Today, in “Sure, it’s a stunt, but what in the world isn’t, at this point?” news: A Dutch theater company is launching an “experiment” where it will hire a hypnotist to try to wipe an audience’s memory of seeing a beloved movie, then show them the film again to see if they can recreate that “Viewing for the first time” experience. This is per Dagens, which reports on the “Rewind” experience being touted by large European theater chain Pathé Cinémas, which will attempt to help audiences approach movies like The Matrix, Se7en, La La Land, or Interstellar through fresh, presumably spiral-filled eyes.
According to Pathé’s site promoting the stunt/experiment, the theater will pick 30 volunteers (who all selected the same movie to get sucked out of their brains, lest film’s classic Matrix/La La Land feud suddenly reignite without the memories of years of tense negotiations to temper it), then book them an online session with Dutch hypnotherapist Victor Kraemer, a hypnotist and life coach who (according to his online messaging) uses his “30+ years of training and practice in hypnotherapy, NLP, EFT, Mind Shifting, and quantum healing methods” to help whiny CEOs get over their imposter syndrome. Kraemer will use his techniques to hypnotize-out the memories of watching the movie in question, after which all the participants will be brought to a theater, given what we can only think of as a “hypnosis top-up” from Kraemer, and then be invited to watch the film and see what the experience is like.
Scientifically, this is all pretty obviously dubious—self-reported methodologies, i.e., “So, do you want to play along with our big marketing machine and say you forgot Neo was The Matrix?”—are notoriously inaccurate, especially when you have this much promotional oomph behind them. But, still: In a theatrical landscape that has seen theater owners go to some pretty weird lengths to get butts back in their seats, we never expected to see “Employ the services of Dutch hypnotists” on the grand strategic list.
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