Son muchas las películas, ya desde el cine mudo, que han abordado la hipnosis, en ocasiones desde un punto de vista cómico, pero con más frecuencia dándole un toque misterioso, en películas de terror, con crímenes de por medio, en las que algún incauto es manipulado por un experto en hipnosis, que le obliga a cometer robos o asesinatos en estado hipnótico.En esta ocasión quiero presentaron un artículo que nos habla de la hipnosis en el cine y la televisión:
Barrett D. Hypnosis in film and television. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 2006;49(1):13-30.
Barrett analiza el papel de la hipnosis, muchas veces negativo, en 239 películas. Pero no todo es negativo, también hay algunos ejemplos de utilización de la hipnosis de manera correcta, realista y positiva. A continuación reproducimos el artículo completo en su idioma original. Espero que os guste y resulte de vuestro interés.
Abstract
When a hypnotist appears on screen, expect evil. If his induction features 'magnetic' hand passes, he's probably about to compel someone to commit a crime. If he hypnotizes with an intense stare, his intent is likelier seduction-in fact many screen inductions are identical to the eye contact ethologists have labeled "the copulatory gaze." This paper explores to role of hypnosis in more than 230 films in which it has been depicted and categorizes the-mostly negative-stereotypes about it. A handful of exceptions in which hypnosis is positive and/or realistic are examined. The discussion compares this to the role of psychotherapy and dreams in cinema. It discusses why hypnosis is so maligned and whether there is anything practitioners can do to alter the stereotype.
Keywords: Cinema, film, hypnosis, hypnotist, media, movies, television.
Hypnosis in Film and Television
Hypnosis in cinema has a dark and lascivious history. For nearly a century, celluloid mesmerists have swung watches, twirled spiral disks, and transfixed the unsuspecting with their piercing gaze. Maidens surrendered their virtue and good men staggered away, glassy-eyed, to steal and kill-while those of us familiar with real hypnosis convulsed with laughter or indignation. This paper will categorize the panoply of negative stereotypes and note the handful of exceptions. It will explore why hypnosis is so maligned and whether there is anything we as practitioners can do to rehabilitate its theatrical persona. 
Sometimes, instead of requiring murder, the cinematic hypnotist compels his subjects to harm themselves. In Orson Welles' Black Magic (1949), Count Cagliostro learns hypnosis from Mesmer, and then uses it to force his enemies to suicide during the rule of Louis the XIV and Marie Antoinette. In The Hypnotic Eye (..Eye) (Blair, 1947), a stage hypnotist selects attractive young women from the audience, brings them on stage for innocuous antics and then gives them secret suggestions to return home and mutilate themselves. He, in turn, is under the hypnotic control of a once beautiful performer who has suffered disfiguring burns. . . .Eye makes overt what is an implied premise of much of the hypnosis-for-murder genre: the hypnotist is a bitter person who would be ineffectual without this extraordinary skill. ...Eye was the most popular hypnotic film of all time, with the exception of Cabinet.... ...Eye was subtitled or dubbed into 20 languages and the depiction of hypnosis as light entertainment masking dark destruction was disseminated around the world. Hypnosis is also a subplot in much horror and science fiction. It is utilized by villain Fu Manchu in several of films bearing his name in their titles. In the original Bram Stoker novel, Dracula (1897), the only episode of hypnosis is by heroic Doctor von Helsing when he hypnotizes bite-victim Lucy to get her to reveal Dracula's daytime refuge. However, in all but one of the film versions, this scene is omitted and instead, Dracula is the one practicing hypnosis (Browning, 1931 ; Melford, 1931; Hillyer, 1936; Siodmak, 1943). In multiple Flash Gordon films (Stephani, 1936; Beebe & Taylor, 1938,1940), Flash's love. Dale, is hypnotized by the villain. With typical 50s restraint, marriage is always the ultimate nefarious goal. Flash inevitably shows up just in time, carrying Dale from the wedding stiff-as-a-board in one film, limp in another. Two unabashedly sensational spoofs of the genre. Invasion of the Space Preachers (Boyd, 1990) and I was a Zombie for the FBI (Penczner, 1982) featured, respectively, aliens and spies utilizing hypnosis to achieve criminal manipulation of crowds.
The villainous use of hypnosis to commit crimes also shows up in mainstream comedies such as Abbott and Costello films (Barton, 1948, 1949, 1951), and most recently in Woody Allen's Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) in which Allen volunteers for a turbaned stage hypnotist and ends up compelled to commit a series of jewelry thefts.
Inductions in Film
When murder and other asexual malfeasance was the goal, the induction was usually accomplished by 'magnetic passes' of the hypnotist's hands close to the subjects body-much like those Mesmer employed-sometimes elaborated to resemble a puppeteer's control of a marionette. Sleepwalking was the model for the subject-closed or glassy eyes, automaton movements. Caligari . . ., The Bells ( Apfel, 1913; The Bells, 1914; Warde, 1918; Young, 1926) and The Mask of Diijon (Landers, 1946) are all examples of this style of hypnosis.
In the "Svengali" genre where the hypnotist is invariably male and the subject a nubile female, the induction features an intense stare by the hypnotist which is indistinguishable from what Eibl-Eibesfeldt termed the "copulatory gaze." Ethologists have observed that when any two animals, including humans, stare at each other unblinkingly for more than 3 seconds, they are invariably-to quote one behavioral coding system-about to either "fight or f-k." On the silver screen, a third alternative is that one is about to fall into a deep hypnotic trance controlled by the other. Films occasionally employ the primal applications of the stare: in 1940's, westerns cowboys froze and locked eyes just before the shootout and Rudolph Valentino's reputation as the 'Great Lover' was built partly on his trademark smoldering gaxe. More often, however, film reserved unbridled murderous or sexual eye contact-or an ambiguous combination of the two-for the mesmerist.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989) noted that during the copulatory gaze, the pupils dilate. To mimic this for the mesmerist, filmmakers lined their eyes with black pencil. The metaphoric sense of energy radiating from the eyes was concretized with lighting effects. In "Svengali", there is a glow around the eyes of the mesmerist. In animated films, rays emanate from the eyes of the hypnotist while those of the subject spiral or go white. The films also borrow from folk traditions about the "evil eye." The "Hypnotic Eye's" performer holds a glass one on stage and the buftbonish villain in Abbott and Costello's Meet the Murderer hypnotizes the heroine with a pair of pupiled rings. The hypnotic stare has become so much of a cliché that the 1979 comedy "Love at First Bite" featured dueling hypnotists commanding, "Look into my eyes." "No, you look into my eyes. " "No..."
There is usually a verbal induction-shorter than any in real practice but containing components of standard authoritarian ones. Hypnosis is depicted as irresistible and absolute in its power over the subject. The only exceptions come late in the films when a hapless protagonist may leam how to resist and fake hypnosis, or to turn it on the villain. Road to Rio (McLeod, 1947) features one of the odder versions of this resolution. Heroine Dorothy Lamour has been under the life-long hypnotic control of her evil aunt, who wields a pendulum, also a popular hypnosis prop. When Lamour falls in love with Bing Crosby, the aunt hypnotizes her into hating him. His buddy Bob Hope observes this, steals the aunt's pendulum, and uses the same hypnotic induction to get her to leave the aunt and marry him. Significantly, this is the only film in which Hope rather than Crosby got the girl in their "Road to..." series. Several films of the 30's-60's have a young woman ending up with a man she's been hypnotized to desire. This is depicted as an appropriate happy ending as long as it's a likeable protagonist performed the hypnosis himself in Eternally Yours (Garnett, 1939), How to be Very, Very Popular (Johnson, 1955), and The Pirate (Minnelli, 1948) or benefiting from a third party's suggestions in Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Patterson, 1999) and Ein Ausgekochter Junge (Schonfelder, 1931).
Stereotypes in Hypnosis
Even when hypnosis is depicted as having beneficial effects, it is still portrayed as terrifyingly powerful and as many false stereotypes are perpetuated. The Search for Bridey Murphey, (Bernstein, 1956) a book about a real-life suspected reincarnation case was made into a highly successful film of the same name (Langley, 1956). Several fictional versions followed including The Devil Rides Out (Fisher, 1967), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Minnelli, 1970), Audrey Rose (Wise, 1977) and most recently Dead Again (Branagh, 1991). The message is that unsuspecting people may seek hypnosis for entertainment (. . .Murphy) or smoking cessation (. . . Clear Day) and end up reliving dramatic experiences from their earlier incarnations. An absolute postulate of these films is that material recalled under hypnosis is unerringly accurate no matter how farfetched. She Creature (Corman, 1956) took the premise into the realm of the cult classic when a beautiful woman discovered under hypnosis that her past life was as a huge-breastedprehistoric monster and began to revert to this state unpredictably.
A similar age regression occurs in the recent K-Pax (Softley, 2001) when Kevin Spacey is hypnotized to determine why he believes himself to be an alien. Though the film leaves some ambiguity as to the answer, the hypnotic recall of a traumatic event is taken as absolute; the only lingering question is whether trauma caused Spacey to develop a dissociative belief that an alien had taken over his body or whether a helpful extraterrestrial really did intervene. In Purple Storm (Chan, 1999), police hypnotists are able not only to extract real memories from a major terrorists' son, but also to implant elaborate false ones that make him believe he's a police agent working against his father.
In Shallow Hal (Farrelly & Farrelly, 2001), the title character wants to date only physically perfect women until he is stuck on an elevator with self-help guru Tony Robbins. Robbins hypnotizes him with an induction beginning "Demons be gone!" and tells Hal he will now see a woman's' inner beauty manifested concretely. This film-which overtly preaches that one shouldn't judge people by their weight or appearance-serves partially as a vehicle for two hours of fat jokes. Hypnosis is again all powerful. One saving grace is that it does attempt-however perfunctorily and unrealistically-to portray the subjective effects of hypnotic suggestions rather than just the observer's perspective. Hal hallucinates his massively obese girlfriend as looking like Gwyneth Paltrow.
Hypnosis has also been featured in pornographic films-almost always with the theme only implied in Svengali or Flash Gordon: women are compelled to satisfy the hypnotist's every kinky whim. She Did What He Wanted (n.d.). Suggestive Behavior (n.d.), Hypnotic Passions (n.d.), Stripnotized (n.d.), and Hypnotic Hookers 1 and II (n.d.) all follow this formula. This theme has been reversed at least once for masochistic male viewers in Wanda the Sadistic Hypnotist (Corarito, 1969).
Almost every genre has ventured into hypnosis. The children's cat-and-mouse cartoons eventually produced Svengali's Cat (Donnelly, 1946). A Calagari-like clown, Dr. Bozo, attempted evil in a Scoobie-Doo (1982) episode.
Hypnosis and Television
Television has been equally harsh on hypnosis. It's used most often by the villain-of-the-week in crime dramas. Several episodes of Hart to Hart (1979), including the pilot, solved a murder by finding out the apparent perpetrator had been hypnotized. In a sophisticated variation, one Columbo (1975) episode depicts the rumpled detective becoming suspicious when he learns that a suicide took off her watch and shoes before diving off a building; she'd been hypnotized to see a swimming pool in front of her. When the hero's the target, the hypnotically suggested murder is foiled at the last minute. Emma Peel almost kills Steel after being hypnotized in one Avengers episode. A co-ed almost kills Hawaii Five-O's (1968) McGarrett after her psychology professor hypnotizes her to do so.
Television, like film, perpetuates the myth that trance memories are infallible. One Perry Mason (1957) episode depicts hypnotic memory recovery from a witness-performed by the defense attorney live before the court. Under his all-powerful suggestion, she recollects witnessing a murder that clears Mason's client. Hypnosis was also used by comedic villains in shows including Dukes of Hazard (Amateau & Asher, 1979) and Gilligan's Island (Amateau & Arnold, 1964), and has been popular in horror/science fiction shows such as the cult-classic daytime soap opera. Dark Shadows (Curtis, 1966) to the recent X-Files (1993).
Realistic Cinema Hypnosis
Are there any positive or realistic depictions of hypnosis in film? Well, yes-a very few. Mesmer (Spottiswoode, 1994) presented a sympathetic depiction of its protagonist and realistic information about why his method worked and why his theory didn't. The multiple personality films: Three Faces of Eve (Johnson, 1957), Sybil (Petrie, 1976) and numerous obscure spin-offs have included hypnosis scenes in which it is portrayed fairly realistically and positively. In Agnes of GoJ, (Jewison, 1985) Meg Tilly plays a young nun who has apparently given birth to a baby and murdered it. Psychiatrist Jane Fonda hypnotizes her to unlock the series of events which led to this act. All of these films use inductions that are dramatized a bit for the camera and feature atypically neat solutions to unconscious conflicts, but they stay closer to the truth than most.
Probably the best depiction of hypnotherapy is in Equus (Lumet, 1977). Some atypical details are used for visual interest: there is an unusual induction with a rhythmically tapping pen and the patient is asked to act out memories in age-regression. However, the initial explanation of hypnosis by psychiatrist Richard Burton and his patient's subsequent experience of it are remarkably realistic. They elucidate the steps in the young man's formation of delusions about the all-seeing horse-god, "Equus" to explain his blinding a stable full of horses in the middle of the night.
One film which is quite negative about hypnosis, but unusually realistic in what it selects as its dangers is the very dark comedy Storytelling (Solondz, 2001). The neglected youngest son of a dysfunctional middle-class family approaches his father after his favored older brother has been brain-damaged in a football accident. He asks if he can hypnotize him, and his dazed father mutters, "Sure, whatever." The boy begins a crude induction much like what one would find in a pop book on the topic. The highly suggestible and recently traumatized father goes rapidly into a trance. "Storytelling" plays out the fantasies of parental favor and all the ice-cream one can eat more amusingly, but also more realistically than an earlier film with virtually the same plot: No Desert, Dad, until You Mow the Lawn (McCain, 1994).
Even when the depiction of hypnosis is positive, the emphasis is virtually always on it as a means to influence or control another person-depicted from an observer's vantage-not on the altered state of consciousness from the subject's perspective. Omitting the feeble attempt in Shallow Hal (Farrelly & Farrelly, 2001), the one main effort at depicting the subject's experience is the film Stir of Echoes (Koepp, 1999). Though it eventually spirals into a supernatural thriller, there's a realistic early scene in which Kevin Bacon argues about the reality of hypnosis with a lay hypnotherapist and then agrees to try being hypnotized. During the induction, the hypnotist tells Bacon he's in a theater. Viewers see Bacon's imagery-a well lit auditorium with red seats. The hypnotist says, "It is dark" and the lights dim, "The seats are black" and their color changes. When Bacon wakes up amnesic for some of the childhood embarrassments he's relived and the pin the hypnotist has stuck in his hand, his confused discomfort is palpable. The film is unique in its vivid depiction of the subjective experience. When he begins to receive supernatural impressions. Bacon learns that the hypnotist has given him a suggestion to "be more open"; the danger of an ambiguous suggestion is quite realistic even if the specific outcome is preposterous.
One other filmmaker who brought the experience onto the screen was Werner Herzog. Herzog was not concerned with overtly depicting hypnosis, however, but rather with using it to depict other issues. Before each day's filming for Heart of Glass (Herzog, 1976), he hypnotized all but one of the cast members to influence their performances. They move with excruciating slowness, eyes rolled up into their heads, which caused one reviewer to describe it as the "most tedious film ever made with the possible exception of a couple of Andre Tarkovsky's efforts." (anonymous, 1999) Herzog wanted to begin the film with a clip in which he would hypnotize the audience and conclude it with one awakening them from trance. His financial backers vetoed this idea.
Lars von Trier begins a film, alternately circulated under the titles Europa (von Trier, 1991) and Zentropa, with Max Von Sydow's voice giving hypnotic relaxation suggestions and counting. Sydow then tells viewers, "You are in a train in Germany..." and the film story unfolds in a more traditional manner with only occasional voice overs by the hypnotic voice, but ends with wakeup suggestions.
While a few highly susceptibles might go into a trace while viewing Europa/Zentropa, others have been more serious about actually hypnotizing viewers: 1990's Russian television featured hypnotists doing mass hypnosis of viewers. In the early 1970's, an obscure Georgia gubernatorial candidate paid for late night television time to hypnotize viewers and suggest they vote for him.
Conclusions and Implications
It is clear that the main interest of film and television is in hypnosis as absolute control over others. This obviously plays to popular fears and fantasies. Most of us at least occasionally wish for greater influence upon the behavior of others than we can effect with ordinary social skills. We also fear undue control by others. When hypnosis is viewed as this metaphor for ultimate control, the filmmaker-and hence his (or occasionally her) audience-wants to identify with the observer not the subject of this overwhelming phenomena.
Obviously, there is something to the idea: "They're only movies." The film's purpose is to entertain and it's not entirely realistic on any subject. But the distortion and vilification of hypnosis go far beyond that of other psychological phenomena. Dreams have suffered the indignities of the Nightmare on Elm Street series (Craven, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1994). Psychotherapists are occasionally depicted as killing patients, while cross-dressing as in Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1980) or as a prelude to cannibalism Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991). However, these films are offset by numerous others which depict positive aspects of dreaming, such as Dreams (Kurosawa, 1990), or psychotherapy as with Ordinary People (Redford, 1980), and which portray the subjective experiences of each richly (Barrett, 2001, 1991 -2006, Gabbard & Gabbard, 1987, Petric, 1998). There are also films in which a character recounts a dream in passing or a minor scene shows someone talking to their therapist-we never see hypnosis depicted in this understated manner. Hypnosis is always there for its metaphoric possibilities-larger than life and usually up to no good. The most likely cause of this difference is that everyone dreams and-in Hollywood at least-almost everyone is in psychotherapy.
There are two possible routes by which hypnosis in film might be rehabilitated. The first is if hypnosis ever became widespread enough that most every director or screenwriter had used it for smoking cessation or headache relief. If the press regularly ran factual, non-sensational articles about hypnosis, it would likely develop a more realistic presence in film. We already see a hint of this reflected in the fact that hypnosis films in the first half of the 20th century were unrelentingly negative and all examples of positive and/or realistic depictions come from the second half. However, the influence of real life use of hypnosis upon cinema is not the direction in which we are most interested. If hypnosis ever becomes completely recognized for all its potential benefits, we'd probably care little what liberties the cinema takes with it. We're more interested in how realistic depictions of hypnosis might educate viewers and influence real-life attitudes toward hypnosis.
Hollywood's raison d'etre is box office success: the plots of hit movies are recycled endlessly. If there was a successful film in which the protagonist benefited from hypnotherapy or one that depicted the trance state with the appeal meditation regularly receives, more would follow. One good screenplay or adaptable novel would go a long way toward changing stereotypes. Half of all films are based on novels. However, most positive hypnosis films have been based on non-fiction books (Dissociative Identity Disorder case studies, Mesmer biographies, etc) and the remainder on stage plays (Equus, Agnes of God). There's as great a dearth of novels that are hypnosis-friendly as of films. Short of beginning to pen screenplays and fiction, hypnotherapists would do well to emphasize positive hypnosis themes to people involved in these media. Herbert Spiegel served as consultant to the film version of Equus, enhancing the authenticity of the hypnosis which was already moderately realistic in the stage play. We might all do well to take every opportunity to get involved in the popular depictions. In trying to discourage false beliefs about hypnosis-discounting stage hypnosis, past life and alien abduction phenomena-we may, at times, veer too far toward making hypnosis sound boring. Information on actual dramatic developments within the field and descriptions of how enjoyable and fascinating the experience of hypnosis can be may be more effective at combating false images than is relentless debunking.
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Deirdre Barrett
Abstract
When a hypnotist appears on screen, expect evil. If his induction features 'magnetic' hand passes, he's probably about to compel someone to commit a crime. If he hypnotizes with an intense stare, his intent is likelier seduction-in fact many screen inductions are identical to the eye contact ethologists have labeled "the copulatory gaze." This paper explores to role of hypnosis in more than 230 films in which it has been depicted and categorizes the-mostly negative-stereotypes about it. A handful of exceptions in which hypnosis is positive and/or realistic are examined. The discussion compares this to the role of psychotherapy and dreams in cinema. It discusses why hypnosis is so maligned and whether there is anything practitioners can do to alter the stereotype.
Keywords: Cinema, film, hypnosis, hypnotist, media, movies, television.
Hypnosis in Film and Television
Hypnosis in cinema has a dark and lascivious history. For nearly a century, celluloid mesmerists have swung watches, twirled spiral disks, and transfixed the unsuspecting with their piercing gaze. Maidens surrendered their virtue and good men staggered away, glassy-eyed, to steal and kill-while those of us familiar with real hypnosis convulsed with laughter or indignation. This paper will categorize the panoply of negative stereotypes and note the handful of exceptions. It will explore why hypnosis is so maligned and whether there is anything we as practitioners can do to rehabilitate its theatrical persona. George du Maurier's Trilby (1894) has been the most influential prototype for film hypnosis. The novel topped British and American bestseller lists at the advent of cinematography. It describes mesmerist Svengali seducing naive young Trilby while endowing her with an unearthly singing voice. At least eight versions have been filmed-most titled "Svengali" rather than "Trilby" signifying how powerfully the hypnotist captured the popular imagination. These ranged from a 1911 silent melodrama to a 1983 made-for-TV movie with Jodie Foster as Trilby. (Svengali, 1911 ; Kolm & Fleck, 1912 & 1914; Righelli & Grund, 1927; Mayo, 1931; Langley, 1955; Svengali, 1981; Harvey, 1983).
The most successful was the 1931 version with John Barry more in the title role. Numerous films featured similar plots of malevolent males using hypnosis to seduce and control hapless heroines including The Hypnotic Eye (Blair, 1947) and Hipnosis (Martin, 1963). Later films starring Barrymore, such as Rasputin and the Empress (Boleslavsky, 1932) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robertson, 1920), inserted gratuitous hypnosis scenes that were not in the original material because this had become such a quintessential aspect of his film persona.
The second most popular application of hypnosis in film has been to compel innocents-male or female-to commit murder. In the classic silent, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Cabinet..) (Weine, 1919), the title character has a carnival act in which he controls a 'somnambulist' for audiences' amusement. By night, he sends the somnambulist to murder sleeping men and women. At the end of the film, the whole scenario is revealed to be a delusion of a man who expects to be the next victim-Dr. Caligari is actually his psychiatrist. Cabinet... was so successful that Fear in the Night (Shane, 1947), Nightmare (Shane, 1956), Hipnosis (Martin, 1963), and Mask of Dijon (Landers, 1946; Mask . . ., 1993) all featured variants of this plot, usually with the hypnotic murders treated as real. Whirlpool (Preminger, 1949) introduced self-hypnosis when villain Jose Ferrer applied the technique immediately after major surgery, endowing himself with supernatural powers of recovery so that he could leave his bed and commit murder without falling under suspicion.
Sometimes, instead of requiring murder, the cinematic hypnotist compels his subjects to harm themselves. In Orson Welles' Black Magic (1949), Count Cagliostro learns hypnosis from Mesmer, and then uses it to force his enemies to suicide during the rule of Louis the XIV and Marie Antoinette. In The Hypnotic Eye (..Eye) (Blair, 1947), a stage hypnotist selects attractive young women from the audience, brings them on stage for innocuous antics and then gives them secret suggestions to return home and mutilate themselves. He, in turn, is under the hypnotic control of a once beautiful performer who has suffered disfiguring burns. . . .Eye makes overt what is an implied premise of much of the hypnosis-for-murder genre: the hypnotist is a bitter person who would be ineffectual without this extraordinary skill. ...Eye was the most popular hypnotic film of all time, with the exception of Cabinet.... ...Eye was subtitled or dubbed into 20 languages and the depiction of hypnosis as light entertainment masking dark destruction was disseminated around the world. The villainous use of hypnosis to commit crimes also shows up in mainstream comedies such as Abbott and Costello films (Barton, 1948, 1949, 1951), and most recently in Woody Allen's Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) in which Allen volunteers for a turbaned stage hypnotist and ends up compelled to commit a series of jewelry thefts.
Inductions in Film
When murder and other asexual malfeasance was the goal, the induction was usually accomplished by 'magnetic passes' of the hypnotist's hands close to the subjects body-much like those Mesmer employed-sometimes elaborated to resemble a puppeteer's control of a marionette. Sleepwalking was the model for the subject-closed or glassy eyes, automaton movements. Caligari . . ., The Bells ( Apfel, 1913; The Bells, 1914; Warde, 1918; Young, 1926) and The Mask of Diijon (Landers, 1946) are all examples of this style of hypnosis.
In the "Svengali" genre where the hypnotist is invariably male and the subject a nubile female, the induction features an intense stare by the hypnotist which is indistinguishable from what Eibl-Eibesfeldt termed the "copulatory gaze." Ethologists have observed that when any two animals, including humans, stare at each other unblinkingly for more than 3 seconds, they are invariably-to quote one behavioral coding system-about to either "fight or f-k." On the silver screen, a third alternative is that one is about to fall into a deep hypnotic trance controlled by the other. Films occasionally employ the primal applications of the stare: in 1940's, westerns cowboys froze and locked eyes just before the shootout and Rudolph Valentino's reputation as the 'Great Lover' was built partly on his trademark smoldering gaxe. More often, however, film reserved unbridled murderous or sexual eye contact-or an ambiguous combination of the two-for the mesmerist.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989) noted that during the copulatory gaze, the pupils dilate. To mimic this for the mesmerist, filmmakers lined their eyes with black pencil. The metaphoric sense of energy radiating from the eyes was concretized with lighting effects. In "Svengali", there is a glow around the eyes of the mesmerist. In animated films, rays emanate from the eyes of the hypnotist while those of the subject spiral or go white. The films also borrow from folk traditions about the "evil eye." The "Hypnotic Eye's" performer holds a glass one on stage and the buftbonish villain in Abbott and Costello's Meet the Murderer hypnotizes the heroine with a pair of pupiled rings. The hypnotic stare has become so much of a cliché that the 1979 comedy "Love at First Bite" featured dueling hypnotists commanding, "Look into my eyes." "No, you look into my eyes. " "No..."
There is usually a verbal induction-shorter than any in real practice but containing components of standard authoritarian ones. Hypnosis is depicted as irresistible and absolute in its power over the subject. The only exceptions come late in the films when a hapless protagonist may leam how to resist and fake hypnosis, or to turn it on the villain. Road to Rio (McLeod, 1947) features one of the odder versions of this resolution. Heroine Dorothy Lamour has been under the life-long hypnotic control of her evil aunt, who wields a pendulum, also a popular hypnosis prop. When Lamour falls in love with Bing Crosby, the aunt hypnotizes her into hating him. His buddy Bob Hope observes this, steals the aunt's pendulum, and uses the same hypnotic induction to get her to leave the aunt and marry him. Significantly, this is the only film in which Hope rather than Crosby got the girl in their "Road to..." series. Several films of the 30's-60's have a young woman ending up with a man she's been hypnotized to desire. This is depicted as an appropriate happy ending as long as it's a likeable protagonist performed the hypnosis himself in Eternally Yours (Garnett, 1939), How to be Very, Very Popular (Johnson, 1955), and The Pirate (Minnelli, 1948) or benefiting from a third party's suggestions in Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Patterson, 1999) and Ein Ausgekochter Junge (Schonfelder, 1931).
Stereotypes in Hypnosis
Even when hypnosis is depicted as having beneficial effects, it is still portrayed as terrifyingly powerful and as many false stereotypes are perpetuated. The Search for Bridey Murphey, (Bernstein, 1956) a book about a real-life suspected reincarnation case was made into a highly successful film of the same name (Langley, 1956). Several fictional versions followed including The Devil Rides Out (Fisher, 1967), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Minnelli, 1970), Audrey Rose (Wise, 1977) and most recently Dead Again (Branagh, 1991). The message is that unsuspecting people may seek hypnosis for entertainment (. . .Murphy) or smoking cessation (. . . Clear Day) and end up reliving dramatic experiences from their earlier incarnations. An absolute postulate of these films is that material recalled under hypnosis is unerringly accurate no matter how farfetched. She Creature (Corman, 1956) took the premise into the realm of the cult classic when a beautiful woman discovered under hypnosis that her past life was as a huge-breastedprehistoric monster and began to revert to this state unpredictably.
A similar age regression occurs in the recent K-Pax (Softley, 2001) when Kevin Spacey is hypnotized to determine why he believes himself to be an alien. Though the film leaves some ambiguity as to the answer, the hypnotic recall of a traumatic event is taken as absolute; the only lingering question is whether trauma caused Spacey to develop a dissociative belief that an alien had taken over his body or whether a helpful extraterrestrial really did intervene. In Purple Storm (Chan, 1999), police hypnotists are able not only to extract real memories from a major terrorists' son, but also to implant elaborate false ones that make him believe he's a police agent working against his father.
In Shallow Hal (Farrelly & Farrelly, 2001), the title character wants to date only physically perfect women until he is stuck on an elevator with self-help guru Tony Robbins. Robbins hypnotizes him with an induction beginning "Demons be gone!" and tells Hal he will now see a woman's' inner beauty manifested concretely. This film-which overtly preaches that one shouldn't judge people by their weight or appearance-serves partially as a vehicle for two hours of fat jokes. Hypnosis is again all powerful. One saving grace is that it does attempt-however perfunctorily and unrealistically-to portray the subjective effects of hypnotic suggestions rather than just the observer's perspective. Hal hallucinates his massively obese girlfriend as looking like Gwyneth Paltrow.
Hypnosis has also been featured in pornographic films-almost always with the theme only implied in Svengali or Flash Gordon: women are compelled to satisfy the hypnotist's every kinky whim. She Did What He Wanted (n.d.). Suggestive Behavior (n.d.), Hypnotic Passions (n.d.), Stripnotized (n.d.), and Hypnotic Hookers 1 and II (n.d.) all follow this formula. This theme has been reversed at least once for masochistic male viewers in Wanda the Sadistic Hypnotist (Corarito, 1969).
Almost every genre has ventured into hypnosis. The children's cat-and-mouse cartoons eventually produced Svengali's Cat (Donnelly, 1946). A Calagari-like clown, Dr. Bozo, attempted evil in a Scoobie-Doo (1982) episode.
Hypnosis and Television
Television has been equally harsh on hypnosis. It's used most often by the villain-of-the-week in crime dramas. Several episodes of Hart to Hart (1979), including the pilot, solved a murder by finding out the apparent perpetrator had been hypnotized. In a sophisticated variation, one Columbo (1975) episode depicts the rumpled detective becoming suspicious when he learns that a suicide took off her watch and shoes before diving off a building; she'd been hypnotized to see a swimming pool in front of her. When the hero's the target, the hypnotically suggested murder is foiled at the last minute. Emma Peel almost kills Steel after being hypnotized in one Avengers episode. A co-ed almost kills Hawaii Five-O's (1968) McGarrett after her psychology professor hypnotizes her to do so.
Television, like film, perpetuates the myth that trance memories are infallible. One Perry Mason (1957) episode depicts hypnotic memory recovery from a witness-performed by the defense attorney live before the court. Under his all-powerful suggestion, she recollects witnessing a murder that clears Mason's client. Hypnosis was also used by comedic villains in shows including Dukes of Hazard (Amateau & Asher, 1979) and Gilligan's Island (Amateau & Arnold, 1964), and has been popular in horror/science fiction shows such as the cult-classic daytime soap opera. Dark Shadows (Curtis, 1966) to the recent X-Files (1993).
Realistic Cinema Hypnosis
Are there any positive or realistic depictions of hypnosis in film? Well, yes-a very few. Mesmer (Spottiswoode, 1994) presented a sympathetic depiction of its protagonist and realistic information about why his method worked and why his theory didn't. The multiple personality films: Three Faces of Eve (Johnson, 1957), Sybil (Petrie, 1976) and numerous obscure spin-offs have included hypnosis scenes in which it is portrayed fairly realistically and positively. In Agnes of GoJ, (Jewison, 1985) Meg Tilly plays a young nun who has apparently given birth to a baby and murdered it. Psychiatrist Jane Fonda hypnotizes her to unlock the series of events which led to this act. All of these films use inductions that are dramatized a bit for the camera and feature atypically neat solutions to unconscious conflicts, but they stay closer to the truth than most.
Probably the best depiction of hypnotherapy is in Equus (Lumet, 1977). Some atypical details are used for visual interest: there is an unusual induction with a rhythmically tapping pen and the patient is asked to act out memories in age-regression. However, the initial explanation of hypnosis by psychiatrist Richard Burton and his patient's subsequent experience of it are remarkably realistic. They elucidate the steps in the young man's formation of delusions about the all-seeing horse-god, "Equus" to explain his blinding a stable full of horses in the middle of the night.
One film which is quite negative about hypnosis, but unusually realistic in what it selects as its dangers is the very dark comedy Storytelling (Solondz, 2001). The neglected youngest son of a dysfunctional middle-class family approaches his father after his favored older brother has been brain-damaged in a football accident. He asks if he can hypnotize him, and his dazed father mutters, "Sure, whatever." The boy begins a crude induction much like what one would find in a pop book on the topic. The highly suggestible and recently traumatized father goes rapidly into a trance. "Storytelling" plays out the fantasies of parental favor and all the ice-cream one can eat more amusingly, but also more realistically than an earlier film with virtually the same plot: No Desert, Dad, until You Mow the Lawn (McCain, 1994).
Even when the depiction of hypnosis is positive, the emphasis is virtually always on it as a means to influence or control another person-depicted from an observer's vantage-not on the altered state of consciousness from the subject's perspective. Omitting the feeble attempt in Shallow Hal (Farrelly & Farrelly, 2001), the one main effort at depicting the subject's experience is the film Stir of Echoes (Koepp, 1999). Though it eventually spirals into a supernatural thriller, there's a realistic early scene in which Kevin Bacon argues about the reality of hypnosis with a lay hypnotherapist and then agrees to try being hypnotized. During the induction, the hypnotist tells Bacon he's in a theater. Viewers see Bacon's imagery-a well lit auditorium with red seats. The hypnotist says, "It is dark" and the lights dim, "The seats are black" and their color changes. When Bacon wakes up amnesic for some of the childhood embarrassments he's relived and the pin the hypnotist has stuck in his hand, his confused discomfort is palpable. The film is unique in its vivid depiction of the subjective experience. When he begins to receive supernatural impressions. Bacon learns that the hypnotist has given him a suggestion to "be more open"; the danger of an ambiguous suggestion is quite realistic even if the specific outcome is preposterous.
One other filmmaker who brought the experience onto the screen was Werner Herzog. Herzog was not concerned with overtly depicting hypnosis, however, but rather with using it to depict other issues. Before each day's filming for Heart of Glass (Herzog, 1976), he hypnotized all but one of the cast members to influence their performances. They move with excruciating slowness, eyes rolled up into their heads, which caused one reviewer to describe it as the "most tedious film ever made with the possible exception of a couple of Andre Tarkovsky's efforts." (anonymous, 1999) Herzog wanted to begin the film with a clip in which he would hypnotize the audience and conclude it with one awakening them from trance. His financial backers vetoed this idea.
Lars von Trier begins a film, alternately circulated under the titles Europa (von Trier, 1991) and Zentropa, with Max Von Sydow's voice giving hypnotic relaxation suggestions and counting. Sydow then tells viewers, "You are in a train in Germany..." and the film story unfolds in a more traditional manner with only occasional voice overs by the hypnotic voice, but ends with wakeup suggestions.
While a few highly susceptibles might go into a trace while viewing Europa/Zentropa, others have been more serious about actually hypnotizing viewers: 1990's Russian television featured hypnotists doing mass hypnosis of viewers. In the early 1970's, an obscure Georgia gubernatorial candidate paid for late night television time to hypnotize viewers and suggest they vote for him.
Conclusions and Implications
It is clear that the main interest of film and television is in hypnosis as absolute control over others. This obviously plays to popular fears and fantasies. Most of us at least occasionally wish for greater influence upon the behavior of others than we can effect with ordinary social skills. We also fear undue control by others. When hypnosis is viewed as this metaphor for ultimate control, the filmmaker-and hence his (or occasionally her) audience-wants to identify with the observer not the subject of this overwhelming phenomena.
Obviously, there is something to the idea: "They're only movies." The film's purpose is to entertain and it's not entirely realistic on any subject. But the distortion and vilification of hypnosis go far beyond that of other psychological phenomena. Dreams have suffered the indignities of the Nightmare on Elm Street series (Craven, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1994). Psychotherapists are occasionally depicted as killing patients, while cross-dressing as in Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1980) or as a prelude to cannibalism Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991). However, these films are offset by numerous others which depict positive aspects of dreaming, such as Dreams (Kurosawa, 1990), or psychotherapy as with Ordinary People (Redford, 1980), and which portray the subjective experiences of each richly (Barrett, 2001, 1991 -2006, Gabbard & Gabbard, 1987, Petric, 1998). There are also films in which a character recounts a dream in passing or a minor scene shows someone talking to their therapist-we never see hypnosis depicted in this understated manner. Hypnosis is always there for its metaphoric possibilities-larger than life and usually up to no good. The most likely cause of this difference is that everyone dreams and-in Hollywood at least-almost everyone is in psychotherapy.
There are two possible routes by which hypnosis in film might be rehabilitated. The first is if hypnosis ever became widespread enough that most every director or screenwriter had used it for smoking cessation or headache relief. If the press regularly ran factual, non-sensational articles about hypnosis, it would likely develop a more realistic presence in film. We already see a hint of this reflected in the fact that hypnosis films in the first half of the 20th century were unrelentingly negative and all examples of positive and/or realistic depictions come from the second half. However, the influence of real life use of hypnosis upon cinema is not the direction in which we are most interested. If hypnosis ever becomes completely recognized for all its potential benefits, we'd probably care little what liberties the cinema takes with it. We're more interested in how realistic depictions of hypnosis might educate viewers and influence real-life attitudes toward hypnosis.
Hollywood's raison d'etre is box office success: the plots of hit movies are recycled endlessly. If there was a successful film in which the protagonist benefited from hypnotherapy or one that depicted the trance state with the appeal meditation regularly receives, more would follow. One good screenplay or adaptable novel would go a long way toward changing stereotypes. Half of all films are based on novels. However, most positive hypnosis films have been based on non-fiction books (Dissociative Identity Disorder case studies, Mesmer biographies, etc) and the remainder on stage plays (Equus, Agnes of God). There's as great a dearth of novels that are hypnosis-friendly as of films. Short of beginning to pen screenplays and fiction, hypnotherapists would do well to emphasize positive hypnosis themes to people involved in these media. Herbert Spiegel served as consultant to the film version of Equus, enhancing the authenticity of the hypnosis which was already moderately realistic in the stage play. We might all do well to take every opportunity to get involved in the popular depictions. In trying to discourage false beliefs about hypnosis-discounting stage hypnosis, past life and alien abduction phenomena-we may, at times, veer too far toward making hypnosis sound boring. Information on actual dramatic developments within the field and descriptions of how enjoyable and fascinating the experience of hypnosis can be may be more effective at combating false images than is relentless debunking.
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Deirdre Barrett Harvard Medical School
Address all correspondences and reprint requests to:
Deirdre Barrett
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Psychological Association convention. Toronto, Canada, August. 2003.
Copyright American Society of Clinical Hypnosis Jul 2006
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Es cierto que el cine ha abordado la hipnosis en muchas ocasiones pero habitualmente de forma incorrecta, como si una atracción de feria se tratara o como un medio para el mal, para controlar a otros y conseguir que lleven a cabo acciones criminales. Sin embargo, la hipnosis tiene muchos efectos terapéuticos de los que, generalmente, el cine no habla.
ResponderEliminarTienes toda la razón, y esa imagen distorsionada y estereotipada hace que algunos vean la hipnosis con escepticismo.
ResponderEliminar