It’s difficult writing about magic tricks when you don’t know the method.
You can talk about the theatrics or the presentation or wow factor but the value of a trick issue outside of the performer and their script and style, you really don’t know much about the mechanics. At best, you can try to infer elements about it from the performances to figure out it’s limitations and features.
So I’m going to say right now: I do not know exactly how or why hypnosis works.
But after seeing a number of hypnotists I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, and what’s going on is not a million miles away from the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance”
Yes, the episode that inspired all those spam emails you get from people claiming to be hackers who have videos of you wanking taken from your webcam and demanding crypto currency to not have them uploaded publicly. None of those are real, just delete them.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, the plot of the episode is that a young guy called Kenny gets hacked by visiting a dodgy porn site and the hackers use his webcam to capture embarrassing footage of him getting off to the contents. Using this they coerce Kenny into doing a few odd jobs. The odd jobs begin with delivering a cake, which turns into intimidating another victim², leading to the pair of them doing an armed bank robbery, and finally Kenny is forced to fight another hacking victim to the death on an internet livestream.
The interesting thing being that at the beginning he is lured into something fun (pornography) and his participation in that is used to shame him into doing something strange but seemingly harmless (delivering a cake) only to find out the cake is a message to another victim, who then pressures him into continuing to the first illegal act, which is then added to Kenny’s list of sins to be revealed if he doesn’t follow further instructions all the way to a murder.
In the end, Kenny’s video is released to the world anyway, ruining his life as the entire sordid affair is revealed¹.
Look Into My Eyes
This might not make much sense as an analogy to hypnosis yet but bear with me.
The average hypnosis show opens with an suggestibility test, usually performed on the entire audience, asking them to hold out their arms and imagine one hand is heavier something similar, to see who is a true believer and willing to join in. This whittles out strong willed people.
The next test is getting the suggestible people on stage to give them induction tests. This typically tests their willingness to play along and be part of the show. Meaning at least at this point in time, they want to be part of the show and this is part of that process.
At this point the ratchet is tightened very slightly. The remaining participants are. Asked to do something silly, like pretend to drive a car or have a shower. Funny scenarios are thrown their way like speed bumps, avoiding a crash, or a sudden drop in water temperature.
The final winnowing happens at this point and only the people who acted silliest are kept – because they have the most to be embarrassed about. This is the point where the real ratchet begins. From this point on the participants are asked to act out increasingly embarrassing scenarios, making them forget things like numbers colours or their names, sing songs, yell embarrassing catchphrases, and flirt with stuffed animals.
When I snap my fingers
You’re probably thinking the same thing I used to think. Why don’t they refuse?
Well when you think about it, each time the hypnotist tells them to sleep, they get to stop doing what they’re doing. In this state however when a new instruction is given, a new trade-off is implied “If you refuse to do the thing, everyone here will know you’re not really under hypnosis, and they’ll know you did all that other stupid stuff willingly. Just do this one other thing, and you will have deniability”.
The only exit point is when they get brought back out through a theatrical uninduction. Uninduction? Outduction? Exduction? Deduction?
Whatever it’s called, until the hypnotist states they’re no longer in control, the participant has to play along.
By the time you realise the cake contains a gun, you’re theirs until they say so³.
You will forget everything
Son at this point I return to my opening statement. It’s very hard to say with absolute certainty that this is what’s happening because like most non-hypnotists (and probably a few hypnotists) I don’t know exactly how hypnosis works. But as Sherlock Holmes once said: “If you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be true.”
I reject outright the notion that people can actually be mind controlled through a 5 minute hand-wavy induction. If that were the case the drug enhanced psychological torture experiments of MK Ultra and Guantanamo bay were a huge waste of money. So either the people being hypnotised are fully on board with looking stupid or they’re being coerced in some less mysterious way.
So how do we know they don’t secretly enjoy it? My evidence for that is the oft stated assertion that drunk people can’t be hypnotised. Why is this? Alcohol frees up inhibitions, surely people would be more willing to do embarrassing stuff when drunk. This also means however that if you cross a line with a drunk person they won’t mind making a scene telling you to fuck off, and revealing that they were just playing along the whole time.
Why is this important? Well, let me take you on a little tangent.
Now You Don’t
The 2013 movie Now You See Me (and it’s 2016 sequel) are interesting culturally, as they are depictions of magic which have had a large impact on the wider public perception of magic. The movies are framed around a number of grand illusions, each of which is explained to the audience with the rhythm of a heist movie.
To be honest it feels like the kind of exposure that would get someone kicked out of the magic circle, which is why I looked to see who was the magic consultant. What I found out was that the first movie had a hypnotism consultant who was later hired as chief magic consultant for the second. That got me thinking about how OP⁴ hypnotism is in both movies but particularly in the first.
Everything the magicians do is meticulously explained, perhaps with a little cgi to enhance the effect but there’s a lot of talk of special inks, flash paper, mirrors, duplicates, wire work, trapdoors and sleight of hand. The hypnotist played by Woody Harrelson, on the other hand can just walk up to a stranger, say “Sleep” and thats it, he has a completely subservient zombie who will do anything and remember nothing.
This, to me is like the movie basically saying “magic is fake but hypnosis is real” and thats bullshit because if it were the case, the plot of Upstream Colour⁵ would be playing out in every city in the world.
It actually kind of upsets me that there are people going through the world believing that this is the case because of the mainstream media portrayal of Hypnotism. Not just because magic doesn’t have anything like the same amount of respect (which it doesn’t but honestly I’m not sure I want it to) but because there are people who have to live their lives thinking that at any moment some dickhead might walk up to them, put them in a coma with a couple of well placed world and wreck their entire fucking life. That’s a fucking horrendous thing to go through life believing. That’s like believing in Freddie Krueger.
This belief in the power of hypnosis and the fear it instils in people, as far as I can see, is the only reason hypnotists can get away with what they do at all.
Shut Up And Dance is pitched as a cautionary tale about surveillance and online safety, and since it was written, laws have been passed about distribution of stolen or secretly obtained graphic imagery of others.
No one has talked about outlawing hypnotism since Now You See Me came out.
Whenever people ask hypnotists whether hypnosis is immoral, hypnotists always say the same thing: “Hypnotism can’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”
This statement gives hypnotists a free pass, seemingly without begetting the followup question of “If they want to do it anyway, what’s the point of the show?”
I think a more nuanced and accurate statement would be, “Hypnotism can’t make you anything you wouldn’t do if properly incentivised.”
You know, like in that Black Mirror episode.
¹ I personally feel like the end of Shut Up And Dance episode ruins the theme throughout. The entire plot to the final minute hinges on the absurdity of this guy (who is an adult but heavily teenage coded; living with his mum, working a minimum wage job, played by a youthful looking actor) destroying his whole life because he doesn’t want his mum or colleagues to know he masturbates, despite it being a thing pretty much everyone does. That would have made an excellent moral to the story, about shedding taboos, but in the last minute we find out that the site he visited was actually full of underage girls, meaning he committed a crime before any of his instructions started. I mention it here for the sake of completion but it doesn’t play into my wider analogy so I buried it in a footnote.
² The second victim is a family man whose only crime at the beginning of the episode is getting catfished while arranging an affair with a young woman. He argues that he has more to lose because his entire family is at stake in the divorce. Ironically Kenny has more to lose because he actually broke the law, but only he knows that.
³ In Shut Up and Dance, the cake iced to intimidate the second victim, was revealed to have a gun hidden in it right after the pair park up outside a bank, and they are told that the only way to avoid this fact being revealed is to balaclava up and get robbing.
Okay technically it’s not a balaclava in the show, its sunglasses and a baseball cap, but balaclava had a better cadence.
⁴ OP is how the kids say Over Powered when talking about the balance of asymmetric ability sets in videogames. Anything declared OP is basically game breakingly powerful, like a weapon which cannot be defeated, ruining the fun for all involved.
⁵ I’m going to admit I didn’t watch Upstream Colour all the way to the end, it made me way too uncomfortable. So that you don’t have to see it, the basic premise is that there’s a drug made by a worm and if you can slip it in someone’s drink they will basically see hear and do whatever you tell them to until it leaves their system, which won’t happen until the next time they eat. Obviously people use this to essentially take everything a person has like in an apparently consensual Pain And Gain⁶ type transaction. Unlike Pain and Gain, Upstream Colour is a horror movie.
⁶ Pain and Gain is a Michael Bay movie about some body builders who kidnap a rich guy and torture him until he signs some documents giving them all his possessions. Unlike Upstream Colour, Pain And Gain is actually a comedy.