Director Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic opens on Friday, May 12, and goddamn does it look silly as hell. While it’s clearly aiming to be the next Inception, it mostly just traffics in ancient and stupid myths about hypnosis.
The film follows Rourke (Ben Affleck), a cop who is dealing with the trauma of his missing daughter when he is called to the scene of a bank heist. While there, a mysterious man (William Fichtner) begins hypnotizing random people to act strangely in order to facilitate the crime. Eventually, it all ties back to a government conspiracy about creating superpowered mind controllers.
I am a professional certified hypnotist who has been practicing for nearly 20 years, and it goes without saying that all of this is ridiculous. Here are some of the myths worth debunking.
You Can Hypnotize People Against Their Will to Commit Crimes or Act as Your Puppets
Hypnosis is simply a relaxed state of mind that is virtually identical to when you are watching a movie so intensely that you feel like the characters are real people. While you are indeed more suggestible in this state, it doesn’t go far beyond a few parlor tricks. When you see a stage hypnotist make someone act like a dog, the reason they are doing it has nothing to do with mesmeric power. It’s because people who volunteer to go onstage at a show like that are already primed to take part.
Absolute mental control over someone is impossible. Even great historical brainwashers like Charles Manson required months of isolation, domination, and substance use to convince his followers to kill, and even then a fair number of them refused on multiple occasions. That scene in the trailer where the man convinces a woman she’s overheated and she starts shedding her clothes in public? A skilled hypnotist might be able to make a person sweat a bit, but that’s the end of it.
On the other hand, there are plenty of people who convince random strangers to do illegal and stupid things. We call them con men, and they don’t need hypnosis to operate. Just a predatory mindset, an understanding of human psychology, and a greedy, gullible mark.
Hypnosis Can Create an Elaborate World Indistinguishable from the Real One
I describe my work to clients as high-level make believe, and I commonly use mental constructs to help them achieve goals. Mostly, this takes the form of a safe place from memory, and sometimes the illusion is strong enough to make people burst into tears.
That said, it’s just a game of pretend, and it can’t stand rise to the level of fully created world. For one, a hypnotist simply can’t account for the all the random variables to maintain the illusion. I’ve sent so many people to so many peaceful beaches, but if I say the beach is sand when in their mind it’s rocky, I can literally watch the loss of the hypnotic state in their face.
In Hypnotic, entire Matrix-like worlds are created. This involves some psychic powers (essentially magic), but it is still a level of mental domination that is unfeasible. Speaking of…
The Government Developed Mind Control
Yes yes, MK ULTRA was a thing. The U.S. government absolutely experimented with mind-alteration during the Cold War. However, it became clear very early on that no matter how many hallucinogens you gave people, they would not become slaves.
In the end, these programs were more about dosing populations with drugs without their knowledge in hopes of driving them insane so that the technique could be used on enemy territory without the international backlash that would accompany weapons of mass destruction. Some test subjects definitely had their minds shattered by this, but none of them ended up mind controlled.
Turns out the easiest way for government spooks to get their way is through piles of money and a willingness to back violent right wing death squads in foreign countries. Hypnosis plays no part in that. It would be nice if Hollywood stopped perpetuating all this nonsense around hypnosis.
You know what is a pretty good depiction of the practice in a film? Office Space. Go watch that instead.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
