Circle of Power, released in 1981 under the alternate titles Mystique, Brainwash, and The Naked Weekend, turned the supposedly respectable world of executive training into a nightmare of coercion and ritualized humiliation. The film’s fictional corporation, Mystique, forces its executives and their wives to attend an “Executive Development Training” weekend at a luxury resort, after requiring them to sign a waiver authorizing the staff to psychologically and physically debase them. Bianca Ray, the company’s white-cane-wielding chief executive, presides over a program in which personal weaknesses become public spectacles: an obese administrator is stripped, paddled, locked in a cage, and force-fed garbage, while an alcoholic executive is sealed inside a coffin and temporarily buried as his wife watches in horror. Another participant is beaten by his colleagues and tied to a cross. The abuse is presented as a path to “breakthrough,” with victims frequently emerging bruised, shaken, and nevertheless grateful to their tormentors.
The film was adapted from The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled, a nonfiction account whose authors insisted in their preface that the events were true. Its premise also echoed contemporary reports of extreme consciousness-raising seminars, including an incident mentioned by Roger Ebert involving a man who died during a seminar. Ebert gave the film three out of four stars but questioned whether a major corporation could realistically get away with such brainwashing; his comment that “art anticipates life” captured the film’s unsettling relationship to real-world self-improvement movements. In the climax, Jack Nilsson appears to accept the program by fighting through the other trainees, only to expose its fraud: he points out that the supposedly transformed participants are still secretly overeating and drinking. Bianca then reveals the final psychological twist—Jack’s resistance itself has been interpreted as proof that he has become a “true leader.” The film won a Dramatic Films Award at the 1982 U.S. Film Festival, later known as Sundance, but its historical importance lies less in Hollywood scandal than in its disturbing suggestion that corporate authority, group pressure, and therapeutic language could disguise organized abuse.
