Rhetoric of The Barnum Effect

The Barnum Effect is well illustrated in a monologue delivered by Jane Russell in the 1952 film, Macao.

The beautiful young woman looked deep into my eyes and told me that I had overcome many obstacles, that I worked hard but had trouble in my life and that I felt like no one understood me but that things would soon be looking up for me.  I looked at her lovely face with its clear olive skin and dark eyes.  She was right about the past.  Would she be right about the future as well?  I looked at the cards she'd laid out and saw the Ace of Wands, The Tower, the Daughter of Discs.

"What do the cards themselves say?" I asked.

"Oh, but I don't look closely at the cards.  It isn't my way.  I tell a story.  I see a story in the cards.  Is that alright?"  And then she told me again about how no one understood me in almost the same words as before.

I didn't smile.  I didn't frown.  In fact, I tried not to move a muscle in my face.  That was difficult because my mind had already begun to chuckle and would soon burst into guffaws.  After the fourth go-round about how I'd suffered, was suffering, but would soon experience a better life, I cut her off, paid her (though she said I didn't have to if I didn't like the reading) and walked outside where I did start laughing.

I was amused because I was getting a cold reading.  The young "psychic" who shared a booth at the Bite of Bend Festival on June 23 was trusting to The Barnum Effect.

Now, I appreciate real tarot readers, people who know the cards and apply them and their archetypal imagery to living creatures as a form of sacred play with the powers of the universe.  Cold readers, however, play off the hopes and fears of suckers like myself.

The rhetoric of the cold reading is based on the idea that a few believable details snatched out of the universe of probability can induce people to cough up further details about their lives.  The Barnum Effect is a type of cold reading first scientifically tested by psychologist Bertram Forer in 1948 and later labeled by psychologist Paul Meehl.  It's also called The Forer Effect or subjective validation or the personal validation effect. Forer gave his students a paragraph descriptor of an individual and then asked them whether or not it was a description of them.  Most students responded that the descriptor was about them personally, not about others.  Professor Michael Birnbaum of Cal State Fullerton has a lecture on the Barnum Effect and the Skeptics Dictionary has a thoughtful description of the experiment.

Spurious psychics, those who are out to prey on others rather than those committed to a type of prayer, will use these  techniques to lead clients or marks to offer up more personal information and to sell other products (future readings).

At the festival, I was momentarily snookered but as soon as my reader refused to look at the actual cards, I knew something was up.

Lately, I've been reading the work of Jungian James Hollis and in his most recent book, What Matters Most, he says that we all feel exiled, we all feel as though people don't understand us.  It's part of the postmodern human condition:  "We are all exiles, whether we know it or not, for who among us feels truly, vitally linked to the four great orders of mystery:  the cosmos, nature, the tribe, and self?"

Digesting Mr. Marmalade

Lucy (Sky Stafford) and Mr. Marmalade (Alastair Morley Jaques)

Was it synchronicity that took me to a Innovation Theater Work's production of Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade when I'm undergoing deep analysis?  It was interesting to watch a "comedy" about child abuse at a time when I'm reviewing family-of-origin traumas with a local professional in hopes of managing my own late-midlife crisis.

A comedy about child-abuse you say?

Whodathunkit!  And why would I go to such a show?
Well, notices for the show don't mention that it's about child abuse, for one.  They noted that it was about a little girl and her "cocaine addict" imaginary friend.  That sounded very un-Bendlike and as my friends know, I appreciate things that aren't all outdoorsy and wholesome.  And it stars one of my favorite local actors, Alastair Morley Jaques, as the titular character,  Mr. Marmalade.  When the play opened in New York City in 2005, that role was played by Michael C. Hall, now most recognizable as the star of Showtime's serial-killer series, Dexter.

One of the conceits of the show is the use of an obviously sexually mature woman  dressed in a tight shirt and short ballet skirt as the pigtailed, four-year old  Lucy.  In our local version the role was played by the amazing Skye Stafford, who captures the awkwardness of the child and manages to deliver even  the most unbelievable lines with deep intelligence and panache. On the Innovation Theatre Website, she says that she was attracted to the show's challenge: "How could I keep the dry, adult humor and bring out the toddler at the same time? It was an interesting problem that I definitely wanted to pursue."

The show "takes place in the home and mind of Lucy sometime this year."  It focuses on her relationships with Mr. Marmalade, his assistant Bradley, and the non-imaginary Larry, a five year old boy played by the grown-up,  Brad Knowles.  Supposedly, having an attractive woman with a bust playing the child Lucy is a way of showing us that Lucy already sees herself as someone like her mother, a woman who leaves Lucy alone on occasion.  When Lucy isn't left to fend for herself, she is in the hands of Emily, a girl who smokes cigarettes and has sex with her boyfriend, subjects the preternaturally sophisticated Lucy comments on several times.

Brad Hills, who designed the brightly colored production, with its stick figure graphics and giant children's blocks,  says in the program that the show is "A play that I thought might be a little risky, a little unsettling."  Ya think?

During the evening, I heard the small audience laughing at jokes related to Larry's being beaten and his attempts at suicide.  Are there people who think that it's humorous that a young child would attempt suicide?  Seemingly there were such people in last night's audience.  I myself was doing a little deep breathing to avoid being triggered.

There were also the laughs responding to Lucy and Larry playing "Doctor," a game in which she makes Larry undress and grabs his equipment beneath his underwear.  Then she invites him to do the same to her.  Mercifully, this invitation is followed by a blackout.  But we are clearly meant to understand that in Lucy's world, she is having what she counts as sex, having witnessed both her mother and her babysitter going into the bedroom to "play doctor"? 

At the intermission, when I mentioned my disquiet, someone said that the four year old might be sex-positive.  I didn't argue, but this is what I was thinking: a sex-positive four year old is going to be playing with herself or honestly looking at another child's equipment without shame.  She will not be attempting a verbal seduction game unless she has learned it from someone else, some older other who at some point took advantage of her.  Now, I may be wrong about that.  I'm not a psychologist, after all.  And yet.... it was all very disturbing.

Mr. Jaques recognizes the play's challenging nature.  In an interview he said it "seeks to tell the truth in an original, often disturbing, always humorous way; in a way that is frequently challenging and uncomfortable for both the audience and the actors."  I agree with him and think he does an excellent job bringing to life this disturbing image of a young girl's fantasy father/lover/betrayer. 

Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, wrote this about Mr. Marmalade in 2005:

     [Noah Haidle's] thesis: a toxic combination of neglect and exposure to the noisy dysfunction in the cultural ether could so warp a tyke's psyche that she dreams up a pal who prefers sex toys to tea parties. Gasps of uncomfortable laughter arise from the audience as the bewildered Lucy negotiates the mood swings of her now-cuddly, now-abusive friend, aping the enabling instincts of her elders. Besieged by loneliness, she seeks his love even after benign neglect - a delayed brunch date - gives way to physical and emotional violence. In a world permeated with chatter about sex and commitment and issues of self-esteem, the play argues, no child is left behind for long.

     But Lucy's interior world is so patently incredible as the creation of a 4-year-old mind, however marinated in the scream-fests of daytime television and episodes of "Law & Order: SVU," that the author never really even dips his toe into the painful emotional undercurrents beneath the play's antic comic surface. Instead, he settles too easily and too consistently for cheap laughs. . . . . 

I appreciate that last line.  I generally like dark comedies and have greatly enjoyed the blood-soaked laughs in Martin McDonagh's great plays, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Pillowman, and A Behanding in Spokane.  These shows are also uncomfortable as they address issues of violence, torture, substance abuse, and rage while implicating us audience members as people who could become either killers or victims just as easily.

I guess that's what I missed in last night's show.  I felt as though the playwright didn't really believe that such suffering exists nor that, to the extent that we disbelieve, that we are culpable in its creation.

Nevertheless, I am happy that this local company is tackling difficult plays.  I look forward to seeing their Waiting for Godot and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You.

Sadly, Mr. Marmalade closes tomorrow, Sunday, March 18 so you may not have the chance to argue with me about this post.