•
Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th-century German philosopher, in his book
Thus Spoke Zarathustra used a philosophical metaphor referring to the hypnosis of the chicken. It is in Chapter 6, "The Pale Criminal", and reads as follows: "The streak of chalk bewitcheth the hen; the stroke he struck bewitched his weak reason. Madness AFTER the deed, I call this." Nietzsche employs this metaphor again within the third essay of
On the Genealogy of Morality, stating, "The unhappy man has heard, has understood; he is like a hen around which a line has been drawn. He cannot get out of this drawn circle." •
Clark Gable, in the 1945 film
Adventure, hypnotizes a rooster while he and
Greer Garson try to lure chickens from behind the bush by using the rooster as bait. •
Werner Herzog has included chicken hypnotism in several films, including the 1968
Signs of Life, which features a scene in which a chicken is hypnotized by a line drawn by chalk, and his 1974 film
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. •
Federico Fellini's 1984
And the Ship Sails On features a scene in which a male opera singer hypnotises a chicken in the mess hall. •
Ernest Hemingway briefly describes the process in
The Dangerous Summer, comparing it to the hypnotic effect of a bullfighters' cape. • The 1993 film
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues has some lines about chicken hypnotism and shows a character hypnotizing chickens by twirling them in the air exactly twenty times. • The
United States military, when trying to avoid divulging information, gives reporters briefings with 25 minutes of intentionally dull
PowerPoint presentations and 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone who is still awake. The presentations are called
hypnotizing chickens. •
Thomas B. Hess, art critic and long time editor of
ARTnews, used chicken hypnotism to describe
Barnett Newman's iconic "zip" paintings in a March 1950 review: "There were some terrific optical illusions: if you stared closely at the big red painting with the thin white stripe, its bottom seemed to shoot out at your ankles, and the rectangular canvas itself appeared wildly distorted. It is quite like what happens to a hen when its beak is put on the ground and a chalk line drawn away from it on the floor. However, very few spectators actually became hypnotized". • The
Iggy Pop song "
Lust for Life" contains a line referring to "hypnotizing chickens", in a nod to
William Burroughs' novel
The Ticket That Exploded. • Australian test cricketer
Max Walker included chicken hypnotism in the title of his book
How to Hypnotise Chooks (1987)
chooks being Australian slang for chicken. •
Danny Glover hypnotizes a rooster in the 1990 film
To Sleep with Anger. ==See also==