Wild Mass Guessing/Live-Action TV/Derren Brown

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The real misdirection in The Events is aimed at the audience

(At whom else would it be aimed?)

How To Win The Lottery gave two possible explanations for how the trick was done. The "official" explanation is that a group of people were able to predict random numbers that, when averaged out, gave the correct lottery results; the "unofficial" answer was that Derren personally sabotaged the Lottery draw. The official explanation fails because "the wisdom of crowds" requires some level of accuracy from the participants - in the example of guessing the weight of a cow, everyone had a rough idea of how much a cow weighs, and so the fairly small errors above and below would cancel out when the average was taken. The unofficial answer fails because Derren Brown is not Jack Bauer; nor is he MacGyver.

So we're left with two unsatisfying explanations. But if you look back on the other shows Derren has done, he has had a tendency to give An Aesop about critical thinking. Seance was about how easy it is to fool yourself into thinking you've seen a ghost. Messiah was about not believing things just because they fit your preconceptions. The System had An Aesop about how you shouldn't trust personal experience without looking at the bigger picture.

So finally, the prediction: the remaining Events will each have similarly unsatisfying, vaguely supernatural explanations. This will lead to the final episode, in which the audience is called out for believing the explanations given so far; we see the real way the tricks were performed, and everyone learns An Aesop about not leaving answers unquestioned.

Further Wild Mass Guessing following How To Control The Nation: The misdirection this time was the importance placed on the video. Any weird-looking clip could have been shown in that slot and had the same effect; the important thing was the hype built up around the video planting a suggestion of how to react when you see it. This is why Derren claims it won't work if it's posted on the internet - you need the whole show to get the effect.

  • The effect of Control The Nation is similar to a hypnotist's trick; the blue screen at the end is essentially the hypnotist clicking his fingers. A key mantra of hypnotism is that you can't get the participant to do anything they don't want to; this is not only to assay the fear of people who have watched The Manchurian Candidate too many times, but also because it fundamentally works by making the person receptive and suggestible. Brown does directly state that people acting defiantly aren't going to have the right effect; he also reinforces the positives of those who do. The physical body lock and bearing weight sensations are things that hypnotists employ.

And onto How To Be A Psychic Spy. The classified ads really were placed in various papers, but a much stronger bit of suggestion came right as Derren was telling the audience to think of what to draw while showing a picture of the woman's eyes with a circle reflected in them. The iris, pupil and this circle created a set of concentric circles similar to the picture.

  • And the reference to Stonehenge?
    • Stonehenge is the world's most famous set of stone concentric circles.

Derren Brown knew with absolute certainty that The System would end the way it did

The trick was to demonstrate to the audience that it is impossible to accurately predict the winners of horse races - other than via the elaborate probability exercise he used - and then proceed to do exactly that. But he gave us all the information needed to work out one possible explanation. He tells us, openly, that the process began with 7776 people. We believe him, because at this point he is explaining the trick, and anyone wth a calculator can confirm that this is the number of people required for the number of races predicted. In telling us this, he encourages us to disassociate the final race from the "System". He has, he tells us, no idea who will win. And obviously that much is true, but that doesn't mean the trick is over. Neither the audience nor the subject sees Derren place the bet, which allows him to change it for his surprise ending. What we are led to believe, at this point, is that this is the only bet he is placing. Believing this, of course, goes against everything we have been told up to this point, but we believe it anyway. We don't even consider the possibility that there was more than one "System". If Derren went into the final race with not one but six "lucky winners", then he would be as sure as he was at every previous step that someone would win. The fact that he changed the bet is easily explained; he allocated horses as normal and simply switched them all around to ensure that he would be able to surprise the ultimate winner.

Derren Brown has supernatural powers

Hiding in plain sight, indeed. All his shows are part of his plans to mind control the entire populace. Before you know it, he puts on a mask, and bam.

  • "How to Control the Nation" was a test run.

Derren Brown is the Devil or some type of demon

What has been said to be one of the devil's greatest achievements? And the logo used for his Trick or Treat show is a silhouette of Derren with the usual horns, tail and pitchfork.

He's notorious for deception, Mind Screw and manipulation; recently he essentially immobilised half his audience across the nation.

(Though it should be noted this doesn't make him a Depraved Homosexual -- more a Noble Demon of The Trickster variety lest we fall into Unfortunate Implications territory.)

  • Isn't his being a demon unfortunate enough?

Derren Brown is the Master.

Just look at the guy. He can mess with people's minds to get them to do what he wants, and he even has the beard.

  • WMG is supposed to be used for plausible theories. Not things that are blatantly true.
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