Jesse Carey

But you have to make it through the zone.

But in the film, you know, troops are like guarding the edge of the zone.

It's very dangerous.

And you have to hire these guys called stalkers.

to kind of sneak you in there and you have to try.

But anyway, in the zone, reality breaks down.

So if you drop a pencil, maybe it'll float, maybe it'll fall, right?

Like anything, you know, it's very true.

So like, I don't know, you guys, David Lynch fans, it's like very Lynchian imagery in the film.

Well, Surkov got really fascinated with this idea of the zone, right?

like what if you can make people question what is real and what is not and how the world operates and he decided to apply that idea to propaganda of course and so he decided so like at one point there was these different uh groups that um i'm trying to remember the details at the time but they were basically came from opposing sides of like the political and social spectrum

And what he did was, as a member of the Kremlin, he started secretly funding all of them, right?

Then he leaked information that the Kremlin was funding these different groups.

And so all of them started pointing at the other one.

They were like, can you believe it?

They're being funded by the Kremlin.

They're...

So all of a sudden, everyone's right, but no one believes each other.

And so he created, like, this zone of confusion intentionally that it didn't look bad for the Kremlin, it turned all of them against each other because no one trusted each other anymore.

And so he was sort of, he, that was his philosophy of, like, old school Soviet propagandas, like the Shepard Fairey Obey posters, you know, like, really clear, this is what we want you to think, right?