Derren Brown and Simon Dinsell, “Derren Brown – Apocalypse (Part 1)” (2012)
A cleverly staged if at times daft and rather too cinematic experiment in which UK hypnotist and sceptic Derren Brown convinces a young man called Steven that planet Earth has been devastated by a meteor strike which has brought a mysterious and lethal virus that kills off nearly everyone save a few and Steven is one of the lucky ones who survived – or maybe one of the unlucky ones who survived. Steven soon discovers that many people infected with the virus have turned into – aargghh!!! – vicious, flesh-eating zombies and comes to realise that if he is to avoid being infected, he must summon up all the courage and inner resources he never thought he had just to survive.
Actually the experiment has an ulterior but ultimately benevolent aim: it’s to encourage Steven to change his attitude towards life and the people around him, to prod him into taking charge of his life and make something of himself. Whereas in his previous “The Experiments” series, Brown had said very little about the subjects of the experiments and why he chose them, for “Apocalypse” he goes into considerable detail about why he chose Steven: Steven is revealed as a feckless lad who as the youngest child in his family has been indulged and is quite immature for his age; he lacks motivation and drive, has trouble holding down jobs and handling responsibility, and spends his free time as a couch potato or down at the pub drinking with his mates. His parents are at their wits’ end trying to get him to take control of his life and the entire family agrees to participate in Brown’s grand and complicated plan once the hypnotist has selected Steven as his patsy. During the auditions in which Brown comes across Steven, everyone has undergone psychological testing and the tests have determined that Steven is psychologically robust but quite suggestible.
The prequel to the experiment proper takes six weeks to unfold and in itself involves elaborate preparations to trick Steven into believing that the meteor strike is imminent and to ensure that he receives no other news that conflicts with the fake information Brown feeds him. Steven’s brother hacks into his mobile phone so that Brown can place fake news stories about the meteor strike into the news apps. Brown even arranges with the radio station in Steven’s town to plant fake news stories. The family TV set is adjusted so that it receives planted information. Steven’s favourite TV programs and websites include information about the meteors. As time goes by, the electronic appliances in the family home experience interference which people attribute to the imminent arrival of the interstellar rocks. Brown even feeds fake information to the neighbourhood mechanic who fixes Steven’s van!
At last the day when the meteors are due to strike arrives and Steven and his brother take a coach trip to a secret gig by their favourite band in a faraway secret destination. Of course the whole gig is a set-up and the coach driver and passengers are all actors. The coach travels to a disused industrial site during the evening and suddenly fireballs fall out of the sky. Steven looks out the windows and sees upturned cars, fires on the ground and injured people lying in the coach’s path. He blacks out (actually, one of the coach passengers who turns out to be Brown puts him into a hypnotic trance) and wakes up several hours later in an apparently abandoned hospital. A news announcement on an overhead TV set tells him what he needs to know: that Britain has been hit by meteors which have unleashed a virus that has wiped out most of the country’s population and turned most survivors into zombies. Sure enough, Steven encounters a number of these unfortunates but he and a little girl he befriends escape with the help of a paramedic and the trio hide out in a compound. Steven is forced to contemplate on what his life has been so far.
The experiment looks quite straightforward and Brown appears to be in total control but it has been edited quite heavily to give that appearance and probably in reality Brown and his crew had to go to enormous lengths to ensure Steven did not hear, see or otherwise find any news that contradicted what Brown was feeding him. The fact that over time Steven appears to accept what he is told without question might suggest that humans are highly suggestible and don’t spend much time challenging their own beliefs or going out of their way to test their beliefs and ideas. It seems that the majority of us really do rely on a very narrow range of media for news and information to help us navigate our way through life and with others, and the range of media we do depend on tends to cater to our beliefs and values. Rarely do people investigate media whose views, values and ways of interpreting events and information differ greatly from our own. A person who believes that certain groups of people are inferior in intelligence and culture to his/her own group will seek out information sources whose expressed opinions and mindsets closely match his/her own and confirm his/her view that there is a hierarchy of ethnic groups and human races. This is something that Brown might explore in more depth in a future series. However, due to the edited nature of the program, it’s hard to say whether Steven merely swallowed what Brown fed him without questioning it or tried to find information that contradicted the familiar sources he relied on.
It’s hard to believe that Steven swallows the post-apocalypse scenario lock, stock and barrel, and one wonders if he’s ever seen the Danny Boyle film “28 Days Later” in which a young man wakes up in a hospital and gradually learns that Britain has been hit by an aggressive virus that turns its human victims into mindless, aggressive zombies who infect other humans with the virus by biting them and turn them into zombies too. If he had seen the film, he ought to have realised that maybe there is something strongly smelling of fish about his situation, especially when he sees the zombies running out of the hospital after him and the little girl. Certainly the experiment could have been rather more original and less Hollywood in its staging, right down to the little girl Leona he befriends and must look after.
The episode is quite a laugh and I imagine it was very surreal for Steven who spends a good proportion of his screen time looking like a poor stunned bunny caught in an oncoming semi-trailer’s bright headlights before its forced flight into Carrot Heaven. The film looks impressive with its elaborate preparations and their seemingly smooth scheduling. No hitches appear. I imagine the reality was very different with people working overtime and Brown tearing his hair out to make sure Steven stuck to the prescribed straight and narrow path.
One soberly considers that it would not be much of a stretch for governments, corporations and their agencies and proxies to drip-feed false information and news stories into our media to influence, shape and direct people’s views and mental paradigms about the world around in order to direct popular emotion into supporting policies and ideologies that actually work against the general public’s interest and which divide people into warring factions based on differences in ethnicity, social class, religion, marital status, work status, whatever, so as to keep the population weak and easily controlled. If there is a serious lesson to take away from this documentary and experiment, this would be it.