52 Essentials: No. 10, OK Go Videography (2006-____)
Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.
I’ve heard that magic doesn't work on babies, not in the first year or two at least. Their eyes are too new, their sense of cause-and-effect is a blank slate, and so everything they see is taken at face value. Dad's thumb can detach from his hand? If you say so. The back of his ear is full of coins? Why not! Rabbits live in hats? Sure, where else would they live? There's something to be said for being a state of constant credulity. But then, when everything is amazing and new, it's also the case, in a way, that nothing is.
It's fun as hell to see Max slowly figure out the rules of reality in real time, don't get me wrong. At the same time, I'm looking forward to Max developing a sense of what's true and what's false. A sense of what's believable and what's not. You know, so that I can screw with it from time to time.
Though, maybe magic just isn't what it used to be. Magicians still exist, as a profession at least. And there are the rock stars among them, just like in any other art form. The standouts have had to adapt to a culture that's grown accustomed to CGI, which is gradually breaking down our sense of cause and effect. You have to show us something more than a detached thumb these days. A few keyboard clicks can easily pull of that trick, after all, without breaking a sweat let alone breaking any actual skin.
In The Prestige, Michael Caine's Cutter breaks down the formal steps of a magic trick this way:
"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"."
Even though the movie's called The Prestige, the focus of the story is really on "The Turn," on wanting to be fooled. Christian Bale's character describes it as the human desire to transcend the hard reality of real life. To see something amazing that breaks the rules and gives us a glimpse--if only for a moment--into something bigger than ourselves.
Since it's a Christopher Nolan film, though, that glimpse of something bigger ultimately leads down a path that is fraught with peril and bleak moral ambiguity. Magic is less of a doorway to a bigger world than a trick, an opiate, an illusion of a bigger world. It's all smoke and mirrors. In simpler terms, it's a lie.
And as Cutter says at the close of the film, "You want to be fooled."
As much as I love The Prestige, and as much as I also love a good fooling, I don't buy that that's all there is to a good magic trick. Anyone can fool you, after all. Pickpockets, politicians, even parents. You don't always feel so good about it afterward, though, and you'd think a good magic trick will leave you with a smile on your face. The question, I suppose, is why. What makes the difference between a good fooling and a bad one?
Fooling comes cheap these days. CGI has broken the cause-and-effect code, and we're only going to get better and better at hacking reality until, somewhere between VR and AR, it may no longer make sense to differentiate between what's "real" and what's an illusion. Our eyes may just become a fresh as a newborn's, no longer concerning ourselves with the mundane rules of reality. Because who says that my thumb can't detach from my hand? If it looks that way through my holographic goggles, and there's no one to tell me otherwise?
But I like to believe that we'll always have our magicians. And just as the boundaries between true and false, real and fake are being redrawn, so too will our understanding of real magic adjust. Maybe it'll even turn inside out, so that the question isn't what can you make me believe really happened that clearly did not, but what can you really make happen that I don't believe you did?
With all due respect to Sir Michael Caine, I don't want to be fooled. I don't want Max to be fooled. I want him to see the real world, both as it really is and also as it could be. And once he thinks he's seen it all, what's he's sure that he understands cause and effect, what can be done and what cannot, what he could accomplish if he tried and what's impossible, I want to screw with him some more. I want to show him that the real world can be full of magic, that if he tries hard enough he can do amazing things. Things that the world may not believe at first, but that really happened.
He'll show them real magic ...
... and also Muppets. Real magic and Muppets.