My investigation into the power of puppetry has taken a wrong turn. Originally fascinated by the ability of a motionless mask or puppet to appear to have a wide range of emotions - probably projected onto the face by the viewer - ended up in an investigation into the possibility that free will and consciousness are illusions. I've been wondering whether humans are actually just puppets, which encouraged me to try to find out who was pulling the strings.
I'm blaming Philip K. Dick. Over Christmas, I indulge in too much television and, in a desperate attempt to escape from endless repeats of The Big Bang Theory and that crap starring the Kardashians, I tuned into Moon. After nearly two hours of spectacular shots of arid landscapes and dialogues on the relative humanity of the clone, I was ready for Blade Runner. Of course, the "puppets" in Ridley Scott's films are automatons who have smuggled themselves into human society, leading to typical Dick discussions on the nature of the soul.
Blade Runner's take on "do androids dream?" inevitably opens up humanity to all manner of robots, with Roy Batty's demise suggestive of redemption (a dove flies into the air, like his soul ascending to heaven): I decided to check out Derren Brown's The Experiments for a counter-balance. Four episodes, which I ought to have watched over a year ago when they were probably still controversial, in which Brown 'demonstrates' that the belief in free will is just an illusion.
It's probably unfair of me to have such a low opinion of Derren Brown - ever since he did that seance, which was too transparent in its trickery, I have regarded him as the Stephen Fry of mentalism. That is to say, he is painfully pompous and replaces celebrity for talent, mistaking the espousal of a belief in natural selection genuine scientific curiosity . In The Experiments, however, he has a good crack at exploring four of the ways that the mind can be manipulated.
In the rather cool advert for the series, Brown has a bunch of people mocked up to look like ventriloquist dummies - I'm sure that I could fake an article on the semiotics of the dummy the next time a company don't return their email interview in time for me to write about them. It emphasises the promise of the series that here is a show ready to challenge lazy assumptions about our ability to make free decisions.
Unfortunately, like in Brown's previous investigations, a serious subject is treated with a show-business insincerity that undermines any possibility of actually fulfilling this potential. The ambition of each episode - it kicks off with an attempt to brainwash a man to assassinate Stephen Fry, although brainwashing Fry into forgetting to sign his next contract for Q.I. would have been a better public service - is so massive that it seems unlikely that Brown could manage it without resorting to TV trickery. The guy who thought he's committed a murder, that one where he predicts the lottery numbers: sure, he could have managed it through his combination of NLP and conjuring tricks. But it is on television, and it would be a lot quicker just to use a stooge.
Even if his goatee makes Brown look like a huckster, I don't really care that he is pretending to skills he doesn't possess. I don't own a TV anyway, and the worst he has ever done to me is waste twenty minutes of my time reading the first chapter of his turgid autobiography. Unfortunately, I don't like the way he presents his cod-reality shows as some kind of scientific investigation. Hoping to find out about guilt, I just watched episode three, which is chiefly memorable for the appearance of yet another one of those science fans, Tim Minchen.
When Brown shouts out that the mind is no so independent as we'd like to think, or that secret programmes can be written into the consciousness without permission or awareness, he is asking the same question that Philip K Dick provokes in Androids: but the format of television itself allows so much potential for deceit that his "experiments" are useless. He's quite entertaining in places and his banter about the ideas is worth a listen though, but my investigation into the way that the human mind imposes worth on two dimensional surfaces that lack depth or integrity obviously has nothing to do with television, does it?
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