The superhero character model for magicians

My computer is starting to fail me. I don't know if it's the power cord connection at the back, or just another in the long line of weird internal failures that seem to point towards me needing to get off my ass and buy a new one. It's a nice fantasy to think of somebody covering my computer with a hankerchief, saying a few things, and when they whip it away, revealing that it's transformed into a brand new laptop. Lighter, faster, more functional, etc. Of course, people like that don't exist. Things like brand new laptops don't just magically appear.

And yet, magicians spend their days transforming 1's into 100's.

In other words, given what I've seen magicians do, I ought to be able to take $10 to a magician, ask him to repeat what he just did, take back the $1000, and go and get myself a new computer.

Except he won't do that. Not necessarily because he's an asshole or anything, but because he can't, despite the proof he's just given me that he apparently can. If he COULD do that sort of magical wizardry with cash, then he'd probably not be working as a magician, for one thing. He'd just spend his days borrowing dollar bills, changing them into one hundred dollar bills, getting change, and leaving with a profit of 99 dollars each time. Even if he was a philanthropic soul, he'd probably end up in deep trouble with the government for having a negative affect on inflation.

So this is a weird thing. We've essentially disproven the possibility of magic being at work when a magician changes 1s into 100s, and yet we've done it without taking a single look at methodology. We don't need to see TTs, or extra bills, or complex packages, etc. We've shown the magic to be false essentially within the theatrical reality of the trick itself.

And that's one of magic's better tricks.

This, I think, is a key part of the problem that Teller points out in the passage quoted by Derren Brown in Absolute Magic. Brown and Teller make the point that the modern magician is a sort of whimsical god-figure who gets what he wants by snapping his fingers, and that this has an alienating effect on the audience. There's no drama, no conflict, no honest exploration of the powers being displayed. There's also no acknowledgment of the theatrical extensions of the effect. Even if the magic effect is totally deceptive, it fails on the basis of theatre. To a certain extent, it's almost like a man going to meet a quadriplegic and saying "Here, watch me dance." The man may be charismatic and charming and a great dancer to watch, but there's bound to be no real connection between the man and his audience.

This is one of the big problems with magic, when you think about it. It's not that we don't have enough strong magic effects, it's that we have TOO many. I can make a copper coin change into a silver coin. How much value did it gain in that transformation? If I can do that, why aren't I on the cover of Fortune magazine? I can make a card jump from your pocket to my pocket. Conceivably I ought to be able to do that with a Mastercard as well, and yet I'm still doing card tricks for a living. I can produce fruit from underneath my cups. Amazing! I'll never have to go hungry again! And so on and so forth, pummeling the audience over the head with these miracles, and then after all that showing off, having to do a complete 180 and requesting some sort of reward for it, be it in cash or applause or recommendations or...

Seems odd when you look at it that way, doesn't it?

Here's a link to Derren Brown's performance of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I'd recommend going and watching that right now before coming back to this follow-up paragraph, as it essentially contains spoilers.

Finished? It's a great show, isn't it? Lots of fun, really entertaining routines, and an absolute killer moment right after the final effect, slightly reminiscent of The Usual Suspects. And yet, look at the "magic" he gave them. He correctly predicted an animal under less-than-test-conditions. He correctly guessed who was supposed to be lying to him, dictated under terms that are essentially a 1 in 5 chance. He hammered a nail into his head. He walked barefoot across glass. He correctly guessed the number of buttons chosen by a spectator, and he needed to adjust his guess TWICE. The final effect was that he apparently correctly foresaw a single word. When he finished that effect, he then turned around and showed that he was able to influence all the choices leading up to that word through subtle linguistic engineering -- not exactly magic, since we're all aware of the power of advertising and propaganda. In fact, the closest thing to an impossible demonstration was when he was able to reveal the name the one girl early on was thinking of, and even that can't compare, on the impossibility scale, with making a single card change into another card.

So what on earth is going on here?

I think the key is that Brown has a strong sense of what his performing character's power is. He's studied it, figured out everything theatrically-pleasing that he should be able to do with it, and perhaps just as important as anything else, he's aware of his power's limits.

Let's back up for a second. If Brown is able to correctly predict a future event, then he ought to be able to predict lottery numbers, win himself a bundle, and retire in perfect comfort, finding new devilish ways to torment Guy Hollingworth. But he hasn't claimed that power. Instead, he's claimed that he can influence people into making certain decisions, and do it so subtly that they won't even know they're being influenced. He's essentially killed two birds with one stone there, from a dramatic standpoint. On the one hand, he's relieved himself of the theatrical responsibility to answer for a character that nobody could connect to (the future seer), and on the other, he's added the outside agent of the spectator (the person he must influence) so as to create drama and conflict. Rather than alienating himself from his audience through his successes, he's established the necessity of an intimate connection WITH the audience in order to find success. That's pretty clever.

Now, while it's a great show, I don't necessarily believe that we're all forced to abandon traditional magic effects in order to produce something similar. Instead, what we need to do is look at what's being done in Brown's show, realize that much of it is just as false as what we want to do, and figure out what he does to make it feel true. He doesn't just snap his fingers in order to enter the necessary mental state to walk across the glass. He COULD have, but he didn't. Look at what he did instead. Ditto for the button-counting -- he doesn't just make the clairvoyance a token moment, he has to get into it by inflicting pain on himself.

So how do we apply this to magic? Well, first, I think we have to abandon the character model of the whimsical god figure, and instead embrace a different model...

...comic book superheroes.

Hear me out.

Take even a cursory examination of any superhero out there, and you'll notice that he (or she) has got some very interesting things going for him. He's got a defined power or set of powers. We've got an understanding of his relationship to his powers -- where they came from, what he needs to do in order to invoke them, what scope they have, etc. He's also constantly in situations of conflict, and he uses his powers to get through them.

There's also the parallel with the magic moment. Superheroes typically aren't cavalier about the gestures needed to make their powers come to be -- when they don't put any effort into it, comedy gets associated with the moment. Instead, when the Hulk wants to lift something heavy, he needs to put a little effort into it. When somebody wants to fly they have to crouch down a bit, then jump up into the air, and then fly. When somebody wants to shoot lasers from their eyes, they find the object, focus on it, and then their face tenses up right before the moment the lasers come out -- imagine how funny it would look if their face was relaxed and nonchalant and the lasers were still coming out of the eyes. Our magic moments could have that same feel to them. I think Sean Cudeck is on the right track with this. Look how he makes an event out of the coin vanishes, and in essence claims all credit for it, giving none to a wand, or a magic word, or some token gesture.

Getting back to the superhero, he also understands the limits of his powers. Arguably, the more limited the powers are, the more compelling the character is who can overcome them. There's a reason Superman is less easy to identify with than Batman -- in most instances, our identification with Superman is strongest when he is shoehorned into the weaker Clark Kent character, when he is dealing with the problems of having to keep things secret, of being unable to fit in. As Superman himself, though, he's just some exhibitionist fantasy figure that gets to be borderline annoying. Consider also that, despite all the powers that a fictional magician should have at his disposal, there haven't really been any truly great magician characters in comic books.

Unfortunately, if there's any basis to this, it's that if we want to take on this sort of character, our magic needs to change. Thankfully, they can be really subtle changes -- we might not even need to change much in the way of skills and methodologies, but rather look at what we're applying those skills and methodologies to. Look at Tommy Wonder's idea for the Cups and Balls. In the end, he doesn't produce foreign final loads. What are traditional final loads, if the effect is to be perceived as magic? Essentially, they are new matter being brought into the universe. But Wonder doesn't create things out of apparent nothingness. Instead, the final loads are items that we've seen all the time which just inexplicably end up under the cups. If we look at things in terms of pure impossibility, it's NOT as strong as causing fruit to come into existence from nothingness. And yet, theatrically and artistically, it's a MUCH more satisfying experience -- we are not surprised by things we could never have expected, we are surprised by things that were right there in front of our face the entire time. Now Tommy Wonder's execution is such that an audience is left with two potential explanations of how the final loads occur. Either the bag and pom-pom have got a mind of their own and just end up under there of their own accord -- on the surface, this seems to be the explanation for how the magic is happening. Anybody who thinks beyond this and decides to sanely disbelieve the concept of sentient bags and pom-poms, then has to consider the alternate explanation, that Tommy Wonder is so fast, so deceptive, that he can sneak things under the cups right under your nose and you don't know it. In essence, this is what's happening, but at the same time, how can these things occur when he's obviously working so hard to present the 'other' magic? Greater analysis yields a different mystery -- since loading them under the cups himself is too bold to do openly, how could he get away with it? These things point towards a deeper power.

I deserve no credit for the superhero analogy, by the way. Again, I blame Tyler. The whole line of thought began for me during a magic video depot discussion about how to perform coins across. The inevitable question was "Why coins?" At the time, my answers were all from the point of view of the magician -- because I'd had training learning how to manipulate coins, because I was comfortable with the sleights and concealments, because I could think of a lot of good methods, etc. The problem was, these things aren't theatrically relevant to the audience. From their standpoint, there's not a whole heck of a lot at stake in a coins across routine when looking at it from the point of view of props. Even if I'm using four half dollars, the scope of the effect is two bucks. Where it starts to get interesting is when it's looked upon as a demonstration of a power, because the ability to make things teleport is quite intriguing. During that discussion, Tyler made the direct analogy to Nightcrawler, who has teleportation powers, but they're not all-encompassing teleportation powers. His range is limited to two miles, and long jumps exhaust him. He can also teleport himself, his clothing, and a limited additional mass he's in contact with -- meaning, he can't make other things teleport without himself going along for the ride. His training allowed him to eventually teleport another person with him for small distances, but while he could handle it, the person with him would become instantly disorientated. Ironically, that made it an effective combat tactic, in that he could grab an enemy, teleport a few times, and they'd be overcome with dizziness and nausea, making them easy to subdue -- an intriguing example of how to turn a power limitation in one context into a dramatically compelling feature.

Do you see where this is going? All of a sudden, now, we can see coins across not just as a good trick, but a demonstration of a power, something that points deeper. Maybe the magician can make anything teleport from one hand to another when he has complete contact with them, but he's using coins specifically so that you can hear when the magic happens. Maybe he can make your watch jump into that box over there that he hasn't touched. Maybe he can have a pile of buttons that you count out, and he stands on the other end of the stage, and you bring him three of them, and he makes each of them vanish, but when you count your pile of buttons you find out that you're not three short anymore.

Maybe the magician has an affinity for metals. He can make coins jump from one hand to another. He can make forks and spoons bend. He can drive a spike straight through his body, and then remove it, leaving no damage (alright, I don't know a method for that one yet). Doesn't that seem like a compelling magician character? And by narrowing his focus to metal, he doesn't have to explain things like, if he can manipulate coins, why he doesn't do it with bills or credit cards.

Maybe he's trying to sell the idea of "fast hands". Maybe he starts with coins across, and then realizes that it doesn't work as well for him as Tommy Wonder's Socked Coins would, so he switches to that. He also does a coin snatch. He makes cards switch places right under your nose. He can pick your pocket and steal your watch. And so on... Each of those three examples strike me as someone who will easily be remembered as separate and distinct from other magicians.

Incidentally, I don't have a set opinion about whether or not the claimed power is one that should be stated outright for the audience. I think sometimes it can be helpful to define a power for others, and other times it could be just plain awkward. I do think that the magician defining a power for himself makes a ton of sense, though, particularly in the avenue of determining power conflicts.

Consider the following theatrical incompatibility. In one trick, three cards are taken by a spectator and placed into his pocket, and the magician, blindfolded, correctly names each card as it's pulled from the pocket. In another trick, the performer launches into a magician-in-trouble scenario where he believes he's found the spectator's thought-of-card, and shows it to her, and she says it's not hers (we'll presume that later he changes the card to the right one or some such). Both of these tricks might be equally good, but there's an incongruency here. How was he able to determine one card correctly, but not the other card, when presumably he's got a consistent set of powers at his disposal? Solving the incompatibility might be as simple as saying that the mindreading works only with men and erratically with women. But leaving that sort of discrepancy there it is artistically unsound.

Another possible theatrical incompatibility might be a performer who mixes mentalism and magic carelessly. Now, while many (including Derren Brown himself) are quick to say that the two can be mixed effectively, I think most would agree that some effort would be required to ensure that one ability does not explain the other. For instance, if I do a mind-reading routine involving three billets rolled up into paper balls, and then immediately launch in a "paper balls across" effect, I believe I've undermined the mind-reading claim, since whatever secret method I was using to make the paper balls jump around, I might also have been using to manipulate the billets for the mind-reading. The routine construction for both individual effects might be exquisite, but are two different powers being displayed here? Or is it just one power masquerading as two?

This is also why I have a lot of sympathy for those who say cards shouldn't be used in mentalism effects. In order to succeed, I think that the key thing is to make sure the performer interacts with the cards in a way that a mind-reader would, and that essentially, the performer would have to come through on the effect in the fairest possible manner. If the power claim is such that the mentalist can really read minds, then a spectator should be able to bring their own deck, shuffle it, look at a card, put it back, and then have the performer name it. If you think about it for a second, that 1-in-52 miracle is better than most mentalism-themed card tricks out there, and yet even it is nothing compared to what many mentalists can do with a swami or a book test.

So let's get back to the initial bill switch trick. Is there any way to apply this whole superhero/power/limitations/whatever line of thinking to the bill switch? Thankfully, yeah, there are tons of ways. The stated claim might be that he's training in origami, and after creating a few amusing shapes, he accidentally transforms the bill into a mismade bill. Or else, he might change the bill, and claim that it's only an illusion, and that it won't remain a 100 forever, and in fact with a bit of a wave it visibly transforms back into a 1. Or else, he might decide to look for less obvious applications of the method. Instead the transformation isn't the effect, but instead an indication of a moment of transposition -- the bill has switched places with another bill. Or else, he's torn the bill almost in half, and then with a rub, he's restored it.

Or maybe he's not even using money to begin with...