Derren Brown: Archive
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From: Rob Dobson
Date: Fri Jan 10, 2003 3:24pm
Subject: Re: [Derren Brown] Re: Photoreading
Sorry if it sounded stroppy. The 'fine, I'm sure...'
was supposed to be sarcastic. It was a bad morning...
I think in the context of what he's talking about in
the video, (and I'm quoting from memory again..), he
seems to be talking about putting mentalism into an
understandable context. This is again the theme for
his second book, that is, putting magic (as a broad
umbrella term for mentalism ,card effects, etc) into a
context that isn't patronising to the spectator.
I realise this isn't a magic board (which surprised me
at first I must confess), but bear with me a second.
A lot of magicians present their effects as if they
have some form of supernatural power. For example, the
coin vanishes due to my amazing supernatural powers.
Now any intelligent spectator knows that this is not
the case, that actually there is some sleight of hand
going on; in other words, that its a trick.
Mentalism suffers from the same problem. In general
mentalism demonstrations, there is nothing magical
happening. For example, imagine that mentalism was a
real skill, a genuine ability latent within us all.
There would then be nothing magical about mindreading;
it would just be the demonstration of an innate
natural skill. Yeah, you can read my mind. So what?
So take the normal demonstration of a book test. A
person picks a book, that person picks a page and a
line, concentrates on a word, and the performer,
(after holding his hand to his head and closing his
eyes), announces the word. So far, so tedious. After
all, this man supposedly can read minds, so whats so
good about that? Why did the spectator have to use a
book to choose a word, why not just think of a word?
It doesn't really make any sense in the real world,
and spectators have difficulty relating to it. THey
don't believe in the mindreaders supposed ability,
there must be a trick to it. To a reasonably
intelligent audience member, its insulting to their
intelligence.
Now if you were to take that effect and give to the
audience a way in which they can see it might be done,
a genuinely skillful way, then the effect changes.
You're demonstrating a particular skill in
photoreading, a particular skill which has no doubt
either taken you years to develop or you were born
with an amazing memory. The method could be exactly
the same, and yet the audience can see, or at least
think they can see, the process. The effect the
changes completely in their eyes.
The same applies to the lifting effect, the
advertising execs effect, the gamblers effect in
MC1,etc. All traditional 'magic' effects, but
presented in a way in which the audience believes that
they can see what is happening; making the magic more
'real' in the audiences eyes.
Another example to make my point a bit more: say I do
a card effect where I deal myself 4 aces, or whatever.
I could present that as the magical transformation of
the cards into whatever I wanted them to be, however
that would never be believable to anyone with an ounce
of common sense. I could instead present it as my
amazing skill with cards, from when I was 3 sitting at
my fathers knee in the back rooms of gambling dens
across the world, watching and learning from the
gamblers and cheats, to the point where I had such
uncanny skill with cards that I'd been banned from all
casinos. The same effect, but the second presentation
has so much more to offer to the audience. They can
believe my supposed explanation about what I'm doing,
and it makes the effect more real.
Having re-read through that I realise it was probably
more suited to a magic discussion board, so apologies
if it was tedious to anyone. I hope not. As a
magician, rather than hypnotist, hypnotherapist,
NLP'er, etc, I look at these effects perhaps slightly
differently, but I am learning a lot from those of you
in these fields, and thank you all for that.
Rob
p.s. Now that isn't to say that there are no effects
in these programmes that aren't genuinely
psychologically based in method. There definitely are,
and as you rightly say, he is exceptionally skilled in
this.
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| Replies | Author | Yahoo! ID | Date | Size |
| 2355: Re: Photoreading | Blue Chip | cs_bluechip | Mon 13/01/2003 | 8 KB |
