The previous entry I talked about watching season two of FX's Legion on Hulu. I mentioned that in some of the episodes they had these segments where Jon Hamm narrated about some psychological diseases like the sort of short films you might see in school and that wind up getting riffed on by Rifftrax, only these had better production values.
For instance, one talks about the "no-cebo" effect. A placebo is giving some people a sugar pill and telling them it's a real drug and often someone will feel better despite not receiving real medicine. A no-cebo is giving people something fake and telling them something bad will happen. The example in the show a doctor gives a guy a glass of sugar water and tells him repeatedly "This will make you vomit." What happens? As he tries to drink it he starts gagging. They didn't say it but it made me think that this is pretty much what hypnotism is. I swing a watch or flash a quarter or whatever and say, "You are getting sleepy" and even though it shouldn't actually make you sleepy, you think that it will and thus you do.
In another segment Jon Hamm talks about how humans are really the only animals (that we know of) who shape their reality. An example in this is if you teach a kid that red is green and green is red he'll grow up believing that to be true. So then the kid steps out into traffic and is killed because he thought traffic was going to stop because the light was green.
Another segment explained to some extent the "plague" in the first half of the show. In an example a cheerleader's parents are arguing loudly and as a subconscious response she develops a weird tic with her arm moving involuntarily. Then this spreads to all of the other cheerleaders in the squad because seeing someone sick can then make you sick. Like maybe if someone comes into the office with the flu you might think, "Oh shit I'm going to get sick" and then that's what happens. To what extent was it biology and what extent was it psychological? Hurm. The simplistic way to think of it is it's like when someone else yawns and so then you have to yawn. Or maybe just reading the word "yawn" you felt a tremendous urge to yawn. Yawn, yawn, yawn...did it work?
The no-cebo effect especially got me thinking about some recent movie flops and the 2016 election. Movies like Solo, Justice League, and the Fantastic Four reboot failed miserably even though they weren't really that bad of movies. (I've only seen the latter two but I'll give the former benefit of the doubt.) A lot of what I think happened was a sort of no-cebo effect. The first two I mentioned there were stories about changing directors and massive reshoots. Fantastic Four there were stories about how the director and studio butted heads over the movie also resulting in reshoots. In Justice League there was all that crap about digitally removing Henry Cavill's mustache and with Fantastic Four there were people blathering about Kate Mara wearing a wig in the second half.
All three of these movies had all these negative stories running ahead of their release and I think it created a no-cebo effect. People heard all this bad stuff about these movies and thus assumed the movies must be bad, hence they didn't go watch. And as I said I didn't think those movies were THAT bad. I mean people acted like they were the second coming of Plan 9 From Outer Space when really they just weren't as slick as Disney's Marvel movies. I mean if you hadn't heard about Henry Cavill's mustache or Kate Mara's hair would you have really noticed? Probably not.
I think we saw the same thing with the 2016 election. Republicans spent basically 25 years planting bad shit about Hillary Clinton in people's minds. The previous three years up to the election there was all that Benghazi bullshit that amounted to nothing and then there was all that bullshit about "her emails," especially the Comey memo just a couple of weeks before the election.
None of this shit actually amounted to anything, but like with the movies I mentioned I think it poisoned people's minds. They heard negative things about Hillary and thus thought negatively of her, either then voting for Trump, staying home, or voting third party. It didn't help that Hillary is not charismatic or a good speaker like her husband and Obama.
Speaking of, Michelle Obama's mantra of "when they go low, we go high" only helped doom Democrats in 2016. By not mentioning the many, many negative things in Donald Trump's past they did the opposite of the no-cebo effect: they made people think these things must not be important because hardly anyone was talking about them. The racism, the affairs, the divorces, the bankruptcies, the sexual harassment, and all the creepy pervy shit he's said about his daughter could be conveniently forgotten because no one was hammering these home except maybe some people on the Internet who could easily be blocked or the likes of Michael Moore and John Oliver, who people could conveniently not watch.
I actually read an article along similar lines. The guy who wrote it worked for the Democrats running against David Duke in the early 90s in Louisiana. By "going high" and not mentioning Duke's racism and white supremacist ties the first time the Democrat candidate very nearly lost. The second time when they stopped "going high" there were still as many active and latent racist white folks voting for Duke but it motivated more people of other colors to vote.
The guy's conclusion is that Democrats need to be hammering home all the shit Trump has done in his life. And maybe now you can see why. The more negative stories you can put out about someone (only in Trump's case it wouldn't even be "fake news") the more people will associate him with negative feelings. It's like a subtler, less violent version of what they did in A Clockwork Orange to Malcolm McDowell.
If Democrats "go high" again in 2020 they're again going to lose unless maybe there is a recession or something to get latent racists to not vote for Trump. Because like in 2016 if you don't keep hammering this stuff (and now there's a lot more thanks to the Mueller report) people will assume it must not be important and ignore it. Meanwhile Trump will be blathering on about the "best economy ever" (not even close) or an "invasion" of brown people--again demonstrably false.
In his own bumbling way Trump uses the no-cebo effect with his dumb nicknames like "Crooked Hillary" and "Sleepy Joe" and "Crazy Bernie." It doesn't matter whether it's true or not; if he keeps saying these things then people might associate them with that person. It's not facts that matter; it's our perceptions of reality that matter the most.
Another of the segments in Legion mentioned that humans are pattern-seeking animals. This is something we developed to find game and avoid predators when we were cavemen and it's still hard-wired into us. As you can see this entry and probably about 60% of the other entries on this blog are about finding common patterns between shows and movies and books and whatnot. So it's not my fault if it's boring you; I'm just following Nature. So there.
1 comment:
Oh, the "no-cebo" effect is definitely real, and it was definitely used to sink the movies in question. And then you get the opposite where massive hit movies benefit from people hearing virtually nothing but good things about them, even if they're not actually better (or in some cases worse) than the movies that bomb. People are swayed by what they hear because they often can't be bothered to think for themselves.
You're bringing politics into it sort of goes both ways, too. The Democrats did go low, as low as they thought they needed to. The whole 2016 election was an epic of attempted character assassination. The results didn't prove whether or not anyone was right about what they were saying, only that there were voters who got completely fed up with the whole process. Clinton's whole persona during the campaign was getting huffy. if there was a high road anywhere in sight, she was hitchhiking in the opposite direction. I personally wouldn't have voted for Clinton regardless of the things said about her, because she's obviously a crass political opportunist, and I don't see anything about her that makes this worth voting for. By the same token, we just had a Democrat in the White House, and this is not something I'm saying because of the color of the dude's skin (anyone who even tries to suggest that knows nothing at all about me), but those were not particularly stellar years for the country or, selfishly, for me. I voted for change, not for a party. But I also don't particularly like how Democrats seem to instinctively try to make people who don't vote their way sound like atrocious scum. How can you theoretically be the party of the people when you're constantly talking about how terrible people are? It's not even worth pointing out when some elitist Republican candidate trash talks about the poor, because every political candidate comes from the elite. Some of them are just better at masking it than others. It's not worth believing in any politician as a paragon of virtue. So instead, put the obvious phony politics aside and just try to be honest. I can put up with outrageous personalities. I'm an adult, aren't I? I see nutty people all day long. Most people spend their free time actively seeking out outrageous personalities. We're not exactly an era defined by the height of civilization.
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