scientists’ minds on our actual screen. I could have been completely focused on those visual elements and missed the critical points. I believe it was absolutely important to repeat how hard the CIA, and the whole government, tried to hide the actual truth of what happened to Frank Olson with their own grainy version of the truth.