I love Derren Brown. Sometimes I love him so much I wish I were a woman so I could turn him and have his babies. But like all loves there are times you can’t stand being in the same room as them and one of you has to sleep on the sofa. Tonight, Derren will be on the sofa. And he may not be invited back into the Master Bedroom for quite some time.
Derren Brown is an odd one. Cast your mind back nearly a decade to his amazing stunts on Mind Control and Trick of the Mind. I never saw Trick or Treatment but am reliably informed it is amongst his best work. His live shows are regarded as magic at their best and I have never heard a bad word about them. Derren Brown has led a skeptical crusade against fraudulent psychics- most notably Joe Power but also psychics in general with his Messiah television show. He has said he finds mediumship ugly, has criticised NLP and stated that Hypnotism is nothing like you see on TV. Derren Brown is considered one of us, despite never publicly acknowledging himself as part of the Skeptical Community or Movement (if such things actually exist) he has none the less become a beacon, a poster boy for critical thinking, exposing the con men and bringing a skeptical approach to millions who may be unaware of skepticism. A British James Randi.
When Derren Brown is good, he’s bloody amazing, but when he’s bad he is cringe worthy. In the past couple of years he has been criticised by skeptics maybe more than he has been praised. There are many skeptics loyal to him who proclaim “it’s all an act”, “he tells you he’s going to lie to you” etc but I fear they miss the point of the criticisms. The Lottery debacle was at the time a low point as far as I and many others were concerned. Don’t get me wrong, the trick was quite effective and even when the explanation came out that split screen was the most likely way it was done, to me he had done nothing wrong. Ultimately the point of magic is what the audience sees. Whether the trick is performed by amazing sleight of hand, year long preparations with some of the worlds leading magical inventors, a complicated and incredible piece of misdirection or using simple camera trickery or a stooge is irrelevant. It is what the audience sees that is important. When David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear the audience watching at home was amazed, many defenders claimed it couldn’t have been a fake set up because there was a live studio audience. Not many people questioned whether the live audience were in on it or not and this was a simple case of closing the curtains and moving the podium round so when the curtains reopened the Statue had “disappeared”. I have no problem with stooges being used in magic. As an audience member I want to be amazed and impressed, and if that can be accomplished by using a stooge or stooges then so be it. It’s clear that during Brown’s “Séance” show he had used a stooge to play the part of the girl being possessed, I could go into a long list of reasons as to why that would be so but the main two points are- if she wasn’t a stooge then she was either genuinely possessed or she was “hypnotised” to act this way but as we shall get on to later this is not how hypnosis works and until recently Brown made that clarification.
So what is all the fuss about? Why are so many people annoyed, angry and worst of all disappointed in Derren Brown and his recent antics? There are two main things that stand out, combined with a small fortune in minor problems. One of the first major blows came during the Lottery reveal, then this was compounded by his most recent adventure “Derren Brown: Hero at 30,000 Feet”. Before we get into these I need to point a few things out. When I’ve criticised Brown before, indeed when anyone does, there seems to be several stock defences his supporters use. It is best to address these before we move on:
1. He tells you from the off that he’s going to lie to you. For the most part this is true, though “Hero…” interestingly lacked his usual reassurance that no stooges where used and it was completely genuine. I accept that Brown is a magician, an entertainer and that he will lie to me. I don’t even need him to say he’s going to lie, I just accept he will. The issue comes when he stages supposedly genuine sections filled with pseudoscientific nonsense, as the magician Penn Gillette said at TAM 8 “Sure there is a disclaimer in the show, but it goes by fast in the show”. But there are times when he doesn’t say it’s a lie or an act and leads you to believe it is genuine. I just accept that almost everything this man says is crap, but the sad fact is others may not.
2. He doesn’t use stooges or camera trickery. This is the problem that links back to the lying bit. People say “Oh well, he said he was going to lie” but then in the next sentence claim “but he doesn’t use stooges or camera tricks”. Why? Because he said so? Of course he uses stooges. But I don’t have a problem with that at all. As I’ve said, it is the illusion that is important not necessarily how it was done. Same goes for camera trickery, it isn’t relevant if the Lottery Prediction used split screen or not, the fact that millions saw him pull the trick off is what is important.
3. “He’s too smart to do that”. Again, linking back to the above two. One defence against Brown allegedly using stooges and camera tricks is he is “too clever to do that”. This is something that confuses me. People seem to have such a high opinion of him that he couldn’t possibly have staged that with a stooge or split screen because “he’s better than that”. Is he? Is he really? The fact that you believe he wouldn’t use camera trickery and stooges because it’s beneath him gives him the freedom to use them. Why do people continue to believe he is smarter than that? Because he tells you he is. He might be, but he doesn’t need to be.
4. Just because a few believe it’s true is irrelevant, some people believe Eastenders is real. Doesn’t matter. This isn’t the case of an individual thinking Dirty Den really did come back from the dead, this is people tuning in because Derren Brown wouldn’t lie to them and when he explains something he’s giving the real explanation. Which is odd because we know he does lie to us. By dressing it up as using psychology and science he is giving it a legitimate veneer, and one that people believe in. They shouldn’t but they do. Is this Brown’s fault? If the show started with an onscreen disclaimer stating “This show is for entertainment purposes only, any claims should be investigated fully before being believed”. I doubt it would damage his reputation, but that disclaimer is better than “I’m going to lie to you” being wrapped up in the middle of a quickly spoken list of how great he is at psychology. I’m sure many psychologists would take umbrage with his apparent “knowledge”.
5. It’s not harming any one, it’s just entertainment. If it was just his magic shows then fine. But he mixes them up with genuine debunkings of charlatans and then fills his programmes with pseudoscientific crap. If it was just entertainment then fine, but he has willingly set himself up as a crusader against the conmen and is inconsistent. Doing a show about debunking the conmen and following it with a show “Hero…” which is full of nonsense from start to finish is misleading. Misdirection is one thing when done as part of a trick but I have to ask in regards to the “Hero…” episode- Where was the trick?
6. You’re just angry because he didn’t reveal the trick. No, not at all. Although I admit I would love to know how he does some of the things he does that is not why people have problems with him. I never expected him to reveal the Lottery Trick, what would have been nice is if the explanation he gave didn’t rely on nonsense.
Ultimately, the issue I have with Brown is that his shows have become lazy, trying too hard to appeal to the masses and most importantly in one breath derided the conmen, in the other spouting the same kind of garbage. He is internally inconsistent as well. In an earlier book (I forget which) he claims that hypnotism is nothing like you see on TV and it’s not possible to do that. Hypnotism is about social conformation, going with the flow and the best people to hypnotise are the ones who wish to be hypnotised. Hypnosis may work great as a relaxation almost mediation like technique. Hypnosis cannot resurface lost memories, past lives and it certainly doesn’t give one the capability to put someone to sleep just by tapping their head. It’s interesting than Brown once said in a magazine article, if memory serves, of Paul McKenna that he would like to chase him around with a wet towel whipping his gouch with a clear dislike for the “hypnotists” methods, yet now he has become a carbon copy, employing the same “sleeeeeeep” hand on head techniques which not only has he criticised but said are not possible- and this in a show without any disclaimer, never mind a rushed one.
Brown has to put on shows the public want to watch, I doubt if he stuck to the debunking he would get much of an audience. He is an entertainer and he admits that. If he just stuck to what he does best there would be no problem. He is one of the world’s best illusionists however he creates the illusion. His live shows and most of his TV specials have been great. His early work is unrivalled but he has now become the new David Blaine. A criticism of Blaine was that he stopped doing what he did best (the amazing street magic) and started performing crazy endurance feats becoming a parody of himself. Many people turned to Brown as a breath of fresh air so it was saddening to read on forums that when a repeat of an early Blaine show was aired after the Lottery “reveal”, many of the posters claimed to have been far more impressed, entertained and mystified by the now joke of a man David Blaine. Derren Brown has become a combination of latter David Blaine feats and Paul McKenna, but just what in his shows has caused this backlash? He is a fantastic showman, there is still mileage in what he does, so why ahs he switched around, attempting to appeal to as many people as possible, in doing so losing a bit of respect and integrity? What is getting under people’s skin? Mainly his endorsement of pseudoscience dressed as fact. We’ll ignore the shambolic “Russian Roulette” and in the second part of the blog look at the two more recent events that have caused anger in the ranks.
