Interesting new Netflix special called the Push, about how easily people bend their morals to social pressure.
New Netflix special Derren Brown: The Push orchestrates events against a supposedly unwitting subject, pushing him into higher and higher pressure situations until he arrives at a clarifying event: will he commit murder by pushing someone off a roof? But, of course, there’s a bigger question looming over all this: is The Push fake, or real?
The subject, Chris, begins as a charity gala guest, but soon finds himself helping to move a dead body. At every step, the request seems just on the edge of reasonable. If he’s already dead (of a heart attack), why interrupt the gala (it’s for a good cause after all)? Chris, like many of us, wants to be liked, wants to be reasonable, and acquiesces to increasingly absurd demands. Social pressure from an army of in-on-it actors pushes him to impersonate the dead person, manipulate the body like Weekend at Bernie’s, and then, in the climactic moment, nudges him towards murder when the dead person turns out not to be so dead after all.