Miracles for Sale

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Miracles for Sale was a TV movie broadcast in the UK in april 2011 in Channel 4 featuring Derren Brown. He wants to stage a fake, live faith healing show on purpose (unlike the usual ones you see on TV, where they pretend nothing is fake) to show the dangers of this multimillion dollar industry of scam, but he can't do it himself, as he risks being recognized. Thus, he decides to choose someone else to act as this kind of scammer to eventually perform live in Dallas, Texas, after 6 months of training.

[edit] Moral ambiguity

The whole idea is to stage a fake faith healing show to help show people that it's little more than a temporary placebo effect. However, Derren, the whole production team and specially Nathan have moments where they have trouble coping with the whole "trick people into deeply believing that they are healed just to show that they, in fact, were not".

At one point, they wanted to hire a PR company to help them advertise the pretend pastor but they decided to drop it, given the true nature of their endeavor, it could severely hurt the company's image. On the day before the big performance, "Pastor James" (Nathan) and Derren walked around the city, looking for people feeling pains so Nathan could "heal" them. All subjects that agreed to participate reported not feeling any pain anymore at the time. Right after so, Derren came clear explaining what exactly was happening to them.

At the end of Nathan's performance, he reads a text, carefully worded so that it wouldn't conflict directly with the present people's beliefs, which is pretty much a short explanation of adrenaline as a temporary painkiller and a good part on how those that ask and charge money for healing are evil, especially when they ask the healed to stop their medications if they were on any.

[edit] See also

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