Derren Brown and Simon Dinsell, “Derren Brown – The Experiments: The Assassin” (2011)
An ingeniously planned experiment in hypnosis and mind control aimed at discovering whether it is possible to direct an ordinary member of the public to kill someone is the focus of this episode in a 4-part series hosted by UK hypnotist and sceptic Derren Brown for the British TV station Channel 4. The direct inspiration for this experiment is the shooting of US Presidential candidate Senator Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after a Democratic Party convention in 1968; as of this time of writing, Sirhan is still alive and serving a life sentence in a Californian prison. Sirhan maintains that he has no memory of killing Kennedy and it is thought by some conspiracy theorists that the Jordanian man had been hypnotised and brainwashed under the CIA’s infamous MK-ULTRA project to carry out a killing. Brown decided to test this idea by designing, planning and carrying out an experiment over several months to mesmerise an ordinary person and direct that person to kill famous British celebrity Stephen Fry. (Darn, you wish it had been Tony Blair instead.)
The actual program itself shows the experiment in progress: the planning and design aspects are not shown. Some of these would have been boring for audiences to watch but it would have been fun to know how and why certain parts of the experiment were designed the way they were and what the scientific / psychological reasoning behind them was. Brown gathers about him an audience of people willing to be hypnotised, though they are not told what they are applying for. Gradually Brown selects a small group of people and through various tests in which he hypnotises them and makes them do things they would never dream of doing, he selects a young marketing executive Chris as his potential assassin. Thereafter, Brown puts Chris through more tests to make sure he is the right person for the job, trains him under hypnosis to shoot with deadly accuracy at a firing range, goes through a training run with the young man at a restaurant and finally takes him to the theatre where Fry is giving a public talk.
The results Brown obtains are quite chilling though enjoyable and riveting entertainment. Clever editing and a fast pace ensure that suspense builds during the episode to the moment where Chris falls into a trance in the theatre when he sees his cue: a woman in a polka-dot dress, an idea copied from the Sirhan / Kennedy assassination incident. Fortunately all turns out well and Fry survives to see another day and meet his would-be assassin. The young man is shocked and embarrassed to see himself in his trance on film, and Brown hypnotises him again to remove the polka-dot and other cues that might set him off again.
The real surprise is the reactions of the people in the theatre when Fry collapses on stage and lies very still: the dominant reaction across the audience is one of shock and nothing else. A few people look towards the back, see the audience up there sitting still (these were security guards who’d been informed in advance of the experiment) and Chris seated with his head bowed, and they settle back in their seats. This is perhaps the most terrifying part of the experiment that Brown missed; this is known as the bystander effect aka the Kitty Genovese phenomenon, in which people don’t respond to an emergency if they observe other people around them acting as if nothing happened. There have been many famous incidents around the world illustrating this phenomenon, the most recent in China in 2011 in which a small girl was hit by a van and then a truck in a crowded street and while she lay injured on the road, pedestrians, bystanders, other drivers and cyclists passed her by. A recyclist rescued her and she was taken to hospital where she died a week later.
What would have been really informative is why Brown chose Chris and what he looked for in the people he selected as potential assassins. Chris isn’t anything out of the ordinary and Brown even shows clips of Chris’s relatives vouching for his good character (and then shows an old film of one of Sirhan’s relatives, taken before Kennedy’s killing, saying that Sirhan wouldn’t hurt the proverbial fly). What did Brown see in Chris and another, equally harmless man Alex, that he didn’t see in the other people? What personality characteristics does Chris have that might make him more susceptible to hypnosis than other people? Contrary to what most people assume about hypnosis victims, some factors that might have predisposed Chris to be amenable to hypnosis include an open and fearless personality, a good imagination, an excellent memory, a strong capacity for concentration, strong physical responses to mental imagery (eg crying at sad scenes in movies) and intelligence; in other words, qualities that might be considered desirable to be an above-average achiever in many areas of life!
A very fun episode that makes you think and wonder, and maybe shudder and thank your lucky stars that Brown is not working for the CIA or any other spooks’ organisation!