The Amateur Scientist Reviews: Paranormal State
Star TrekStargate:AtlantisFireflyBrian Thompson
Imagine you’re a hollow husk of a human being. You’re running only on your body’s autonomous systems and perhaps a 20oz. bottle of Mountain Dew. Yes, your brain still works, but only inasmuch as it isn’t blocking the signals from your eyes, and you’ve often taken the advice of local newspaper film critics and “checked” it “at the door” in order to enjoy things like flashing lights and the Star Wars prequels. Even at this point—even when your standards of entertainment have been lowered to the point where they’re nothing but a gaping crater—even then, A&E’s Paranormal State is a malignant tumor in your television.
I watched the entire season one DVD set in a single sitting, and I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that those hours are lost to me. There is no life after death for this wasted time. Set up all the electromagnetic field detectors and infrared cameras you like, and you’ll find no trace of them. No other experience has so forcefully driven home the utter despair of an existential reality. True, I didn’t believe in an afterlife before, but the exploits of the Paranormal State crew have done nothing to change my mind. I hope there is no afterlife, so our ghosts can be saved the indignity of being chased around by these witless buffoons.
Ryan Buell is the host/perpetrator. This may not be apparent at first, since he doesn’t demonstrate any of the traditional traits one expects in a television presenter—likability, varied inflection, personality. But the show does seem to be designed solely to perpetuate Buell’s messianic delusions. In the intro, he explains that as a child he was terrified by paranormal experiences, so he made it his life’s mission to investigate the mysterious. With every investigation, he’s one step closer to the truth. Buell doesn’t elaborate as to what these terrifying experiences were, offer any evidence that they actually occurred, or tell us why we should give a sh!t. He does point out, however, that sometimes he and his team of dumbfounded pretend researchers act as warriors. In what capacity is anyone’s guess, as they spend most of their time on the show running around in the dark and looking confused.
When I came to the end of the season, I must admit to being mystified. Why did A&E give these morons a show? And before you jump on me for name-calling, let me remind you that Buell’s chief researcher’s unintelligible and nonsensical mumbles must occasionally be subtitled even though she’s speaking English. It’s the Arts and Entertainment channel, after all. As a kid, I’d watch tours down the Rhine during the day and Monty Python and the Holy Grail at night. Now the channel’s just a depository for ghost enthusiasts with delusions of grandeur and racist bounty hunters with mullets.
Even in a field as chock full of nonsense and idiocy as paranormal research, Buell and his Penn State-based Paranormal Research Society can’t possibly be considered experts. Buell himself is only 25 and started the PRS as a student organization. Their official website claims that some Penn State faculty and staff members have joined the group (say goodbye to tenure!), but this isn’t evident on the show. These are the kind of candle-wielding neo-Pagans you see wearing Tim Burton t-shirts in the New Age section of Barnes & Noble. In other words, they’re a nuisance. Every episode begins with the written introduction: “Each year, PRS receives hundreds of reports of paranormal activity…only responding to the most severe.” But how much experience could these kids rack up in less than six years? And don’t any of them ever graduate?
I’m not going to go through every episode since they’re mostly all the same. Sure, there’s the occasional monster story. They even investigate the famous West Virginia Mothman, though their detective work consists of running into the woods in the middle of the night and not finding anything. But the show largely coasts by on various hauntings. For the purposes of this review, I’ll focus on a typical episode entitled “Vegas”.
The PRS crew uses their A&E budget to (apparently) ignore their academic obligations and fly to Las Vegas, where a 14-year-old girl claims to be visited by a dead peer. The girl seems normal enough, but one wonders what her mother was thinking calling a group of paranormal researchers with cameras instead of a licensed psychologist to deal with her daughter’s visions. We’re told via Buell’s obnoxious voiceover that the girl has a traumatic past, though it’s unclear how exactly she was abused. This is a serious issue and another reason why the PRS is wholly unqualified to deal with this poor girl, but that doesn’t stop Buell from drawing some kind of parallel between his own allegedly horrific childhood and hers. Buell obviously thinks he’s a real-life Fox Mulder, but this kind of crap comes off as both irresponsible and exploitative.
As investigators, the PRS team are worthless. The girl says her ghostly companion’s name is Emily and that she has bruises around her neck as if she were strangled. Mumbles the Researcher and her crew of interns search Las Vegas’ public records but are unable to come up with any violent crimes committed near the girl’s home involving an Emily. So without any reason why they should do so, they decide to comb through a national database, and (surprise!) find a 15-year-old named Emily who was strangled to death. Only the real-life Emily was murdered in 1990. In San Antonio. Instead of seeing this evidence and wondering why a ghost would wait seventeen years before manifesting herself in another state, Buell becomes instantly convinced that this is the ghost they’re looking for. And instead of having the girl describe and corroborate the details of the murder, they show her the police report and tell her that this is the ghost she’s been seeing.
At this point, Buell brings in a parapsychologist to talk to the girl and provide a professional opinion on her condition. A parapsychologist, you see, is like a psychologist, only without the scientific education, ethics, or expertise. Basically, they’re just like those kids in the New Age book section, only they’re grown up and have their shirts tucked in. Of course the parapsychologist backs up the girl’s story. That’s why they brought him. But he also rules out the possibility that she might be hallucinating her dead friend by saying that at fourteen, she’s too young to be schizophrenic. I’m no doctor, so I don’t know if she’s schizophrenic or not, but a two-second Google search will tell you that the peak onset years for schizophrenia are adolescence and early adulthood. Not only are they exploiting this girl, they’re giving false medical advice. This has left the realm of crap TV and turned into a criminal act.
Sadly, it gets worse. Buell brings in his recurring sidekick, a self-proclaimed psychic medium named Chip Coffey. In most of his appearances, Coffey is a fairly innocuous presence. He usually just wanders around talking about how he senses emotions in various corners of a room. In this case, he pretends to play the role of skeptic, asking Buell if he’s directly asked the girl if she’s making all of this up. Buell acts like the thought has never occurred to him, and it probably hasn’t. I can think of several other thoughts that have probably never occurred to him. Buell asks Coffey how they would know if the girl were telling the truth, to which, based on nothing, Coffey responds, “She’ll tell me.” Coffey then lies on the girl’s bedroom floor as if he’s her best friend over for a slumber party and poses the obvious question. She says that everything she’s recounted is 100% true. Instead of questioning her further, Coffey exclaims “Good for you!” and proceeds to tell her all about how she’s a medium with a “special gift”.
Let me get this out of the way: Chip Coffey is slime. Go to his website, and you’ll see that he touts his ability to communicate with your dead loved ones, bringing you comfort and peace. But like every other charlatan in his business, he’ll charge you out the ass for that peace. $400 an hour for a telephone “reading”. Never mind the fact that if he or anyone like him can prove they have these powers, there’s a million dollar prize waiting from the James Randi Educational Foundation. Coffey could say he isn’t interested in the prize, but why then is he interested in your $400? Keep in mind that this is the man Buell offers to “mentor” this disturbed young girl. I wonder how much money Coffey could fleece from her mother.
Paranormal State eventually falls into the same trappings as every other half-baked ghost hunting farce. Buell asserts that 3 AM is known as “dead time”, when paranormal activity is at its peak, though he doesn’t back up this claim with anything as mundane as evidence or even reasoning. During “dead time”, the PRS team sets up motion detectors and infrared cameras. I have no idea how a non-corporeal being would set off a motion detector, and neither does Sergey, the PRS tech guy. And the IR cameras are set up to look for “cold spots” in the room, but just like in every other ghost hunting show, there’s never any explanation as to why ghosts would necessarily make a room cold.
I could go on and on about the true horrors of this pseudo-horror show. There’s a disturbing amount of Catholic mysticism—lots of holy water and crosses and blessed icons of the saints buried in the four corners of property. Taking Paranormal State at face value, it’s amazing how easy it is to rid a house of an evil spirit just by telling it to go away in Jesus’ name. Don’t spend too much time thinking about why this would be the case, considering Jesus’ dad supposedly created those spirits and could theoretically have stopped them from terrorizing these people in the first place.
It’s the involvement of innocent children in this nonsense that is the real tragedy here. The very first episode deals with another obviously disturbed kid whose delusions Buell and his crew feed, nurture, and present to the world as entertainment. The hokey hyper-editing, ridiculous sound effects, and creaky production values aside, this show is pure trash, and the people involved should really be ashamed of themselves.
On one of the DVD commentary tracks, Buell explains his on-the-scene code word for angry demons. He calls them “bunnies”. The point here is to confuse them and rob them of their evil majesty. This is just one more lump on the bullsh!t pile, but on the off chance that these demons are actually real, I thought I’d give this little trick away. Demons, when you hear Buell running around in the dark talking about bunnies, that’s when you strike. In Jesus’ name, that’s when you strike.
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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.
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