Going Mental

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The first episode of the number one show in America. I said I'd review it, so how was it?

The villain was obvious, the characterisation stereotypical, the love interest that's to come in later episodes was telegraphed, the conflict between characters predictable, the hero smarmy, the settings unbelievable and the resolution hackneyed.

So it was pretty much as expected.

In the opening scenes, a married couple were grieving at the murder of their daughter, but the wife refused to hold the husband's hand. From this our hero deduced (a) that the wife suspected the husband of being the murderer and (b) that she was right because "a wife always knows when her husband's lying to her".

This is bollocks. Husbands successfully lie to their wives all the time, and you might not want to hold your partner's hand at a staged press conference because you're angry and distraught because, oh I don't know, maybe your child's just been murdered.

Bullshit cod psychology, dressed up as almost superhuman perceptiveness. Later our hero deduced that a man had been gay from a brief look at his corpse, and knew his soon-to-be romantic interest's father was a football coach because...everything in her demeanour made it obvious, apparently.

There is however one interesting thing about the show as a cultural barometer. I said earlier that the days of unthinking acceptance of Sylvia Browne and Uri Geller were over - but I think it's more complex than that.

Here in the UK we have a mentalist magician called Derren Brown. He's actually a damn good mentalist, but there's a problem. He could have a good career using just his own skills, but instead he uses stooges and camera tricks to mimic having skills that aren't just the product of astonishingly good training - they're actually impossible.

Things like memorising the positions of thousands of tiny identical objects with a single glance, or making strangers hand over their wallet and keys. He claims never to use stooges, but has been caught several times doing so.

I'm less familiar with the work of David Blaine, but he seems to be similar, though much more theatrical. A similar remark for Chris Angel.

This is a little paradoxical. On the one hand, the existence of anything supernatural is explicitly disavowed, but on the other, the magician's skill is fraudulently portrayed to be of such a high level as to be...virtually supernatural.

It's like saying "There's no such thing as magic, but human potential just as great."

The character of Patrick Jane, the hero of The Mentalist, taps into this zeitgeist of "mundane magic" or "supernatural by proxy". An older example might be Frank Black of the series Millennium.

I don't really mind that shows like CSI and The Mentalist are silly and unoriginal. I watched the various versions CSI quite happily as disposable television, and will probably tune in to The Mentalist next week.

No, the thing which annoys me is the way the fantasy science of CSI, and the fantasy skills of The Mentalist, are implicitly portrayed as real.

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