Derren Brown – Subliminal Video

I’ve been looking forward to it for a week and after having watched it I’m pretty disappointed that I was unaffected.

Derren Brown promised a video that would ‘literally glue you to your seat’ and I was very excited to experience the effects.  We saw a video of people reacting to it during his ‘refinement’ tests then went to the break.  After the break we heard spiel which was heavy on synonyms and emotive language; Brown told us to focus on the feelings that we might experience of being stuck, glued, welded to our seats and surrender to them.  There were also a handful of flashes of black sketches with simple lines on white backgrounds while he was talking both before and after the video.  I wasn’t able to catch all of them properly but one (the first one I think) was of a woman bound to a chair by ropes wrapped around her torso.  My mum said she saw one sideways on of a man sitting in a chair but my dad didn’t notice anything in the flashes.  When the video was eventually cued it was a spiral of black lines on a white background which made me feel a bit dizzy and disorientated, and gave me the feeling of the things around me pressing in on me.  But when the video finished and we were asked to try moving my mum got up fine, then so did my dad and reluctantly I got up, quite spectacularly miffed at not having it work.

I think Brown’s words before the video and the flashes of people in chairs were probably more responsible for causing people to ‘stick’ to their chairs and that the swirling video just consolidated all of that by inducing disorientation and an oppressive feeling.  I did look for something in the video, imagining that I could see a shape in the centre but that may have been more me hoping to see something in it.  It’s hard to tell.

I’m just wondering why it didn’t work.  It’s strange that it didn’t work on me, my mum or my dad as we all noticed different things while we were watching.  Perhaps being able to consciously make out the images and be aware of them while they’re being presented to you makes you more likely to be unaffected but…my dad sort of disproves that theory because he was completely oblivious to the pictures, only noticing them as white flashes.  I think I was the only one who felt a bit dizzy when we watched the actual video too so…we all had different experiences but none of us was affected as we were expecting to be.

Ah well…I guess I’m not as impressionable as my maths teacher always said I was.