Ye Olde Magick Blogge

This was originally published on the old ye olde on April 3, 2007.

One of the tricky things to figure out about exposure is why people are motivated to do it in the first place. It’s possibly unique in this way amongst the performing arts (all of which could be considered fraudulent in their own ways). Imagine three scenarios, if you will.

The first… You’re in the cinema watching a World War 2 movie, and on the battlefield there’s a whole lot of explosions going off, and one heroic character runs through enemy crossfire to grab a wounded friend and drag him to safety. Let’s assume that you’re really moved by the scene. A guy leans over in your ear right when he’s pulling the other guy free and says, “Man, the CGI is really good in this movie, isn’t it?” Annoying, isn’t it? You’ll consider it a distraction.

On the other hand, if you’re at a live performance and the magician is floating a rose for a lady in the front row, and you’re looking at her appreciative reaction and you’re thinking she’s kind of hot, and the magician sort of looks like a regular person. Lets assume that this time, the guy next to you DOESN’T say anything, but you know that he happens to know a little bit about magic. Suddenly, the role is reversed, you might not mind if the guy leans over and tells you how it’s done. In fact, you might even ask him.

Let’s take it one step further. Forget about the World War 2 movie. You’re in a different movie this time, a medieval period piece, and a lowly shepherd with magical talents is trying to woo over a princess, and one day when they cross paths, he presents to her a rose, and makes it float from his hands to hers. Again, you’ve got that twit next to you again who leans over in the ear saying, “Man, the CGI is really good in this movie, isn’t it?” Now the guy’s back to being a distraction again. It’s the same magical effect, and chances are in retrospect it would be less impressive than the live show because this one isn’t being done right before your eyes, but you don’t care about the “how” of it anymore — it’s still magical.

What can we take away from this?

One of the big problems with magic is that we have to dance the line between reality and fantasy. It’s fantasy because obviously magic is impossible. But everything else keeps reminding us of the reality of it. It’s really happening in front of your eyes, and what’s more, the guy who’s doing it really does seem to be a real character — meaning, he acts the same way when he’s not doing magic as he is when he is doing magic. Some even consider your entrance to be your first effect, regardless of whether or not there’s magic involved. What’s more, it’s even common mantra to say that the magic is meant to serve your character, rather than the other way around, but if the magic itself is inherently impressive, isn’t it almost arrogant to think that you are meant to be seen as even GREATER than the impossibilities you’ve just shown? We’re conditioned to see the difference between Tom Cruise and Ethan Hunt. We’re not so clear-headed when it comes to separating Michael Ammar from… well, Michael Ammar.

Step back again. The fictionality of those characters distances us from them, but the heroism of the soldier or the timidity of the shepherd allow us to empathize from that distance. The magician on the stage, however, is right there. There’s no denying that he appears to be doing magic. He’s also possibly trying to spend a lot of time convincing you that he’s just like everybody else — Mentalists often have to deal with the disclaimer dilemma. But doesn’t that claim of equality serve to make the differences between you and him more pronounced? If he’s just like you and you’re just like him, then how is it that he gets to be the guy who’s always finding the damn card and getting all the applause and attention, and you’re the guy who’s supposed to sit there and feed his ego with your clapping?

The actors in the movies become metaphors. We’re divorced from them. They might be, as John Malcovich dryly said, nothing more than millionaires pretending to suffer, but we don’t care. We buy into it because we want to enjoy the show. Hell, we can even hate the characters we see but we still like the show. Now step back into our reality as magicians. We don’t always have this actor/movie duality. We’re not just the star of the show, most of the time we’re pretty much the SHOW (by virtue of lacking co-stars, setting, conflicts that we are not of our own contrivance, etc.). I think this is one thing that mentalists have figured out that not all magicians have yet. It’s a fairly dull thing to reveal someone’s inner-most thought — the entertainment value often comes from the freak-out of the spectator in the middle of confirming it. By broadening the show, they make it about more than just the mentalist. This is also one place where Blaine did it half-correctly in his TV specials — by putting so much emphasis on the spectators in the effect, he made them the show, and made the whole process of watching magic interesting in a way that others weren’t. Even as magicians, I think we have to admit that it’s a great piece of entertainment watching people freak out to tricks regardless of whether or not we know the secret to that trick.

But like I said, he did it half-correctly. The problem was that afterwards, Blaine allowed the emphasis to be put back on himself. Perhaps that’s where it should be, I don’t know, but here’s the thing, in demanding all this attention, you’re basically drawing a line in the sand and saying, “I’m on THIS side of the line, and you’re on THAT side.” All of a sudden people are starting to try to figure out just what makes you so special. And, on the surface, what is it that makes you different? It’s knowing how to do the tricks. That appearance of hubris is going to tempt that little iconoclast in all of us — anybody who tries to elevate themselves above the regular folk is begging to have people bring him back down to reality, and if giving away the magician’s secret will do that, well, that’s what’s going to happen. There’s a reason the Paparazzi thrive, why there’s a market for unflattering pictures of movie stars, and so it shouldn’t be any surprise that when Blaine or Copperfield allow themselves to be deified for their feats of magic, people are going to want to bust that illusion up. You’ll notice Fox isn’t signing up the Masked Magician to expose Tommy Wonder’s act.

The idea that it’s all about the secret is just on the surface, of course. In reality we all know there’s much more to it than that (showmanship and presentation and practice and handling and whatnot), but I think, because so much of art is removing the scaffolding around the statue, we not only don’t see all that extra work, we’re not MEANT to see it. We’re just meant to get caught up in the moment. And I think, if the moment spends a little too much time focusing on the magician and his feats of magic and not on the entertainment value that comes from it, people will start to try to appraise that magic and figure it out. Such a magician has basically given them nothing else to focus on.

Back to the movies. We’re in the middle of that wonderful scene with the shepherd giving the rose to the princess. Do we want to try to dissect how it’s done? No, because in the context of that scene it doesn’t matter. Because the fourth wall isn’t being broken, the comparison between ourselves and the performer isn’t overt. Instead we have something else to watch — the shepherd’s floating rose isn’t a mere feat of magic, it’s a gesture, and it comes with extra entertainment value because of that (the romance of the gesture itself, the interest in watching the princess’s reaction, the tension in wondering if it will win her over, etc.). Similarly, the moment with the World War 2 soldier’s heroism comes with so much intrinsic entertainment value that it doesn’t matter the degree to which we’re immersed in the moment. Paradoxically, it’s one of the reasons that the CGI has to be so good… if the falseness calls attention to itself in any way, strange smoke rising from the battlefield or perhaps the glint of wire holding up the floating rose, the spell is broken. That can cause just as much resentment (if not more) than the guy next to us wanting to spill the beans on how the film’s illusion is being performed. But at the very least the movies, if well done, have enough for you to appreciate that you won’t let yourself focus on all the technical details that make it happen.

Darwin Ortiz talked about the point I’m getting at when he mentioned Fitzkee’s fallacy — namely, when he said that Fitzkee said that magic was a bitter pill to be swallowed and it needed to be dressed up in theatrics and whatnot in order to be entertaining. I think Ortiz’s central point there is a little tangential to this one, since this is a series of articles about exposure, but it’s worth exploring. Ortiz’s main point is this — if the magic is strong enough, it has an inherent entertainment value. The main issue is that if the core of the entertainment comes from the presentation of an impossible feat, people are going to speculate upon the nature of that impossibility, and will be curious to find out how it’s done. If the secret is hidden well enough, you’ve got no problem, and you’ll have an excellent niche for yourself as a performer in that you can seemingly do things that others cannot. If the secret is NOT hidden well enough, on the other hand, then the curiosity about how it’s done can be satisfied, perhaps with nothing more than a quick visit to Metacafe or Youtube or whatnot.
Let’s assume that you haven’t made up an entire act of original material and that your repertoire falls into the latter half. What can we do? Well, the reassuring answer is there’s a lot we can do. Just turn on any magic performance where you as a magician didn’t care how the trick was being done. It’s a natural reflex for us to look for clues to the secret, and so any routine that coaxes those reflexes into a passive state is a GOLDMINE for us to study. Forget regular audiences, if it can make the magician forget about the secret, there must be something there. Why don’t we care where Cardini keeps getting those cards from in that lobby? Why don’t we care how Tommy Wonder gets that watch into the nest of boxes? Why don’t we care how Michael Finney gets those ropes to restore in the Lady Rope Trick? Once you start looking at these performances you realize that the secrets to the tricks mean little compared to the entertainment value in the performance of them. The Cut and Restored Rope hasn’t been as badly exposed as the ACR, but it’s still been exposed, and yet, if some twit next to you wants to point out how Finney’s actually doing it, you’re going to tell him to shut up because you’re having too much fun watching Finney interact with the lady spectator. There is a magic of sorts at work, but it’s the same sort of magic that you find in a good movie, a good bit of stand-up, a nice dance, etc.

And here’s one way that I’m going to part with Ortiz and John Carney, for that matter. Both have stated that a challenging attitude has no place in a magical performance, and so much of what we do in magic is to try to minimize the feeling of the audience being tricked or browbeaten into not being able to solve the puzzle… and yet I can’t help but think that if there is some potential for an audience to be entertained by a challenging attitude, it should be explored. Bill Malone constantly gets confrontational with the spectators next to him, and they LOVE him when he performs. Whit Haydn fools the pants off you with the Pea and Shell game (where the audience always LOSES, where’s the fun in that?), and they LOVE him when he performs. Obviously it’s not as cut and dry as just removing the challenging attitude. We might as well state that villains in movies cannot be sympathetic. Humility isn’t a bad place to start, but being entertaining is a virtue that can trump even that. In our shows we are both the artist and the art, and however flattering humility might be to the artist, art itself has always played by a much more complicated set of rules. A boring artist can hide behind their art. What are we going to hide behind? Ourselves?

That said, it’s an obviously fine line that Haydn and Malone walk that many of us mere mortals haven’t quite figured out yet, but I think a lot of it has to do with study outside the branch of magic to other disciplines that are also entertaining. Bill Malone’s naturally funny and odd-looking — this helps him get away with alot that other magicians could not. Whit Haydn has spent a lifetime figuring out how con men charm people, and a philosophy degree can’t hurt that understanding, either. David Regal fools people immensely, but even if he didn’t, he’d still probably be the success that he is just because of his intelligent writing.

But the problem is this… for every person in our field who understands what it means to entertain, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of those who want to perform more than they want to entertain. Many people fantasize about singing for a stadium full of adoring fans, but we confine our indulgences of that fantasy to the shower where it belongs, because deep down we know that there’s little entertainment value in listening to someone who can’t sing very well. Magic, unfortunately, doesn’t have this same shame filter, and what that means is that some people misinterpret the shocked reaction to an impossibility as signs of an entertained audience. What’s more, it can even happen at the highest level — there are a lot of magicians who use magic as their crutch, their best and only means of negotiating with the audience, what makes the spectators patiently sit through the most tired and worn out of jokes and presentations. If their magic is good enough, they’ll survive and possibly do quite well.

But the danger lies in whether the audience is led to believe that the only difference between themselves and the magician is the effect itself, because if they do, then it follows that the audience would believe that in knowing how to make the effect happen, that they would equalize things somewhat between themselves and the performer. Rub their nose in it enough, make too much money, hang out with celebrities and date supermodels, and people will want to expose you, just as they exposed Blaine and Copperfield. Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re both good magicians, but I think we have to take a look at their iconic status as part of the reason for the blatant exposure of their effects, especially considering that the feats they’re being lauded for are relatively unimportant when compared to solving world hunger or curing cancer — you know, productive ways of using supposedly magical talents.

If, on the other hand, you’re a capable entertainer without doing a single bit of magic, suddenly you’ve got an extra defense against exposure — people, even non-magicians, will believe that it’s more than just magic that is entertaining about you, and they’ll resist any twit who tries to bust you because he’s getting in the way of that entertainment. That’s not to knock guys who make the magic the focal point of their performances, but guys who don’t let the magic define them too much are going to have it a little bit easier when dealing with the problems of exposure.