Junk Food for Thought is the review column about whatever it’s about.
I’ve recently become obsessed with a British magician named Derren Brown. It’s actually something of a problem—I cannot stop thinking about him.
My continuing fascination with the man began when I stumbled upon a 2019 TED Talk in which he appears to read audience members’ minds through “the dubious art of mentalism.” The whole time, he keeps reiterating the fact that he has no actual psychic abilities, instead insinuating that he’s achieved his apparent clairvoyance by analyzing microexpressions, or something of the sort.
But that explanation didn’t sit right with me; it seemed like just another layer of misdirection. Dumbfounded, I spent a solid half-hour scanning the comments section in vain for a hint at what Brown’s actual method had been.
I was stumped, and immediately wanted to see more. So, I found the official Derren Brown YouTube channel, which posts clips and full episodes of Brown’s various old TV series, as well as recordings of his stage shows.
Ravenously I made my way through his back catalogue, my jaw dropping further and further as I learned more about this larger than life figure and his res gestae.
My first big discovery: Derren Brown is a hypnotist.
With just a dramatic gesture and a few choice words uttered in his mesmerizing English accent, he has the power to actually place someone into a trance and subconsciously influence their behavior.
This may just be my ignorance speaking, but I didn’t realize that hypnotism was a real thing before encountering Brown. I figured it was one of those things that existed only in fiction, like quicksand or photographic memory.
But lo and behold, there was Derren Brown, knocking people unconscious with an incantation of “right the way down, right the way deep, right the way sound asleep,” convincing an average person that he’s actually a ventriloquist dummy and—I kid you not—hypnotizing a poor innocent bloke into assassinating Stephen Fry (the gun wasn’t loaded, but he didn’t know that).
That brings me into my second big discovery: Derren Brown isn’t afraid to take the power of life and death into his own hands.
The Stephen Fry assassination isn’t the only time Brown convinced someone that they’d committed murder. In his Netflix special “The Push,” he gaslit three people into pushing an old man off a roof using only peer pressure.
Once, he even made a woman think that she had died in a car accident using a combination of realistic prosthetics, extensive rehearsal and, again, hypnosis. On another occasion, he forced a man to pilot a passenger jet to safety in order to help him get over his fear of flying.
And, of course, there was the time he played Russian roulette on live TV with a gun that had been loaded by a nervous volunteer. How anyone agreed to do that beats me, but it certainly made for some riveting television.
And then, thinking a little harder about that stunt, I made my third big discovery: Derren Brown shouldn’t be allowed to do any of this!
Sure, he’s pulled off a number of harmless feats, like playing nine expert chess players at once and winning against five of them by using his photographic memory (it is real!) to weaponize their own moves against each other.
But even when taken with a major grain of salt, many of Brown’s tricks seem blatantly unethical. I mean, renting out an abandoned military base and hiring hundreds of actors to convince a man that he’s living through the zombie apocalypse can’t possibly be OK, even if it’s meant to teach him responsibility.
And what about the time he hypnotically coerced a gentleman into lending him £5,000, which he promptly lost at gambling when his plan to calculate the winning roulette number in his head failed spectacularly on live TV?
And hypnosis itself, is that something we should be condoning in the first place? Should anyone, even a hot British magician, be given such power over others’ minds?? And if photographic memory and hypnosis are real, should I start worrying about quicksand???
I really don’t know. All I can say is that Derren Brown is creating entertainment on a whole different level from everyone else. For that, I’m grateful, if a bit terrified.
★★★★★★★☆☆☆
Photo courtesy of Derren Brown
