Influence: The Bombardment Principle
/Influence took off as a presentational premise over 20 years ago when David Copperfield influenced that Tornado of Fire not to burn him.
Okay, that’s probably not completely accurate. It’s more likely that the influence premise really took hold with Derren Brown, perhaps most notably in these two performances…
The fun thing about both of those performances is that there is, of course, no actual influence being used here. I crossed out “of course” because, despite the fact that these tricks are 100% reliable and work in a purely mechanical fashion, there were plenty of magicians, maybe a majority, that thought these were genuine demonstrations of influence/mind control. That was always crazy to me. You study magic. You should know better. You think you can make someone think they wanted a BMX bike by putting some bicycle imagery in the room and using some sound-alike words? That’s how you think the human mind works? Do you go to the dentist and subconsciously absorb all the dental imagery on the walls and think, “You know what I want for Christmas? A molar!”
While these performances aren’t good examples of actual influence, they are good examples of how to present an influence-based effect.
If you’re going to go with a premise that is strictly “You were influenced to do X,” then the influence needs to appear substantial. It should come off as if you were bombarding them with influence from every direction.
The reveal of how they were influenced is where the enjoyment of this type of effect lies.
Imagine a mystery novel where the detective said at the end, “And I know the killer was the butler because… we found his fingerprints on the knife.”
That wouldn’t be a good story because, with a mystery, you want to see a bunch of pieces come together. You don’t just want one thing to explain the whole story.
Think of influence reveals like that. They should have multiple parts that come together. Not just one “thing” that supposedly influenced the person.
You can see this in action on a smaller scale in the trick I wrote up in this post way back in 2015.
I had Sebastian Calbry’s effect Offset (which looks to be unavailable now), which allows you to make ink appear on a card box. Done openly (which is not how you do it), it looks like this…
My idea was to use a type of dual reality on one person by filming the trick with a cell phone. You can read all the details in that post. Essentially the trick is that my friend “sees” a word that was never actually written down (according to the video record of the effect). And then I reveal that she was “influenced” to see that word by about 8 different types of cues from our interactions going back a week that were designed to embed that word in her head.
Last Wednesday, I said that standard “influence” effect leads to one of two conclusions for the spectator:
What I just experienced happened because I am particularly easy to influence.
OR
What I just experienced happened because humans are easy to influence. This works on everyone.
By bombarding them with influence cues, you create a new interpretation for them:
“If someone goes to a lot of trouble they can invisibly implant a thought or action in my mind.”
That’s a much more enjoyable story than one where they were influenced by some simple cue that they saw or heard briefly.
It’s more enjoyable because the subtext of that story from the spectator’s perspective is: I’m someone who’s worth going to a lot of trouble for in order to create a unique experience.
This is a way to make someone feel good with an influence effect. Rather than just making them feel like they’re completely impressionable and lack control over their thoughts and actions.
In fact, when I do an effect with an influence reveal, I make a point to tell them that I had to go to all these lengths to make this work. I’ll say something like, “I tried something similar with you about 6 months ago but I couldn’t get it to work at all. You’re so strong-willed I knew if I was going to try it again I had to really overwhelm you with subtle cues if I was going to be able to affect your thoughts in some way.”
Are all my friends really strong-willed? Not necessarily. But people like to feel they are, so why not reinforce that?
The Bombardment Principle with influence effects is simply that there is a direct relationship between the number of hidden cues you can reveal (within reason) and a spectator’s enjoyment and willingness to embrace being “influenced.”
I like to have at least half a dozen things I can point to as being part of the process. That way the reveal has a real feeling of one thing after another—it’s like a barrage of punches to the gut.
I would say you want your reveals to build in “obviousness.” There is a temptation to reveal them in order of how clever they are. But I’ve had better luck with revealing the subtle cues first and building to the most obvious ones.
If I can’t bombard them with cues for an influence-based effect, then I will reframe that premise. I’ll discuss three of those reframes in future posts over the next couple of weeks.