Sam Hayes's Blog

And “Derren” Brown is a diabolically mad pseudo-scientist.

I haven’t been on Medium in quite some time, but Derren Brown has brought me back. This is the first review of pretty much anything that I’ve ever written, except on yelp. And as we know, the reviews on Yelp are only ever soaring, or scathing. This is a scathing Derren Brown review, who could use a trip back to kindergarten. It’s not just that he never learned how to spell his name — I’m not sure he ever learned how to be a decent human being.

He calls himself a “psychological illusionist,” which is a fancy term for being a good liar, and enjoying the looks on people’s faces like a magician does, without doing anything magical at all.

His show, THE PUSH, is a reality show that creates an immense facade in hopes of convincing the unwitting participants to literally kill a man. To murder someone — actually. In case you haven’t seen the show I’m trying to be abundently clear on this absurdity: at the end of the show, when 3 out of the 4 subjects each indepently choose to push an innocent man off a roof to his death, they really believe they are murdering him.

And then “Derren” comes out, chipper as fuck, like he’s doing them a favor by revealing that they didn’t really murder the man, because he’s hanging below on a harness. Like it’s all good, they’ve learned a lesson, and they won’t suffer massive psychological damage from the choice they made to murder an innocent man, after being coerced by an elaborate PTSD-inducing scheme created in Derren’s sick mind. Like this is all a video game, and now that these people get to hit a reset button, they’ll forget that they choose to be murderers.

I have a lot of respect for Netflix as a company, and I’m shocked that they put this on the air. But I’m not shocked that people like it so much, because it’s so damn riveting, and at first glance, appears to have some kind of postive moral to offer. And of course, there are important lessons one can learn from it — but at an alarming expense, and one that didn’t need to be paid. These lessons have already been well-learned.

In her article on THE VERGE, Lauren Hudson points out that we’ve learned this experientally throughout the whole history of horrible regimes easing compliant citizens into committing horrible atrocities, and clincally through one of the most controversial scientific experiements ever done:

“In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram recruited male participants from a variety of backgrounds, and had an authority figure instruct them to administer escalating electrical shocks to an unseen person — an actor — as the person screamed in pain and begged to be released. Two-thirds of the participants were willing to administer a potential fatal dose of electricity to the victim, because a man in a white lab coat insisted that they were ‘required’ to do so… The idea that people can do horrific things when coerced to do so by an authority figure — or an elaborately constructed psychological scenario — is not a revelation in the year 2018; it’s a thinly veiled excuse for watching a man get traumatized into committing “murder” on television for entertainment”

And yes, of course the participants gave paid permission for their murder stories to be released, but is it really any shock Derren could convince them to let him ruin their reputations for life, when he had already conviced them to murder an innocent man?

Derren is a master manipuator, just as he claims. He has not just manipulated people into murder, he has manipulated this whole thing from start to finish, from the people who agreed to work with him on this self-serving project, to the people who agreed to air it on Netflix, to the people can’t help but watch this wildly entertaining show, to the people who agreed to let the whole world watch them actually try to murder someone like it’s a game show. He has “pushed” all of us, and only Derren is winning here. Fucking Derren.

I must sound livid to the reader. And I guess I am, but it’s more that I’m so just confidently opposed to Derren and everything he’s about, I am left absolutely unabashed about absolutely trashing him.

If the concept and the outcome for these poor victims isn’t enough, it’s very easy to see through Derren on the screen. The all-too-quaint conclusion of the documentary features him rattling off a breif and insincere sound bite about checking oursleves to make sure we aren’t so compliant, so we don’t end up getting pushed into doing bad things. But during the rest of the documentary, we constantly see Darren grinning with the joy at the prospect of manipulating people into murder. It’s very clear — he’s not rooting for them to do the right thing. And the way he hosts the documentary reminds me of the announcer from The Hunger Games.

That’s essentially what this is, in the end. It’s a psychological slaughter. It’s the colliseum but we’re only killing their dignity. Let’s all get together and watch 4 real people really suffer. Let’s pretend they’ve simply learned a lesson like the audience. There’s a reason The Truman Show was a movie about a fictional reality show, and not an actual reality show instead. Only in The Truman Show, they aren’t trying to make JIM CARREY murder anyone. They’re actually just trying to manipulate him into a perfect life, and that’s already evil. Derren, on the other hand, whose name my computer keeps trying to autocorrect into “Sweden,” has moved much farther south. He’s caused three people to commit murder, and left them to deal with the tragic psychological scars while he calls his work a contribution to psychology. And even more ironically, it’s not the “murderors” who have outed themselves and humanity to be capable of such depravity — it’s Derren. Dazzling Derren.

If you haven’t already ballparked my review rating, I’m going to give this brilliantly crafted show about 97 thumbs down, because Derren Brown has duped us into watching meaningless psychological torture, and we’ve all lost a little bit of innocence because of it. I never thought I’d see a person actaully murder someone, and I hoped I wouldn’t, but in THE PUSH, I saw it three times. Thanks Sweden. How enlightening.

Written by Sam Hayes

And let me leave you with this precious line pulled straight from the Derren section of Derren’s website, on his first decade after university — “He liked to wear a cloak and, with the luxury of hindsight, suspects he was a bit of a dick.”

Pssst…you’re still wearing the cloak Derren.

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From my novel, The Weather Man — the story of a man sent on a roaring pursuit of happiness, because his emotions control the weather.

Grab it on Amazon  — $3 ebooks, $15 paperbacks.

From my novel, The Weather Man — the story of a man sent on a roaring pursuit of happiness, because his emotions control the weather.

Grab it on Amazon  — $3 ebooks, $15 paperbacks.

From my novel, The Weather Man — the story of a man sent on a roaring pursuit of happiness, because his emotions control the weather.

Grab it on Amazon  — $3 ebooks, $15 paperbacks.

From my novel, The Weather Man — the story of a man sent on a roaring pursuit of happiness, because his emotions control the weather.

Grab it on Amazon  — $3 ebooks, $15 paperbacks.