248/365: The Superhero Theory
One of the most exciting modern developments in terms of defining a magician persona is this one, the idea of looking at your character in the same way that comic books look at superheros. Specifically, understanding your powers, their capabilities and their limits, and how they ought to play out if dramatized.
I’m going to quickly set aside one thing that this entry is not about, that of trying to convince the audience that you’re really capable of doing what you’re capable of doing. That’s charlatan territory, and I’ve got no real opinion on that topic. Rather, we’re talking about added details that help make the illusion better within the theatrical context.
The concept also allows for flexibility in terms of the power itself. Spiderman doesn’t have powers because some wizard gave them to him (a la Captain Marvel), he has them because of some scientific disaster. We don’t necessarily have to play the same game, I’m just saying that we’ve got a lot of options including even defaulting to technology as a motif. Take, for instance, Whit Haydn’s Teleportation Device. Besides using plenty of standard magic strategies, the presentation includes lots of details that are there to push the technology aspect — especially the troublesome failure-prone technology. The sudden flash, the potential for radiation damage, the removable antenna, the wind-up sound, etc. are all fantastic details that not only make the trick funny, they help give theatrical credibility to the effect. These are all parts of the “Positive Illusion” in Wesley James’s Positive/Negative duality.
The key is that, within the details, you can make the effect that much more fascinating.
An example… Say you’re going to do a coin bend in the spectator’s hand. You give them the coin and get them to squeeze. They open it up, and nothing’s happened. You take it back get them to do a warm-up exercise with their fingers. You get them to practice shaking your hand with authority (if they’re a guy, maybe you tease them a bit about it). They try to squeeze it again, and nothing happens. You take the coin back and then you try to give it a squeeze, to show them how it’s done… only it’s not quite there yet. It’s loose (rubber coin effect) but it still goes back to solid form if left alone. Finally, you put it in their hand, get them to squeeze, and then you put your hand over their fist, and you squeeze (not so much as to hurt, but more than is entirely comfortable), and then, with the combined power, you open the hand and show the coin has been properly bent.
Another example… They pick a card from a borrowed, shuffled deck. You ask if they believe in psychic powers. They say “no”. You sigh, because that means it’s going to be tough. You stare into their eyes and ask them to think of the card, which they do. As a consideration, you ask them not to think of a different card, but the one they took. Staring into their eyes without blinking, you’re able to get from them the colour, the suit, and then the approximate value. In the end, though, you can’t get exactly the right card. Maybe they took the eight of hearts and you can only know for sure that it’s one of the two red eights, or maybe you think it’s either the seven, eight or nine of hearts. Later on, you ask somebody else who is a bit more open-minded about the possibility of psychic powers, and you’re able to get their card straight away, and move into “more interesting” territory (such as divining things in their past or future).
Another example… you can make things move, but just a little bit. You take a bill and have it signed, so people can know you’re not switching it. You then roll the bill up and put it on the back of your hand, and it moves, just a little bit. You hand the bill back. You then take the pen, and put in on a table, and it moves (rotating this time) just a little bit. Finally, for a chance of pace, you pull out a die and have a game with somebody. They roll a three. You take the die back and roll a two. Pausing for a second, you hold your hand near the die and after a minute it topples over to six.
One could sit here and list similar examples all day. With the first two examples the methodology is straightforward (the concept of combining the “rubber coin” with a coin bend goes back a long way), and the third (while complex) allows for cancelling methods. It’s in the extra details that you get something really interesting.
Similarly, without the details, you lose a little something, but the problem here is mostly that magicians haven’t even realized that there’s something to lose. You’ll notice that we’re not content to just have the rolled up bill move. We want it to float in space, levitate around, bleah. We don’t want to just nail the exact card they’re thinking of, but show it painted on the side of a wall. We don’t want to bend the coin, we want to bend huge spikes, and make sure they see it. Our problem in magic isn’t that we don’t have enough strong effects, but rather that we have too many, and we mishmash them all together in a single show, and become as described by Derren Brown as a “whimsical god figure”. That should make the feats that much more interesting because they’re a lot more extreme, but sometimes the most compelling illusion isn’t any effect so much as the character of the magician up on stage.
Another thing to consider… Those three examples basically showed supernatural powers, but the powers don’t actually have to be in that overt territory. Consider the following scenario. You pull out a deck of cards, and ask them to think of four of a kind. They say “the Queens”, and with a flurry of fancy cuts you produce the four Queens. Impressive. Later on, though, you want to show them a different trick, one that requires, for instance, the four aces. At this point you go through the deck and upjog the aces to strip them out. In that one instance, which doesn’t really have anything to do with a trick yet, you’ve already undermined your supposed power. The first trick suggests you can get any cards you want at your fingertips anytime you want. The second trick — and not even the trick itself, but its preamble — demonstrates that you can’t, and it betrays the first effect as false somehow. This carry-over of the impressions of one trick into another is palpable, and some magicians won’t follow the Ambitious Card routine with any other card effect simply because the implication is so strong that the magician can make a chosen card appear at the top (and therefore under his control) whenever he wants it.
Yet another potential problem comes from performers who mix magic with mentalism without enough forethought. One mantra amongst mentalists is to never mix the two. The frequently-cited example is that Dunninger used to open with the Linking Rings. The argument and counter-argument here are both oversimplified. The reason why Dunninger and others got away with it is because there is no power portrayed in the Linking Rings which can undermine mind-reading. However, if you do a one-ahead billet routine to read three people’s minds, and then move into something like “billets across” (think Coins Across, but with three balls of paper), then you’ve essentially shown yourself to be skilled at manipulating billets, and that can undermine the mind-reading, because now, based on the evidence you’ve given them, they might think you just made pieces of paper jump around to give yourself the necessary information. That comes uncomfortably close to the actual method.
Still, even with the oversimplified “Dunninger did the Linking Rings” rebuttal, mentalists are in general miles ahead of magicians when it comes to understanding what they do in terms of powers, and more importantly, consistency of power claims. You’re a mind-reader? So, why haven’t you won the lottery? Banachek has a great answer for that. You can tell the future? You foresaw the newspaper headline? So why didn’t you predict the plane crash? Osterlind has some answers for that. The very fact that they recognize the difficulties on its own is something that regular magicians can learn from, because in much the same way that regular audiences want to test and understand the bounds of powers that mentalists have, so too do they want to see what magicians can do in the face of similar challenges.
Case in point: A guy takes your cards, shuffles them, looks at a card, shuffles them again, and then gives the deck back to you and says “Find my card!” Does this scenario sound familiar to you? I can’t imagine a single competent close-up card guy who hasn’t been in some situation like this even once. Prestige alone won’t necessarily fix this, and in fact it may even exacerbate it. Daryl, on one of his Revelations DVDs, had to deal with this specific situation from a spectator who ignored his request to name a number, and instead she named a card. She wanted the card that she named off the top of her head, and we’re talking about Daryl doing tricks for an L&L audience where he’s the headliner — it’s hard to get a more advantageous prestige situation than that.
Frequently magicians dismiss such challenges and write the thing off as being the result of a difficult spectator who should have been quelled through audience management. While there’s something to that (and if you’ve got enough performance experience you’ll know more than a few ways to shut such people down gracefully), I believe that a lot of the time their attempt to dictate the terms doesn’t come so much from poor social graces on their part, but rather from pure curiosity about what it is you’re able to do. The fact that they say it aloud might betray some lack of interpersonal tact and politeness, but it’s an old adage in magic that whatever somebody says aloud, more people in the group are actually thinking. In my mind, if you can get past your own ego, you realize very quickly that these people are doing you a favour.
The key theme here is one that Derren Brown highlighted in his writings, that of audiences being just as interested, if not more interested, in the cause of the effect, rather than the effect itself. Frankly, the old blogge considers the following two ideas axiomatic. First, any strong effect has an implied cause. Second, if the magician does not offer a satisfying cause, then the audience will attempt to seek one out. They may get close (eg: “He’s got fast hands!”) or they may grasp at straws (eg: “It went up his sleeves!”) but it’s human nature to try to understand an impossibility, and what the hell are we doing besides exactly that — offering them impossibilities?
So, somebody’s taken your deck of cards and enters into the nightmare scenario as described, and demands you find their card. How do you get out of it? What’s your excuse for not being able to get their card? You could have an elaborate system of outs as a back-up plan (even an Invisible Deck might be more than enough), and there’s nothing really wrong with that. However, I’d personally take that occurrence as a sign that you need to be preemptive, and hell, if it’s never happened to you, then lucky you, you’re reading this instead of performing your trick, which means that you can start planning now.
My own approach is to undermine the whole “magic” thing from the get-go by portraying myself as a sleight-of-hand guy. It’s not overt, but the ultimate message taken away from things like Three Card Monte or a standard pick-a-card followed by a flourishy production is one that my hands have something to do with it. While this has been working alright for me, I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t a glass ceiling to it, or that people won’t be more compelled by greater mysteries.
Perhaps the better way is to manage the situation and make sure that the opening effect offers something very close to the nightmare scenario, so that curious spectators will get their question answered (apparently) before they have a chance to think it.
Yet another way, though, is to make sure that the bounds of the power you claim requires access to important things on your side. The key thing is getting a good mystery, and sometimes any mystery will do. A perfectly fine out is to say you’re not a mind-reader, or else to say that the last time you were in this situation, you actually found their card, but they lied and said it was another card, so they have to go first, or else they have to sign the card, or else do it again but show the card to several people, etc. Somewhere in the midst of all these details there are going to be ways to get ahead of them again. A swami, a deck switch, even palming off an indifferent card and loading it in the pocket (or even having one there before the trick even starts) can give you just enough of an advantage to set yourself up for success. The art, of course, comes in coming up with something that is consistent with everything else you’re doing.
And don’t underestimate the idea of saying outright that you’re not a mind-reader. Besides being an honest claim, it’s one that essentially gives shape to the powers you do have, even though it’s a limitation. The only problem will be if you happen to do a trick earlier that suggests you really do have mind-reading powers. Then you’re screwed, because the power claim you’ve insinuated is one that you can’t sustain. Essentially, it’s the same as magically producing four of a kind, and then having to hunt through the deck for some other cards, only this time, your failure is right out in the open.
The final thing that can come from looking at your character as having some sort of power is that every now and then, the power will suggest to you effects that are non-standard but still compelling. Take a look at Nightcrawler, the X-Men character who can teleport around instantly. An obvious way to use that in a fight is to teleport behind the guy and knock him from behind. That’s fair enough. One thing he’s been known to do, though, is to grab his adversary and teleport the both of them around quickly, so that the guy because so disorientated that he collapses, and now Nightcrawler has essentially subdued the guy without having to throw a single punch.
Are there opportunities for similar offbeat effects through the power? Why not? The whole bent coin routine could be followed up with different ideas. You each hold onto the edge of a coin, and if each of your pull, you stretch it between both of your hands and end up with stretched-out coin, something Paul Harris would term “A permanent piece of strange.” Maybe you move off coins and borrow a bottle-cap, and smash it flat on a table-top. Or maybe it wasn’t strength so much as heat that made the coin warp, in which case you could turn around and do a trick where you suck the heat out of a borrowed coin, so that it’s now paradoxically freezing cold. Maybe you can only heat and freeze the coin with your left hand, and when you heat up a coin and touch it with your right, you get a big blister on the fingertip. Or maybe something else.
If you decide you’re going to go this route, it’s probably not going to be easy. Speaking of Paul Harris, Michael Ammar had a guest appearance and interview on Harris’s latest DVD set, and on there he talks about this very thing, being a character with a clearly defined power. He’s got some interesting (and funny) suggestions on there, but in the end concluded that it would be too difficult. It didn’t seem to hurt Ammar too much — not only is his celebrity-status within the magic community long been secure, but he got plenty of exposure on late-night talk shows and magic specials — but one wonders what might happen if one did take it into the territory he was hesitant to go into himself. Arguably, that’s where Derren Brown is right now, and if there’s any indication of its potential appeal, ask how many Brits know about Derren Brown, versus how many Americans know about Michael Ammar. That’s not to say that one is necessarily better than the other, but rather just to show that people are hungry for that sort of compelling approach to our art form, be it magic or mentalism or what-have-you. It’s a route that even David Blaine was on for a while, and it might be a route you’d be capable of travelling, if you dared…
Not that I’m a credit Nazi, but I believe Derren Brown was paraphrasing a Teller idea, so you might want to re-check that.
Yeah, noted. I was working from memory there, and couldn’t remember if the term was his or if it was just in his book. I don’t actually own it (read it on my pilgrimage to Minnesota) so if somebody who does own it can verify, I’ll change the relevant passage above.
Great stuff!
quote “Another example… you can make things move, but just a little bit.”
I love doing this, whenever someone asks me if i can levitate I always say…
“ya i did once, but not much just 1/4″ or so, it didn’t really work”
The reactions I get to this statement are interesting, the fact that i’m practically clamming failure seems to give it a sense of believability.
Because in there minds it was a yes or no question, not a matter of degrees that I suggest.
and when it comes to the task of levitating 1/4″ is just as impossible as 2ft