Blog Post #3

    While listening to the lecture audio and viewing the corresponding slides for "10% of Our Brains & Out of Body Experiences," I was reminded of a recent film I saw called Late Night With the Devil.

    The film, set in 1977, which focuses on a struggling late night television host attempting to save his show by bringing on a psychic, a skeptic, and a purportedly demon-possessed young girl, was almost certainly (at least in part) based on the Bob Barker-hosted That's My Line television broadcast featuring James Randi and James Hydrick. In fact, the skeptic character in the film (named Carmichael Haig) is actually based off of James Randi, and both the character and Randi himself offered a monetary reward for anyone that could demonstrate scientifically-verifiable psychic abilities.

     (James) Hydrick, on the other hand, was not said to be the inspiration for Christou (the psychic character in Late Night With the Devil), though he may have been, with the detail possibly going unacknowledged due to the disturbing charges of child molestation that Hydrick was convicted of in 1989. Even so, both Haig and Christou's interactions in the film are so clearly inspired by the Barker broadcast (as well as other public, notable moments) that the characters reenact a number of events that actually took place, including Christou demonstrating so-called psychic abilities, Haig attempting to discredit him, Haig demonstrating similar abilities before explaining the rational explanation for them, and Haig offering a large sum of money to anyone that can demonstrate real psychic phenomena. The characters even share some physical similarities:

Left: "Christou," Right: "Carmichael Haig"

Left: James Hydrick, Righ: James Randi

    The difference between reality and fiction is that - while in real life Randi comes off as a kind of hero, exposing fraud and championing rational thought - Late Night With the Devil presents its own Randi character as a sort of villain, smugly dismissing anything and everything that's seemingly paranormal, even as the events during the broadcast become more sinister and unexplainable. When all hell unavoidably breaks loose in the final fifteen minutes of the film, we see the Randi character first offer the money he's carried with him all these years to the demon that reveals itself, before falling to his knees and attempting to worship the entity, and then finally, essentially, being vaporized in a most painful manner.

    This all makes me long for a time when television still produced programming like this, where the mystical and the rational could compete, with regular people charged with the responsibility of being the judge and jury overseeing the entire spectacle. I think America in the 1970s was much more spiritual and therefore open to these kinds of discussions, whereas now, the average American doesn't seem to be interested in conversations like this, and the television companies themselves seem far more comfortable producing mindless garbage that pushes a specific agenda while simultaneously avoiding anything that could be construed as politically incorrect. I miss when we could tune-in to events like this on live television, where a subsequent national conversation would take place, and we could all rationalize our positions and have deeper interactions with our fellow Americans. What a shame; those days seem to be gone.