Posted by Joshua Tyler | Published
America’s college system is in trouble. In accordance with recent research published by the Federal Reserve Bank, going to college no longer gives graduates a chance to get a job. College is out of business, and people are starting to find out. A recent NBC Poll found that the number of Americans who think college is important has dropped from 60% in 2013 to a precipitous decline of 33% by 2025.
In that place comes season 2 of the Netflix series The Man Inside. What started out as a show about old people living in nursing homes has now been turned into a persuasive tool designed to entice people to give their money to colleges, regardless of whether attending them helps the students or not.
If you watched season 2 of The Man Insidewhether you saw it or not, you were being cleansed.
cleaned the screen (adjective) — When something seen on the screen completely changes the way a person thinks or feels, as if his old beliefs have been erased and replaced by what he just saw.
Poisoning the Source Against Good Ideas
The first method used by The Man Inside influencing your brain is called “poisoning the well.” Poisoning the Source it is a form of propaganda that unfairly defames a source by presenting negative information about it, biasing the audience against their arguments or views of the future.
In screenwriting, this is sometimes simply described as “a crazy person telling the truth.” It is used deliberately to make the audience reject valid ideas by making them sound distorted in the way they are presented, or by making the person presenting them seem crazy, or by portraying people who oppose those valid ideas as heroes.
By making the main proponent of an idea that you want to demolish look like a lunatic or a bad person, you can bias the audience against the ideas that person stands for. The audience will not see what is being done to them, and it works very well
So what does that have to do with it The Man Inside? Everything.
How the Man Inside Poisons
Season 2 of The Man Inside revolves around an area called Wheeler College. Like all modern colleges, it is a beautiful palace of marble, elaborate woodwork, and well-maintained, park-like grounds. I guess being surrounded by marbles helps students learn better, somehow?
Whether all those marbles are necessary for learning or not, it doesn’t matter because the workers there don’t really do anything or teach anything of value. They get drunk, laugh at people who build bridges (actually, this really happens), and constantly brag that everything they teach is completely and utterly irrelevant to the outside world.
You might think that these college professors would be the villains of the show, but instead they are played as such The Man Inside compassionate heroes.
Ted Danson plays The Man Inside series lead, an elderly detective named Charles Nieuwendyk. He is hired to infiltrate a college posing as a professor to find out who stole a laptop containing sensitive information. If that laptop falls into the wrong hands, Wheeler College will lose the free money it receives from a billionaire named Vinick, played by Office Space’s Gary Cole.
Vinick, we learn, has a plan to turn the college into a palace of learning. He wants Wheeler to be a leader in real education, a place that will help educate tomorrow’s inventors and send its students out into the world to become tomorrow’s millionaires and millionaires.
That show made Vinick the main villain of the season. The heroic staff of Wheeler College, with Nieuwendyk’s help, are determined to stop him from making their campus a useful resource for its students.
Thinking Past the Sale of College Without a Purpose is Beneficial
In addition to poisoning the source, another method of screen washing used by this show is a marketing and hypnotic technique called “thinking past sales.” In Thinking Beyond Marketingrather than making an argument to bring someone to your point of view, you make them think about the outcome of what you want and skip the decision point.
In The Man Insidewe are shown how beautiful and perfect life can be when College is useless and worthless, we think beyond being sold if that is a good idea. So, we’re shown cute scenes of campus life, endless talks about how college is a family, and we watch college professors get drunk and party and basically never do any work, even when they’re in their fancy offices. College is presented as a paradise, a paradise that only works as long as there is absolutely no work and no one is doing anything or learning anything of value.
Watching the audience stray from their plans is Vinick, who is always around to point out and wonder why no one is reading anything. He does that while being a big, cartoonish jerk, to make sure he continues to conflate his views on education that need to be useful as completely and utterly evil.
Leading the Audience in Looking Unprofessional by Example
By the end of the season, Nieuwendyk’s daughter had given up the successful job she used to support her grandchildren to join the wonderful world of taxpayer-funded lifelong learners and lazy college professors. I think her husband will have to take an extra shift to drink coffee by the quad fountain. Meanwhile, Vinick has been pushed back into the negative realm of people who want students to succeed.
Although The Man Inside the making of Poisoning the Source again Thinking Beyond Selling strategies that may seem difficult and ineffective, have often worked as propaganda tools in the past. Check out this test on how The Stepford Wives he examined the world into poverty, back in the 1970s, as another example.
How Netflix Turned The Script Into Reality
The Man Inside the screen wash function effectively turns text into reality. In the real United States of 2025, parents are taking out second mortgages, and teenagers are sinking into six-figure degrees of debt that prompt the question, “Do you want fries with that?”
Currently, Netflix It’s eight hours of richly produced, subtle messages, where the only sin worse than being useless is the sin of usability itself. The show’s message is: if you’re questioning the value of college, you’re not wrong; he is a heartless monster, who loves money and hates family, society, and fountain-side coffee conversations.
Congratulations, future unemployed college graduates, you’ve been cleared.
