So what if the illusionist does trick us? Isn’t that what we want? Martyn Bedford says we must let magic keep its mystique
So you’re on your way out of the concert hall, the music of one of the world’s great pianists still reverberating in your ears when someone sidles up alongside you like a pimp.
Psst, I know how he does that. Does what? That piano malarkey. You’re hooked now, drawn into the mutt of a shared secret … those keys, they’re connected to little hammers hidden inside the piano, and these hammers hit the strings that make the notes that make the music. And suddenly the concert is spoiled, the magic of the music rendered mundane. You feel cheated.
Except, of course, that it isn’t. And you don’t.
Now imagine a different scene: same “pimp” but this time you’ve just been to a magic show by that most spectacular of illusionists, David Copperfield. This time, whispered in your ear, are the tricks of the trade of the Trade of Tricks. How does Copperfield make that railway carriage from the Orient Express levitate and disappear? How does he walk through a wall? How does he cause the Statue of Liberty to vanish? The pimp can reveal all. He says he has a book full of explicit pictures explaining away the magic … and, for a small fee, it could be yours. You decline. But he isn’t bothered, because by now a crowd has formed and people are clamouring to buy his volumes of disillusion.
Such a book has been written and is a best-seller in Germany, where Copperfield has a huge following. Its author, a Bavarian biologist and amateur magician called Robert Rau, has studied Copperfield’s act for years and reckons he’s got the man sussed. And the methods, he says, are disappointingly conventional – the use of mirrors, lighting, concealed compartments, optical illusions and pure sleight of hand. The mainstay of stage magic for centuries.
Of course, the sheer scale of Copperfield’s illusions is what raises his act above the rest. Making a smiling, sequin-costumed assistant disappear is one thing, spiriting away a 25m, 77-ton train carriage is something else.
Yet according to Rau’s book the basic principle is the same. The object is draped in a cloth then removed – quietly, unseen – into a “dark zone” created by subtle use of spotlighting and black backdrops. Meanwhile, its presence beneath the cloth is stimulated by a “jimmy” – a collapsible wire frame which is whisked away with a flourish, along with the cloth, when the magician delivers the illusion’s dramatic punchline.
We have to take the author’s word for this as Copperfield himself dismisses the revelations contained in the book as “mere hypotheses”.
The German Magic Circle accused Rau of breaking the fundamental code of magicianship by laying its secrets bare, and all in pursuit of a publicity-seeking expos.
But what is there to expose? What is there to understand? In this age of technological sophistication, does anyone go to a magic show in the serious belief that they are witnessing a real magician – some kind of Merlinesque sorcerer – at work?
Is the magician harming or exploiting his audience by raising false expectations, by claiming to be something he isn’t, by presenting lies as truth? If he is an exploiter, then so is the actor and the novelist. As American illusionist Ricky Jay says: “The magician is supremely honest. He tells you he is going to deceive you, then lives up to his word.”
This remark – and, in a way, Rau’s book of revelations – touches on something much more interesting than the mechanics of magic. The subtext here is the tension that exists between a magician and his audience. To the lay person, magic is about tricks; to the magician it’s about performance. Sure, we watch Copperfield, Paul Daniels and others to be entertained, but we’re also trying to suss the trick. Part of the allure of magic is the undeniable and irresistible curiosity that leaves you wondering, how the hell does he do that?
Often the answer is quite simple, and its discovery would be anti-climactic. Better not to know. Or, at least in an age when many of us have an inkling about the magician’s methods, better not to be absolutely certain.
There’s nothing new in making public the tricks of the magician’s repertoire. Penn and Teller, an American double act, have built a show around the performance of an illusion followed by a repeat performance, this time with a step by step explanation of the methodology.
Before them, Harry Houdini – the greatest illusionist and escapologist of them all – used to publish the secrets of his feats in a magazine.
Earlier still, in 1584, the Discoverie Of Witchcraft was written – a book explaining the techniques of legerdemain so that its practitioners would be protected from false accusations of satanic practices. In those days, when magic was commonly equated with black magic, the performing conjuror trod a treacherous path.
Today, we know too much. We know the magician operates in apparent rather than actual defiance of the laws of nature. We know he possesses great skill rather than paranormal powers. We know his illusions to be just that: illusions. And the honest magician pretends to be nothing other than an artist or entertainer. Yet some of us remain fixated with the trick, in pitting our wits against the conjuror, or catching him out.
The advent of television enabled the magician to present his art to a wider audience, and to perform small conjuring feats in close-up for millions of viewers. Meat and drink to the expos anorak.
But magicians grew more skilled at masking their sleight of hand. They had to. Especially when video recorders came along allowing every action to be viewed repeatedly in the hope of sighting a “flash” of the trick. This tension, again. The illusionist concerned with performance, the audience preoccupied with technique.
Nothing new about this, either. In Our Magic, co-written in 1911 by the top British illusionists of their day, Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant, the authors state: “Tricks and dodges are of comparatively small importance in the art of magic. At the utmost they display inventive ability, but nothing more. The effect – and the effect alone – produced by the use of such invention, is the consideration of real importance.
“The general public, however, tend to the notion that magic consists merely in puzzles to be solved and challenges to the audience’s acuteness. To the magician, the `secrets’ are little more than are, to the actor, the wigs, greasepaints and other make-up and costumes … the art of the magician, like that of the actor, depends on matters far higher than mere appliances and processes.”
Magicians haven’t always been so honourable, and it’s a short step from tricks to trickery. In the days of street shows and travelling fairs, conjurors were said to operate in cahoots with pickpockets who worked an audience while it was distracted by the amazing events on stage.
Another notorious rip-off is the centuries-old gambling game, Find the Lady, where you have to bet on which of three playing cards is the queen. Performed legitimately, this is a true contest between performer and punter. Its illicit version is an illusion within an illusion: you think you’re testing your powers of observation against the card-sharp as he moves the three cards about the table at high speed; but it’s a case of heads he wins, tails you lose … sleight of hand has removed the queen from the fray before you place your bet, and restored it as one of the “losing” cards after he’s pocketed your money.
But the true magician is no trickster; there is no victim in magic as an entertainment. Indeed, the profession boasts a long history of seeking to discredit performers who use their “magical” skills for fraudulent purposes or who pass them off as psychic or supernatural phenomena.
One of the forefathers of modern illusionism – that man Maskelyne – launched his career with an act devoted to exposing the tricks used by spirit mediums.
An apprentice watchmaker and jeweller who practised conjuring as a hobby, he also had a fascination for spiritualism. But his credulity was broken when a professional clairvoyant asked him to repair a piece of apparatus. The device was designed to be attached to the medium’s leg so that – unseen beneath the table – the communicative raps and knockings of lost loved ones could be produced.
Before long, Maskelyne – who billed himself as a royal illusionist and anti-spiritualist – had mastered this and other clairvoyant techniques and was staging mock sances. One bogus medium was jailed for three months after Maskelyne demonstrated in court how the defendant faked written messages from the dead.
Houdini also had it in for spiritualists. When his mother died he employed a medium to make contact and, sure enough, the dead woman’s spirit spoke to her beloved son. Snag was, she used English – a language she could barely speak when she was alive. Thereafter, Houdini dedicated himself to rooting out charlatanism.
Even so, he must have clung on to the notion of communication from beyond the grave – promising to try to contact his wife, Bess, if he died before she did. To safeguard against false messages, they devised a code word. Houdini died on Hallowe’en, 1926. Every year for 10 years, Bess held a sance on the anniversary of Houdini’s death. Plenty of messages, no code word. The sances ceased.
In Third Law, science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The analogy is attractive, up to a point, but it misses a subtle differentiation. We live in an age when science has lost some of its capacity to amaze. A space shuttle takes off and we sit in our homes watching the event via satellite, taking this for granted.
Yet a good magician can still hold an audience spellbound. He can make them wonder: how the hell does he do that? It might be that modern technology is so complex, we give up trying to understand it. We simply accept. After all, you don’t need to know how a video recorder or a computer work in order to use one.
Whereas with magic, the workings of an illusion seem comprehensible, albeit teasingly poised beyond our fingertips. We may feel excluded by the technological “miracles” of our times, but we can still immerse ourselves in the pretence of the magical.
Here’s a story about Houdini, attributed to Walter Gibson (1897 to 1985), magician, journalist and writer. “Four men wheel a large cabinet on stage. Houdini leads an elephant into the cabinet and closes the door. Houdini opens the door and shows the cabinet to be empty. Twenty men wheel the cabinet off stage. Where did the elephant go?”
This is the essence of magic at its best. The chain of cause and effect which underlies the thought processes of rationality has been broken. We are disoriented, and delighted to be so. We glimpse a world where logic and science, and what we’ve learned to be the natural physical order, have been stood on their head.
In magic, there are two things taking place at once: what seems to be occurring and what is actually occurring. The joy of mistaking the unreal for the real is the joy of storytelling. And stories are what set us apart from the other animals.
Facts tell stories too, they make sense out of chaos; but fictions transport us beyond what we know to be true and into the realm of mystery and of belief. People have an innate need to believe, or at least a need to suspend disbelief from time to time. We know where Houdini’s elephant went. What we don’t know is how Houdini made us think we didn’t know.
And what we don’t need is some smart-arse sidling up to us on the way out of the auditorium and whispering: Psst! I know how he does that …