Derren Brown

I know something you don’t know

I don’t like many performers, so Derren Brown should consider it a privilege that I find him to be one of the most fascinating people alive. He provides TV shows and live performances that combine a number of different skills. To quote his own blurb, he can seemingly predict and control human behaviour. He doesn’t claim to be a mind-reader, instead he describes his craft as a mixture of applied psychology, magic, misdirection and showmanship.

You may have heard of this guy. He famously did a live TV show where he pointed a loaded gun at his head and fired it in Russian Roulette style, having correctly predicted into which chamber his willing assistant had placed the live round. More recently there was a TV show where he took a bunch of impressionable students into an old deserted hospital and appeared to engage in a seance with somebody that had killed themself there. It was all a trick of course, but the pre-show publicity caused outrage and panic.

So, finally he produced a TV show called Messiah. Really, this was just another application of his ‘tricks’ but in a twisted setting. He challenged basic core religious beliefs, and belief systems. He went to America where he is unknown, and he posed as a number of different people with very specific ‘gifts’. In front of religious loonies he fairly instantly ‘converted’ an audience of ‘unbelievers’ (who had answered an advert in a newspaper) into full-on Christians. He convinced some UFO abductees that his own (pretend) abduction experience had left him able to read their minds and he was able to successfully bring very accurate messages from ‘the other side’ during a session pretending he was a spiritualist medium.

What was interesting, and indeed, the thrust of the point he was making, was that at no point did anybody ask if it was a trick. They just blindly accepted his ‘gifts’ as being real. In other words, he really was a highly efficient evangelising Christian, he really was able to communicate with the ‘other side’, he really was able to read minds.

What it does make the sceptical like myself realise is just how damn easy it all is for these nutters to take control of people and make them believe their funny beliefs, whether that be a belief in a god, or a belief in messages from beyond the grave.

In his more conventional TV shows, Derren has done some pretty bizarre things. Most memorably, after saying seemingly random phrases through the PA of a shopping centre for 20 minutes he then gave a command and the crowds instantly lifted their right arms but didn’t know why. Or there was the one where he’d somehow make people forget which station they were getting off from their train journey home. Or ringing random phone boxes and making the person answering just slowly fall asleep. He’d appear to do these things without having met the people before or doing any form of preparation work. Unless I’m missing something, what he disturbingly shows is how easy it actually is to manipulate people to do as you want them to do, without them realising it. If he’s doing it as a ‘sideshow’, what are others doing to our heads to make us think things or buy things?

Overall, there are more questions than answers, and the brilliance of Derren Brown is that somehow he makes me feel extremely uneasy. I know that’s what he wants me to feel, but I don’t know if I just feel uneasy, or if he’s ‘controlled’ me to feel uneasy. And that’s making me feel even more uneasy.