That is a really harsh ‘expose’ that seems to condemn Brown for being a good entertainer. The only contract he has with the audience is to entertain them. He’s not obligated to tell the truth about what he does or how he does it. I don’t know how to address the concept that there’s something wrong with a magician fooling his audience.
I generally agree with you, but the author makes , IMHO, two possibly valid arguments :
1)
I don’t know Channel Four, but if it is indeed bent on science, and mislead the public into believing that mentalism is a real psychology field, it might be an issue. However, it’s an issue with the channel, not the magician.
2)The author implies that Brown uses informations obtained from the audience before the show (having them write down their thoughts before later “divining” them, presumably thanks to the show organizers handing him what was previously written). If true, it’s such a cheap trick that it makes Brown worthless as a magician (or rather, it’s beyond the pale for a magician to use such methods).
Channel 4 makes some great documentaries… And also brought Big Brother to the UK. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great channel but to make out that an entertainment show taints its image is laughable. The author is really pushing it here.
Channel 4 is known for ground- breaking shows of all stripes, including Derren Brown.
OK. I watched on Youtube one of his shows (quite good, varied, and fun, by the way. He’s a great showman). I didn’t expect him to again say at the end of the show that he had influenced a subject into picking a specific word from a specific page of a specific paper, with a short edited movie of the show as “proof” of his successful attempts to influence her.
However, it didn’t seem to me that he was seriously trying to convince the audience that he could really influence people. He didn’t switch from a “show” atttitude to, say, a “conference” attitude. He kept the same tone and manners he used while performing other tricks. He was just pretending to be able to influence people in the same way another will for instance pretend to be able to read your mind and tell what card you choose.
So, I don’t think, at least in this instance, that he’s actually trying to deceive his public anymore than other magicians do. Maybe part of the public fall for this explanation because it’s more believable than being able to make a dove appear out of thin air, but it’s not real deception. He could do much better if his intent was really to make people believe that he’s a “mentalist”. He’s just playing with the ambiguity.
He has made a career out of proving that mentalists are simply conmen – he has never pretended to be anything other than a trickster. He even did a tour of the USA where he demonstrated that mind readers and spiritualists are conning people, by performing the same routines and then showing how he did them.
I think he’s great.
I agree that carbon paper is the likely answer. Brown made a big deal about the envelope being opaque, which would explain it being dark on the inside and also rigid enough to draw on while being held in the air. Presumably he used his thumbnail or a concealed burnishing tool. The kite’s elaborate tail is in the lower right corner where Brown could easily “thumb draw” while holding the paper. Creating much image near the top of the sheet would be a bigger challenge.
As for how he knew what the host drew, well, that paper was not opaque, and the host was sitting in front of a window. Brown could also see the drawing movements.
Brown may have thought it was a kite, but in an act like that it can be more effective to be close but not perfect.
He’s flat out claimed not to use NLP, and nearly everything the claims about subliminal messages is exactly what NLP is. Since the former is not said while in his patter, I tend to believe it.
But even if I discount that, there’s just no reason for this to be a subliminal-message-based trick. Getting something into a closed envelope is a staple of magic. Plus there’s absolutely no reason for him to actually tell you how he did the trick.
Then there’s the added complexity of subliminal influence. As stated, the best case scenario has to have a ton of backups in case the original doesn’t work. Why go to all that trouble, introducing that much risk of failure?
Finally, there’s the simple fact that we saw the entire trick, and yet did you think to draw what he drew? No, you didn’t. If it had been a subliminal mind trick, surely other people would be affected.
One thing I did notice is that he subtly urged the host to draw a ‘simple’ shape a couple of times. I don’t know if influencing the host is part of the trick, though.
It’s not beyond the pale. I don’t know how many magicians use this technique, but certainly it is a common tactic of the phony mentalists who claim to have supernatural powers. But a magician is an entertainer, and they’re entitled to use any means at their disposal to entertain. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of this used as part of the process of drawing the audience into a mindset about what they are seeing. It could also be a ruse to get the audience to believe he was relying on information like that in order to leave them stunned when demonstrating a trick that could not be based on such prior knowledge.
This guy is a class act compared to some big name magicians who do nothing but employ video tricks and look-alikes in their cheesy performances.
I know nothing about Derren Brown, but the idea that all magicians are subtle is a bit naive, I think. I once saw this trick where a magician made an elephant disappear from a parking lot. One thing he did was have 100 people hold hands and encircle the elephant as a way of making the trick more impressive. Yep, all 100 were in on the trick…
I’m cynical enough that I think it is highly likely that the hosts were in on the trick. Anything for ratings.
clearly (not saying this to pick on you - I wouldn’t recognise canal plus over TF1 necessarily, and I spend loadsa time in france)
This clip is from the one show, I’m 99% sure, a crappy program on at 7pm (iirc) on BBC1 where boring things happen to the “delight” of boring hosts. Christine Beakley and Adrian fergethisname used to present it until they were sacked for being too interesting!.
Derren does loads of great programs on C4. This wasn’t one though.
One possibility is that he has several pre-made drawings of different shapes and, after he sees what the subject has drawn, forces the one that’s the closest match.
As others have said, it looks like a simple use of the Swami gimmick, but with carbon paper in the envelope. Neither of the hosts are looking at Brown while the shape is being drawn, and neither is the camera on him. I have no sound here, so don’t know whether he claimed to have his eyes shut while the shape was being drawn, but I could see clearly that a diamond shape was being drawn. Brown also seemed to keep them talking for a few seconds after the shape was drawn, giving him time to copy it. The line on Brown’s drawing did look a bit thick and clear to be carbon paper, though.
I don’t buy the carbon paper. Looking at the kite drawing, the lines are super crisp and dark, and look to have been drawn with a sharpie. I also don’t see him being able to draw a shape that complex on the sly.
I saw Penn and Teller pull this on one of their shows - Penn ran over Teller with a truck, and a pre-batshit Victoria Jackson and a large studio audience swore that it was a normal truck. When it was revealed to be a heavily-modified vehicle for the trick (which would have been obvious from Jackson’s POV) and Jillette asked her about it, she said “I lied”.
As soon as Derren told the One Show presenter about a rectangular envelope I know the “simple shape” would be a diamond or a rectangle. I saw a show in which he asked an advertising agency to design a poster for something. It was a complex design with a lot of different features and he then revealed his design which had stood covered up in the same room since the beginning. The two were almost identical. At the end he tried to show how he manipulated the agency designers. In the taxi on the way to the studio they had their taxi stop at a pedestrian crossing at which someone in fancy dress crossed the road; there were designs in shop windows the designers had to walk past etc. All these things eventually appeared in the poster. Brown claimed he had subliminally planted these ideas in their minds.
Whether or not that is true or he’s simply trying to make himself look more clever than he is I don’t know. I do know someone who worked on his show briefly and one of his tricks is a complete con. But Brown massively impresses me. Watching him beat opponents at ‘rock, paper, scissors’ a gerzillion times in a row shows he is very good at manipulating people.
Yeah, despite what I said earlier, I thought of this also and think it’s likely too. Remember how he repeated a few times that the didn’t expect the host’s drawing to be an exact match.
Are you suggesting that if the camera were on him, then the trick might have been given away? Because if so it seems to me that this would have to be prearranged to make sure the trick wasn’t accidentally given away, which would go back to my idea of people in the studio being in on the trick. If somehow carbon was used, which I think unlikely given the precise drawing of the kite, I do think it would have been easy to see what the host was drawing. I could clearly see a diamond shape being drawn.
I don’t know, but ever since Derren Brown used nothing cleverer than split-screen camera trickery, dressed up with pseudo-mathematical claptrap that was utterly illogical, in his “predict the lottery balls” thing a few years ago, he has gone way down in my estimation. He’s clearly not averse to using techniques that I consider outright cheating, rather than “proper” magic trickery. To me, the test is: when the method is revealed, do you feel admiration for the way it was pulled off, or let down by being cheated? The lottery trick certainly failed in that regard.
One bit of Derren’s instructions
If the host is genuinely playing the game and following instructions, he’ll naturally come up with a shape that is rectangular or diamond shaped. He doesn’t want Derren to look like an idiot, that’s crappy TV, so you play the game rather than try to be a smart-ass.