I've always felt a great ambivalance for Derren Brown: I've watched everything he's ever done, but always with a strange mixture of admiration and cringing discomfort, due to the exploitative nature of his work, and how much further he crosses the line in manipulating his 'victims' lives and minds than other stage magicians.
Then there's the interjection of his own beliefs and opinions about the world into his act, such as his shows about faith healers and mediums, which it's hard to divorce from his strongly held atheism. In that instance, I think most people would forgive him, since outing charlatans can never really be that bad, can it? Doesn't everyone benefit from that?
But this one pushes the line even further, through being so explicitly political, specifically pushing a Democrat/'liberal' open borders party line over immigration.
Now, concerns about mass immigration - and especially illegal immigration, as in this instance - are widespread all over the western world today, are strongly affecting the outcome of all elections, and are probably shared by going on half the population. So to depict anyone sharing those concerns as simply a racist white nationalist is arrogant, crass and condescending, but that is what Brown does throughout, with nary a flicker of self-doubt.
What is most insulting is the depiction of anyone not sharing his own political beliefs as someone needing 'curing' of their wrongthink, pathologizing the opposing political viewpoint and then openly manipulating a person's mind to change them into line with how he would choose them to vote.
I found the ease with which Brown would be happy to manipulate the political opinions of another human being, in another country, to be actually quite chilling.
The whole thing was way, way too partisan and preachy. If you don't think so, try imagine him making a show about hypnotizing a Guardian/HuffPo reader into seeing how catastrophic unchecked mass immigration is, and how they need to do something drastic about it RIGHT NOW. And, having come to that conclusion, that's the happy ending.
Well, maybe that will be Derren's *next* show.
On top of that, as other reviewers have already pointed out, it really feels as though he's about run out of ideas, and so is only focusing on finding new ways to dress up old tricks we've seen so many times before in new and headline-grabbing ways.
For all of this, it's still done very well, and as usual with Brown, it feels on a much more lofty level to anything else one could try to put forward as 'competition'. So it's still 'entertaining', I guess, but very troubling, too.
