Hostile break-up, sinister reunion: Mesmerism & the Boob
by John-Ivan Palmer
[ strangeness | opinion - march 04 ]
The first "TV" was built in Paris in 1778 by Franz Anton Mesmer. It was all there - the set, the rabbit ears, the broadcast, the reception. Mesmer's TV-like contraption, complete with metal rods for antennas, was called a "bucket." What you watched was inside your own mind.
About the same time in America, Benjamin Franklin figured out how to store electricity (via kite) in a jar. This was the world's first capacitor, indispensable for the operation of TV as we know it today. Electromagnetism (the basis of TV) and animal magnetism (aka hypnosis) were thus born together at the end of the Enlightenment, but quickly split up, only to be reunited a century later as the mega-phenomenon of mass media.
In Mesmer's case people had to touch the bucket's "antennas" to get the effect, in the same way you have to touch TV rabbit ears to get a clear picture. What you got for your cover charge at "Live From Paris" was a buzz called "animal magnetism." Devoid of all context and content, it was pure sensation, like modern TV. And what a show it was.
People who touched the antenna twitched and vibrated and dropped to the floor. They wet their pants and laughed their heads off. They did stupid things because they were mesmerized. Women in skirts rolled around and kicked their legs up in the air. People howled like dogs, made chicken noises, screamed hysterically and coughed up blood. As for himself, Mesmer laughed all the way to the bank.
But all the leg-kicking and skirt-raising and wardrobe malfunctions at these Dionysian cacklefests brought in the censors. The first recorded Code of broadcast standards was created by King Louis XVI through his various investigative commissions into mesmerism. What happens, the Commissioners asked, to "sensitive women" who go into a screaming mesmeric convulsion which terminates in "the sweetest emotion"? Mesmer had many imitators and wasn't it always men who hypnotized women? Should we allow this to happen?
Maybe it was just good old fashioned fun to watch a grown man touch the bucket's antenna, bug out his eyes and hoot like a monkey, but how do you control "the involuntary instinct of imitation?" Like Malayan latah epidemics, or mobs of seething believers, imitation can fission out of control. So the King's Commissioners, acting like the Federal Communications Commission, issued a serious warning: "...the repeated stimulation of the imagination in the production of [mesmerism] may prove harmful... because of the risk of imitation." But even the King of France couldn't pull the plug on mesmerism. Demand wouldn't allow it.
Mesmer's "animal magnetism" and Luigi Galvani's "animal electricity" were not only remarkably similar, but arose at the same time in the same part of the world. This seems like no more a coincidence than the birth of twins at the same time from the same mother. Franklin's "electrical fluid" could be dammed up, directed and stored just like Mesmer's "universal fluid." Franklin stored his fluid in a jar, and Mesmer stored his in a bucket.
But putting it all into one box wouldn't come until later. First there would be The Great Disconnect caused by Count Alessandro Volta, when he separated the electrical from the animal by the invention of the battery. At first it was hard to make the distinction between Mesmer's twitching people and Galvani's twitching frog parts. But when the mysterious electrical fluid could move within a closed system without the intervention of body parts, the distinction became obvious and electromagnetism moved the world into fast forward. Twitching frog legs evolved into the twitching fingers of telegraphy, then wireless telegraphy (radio). The first TV broadcast (of a windmill symbolically pumping the fluid of water) occurred in 1884.
Almost overnight came an explosion of Nipkow Disks, Braun cathode ray tubes, iconoscopes and dissector tubes - all more complicated forms of the bucket and jar - which chopped up, redirected and refined the electrical fluid. By 1922 things had evolved to the point where a 13-year-old Idaho bumpkin named Philo Farnsworth figured out the complete workings of electronic TV. A few years later, barely out of his teens, Farnsworth demonstrated his invention to investors by broadcasting the image of a $ sign. When John Logie Baird, the man with the cash, saw Farnsworth's working model he was described by Farnsworth's wife as "mesmerized." Instead of coughing up blood, Baird coughed up bucks.
Buckets to boob tubes in a millisecond of historic time. The only body parts that twitch now are the thumbs of video game players and channel surfers.
Animal magnetism, on the other hand, languished behind and was ridiculed and discredited and went down the path of pure entertainment of barking dog and clucking chicken fame. Discredit notwithstanding, mesmerism was still a crowd pleaser. What would you rather watch, a live human who thinks he's a monkey, or a fuzzy little image of a moving windmill? Bans, warnings and prohibitions notwithstanding, the japery of "unscientific" stage hypnotism spread around the world. As the electrical bucket brigade expanded to connect everything and everybody, stage hypnotism, with its total annihilation of rational thought, flourished underground, disconnected to everything except the ancient world of magic. The pointed finger of the stage hypnotist was the same finger used by ancient healers in the Temple of Sleep.
So while the 19th century flipped the switch of scientific modernism, hypnosis (as mesmerism came to be called) thrived in a world of its own, but the ties with electricity were still evident. A favorite stunt of 19th century stage hypnotists like Dr Herbert L Flint was the "electrocution test," where a hypnotized subject sat in an ordinary chair and through suggestion alone was jolted into grotesque contortions by imaginary electrical current. When you annihilate rational thought, you can do anything to people. Subjects were set on fire, buried alive, told to hold back the effects of explosive emetics and laxatives. Plates of hot pepper were blown into pried open eyes. Hypnotists took sledge hammers to massive slabs of stone placed on human planks stretched between two chairs, resulting in at least one death. Huge crowds rose to their feet in standing ovations at the sight of several hypnotic subjects sewn together at the lips and ears with carpet thread.
After the two "fluids" of mesmerism and electromagnetism had flowed their separate ways for a hundred years, a great confluence was about to take place. In the early 1920s, radio was already being called "wireless chloroform" by the New York Times. [1] In 1923, stage hypnotist Joseph Dunninger performed the first "long distance hypnotism" by radio on a listener 10 miles away. The subject, in Long Island, was instructed to "look directly into the horn of the radio," reminiscent of Mesmer's focus on his bucket of mojo. Shortly, the radio listener was "staring at the ceiling with unstaring eyes," whereupon he was stretched between two chairs like a human plank, and then jabbed through the arm with a large needle. Like the Frankenstein monster (essentially an electrical phenomenon) the two magnetisms were being crudely, but prophetically, stitched together.
Orson Welles' 1938 Martian invasion broadcast was the first significant departure from a formal trance induction, which was not necessary because the medium itself had become hypnotic. Welles went straight to the suggestions. Hell of a show. Creating the end of the world is a hard act to follow.
But it was followed. "Mass chloroform" was very much in the air by 1941, when hypnotist Howard Klein "appeared" on CBS's Hobby Lobby radio show. Klein, described as "Dr. Mesmer's star successor", restricted his demonstration to subjects in the studio audience, although the electromagnetic signal went out to untold thousands. Klein's subjects ate lemons thinking they were peaches, and swatted imaginary mosquitoes. The audience's laughter reified the suggestions for the broadcast listeners. An astute reporter noted that "many radio listeners might qualify as hypnotized." The same reporter noted ominously that the "aggravated lethargy" of hypnosis could, through electromagnetic signals, hypnotize a large part of the entire US audience in one fell coo [sic]." [2] Such would happen within a decade.
A few years later a hypnotist named Van Loewe went, not just for the studio audience, but everyone who was listening to radio station 6AM in Perth, Australia. There was panic as at least one person failed to awaken.
Hardly into the 1950s, Ormond McGill reached an audience of millions through his hypnotic yuks on Art Linkletter's People Are Funny television show, making fools of volunteers in front of a backdrop for Niblets Mexicorn. Hypnotists were represented in illustrations as having zigzag bolts of electricity coming from their eyes or fingertips, reminiscent of the lightning bolts from which electricity was harvested by Franklin. The same zigzags became the visual clichés featured in print ads depicting waves coming from TV towers. The ghosts of the two antagonists, Franklin and Mesmer, were shaking hands.
Although contemporary hypnotists like Britain's Paul McKenna are sometimes seen on tabloid shows, TV has now preempted the role of the hypnotist altogether. They are no longer crudely sewn together at the lips and ears. They have seamlessly merged. Live, walking-talking stage hypnotists today complain they can't work in night clubs anymore because they are all full of TV's which no one wants to turn off. Stage hypnotist Marshall Sylver, for example, is better known for his manipulative infomercials than for his stage shows (which some people have said play like infomercials). Surpassing the more straightforward "look into my eyes" form of hypnosis, television, radio, and other "fluid" "streaming" media, use ultra-refined techniques of disguised manipulation which now comprise the universal Mesmeric ether. Touching the bucket is as easy as touching the remote.
Once disowned by science, hypnosis has become its chief product. Marshall McLuhan expressed the merge in his famous pun on thought extermination: "the medium is the massage." McLuhan's message, which you never hear any more, has been muted by 500 channels of massage.
Now that animal magnetism and electromagnetism have rejoined, they have become, what the Journal of Abnormal Psychology has said of stage hypnotism itself, "the most powerful social influence phenomenon known to man." [3] The old idea of a universal ether has become the universal media, creating a worldwide hypnotic reality, a reality with no history, no consciousness outside itself. It is pure trance. Or, as TV critic Ron Powers put it in 1990, "The world, croons television, is television."
In the 19th century Dr Hippolyte Bernheim warned that failure to snap out of it was one of the dangers of hypnosis. After the advent of electronic media, the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis published a monograph titled 'Difficulty in dehypnotizing', where the author cited an "assaultive episode" by someone who didn't want to be awakened. [4] In a 1986 study titled Hypnosis Complications, Dr Frank MacHovec enumerated scores of horrendous hypnotic sequelae, like the subject who swallowed her tongue, the man who turned gay overnight, the woman who experienced her hands 20 feet from her body, or the man who developed an obsession for eating raw onions thinking they were apples.
Pierre Bournieu has pointed out that TV communication "is instantaneous because, in a sense, it has not occurred." It's all suggestion, as Welles proved in his 1938 broadcast. You watch in "aggravated lethargy" as a talking oven mitt convinces you to buy a chemical sandwich. You embed yourself in a dangerous guzzler thinking it makes you safe. You watch an entertainment show disguised as news. You vote for whoever pushes your appropriate buttons of sensation. You watch "reality TV," thinking it's reality. You are now the hypnotic subject, twitching to the signals like a pair of amputated frog legs.
Hypnotists don't like subjects who analyse hypnotic procedures. They get thrown off the stage for "fighting it." Therapists can be hardly less diplomatic with patients who "resist." If you refuse to speak (or perform) on-camera, you'll come off as a kind of latter day heretic, flaunting the Holy Writ. And if you throw away a perfectly good TV and live without one at all, at the very least you'll come off as an eccentric.
But you'll be wide awake and out if it.
Notes
1 'Radio to be tried as anaesthetizer', New York Times, July 14, 1923. [Back]
2 'Radio hypnosis', Time Magazine, October 13, 1941. [Back]
3 William Meeker and Theodore Barber, 'Toward an explanation of stage hypnosis', Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol 77, no 1, 1971. [Back]
4 Griffith W Williams, 'Difficulty in dehypnotizing', Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, vol 1, no 1, 1953. [Back]
