Secular Magic and the Moving Image: Mediated Forms and Modes of Reception 9781501320934, 9781501320941, 9781501320958

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Secular Magic and the Moving Image

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Secular Magic and the Moving Image Mediated Forms and Modes of Reception Max Sexton

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Max Sexton, 2018 Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image © Claudio Arnese/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2093-4 PB: 978-1-5013-5389-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2095-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-2096-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To LB, Michael Sexton and University College, Farnborough

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Contents Introduction 1. Magic, Mediation and Television Form 2. Magic and Entertainment 3. Magic and Performance 4. Magic as a Game 5. The Magic Film Conclusion Bibliography Filmography Index

1 9 35 65 105 127 159 163 171 173

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Introduction

This book explores the idea of secular magic and its use in the moving image. The term ‘secular magic’ is used in this book to suggest a realist account of magic and its proximity to illusion and fiction. The link between communication technologies, such as radio and television, and invisible forces has been well documented.1 Rational technological marvels, including film, and a fascination for enchantment and wonder have, since the advent of the magic lantern, transmuted older beliefs in the supernatural into secular attractions. Boundaries of belief and doubt, magic and science are some of the topics that are discussed in this volume as also the cultural sensibilities through which sense is made of secular conjuring magic – in its many variegated forms – primarily on television, as well as film. Initially, the book is concerned with the formal and aesthetic changes that television has undergone since its growth in popularity in the 1950s and its impact on a particular form of entertainment that emerged from the theatrical variety act  – the presentation of secular magic. Realism has also been a mode that has, throughout television history, dominated much of its output and continues to be tied to arguments about its essential nature as it transmits images and sound instantaneously. Yet its liveness, if a dominant paradigm, ignores how conjuring magic has sought to destabilize realism and the boundaries between belief and doubt and the ordinary and the extraordinary. At the same time, the enduring fascination for magic on television – including recent popular acts by, for example, David Blaine – reveals much about how relations between everyday life and the extraordinary are played out. The imbrication 1

Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

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of magic, especially in the presentation of ‘street magic’, with the daily lives of its participants not only destabilizes reality but offers a utopian sensibility. Such magical transformations of the mundane complicate our understanding of television as a medium whose main aesthetic is realism, as well as other debates about the uncanniness of television as it brings the world into our living rooms. The performance of magic transcends cultural and linguistic barriers because of the relatively few competencies that are required for the majority of conjuring tricks. Although it has built a globalized culture of illusion and sleight of hand, it appears to lack deeper structures of meaning. However, if apparently trivial, magic’s diverse content has sustained a remarkable longevity and enjoyed enduring popular appeal. Moreover, if definitions of secular magic on the moving image are difficult due to its ability to be so varied, it raises possibilities that the cultural construction of magic is bound to the social application of broadcasting and recording technology. The art of illusion with its secular development has led to modes of entertainment and realism that increasingly cannot be understood either in aesthetic terms or in narrative and contextual terms that articulate complex ideas to do with both image making as well as the relationship between forms of moving image. Such relationships continue to complicate any single definition of screen media within the mediatization of the live and converging mediums of television and film at the beginning of the twenty-first century. How a number of programmes by Penn and Teller, David Blaine, Criss Angel and others function to explore ideas about truth and deception is shown to depend on the cultural as well as visual possibilities of illusion. Since the invention of the moving image in the 1890s, secular magic and the moving image have had a history of affinity. Hitherto, the relationship between them has been usually understood in terms of ‘the magic of the movies’ and suggests the power of moving images to conjure marvellous worlds and evoke feelings of amazement. But this book is not about the history of special effects in the movies or a history of magic. Rather, it is an attempt to determine the influence and status of secular magic within its various complex modes of delivery in contemporary television and, eventually, in film.

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Introduction

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The use of secular magic has served to demystify the world and often deploys the technique of novelty as a device for exploring the limits of knowledge. For example, in the shows of the British mentalist Derren Brown, a series of programmes has been created within the genre of popular science. On the other hand, secular magic also promotes modes of representation that serve as entertainment rather than modes of presentation (David Copperfield’s Dreams and Nightmares).2 The overlap and tension between these modes reveal the often complex way that secular magic can be understood in contemporary screen media. The book contends that the phenomenon of secular magic creates distinct cultural forms that have been responsible for the commercial production of modes whose appearance in recent television and cinema has been overlooked. The act of magic permits a relationship between the producer and the spectator to resemble that between conjuror and audience; the quality of the magical performance is judged by its ability to deceive and mystify as well as, at other times, inform and empower. The emergence of the modern stage magician in the nineteenth century inaugurated a century of close links between the performance of magic as education, entertainment and screen projection. This would climax when film coincided with the golden age of theatrical magic at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, unlike the formative years of film, the need for ever greater novelties in the 1990s and the twenty-first century has been less about the magical effect as an innovation, and more about how different modes within the moving image have interreacted to provide the maximum cultural value to audiences and producers. Such an interest in its cultural construction raises questions about its practices and the ‘real world’, or relations between the moving image and society. Specifically, it is the relationship between the live performance of magic and the image that dominates many of the debates in this book. The motion picture industry is older than the electronic (television) image and exists as a longestablished art. Despite resistance from many quarters, many of the techniques and qualities of film were eventually adopted by television drama which was

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Greg Evans, ‘Review:  “David Copperfield:  Dreams and Nightmares” ’. Accessed at http://variety. com/1996/legit/reviews/david-copperfield-dreams-nightmares-1117436932/.

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shot on film for the production of the telefilm. Neverthless, the production of certain types of programmes recorded in the television studio, such as the variety show, remained ‘live’, and in a magic show, the experience of the audience continues to be a sense of immediacy of events happening as they appear on the screen. If the sense of immediacy made little difference to dramatic programmes that relied on the camera direction and editing techniques of film, other types of entertainment, including the ‘live’ performance of magic on television, depended on the continuing understanding that the audience had a direct access to the reality that was being transmitted. Yet, as John Ellis notes, the immediacy of the TV images depends largely on the relations that the image sets for itself.3 To this extent, the examination of magic involves exploring both the formal and technical qualities of the host medium as well as moving beyond the matter of examining particular texts by exploring the discourses and practices within television, as well as film. The representation of magic touches on matters ontological, but in order to do so, it is important to realize that an understanding of the text depends on how it participates in broader systems of cultural meaning. A desire to identify secular magic as possessing the traits and characteristics of a cohesive system is not an argument that magic can ever have the nature of a genre such as, say, science fiction with its semantic and syntactic conventions. Rather, if magic appears at moments to become a formulaic discourse, then the marks of coherence loosen due to its inclusion of discourses to do with the randomness and uncertainty associated with the ‘real world’. The positioning of the spectator between certainty and scepticism allows a dynamic interplay between the various narratives within magic, which the book wishes to explore. Such narratives deal with the status of the authentic and the raising of the possibility that there are ‘contradictory truths’ in a stable world that appears knowable and predictable.4 As Michael Caine playing the character of Harry Cutter in The Prestige (2006) says, ‘Are you watching closely?’ Magic is an invitation to reflect on our perception of events. In this way, continuing to

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John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, rev. edn, 1992), 132. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 23.

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refer to tropes about genre, the iconography of magic – cabinets, ropes, spirits, swords, coins and flower bouquets – involves ‘attractions’ and represents its structural properties, but so too are evolving modes that present contradictory truths as bodies and minds are apparently freed from the ordinary physical constraints of the physical world. Chapter  1 examines the ability of magic to be live as well as mediated, including its relationship to television form. The attempt to situate the magic show within theoretically delineated generic boundaries is shown to close down other possibilities and ignore the complex ways in which live demonstrations of magic have functioned. Instead, the book contends that the construction of conjuring magic on television engages with a set of culturally and historically constructed conventions for creating illusions. Ideas of a ‘living diegesis’ and the intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life are used to argue that television has historically signified authenticity and an immediate presence. Subsequent discourses of making direct contact with the live power of television are shown to depend on an understanding of the types of performance that formed the basis of the earliest television shows featuring magic. The sense of ‘being-there’ and simultaneity with the act of magic are traced to the use of vaudeville and the variety show that existed as a preamble to the language of television’s live technology. At the same time, discourses about the value of entertainment and notions of quality and how they can be assigned to programmes to do with conjuring magic are explored. Chapter 2 examines the idea that magicians are entertainers of a specific sort. The term ‘light entertainment’ for television has, like magic, usually been a form that has had to gain critical recognition. However, if conjuring magic can be defined as entertainment, what does this mean? Magic was able to make use of light entertainment’s live audience and the construction of simple props inside an electronic studio. Yet, televised magic in the 1950s and 1960s testified not only to the idea of an event on television but also the ephemeralness of television at a time when assumptions were being made about its cultural status. The status of live entertainment accorded to magic would mean that it would suffer marginalization. It would not be viewed as art or, at best, the least of the arts. One result of this implicit hierarchy between live and recorded programmes would mean that magic was regarded as more suitable

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for children rather than for adults. Nevertheless, it was possible for dialectic to exist between the formulaic and the experimental in conjuring shows and, by the 1970s, the British David Nixon Show would use visual and presentational techniques to augment the magic that its host performed. There was also the possibility of the first mentalist acts on television during the 1950s from Chan Canasta, who would encourage a style that opposed the show business repartee and glamour of other magicians. New developments were also occurring in the United States and, again in the 1970s, formation of ideas about television as a reflexive as well as a reflective site of culture that combines the real and the virtual, between the living and the mediated, became visible in many of the acts by David Copperfield. Chapter 3 examines more recent changes in televised magic. The idea that entertainment on television is never static is explored in order to reveal how distinctions between the real and unreal and concepts of true and false have lost coherent boundaries. Rather, the chapter proposes that a metatextual analysis is required to establish how the act of magic is structured by television’s relationship to daily life, including discourses of entrepreneurialism and self-actualization that are examined using examples such as Criss Angel in the United States and Dynamo in the United Kingdom. The advent of magic leaving the confines of the electronic studio and the development of ‘street magic’ has revived interest in magic as a method of testing ideas about realism using a comparison between television and the everyday condition. The chapter demonstrates how lived relations between magic and the everyday and its imbrication have been exploited by prestidigitators, who demonstrate the precariousness of life and unpredictability at the end of the last millennium and into the noughties. The chapter further discusses the way that challenges to the perceptions of the everyday have formed the basis of magic by practitioners such as Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller. Together, Penn and Teller have the reputation of using audience participation that acknowledges how magic maintains a fiction of possessing special skills but, in fact, depends on creative participation with the spectator. Stage magicians are entertainers who work creatively to complete an illusion, and creative participation with the audience stimulates a renewed realization of the process that is undergone while experiencing

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magic on television. Nevertheless, the development of the ‘television shaman’ by David Blaine is important because the process of producing a mediatized event engages with several emotionally charged as well as cultural forms on television that signify degrees of authenticity. The book shows how discourses of personal experience and the narrative of the self can appropriate magic and have transformed the performance of prestidigitation in the past two decades. Chapter 4 explores how these complex modes of engagement are observable in the magic of Derren Brown – one of the most popular and best known mentalists in the past two decades. Mentalism has been regarded as a variant of stage hypnotism. Although hypnotism raises concerns about the danger of it appearing on television and the control television can exert on an unwilling audience, it has also been regarded as fakery. Brown’s demonstration of mentalism reveals that there is an interaction between him and his subject, which depends on developing a narrative of the self, but which, in his hands, can be used to explore often complex notions of simulation and game play on television. Within the game worlds that Brown constructs, he is able to chart the relationship between television and modes of fiction and nonfiction, as well as poetics of the self and the attempt by television to offer a form of public education about its subject volunteer. In the case of Brown, this is achieved due to his role of both scientist and shaman, which cleverly relies on the exploitation of newer types of surveillance technology. By ensuring a loss of control by the volunteer within his show, Brown is able to create a mode that operates as a prank that in its scale and range is able to destabilize the everyday and ultimately destroy habitual notions about reality. The magician is often seen to be working as an illusionist but, for Brown, the magic is not the art of enchantment but more usually the confidence trick. Chapter  5 is different from the previous chapters because of its focus on film. Its purpose is to demonstrate how mediatized magic on a recorded medium like film is not the same as ‘movie magic’. This is not to make the mistake of arguing that convergence between the different mediums of film and television has disrupted previous theoretical oppositions about them but that, at the same time, any differences or similarities should not be considered at a purely technological level. The book argues that secular magic represents

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a distinctive cultural form of the moving image that has been used to create a sense of being-there with the audience. In the films The Illusionist (2006), The Prestige (2006) and Now You See Me (2013), the ‘aesthetic of amazement’ is always a reminder of the profound complicity of the audience in the process of magic-making. The relationship between each film’s director – Neil Burger, Christopher Nolan or Louis Leterrier – and the spectator is shown to be the partnership between the conjuror and the audience. The audience will know from the start that it is all an act, but the performance of magic is judged by its ability to deceive. This neatly returns to the role of the magician that Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the founder of modern conjuring, believed was vital to render a trick successful.5 The films in question are not an exercise in mystifying the audience but reflect on the performance of illusionism. The use of misdirection is one stratagem that is deployed as the films explore the boundaries between performance and performer, as well as the distinctions between mode and the type of presentation of illusions. This book demonstrates that the appearance of extraordinary things within secular magic should be understood primarily in relation to the ‘real’. Different tricks continue to demand a sense of immediacy and a transparent view of realtime events. Although this is different in film and television, in order to understand magic in the moving image, it must be finally defined through its mode of reception, as well as textually or via its mode of production. Ultimately, magic is a cultural discourse whose meanings and how they should be understood are complex and which form separate discourses whose stylistics can be used to articulate wider cultural processes within television and film.

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J. E. Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic or How to Become a Wizard (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1878), 43.

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Magic, Mediation and Television Form

Television was to transport viewers into another world and transport other worlds into the home. Rather than a photographic record, television could provide a living link to distant vistas.1

Televised magic: a matter of fact? Sleight-of-hand, legerdemain, prestidigitation, mentalism  – the various acts of ‘natural’ or secular magic. In each of these various magical acts, audiences see natural laws at work but are misled or misdirected in their understanding of which laws are at work. The fascination with magic is a willingness for the disruption of natural laws followed by an interest in how the audience will respond to it – to be teased, amused, frightened or puzzled. It is the construction of these acts of magic as a form of television entertainment that opens the possibility of an understanding and appreciation of the taxonomy of what has been a marginal and sometimes subversive form as well as a type of ‘live’ entertainment that has been hugely popular.2 The historical antecedents of the magic show can be found in the history of carnival and in popular nineteenth-century theatre. If the modern-day founder of much of the theory about magic was Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin

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Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 128. For example, at the height of its popularity, The Paul Daniels Magic Show, series 7 on BBC-1, averaged ten to twelve million viewers and was shown as prime-time television on Saturday from 7 September to 9 November 1985. See Broadcasters Audience Research Board, weekly TV audience network report. A repeated series had audiences of more than five million and was the most popular show on BBC-2. See Broadcast, 17 August 1984, 25.

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(1805–1871), most modern magic is based on older illusions and sleights of hand, some of which date from the itinerant performers of the medieval village fair.3 For example, the cup-and-ball trick can be traced further back to Roman times.4 But it was Robert-Houdin in the nineteenth century who realized that the arts of magic are as much a case of disguising the old and the hackneyed with newer forms of presentation, and by putting a new stamp on them, he was able to alter some of magic’s entertainment practices. The exploration of magic’s taxonomy on television and the extent to which its live performance has been mediated for the small screen has to first deal with some of the questions of institutional discourses and practices specific to that medium. Although several types of conjuring magic and illusion had been popularized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in vaudeville theatre, carnivals and night-clubs, its transition to television posed specific problems. Television’s ability to transmit images and sound instantaneously and the live origination of programmes suggest that the study of a series of texts will differ in many ways from its literary and cinematic equivalents. According to Jane Feuer, as the study of generic texts has moved from film to television, its study must rely on a number of different critical levels.5 By asking how programmes were understood by institutions, programme makers and audiences, the television text can be analysed as an industrial form of aesthetic practice. In this way, its analysis can go beyond the limits of any one programme and examine a number of ‘extratextual’ areas, including television’s changing production process as well as other cultural phenomena. A critical discussion, therefore, serves two purposes: first, it pays careful attention to the historical conditions that formulated and reformulated the presentation of magic on television; second, the changing modes of television entertainment help to explore the discourse between familiar and inverted norms, by which audiences construct meaning and pleasure about each programme. Historically, the study of genre within the moving image has relied on similar texts to establish its key structures of characters and themes. For 3 4

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Robert-Houdin’s legacy is explored more in Chapters 1 and 3. One of the most famous examples of this trick was painted in the fifteenth century by Hieronymus Bosch. There are five copies, one of which is now in the Louvre. Jane Feuer, ‘Genre Study and Television’ in Robert C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987), 113–33 (131).

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example, some of the earliest film criticism by André Bazin and Robert Warshow argues for a genre’s autonomy or near autonomy or else its ‘essence’.6 Similarly, Jacques Derrida has argued that ‘there is no genreless text’ and offers a prescriptive approach to genre theory that provides for an orderly classification of texts.7 Yet, the approach to individual categories of genre is problematized by television’s ‘phenomenology [as] one of flow, banality, distraction and transience, its semiotics complex, fragmentary and heterogeneous. The limits of the text “proper” and its formal unity – apt to be broken at any moment by an ad or a turn of the dial’.8 Within this ‘flow’ of programmes in the television schedule, texts do not interact on their own, but are brought together by practices both inside and outside television. As we will see, the television programme can be formed by an often complex set of processes involving both production practices and the psychological preparedness of the audience to accept the various magical arts that are performed. Furthermore, if television is culturally specific and temporally limited, its production can be organized around principles other than generic ones from one decade to the next. The history of magic on television recognizes the multiple forms of entertainment that changed frequently over time, although the programmes looked at will mostly fall within the conventions of a ‘live’ tradition. Nevertheless, the acts of magic have created hybrids as they sought to offer distinctive forms of entertainment from the norms that had been established early on in television’s development. At times, such newer hybrid forms have sought to critique many of the utopian assumptions first suggested by Robert-Houdin about the magician as an actor who plays the part of someone with supernatural powers with its promise of re-enchantment and antidote to the rationality of modernity.9 If it was in the interests of producers, schedulers and audiences to respect generic differentiation between and within programming areas, it was also

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Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume 2 (1967), and Robert Warshow, The Gangster as Tragic Hero (1971). Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1992), 230. Nick Browne, ‘The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies ( 1984), 9, no. 3, Summer, 174–82 (176). Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic or How to Become a Wizard (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1878), 43.

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the case, as John Ellis has argued, that audiences tended to watch an evening’s worth of television rather than specific programmes.10 Earlier in television history, for Raymond Williams, the significance of the difference between broadcasting, including radio, and previous cultural forms was not simply in the distribution of programmes to the home but ‘a sequence or set of alternative sequences of these and other similar events [plays, meetings and stories] which are then available in a single dimension and in a single operation’.11 For Williams, flow was a feature of television that compromised and altered both the separate texts that television had produced. Consequently, a theory of television flow focuses more on process than product and its consequences for reception. Due to this electronic flow of sounds and images, Feuer identifies how TV genres appear to have a tendency to recombine across genre lines and possess a tendency for hybridity and intertextuality.12 Rather than fixed and absolute boundaries, the presentation of magic is less prescriptive and relies on a more discursive approach to genre and the creation of definitions, meanings and values within particular historical contexts. The question of what is a genre on television has been considered by Nick Lacey. His argument, which can be applied relatively easily to programmes that have a clear narrative structure, is that a ‘repertoire of elements’ form basic building blocks of identifying character types, setting, iconography, narrative and style.13 However, although attractive as a straightforward method, a reliance on the text or an aesthetic approach to genre ignores the fact that television is too much more of a ‘leaky’ medium, whose meanings constantly spill over into other areas of life, to think of magic as a discrete set of programmes. John Hartley has claimed that ‘The object of study is colossal, chaotic, complex. There seems to be no such “thing” as “Television”, whose natural properties can be described by scientific methods . . . As a result . . . the best that we can hope for is not the academic discipline of “Television”, but the more 10 11

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John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1992), 111–26. Raymond Williams, Television:  Technology and Cultural Form (London:  Fontana/Collins, 1974), 87. Jane Feuer, ‘Genre Study and Television’ in Robert C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987), 113–33 (131). Nick Lacey, Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies (London: Macmillan, 1980), 133.

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modest “television studies” ’.14 This can be used to think further about television not as a discrete series of programmes or texts but as a flow that merges homogeneous programmes into a continuous cultural experience. However, writing in the 1990s, Hartley sees in televisual flow the textual openness of television as the holding of viewers in the loose grip of the programme. In other words, there is an increased emphasis on discourse and the viewer that reduces the prime position granted to the text. Rather than discrete groups that form a discernible genre, there is a flow of sounds and images, and homogeneous programmes can segue into a particular cultural experience. Notwithstanding this, Lacey’s earlier examination of another type of programme – the game show – defines it in terms of its repertory of elements. The same methodology applied to televised magic can establish that magical sleights of hand and illusions consist of a setting (the television studio), characters (usually a male magician host, his female assistant or famulus, a volunteer or dupe chosen from the studio audience), a narrative (depending on the type of magic performed from close-up tricks to large stage illusions), an iconography (a glitzy set) and a style (basic ‘live’ television). However, in much the same way as Lacey’s discussion of the game show, the boundaries of televised magic leak into other types of programmes, including, for example, the talk show. One solution would be to categorize the many different types of magic. But the range and the types of magical tricks are eclectic; a mechanistic classification of magic, seeking the formal boundaries of genre, becomes either too delimiting or else too elastic to make further definition meaningless. For example, what is the link between a card trick performed in the TV studio and an act of endurance of someone being buried underground with limited time to escape besides the fact they are both made for television and broadly described as magic? Instead, a broad classification may attempt to include all magical ‘effects’ under one of the following six headings: 1. 2. 3. 4.

A production or creation A disappearance A transformation An apparent defiance of natural laws

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John Hartley, Uses of Television (London: Routledge, 1999), 18.

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5. An exhibition of secret motive power 6. Apparent mental phenomena15 Within these categories, the different types of narrative events convey the norms an audience expects to see within a magical performance. We might also consider how each of the six headings is, in fact, a distinctive narrational mode that sets a particular style historically. A narrational mode, as suggested by David Bordwell’s analysis of film narrative, is a ‘historically distinct set of norms of narrational construction and comprehension’ that transcends genre and specific creators to build a coherent set of practices.16 If the narrational mode of older magic such as The Paul Daniels Magic Show (1979–1994) was performed inside the TV studio and was characterized by artificial spaces and less of a connection with everyday life, recent street magic is within a ‘lived context’, which immerses magic in the daily routines of ‘ordinary’ people. The insignia of the ‘hip-hop Houdini’ for David Blaine indicates how, twenty years later, the style and presentation of his magic differs from that of Paul Daniels. The act of magic on US and UK television occupies a range of textual characteristics from the traditional magician’s props and table to demonstrations of physical endurance by David Blaine and Criss Angel. However, it is already clear how elastic the phenomenon of magic might be on television and the problem of imposing taxonomy on a medium whose texts are eclectic. Any initial attempt to define the performance of secular magic on television within stable and neat categories ignores how far electronic textuality throughout television’s history has been affected by the interplay of multiple shaping influences, including the broadcasting institution, the technological potential of the programme and the medium’s changing relationship to its audience. Yet, despite shifting parameters, the interplay between these influences does not necessarily produce a ‘wild’ form that remains occulted, beyond the reach of definition. Rather, magic on television has emerged at particular moments as a response to historical contexts within specific modes of functioning. One recurring theme in this book is that it has acted as an affective investment

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This list was first suggested by David Devant in the early twentieth century and is reprinted in My Magic Life (Bideford: The Supreme Magic Company, 1983), 105. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985), 155.

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and empowerment that uses cultural forms, images and practices for different groups of viewers, each defining its own ‘taste culture’. Consequently, the development of magic usefully demonstrates changes in television as well as the wider media environment. The construction of reality as entertainment is an important part in understanding the appeal of televised magic. However, the multiple responses of the audience to the performance of a trick on television are a reminder of the longing for a suspension of the natural laws. The magician’s illusions express desires that are spell-binding, glamorous and dazzling. The dissolving of identity using vertiginous and thrilling spatial displacements or transformations, such as escaping from a locked box, expresses the desire for the possibility of the supernatural against the real. David Blaine discusses the appeal of this supernatural possibility in RobertHoudin’s theories of magic: His notion that a magician is an actor who plays the part of someone with supernatural powers was revelatory, and his theories on acting seemed to anticipate the Method school. ‘Although all one says during the course of a performance is . . . a tissue of falsehoods, the performer must sufficiently enter into the part he plays, to himself believe in the reality of his fictitious statements . . . This belief on his own part will infallibly carry a like conviction to the minds of spectators.’17

For Blaine, street magic is, therefore, a mix of genre signs, of fact and fiction – the mix of aesthetics indicating for him the similarity between reality TV, soap opera and ‘serious television’. The emotional truth of reality-inflected street magic, which Blaine practices, enables questions to be raised by the audience to better understand the methods of deception on television and its mediated representations. This combination of affective appeal and empowerment suggests both the atmosphere of mystery and inexplicability, as well as the edification of the audience who can be challenged intellectually. The mediation of magic on television has become an attempt to arrange everyday life for maximum emotional power that can be used in a variety of ways from

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David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 2002), 31

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self-actualization to contemplation of the honed skills required for its success: the practical power of magic is on offer as well as its emotional appeal. The mix of aesthetics and its relationship to its audience in magic also raises some important differences between scripted and unscripted programmes on television. Scripted programmes such as soaps are structured and have a narrative that relies on repeatable and familiar elements. However, since the 1980s, the TV format revolution has been powered by reality programming, as broadcasters have shopped around for more popular programmes, and national broadcasting markets have opened up fostering more competition.18 A format for a programme has strict rules laid out in a production bible. Like game show formats, the acts of magic can travel easily and fit into different cultures with the minimum of adaptation. The transfer of expertise is fairly straightforward, and some of these acts include the American-Japanese magician Cyril Takayama19 and Indian Ramakrishna Kotha.20 Unlike genre, format is widely used within the television industry . . . Formats can be original and thus copyrighted, franchised and under licence, and traded as a commercial property. Genres, by definition, are not original. Format is a production category with relatively rigid boundaries that are difficult to transgress without coming up with a new format. Genre is the product of a text- and audience-based negotiation activated by viewers’ expectations. Genre is the larger, more inclusive category and can be used to describe programmes that use a number of related formats.21

The format is important to the study of magic because of the difficulty of making the idea of genre work for critics, industries and audiences. If genre refers to a core of similar texts that include conjurors such as Paul Daniels, Penn and Teller and internal textual features, it should not be forgotten that, within the various acts of magic, genre is not bound by intrinsic textual features but depends on the cultural or industrial use of the illusion or trick. A term like 18

19 20

21

Robin Nelson, State of Play:  Contemporary High-End TV Drama (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2007), 13. Cyril Takayama mostly performs in Japan. Ramakrishna Kotha won the Best Indian Entertainer Award, 2005, and Best Indian Magician Award, 2012. Graeme Turner, ‘Genre, Format and “Live” Television’ in Glen Creeber (ed.), The Television Genre Book (London: BFI, 2001), 6–8.

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17

a NBC or BBC ‘special’ reveals the industrial origin of the programme rather than its own textual features, and many magic acts on television are the product of different organizations, each with its own use of stylistics. Equally, the advent of the format may limit and help to standardize the magic on our screens, but magic has also appeared as a series of ‘exceptional’ programmes. Such programmes have been transformative events that demonstrate how televised magic varies its appeal by combining visual style and a negotiation between different discourses – some of which celebrate consumerism and others that reject it. In this book, rather than a fixed understanding of secular magic, it is possible to see how magic on television can disrupt audience expectation. In this way, televised magic can often resist an immanent reading, and this is because of its eclecticism and method of its consumption. To analyse the full range of televised magic’s cultural meanings, by intriguing its audience, it is necessary to understand that viewers can appreciate continuity and variation within the magic show.

Going live? Since the 1930s, both in the United States and the UK, television has been defined very much by its ability to transmit events that occur simultaneously to the time of viewing. Nevertheless, in spite of television’s relay function, during the 1950s and 1960s, the critical discourse constructed around the early function of television was concerned with television as an aesthetic medium, but which aesthetic was ‘natural’ to television? In 1970, writer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell was to comment that, ‘a whole theology was erected to justify television’s existence as an autonomous art in terms of its liveness’.22 This peculiar quality of electronic communication raises issues to do with the presumption of television as always being ‘live’ and the possibility of the immediacy of television. The conceptualization of television as a ‘live’ medium is a debate about not so much how TV images may differ from reality but how liveness 22

Joan Bakewell and Nicholas Garnham, The New Priesthood:  British Television Today (London: Allen Lane, 1970), 14.

18

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has created complex meta-realities to do with the construction of magical entertainment as one of the multiple forms of television as well as shifting forms of address for its audience. The call of the magician when performing a trick on television to ‘now watch carefully’ is, in fact, a call to make ‘direct’ contact with the live power of television itself. Television’s ubiquity, its technology of vision-from-a-distance has been fully utilized to fulfil the promise of magic of achieving transcendence from the confines of the ordinary and to extend the range of sights and sounds within the compass of the human senses. The shrinkage of space caused by television’s ability to close the gap between disparate places helps us to understand some of the uncanny qualities of electronic communication. Television’s ability to shrink space and achieve instantaneous communication has brought the audience at home into the immediate presence of new people and territories  – both geographically and psychologically. Television’s ability to ‘go-anywhere’ has become an extension of our senses. If broadcasting started in the role of universal eavesdropper in the first half of the twentieth century using radio, television and its ability to be anywhere-at-once has become the universal eye-at-the-keyhole. At the same time, the phenomenon of liveness on television and its claim to be able to offer ‘a window on the world’ relies to some extent on its use of indexicality – the bond between copy and reality that within moving images seems to signify authenticity and a reproduction of the real world. For film theorist André Bazin, a photograph was inscribed with the essence of the object that was captured by the camera, and it was the allure of the ‘presence’ contained in the image that made it so compelling: A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith . . . Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer . . . No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.23 23

Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Los Angeles: University of California University Press, 1967), 14.

19

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19

The notion that photography aspires for immediacy was also explored by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. For Barthes, like Bazin before him, photography offered an immediate presence to the world. Realism in the photograph would not be ‘a “copy” of reality, but an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art’.24 They would be photographic recordings of real events taking place in a real, physical space, although embalmed and not temporally co-present. Instead, they would be the ‘disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration’.25 However, the difference between the photograph, film and television is that, whereas the former can never, by definition, be anything but recorded, television is often live and works to maintain its status of a medium capable of unmediated spontaneity. As Jane Feuer argues, Television’s self-referential discourse plays upon the connotative richness of the term ‘live’, confounding its simple or technical denotations with a wealth of allusiveness. Even the simplest meaning of ‘live’  – that the time of the event corresponds to the transmission and viewing times  – reverberates with suggestions of ‘being there’ . . . bringing it to you as it really is.26

The live TV image relentlessly insists on an embodied account of experience with a minimum of human interference. This sense of reality is made more powerful because it is heightened by an apparent unawareness of television’s production process and the presumption that it is a more objective, less mediated access to the world out there. For John Ellis, this ability for the live image to embody the experience of actually ‘being there’ is an invocation of the century of witness that has been established by the invention of television.27 This is because television has created a sense of immediate experience in the realist genres of news and talk shows, which is seemingly live and personally addressed to the viewer at home. Such ideas about the extension of the human sensorium that have built on earlier writings by Marshal McLuhan28 and Don 24 25 26

27 28

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 88. Bazin, What Is Cinema, 14. Jane Feuer, ‘The Concept of Live Television:  Ontology as Ideology’ in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Regarding Television (Los Angeles: AFI, 1983), 12–22 (14). John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 9. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message:  An Inventory of Effects (New  York:  Bantam Books, 1967), 26.

20

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Janelle29, as well as Ellis’s own analysis, help to suggest the uncanny quality of electronic communication, which represents both embodiment – the sensation of witness  – and disassociation from the material world as we watch its uninterrupted flow of programmes across the TV schedule. For Ellis, television has also been a major contributor to the age of information. Its ability to create for us visual evidence of what may have been, in the past, a distant event in another region or nation has been replaced to bring the audience into a powerful close proximity to the same events. In this way, the possibility of denying knowledge of famine or the horrors of the twentieth century become impossible to evade as we are made omniscient and omnipresent by the rapid accumulation of superabundant knowledge. It is the bifurcated impression of being there as well as the realization of sitting at home that suggests how our experience of the world has been transformed by electronic communication. The illusion of an immediate presence in order to witness an event at a specific time, which has been augmented by television, has been articulated further with words such as ‘simultaneity’, ‘immediacy’, ‘now-ness’ and ‘intimacy’. At the same time, as television has sought to offer a presence, it has also created a vast array of images, graphics and sounds that capture the chaos of real life. Such unpredictability and presence has to be controlled, and as we watch an illusion unfold in front of us, we also hear the controlled, nonchalant patter of the magician, who is informative about the trick and hopes to elucidate and restore a renewed sense of order. The discourse of conjuring magic depends on these understandings of television. On the one hand, magic creates its six effects listed earlier to move objects seemingly at will and defy natural laws. Although it produces bafflement, we are assured by the magician that however disturbing the magic trick may be – for instance, a decapitation – there is little sense of unpredictability because order will always be restored. The ability of magic to incorporate such fantasies of bizarre transformations builds the link between the ordinary world and the extraordinary to create an uncanny electronic space that is overseen by the professional who remains in charge.

29

D. G. Janelle, ‘Measuring Human Extensibility in a Shrinking World’, The Journal of Geography (1973), 72, 5, 8–15.

21

Magic, Mediation and Television Form

21

Although Ellis is correct to point out that there has been a century of witness, which makes the denial of an event difficult when faced by an excess of visual evidence, the act of witnessing on television, although seemingly live, has been mediated for the audience at home. The role of the magician is to take advantage of such presumptions about television and to be able to utilize them, as well as be a keen observer who offers an insight into ourselves that we are not aware of. Often violent annihilation and displacement in an act of magic for television is the attempt to arrange life for maximum emotional power. As we have seen, one of the earliest appeals of television was its ability to create a sense of spatial co-presence with the events unfolding on the screen. Originally, the temporal simultaneity of viewing a programme that was broadcast once within its scheduled slot meant that there was no possibility of viewing a programme outside its initial temporal and spatial context. In this way, television-as-transmission reinforced the presumption that it was an ephemeral medium capable of broadcasting content without the possibility of repeats. Much of the staple of the TV schedule in television’s formative years, such as the variety show of which magic was a part of, was broadcast live and unlikely to be preserved. Unlike drama after the advent of videotaping, variety would continue to rely on a sense of being transmitted as it happened and the action broadcast in continuous takes. Such proscenium-stage performances were also photographed from the point of view of an audience both inside the studio as well as at home. Yet, earlier on radio, others were able to argue that a live performance could not be a simple relay from the actual theatre where a performance was taking place.30 It became obvious that performances had to be inside a studio because plots were difficult to follow when significant visual cues were missing. Radio developed its own techniques to create a new form and, inside its multi-camera studio, television would do the same. Nevertheless, one similarity between radio and television continued to distinguish them from theatre besides different techniques. Both are examples of a mass medium that seeks to entertain not hundreds of people in a live auditorium but possibly millions listening or watching. Like radio before it, television would 30

Val Gielgud, British Radio Drama 1922–1956 (London: George G. Harrap, 1957), 32.

22

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Secular Magic and the Moving Image

simultaneously appeal to the smallest as well as the largest possible audience.But the millions would not watch TV content as if a member of a mass rally but as individuals or in small groups – usually linked by family ties and influenced by the environment of the home. Television was able to remediate types of live magic seen within the theatre and the live auditorium at an ontological level because of its ability to offer immediacy. Nevertheless, theme and presentation had to be suitable for an audience sitting at home; the haute voix of the live performance of the auditorium does not necessarily translate well to the TV studio. Instead, the intimacy of the television camera with its ability to offer close-ups was to be exploited. In these ways, early TV form was already a dynamic fusion of a range of different techniques that could consist of a relayed live performance within a public auditorium to a much more controlled visualization of a live performance using carefully prepared camera positions. Lynn Siegel summarizes the discourse in the 1950s around liveness: Television, it was constantly argued, would be a better approximation of live entertainment than any previous form of technological reproduction. Its ability to broadcast direct to the home would allow people to feel as if they really were at the theatre . . . Whereas film allowed spectators imaginatively to project themselves into a scene, television would give people the sense of being on the scene of presentation – it would simulate the entire experience of being at the theatre.31

Theatre may have inspired live drama on television, but vaudeville and nightclub performances were used as models for such early shows that included acts of magic, such as the BBC’s Café Continental (1947–1953), which was a spectacular forty-five-minute cabaret show. To simulate a sense of being there, a commissionaire would walk up to the TV screen and appear to release the taxi window blind, before saluting the viewer/member of the audience. He would gesture as if he was opening the door of the taxi before a second liveried attendant held open the doors to the club. Al Burnett, the master of ceremonies, would welcome not so much the audience but the individual, who was told 31

Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV:  Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 138–39, original emphasis.

23

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23

that ‘your table has been reserved by the Maitre d’hotel’. At the end of the show, the welcoming procedure was reversed before climbing back into the taxi. Magicians have exploited television’s illusion of simultaneity by hoping to craft the impression of immediate, intimate and continuous contact with reality, but also a magical world that transcends the real. The impact of television’s cultivated liveness continues to maintain that diegetic time is aligned with that of the viewer: we experience a conjuring trick at the same time as the people in the live audience within the studio – and this is as true in the 1950s as it is today in the recent British-American co-production Penn and Teller: Fool Us (2011–present). The effect of this illusion is to allow the viewer to not only visit but also witness the parallel TV world of the magician on a weekly basis – the sense of wonder and amazement constructed during an extended period, helping to build viewer loyalty and interest.

Fool us: mode and the expanded function of television The appeal of conjuring magic with its desire to baffle and defy rational forms of explanation also inhabits the domain of professional forms of entertainment and showmanship. The flashy, high-status professional magician of popular television is a master of publicity, and often a safe, respectable figure whose weekly familiarity, as they appear on television, can be trusted to provide good value forms of often family entertainment. The avuncular magician has been seen on both UK and US television, but, perhaps more so, on UK television, including David Nixon and Paul Daniels. Moreover, the guest appearance of the magician on various talk shows establishes a clear distinction between the professional world of performing and the act of viewing at home. For instance, Doug Henning32 on the Johnny Carson ‘Tonight Show’ in 1981 invites Carson to participate in the trick, underlining the status of these show business professionals – including Carson’s own status as a skilled amateur magician – as distinct from ordinary people in the studio audience as well as at home.33 The 32

33

Doug Henning (1947–2000) was best known for his annual television specials on NBC in the 1970s and his spectacular form of magic in the 1980s. Originally broadcast 9 October 1981.

24

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structured presentation of magic on television that often provides an ideal, such as a warm, friendly personality or else a figure that possesses a singleminded determination to accomplish some impossible task, reminds us that, despite the possible subversive qualities of magic as it defies natural laws, it has usually existed on a conservative medium. Although, as we will see in the next chapter and the example of Penn and Teller, this is not always the case, the acts of magic have subverted many of the norms of ‘professional’ television. In some ways, the presentation of magic on television, which seeks not to unbalance the viewer but bring closure to each illusion, may appear to be in contradistinction to its actual ability to challenge a priori assumptions about perception and whether what we see can be believed. Of course, magic’s ability to defy logical, deductive thinking is an important element of its appeal. How is it possible that the card of the King of Diamonds has travelled to the top of the pack when it was seemingly randomly put back into the pack with the added precaution that the magician had their back turned when the card was inserted by a member of the audience? The inability of logic to explain things is a reminder that however more powerful the act of witness on television has become as cameras are made more lightweight and have increased their ability to explore every facet of life, we risk the feeling of powerlessness rather than empowerment. The audience is invited to watch closely and search for deception, and the camera serves as the eyes of the whole audience looking for the deception that the magician wishes to conceal. Normally, we expect the TV camera to see or feel for us, but the heightened sense of realism offered by the camera, which incorporates television’s apparent ubiquity, also threatens to be overturned as the King of Diamonds is presented as the correct card or, more drastically, the lady is cut in half with the promise of restoration. Ultimately, magic, as so much of live action on television, depends on a sense of complicity with the viewer. There is a tacit agreement between the televised magician and the audience:  this may be a trick that will baffle and worry the spectator, but rest assured the ‘normal’ of television will be restored. It is because of television’s powerful ability to create actuality through the tools of immediacy and liveness that the dissonance between authenticity and a trick as a temporary aberration of its dominant aesthetic makes conjuring magic appealing.

25

Magic, Mediation and Television Form

25

Historically, magic existed as a marginal form of entertainment on television, and its attributes of deception and misdirection may have been regarded as light-hearted amusements similar to a variety song. Both are able to produce a transfixed moment of interest, but neither is long-lasting or memorable for long. However, as television has developed in scope and scale, by the time of shows by Doug Hennung and David Copperfield in the 1970s, there had been a fusion between the live performance and the need to entertain using multiple camera angles and a sense of television’s spectacular style. As new cultural forms are produced that are associated with the moving image, television’s use of a live style continues to borrow from other forms, including the sports event as well as talk shows and other similar genres. As we will see in later chapters, its latest incarnation – street magic – as practised in the United States by David Blaine, and in the UK by Dynamo, suggests an orchestration of shots similar to reality TV that is used to follow the action (often misdirected) as the camera remains the eyes and ears of the viewer. Although TV images can be manipulated using a variety of methods ranging from using a vision mixer while it is being broadcast to altering the image during post-production, the directness of depiction is a quality that is usually missing from cinema. Magic has appeared in films made for the cinema, but they tended to be the exception.34 To return to André Bazin, the art of film could never be compared to television’s ability to relay a live image of an event. However, television was regarded as aesthetically impoverished compared to the cinema, and Bazin predicted that ‘the television picture will always retain its mediocre legibility’.35 A lack of style has been the judgement made by other commentators, but it is a style that uses the register of speaking to the viewer in personal terms rather than a type of mass public communication. Televised direct address can be the magician speaking to the audience at home through the camera. It can also be through visual techniques developed elsewhere for television. The magician will appear to make eye contact with the viewer and use expressions that are common to interpersonal communication, which are

34

35

In the 1920s, films made by the Houdini Motion Picture Corporation lost half-a-million dollars. See Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 80. Andre Bazin, “Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry?” in Bert Cardullo (ed.), Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties (New York: Routledge, 1997), 80.

26

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often shot in close-up. Giraud Chester and Garnet R. Garrison were to comment that the ‘intimacy of the medium calls for naturalness in bodily action’.36 Television has addressed the audience directly because of its presumption of intimacy. The magician’s craft, therefore, depends on an ability to foster a sense of immediacy and intimacy while performing the role of hosting the show and controlling the individual members who have volunteered on stage, who are the eyes of the audience in the studio as well as the audience sitting at home. Within such a complex performance mode, the method of direct address can psychologically prepare the viewer for the illusions and tricks to follow. Conversely, as television has made direct address an important component of its speech and image-based style, one problem with direct address by the magician as the dominant mode of the studio-based magic show is to weaken engagement with the audience at home. The creation of subjectivities within dramatic moving images achieved using techniques such as close-ups, different locations and, crucially, editing are often absent in conjuring shows in order to preserve a clear sense of unedited reality. To some extent, weak engagement can be essential for performing a trick because it anticipates and, in fact, invites the scepticism of the audience watching it. Penn Jillette – of the conjuring duo Penn and Teller  – refers to such scepticism as the ‘unwilling suspension of disbelief ’. Such a phrase suggests resistance to narrative logics of close engagement normally associated with the performance dynamics used to control audiences on live television. The direct address by magicians seeks to overcome the doubts of a sceptical audience. Notwithstanding the address, audiences often remain sceptical. In this way, the realism of the illusion is emphasized because of its trickery. Yet, although Jillette may well be correct in some of his observations about making conjuring magic work, the reduction of the narrative of a trick on television to a series of stark choices denies the viewer the opportunity to experience the performance of magic at a deeper emotional and psychological level. As the bad boys of magic, Penn and Teller intentionally reveal how tricks are done, which destroys any faith in magic and its process of ‘re-enchantment’

36

Giraud Chester and Garnet R. Garrison, Television and Radio (New  York:  Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1956), 534.

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27

in a secular age. They seek to demonstrate how the acts of magic work with a high level of abstraction, or even transcendence from reality, in which the audience reaction is carefully controlled, but reactions to the various illusions continue to be cathartic. The shows of Doug Henning and David Copperfield, in their ability to have presented magic as a series of strong effects, demonstrate how illusion creates access to a new-found sense of wonder. At the same time, Jillette complains that tricks have in fact become illusions to create a faux status for what is a simple accomplishment and which artificially boost the reputation of the magician.37

Magic and variety38 The performance of conjuring magic, because it was often judged to be not culturally significant, can be compared to the lowly status accorded to other forms of entertainment that existed in the variety hall or vaudeville, and its difference to drama in the theatre. Critic Alexander Bakshy, who wrote about developments in the early twentieth century in theatre and the cinema, was clearly bemused by the supposition that variety and vaudeville should be marginalized. He quoted an anonymous critic of vaudeville as saying ‘Vaudeville is essentially one of the lower forms of theatrical art which inevitably takes the back seat when faced with the competition of such superior forms as drama and musical comedy’. Bakshy was to retort: ‘What preposterous trash passes here for an aesthetic theory! The popular notion of art is that it is something very serious and very solemn, while entertainment means trivial and lighthearted distraction.’39 The low cultural status of magic can be traced to other arguments to do with the status of art and its difference from entertainment. R. G. Collingwood in Principles of Art (1938) contrasts art with entertainment and how art can be distinguished from entertainment, which, he argues, exists as a craft and is a 37 38

39

Untitled interview with Penn Jillette. Accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP_ewoWOFfE. The author will take the liberty of using the words vaudeville and variety interchangeably for the purposes of brevity in his argument. Alexander Bakshy speaking in 1910, cited in John E. DiMeglio, Vaudeville USA (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973), 13.

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means to an end rather than an end in itself. In this way, a conjuring trick can only be categorized within a hierarchy of forms with art at the top and magic near the bottom. For Collingwood, ‘amusement art’ unlike art was constructed on the basis of evoking an emotion. As a consequence, when art is identified with amusement, it makes aesthetic criticism impossible. However, as popular culture has gained greater significance  – in large part due to the influence of television – the argument about serious art and popular entertainment appears hopelessly outdated. That entertainment should be associated with the masses as a reflection of the masses appears to form the core argument by Collingwood for his dismissal of ‘amusement art’. Such attitudes would later be converted into a debate about the intellectual wasteland of television from the Chair of the US Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow. The arrival of television may have been popular, but it had created a limited discourse that he declared to have been culturally uninspiring.40 In 1961, Minow in a speech described US television as a ‘vast wasteland’.41 The best television was non-ephemeral, taking on the properties of film, and escaped from and transcended its instantaneous, transient nature. However, instead of seeking durability, another view saw television’s aesthetic as being true to its nature as a medium  – a nature that was instant, superficial and ephemeral.42 The critical debate about television drew on earlier debates about the status of popular culture within a mass medium. In Culture and Society, Raymond Williams describes how aesthetic theory in the Romantic period saw the artist as essentially opposed to society, achieving personal expression in the face of a hostile world and, therefore, valuing his creation all the more for this. ‘In this conception . . . the Artist is by nature indifferent to the crude worldliness and materialism of politics and social affairs; he is devoted, rather, to the more substantial spheres of beauty and personal feeling.’43 Nevertheless, before its transition to television, there already existed, within the arts of magic, a tradition that aspired to transform circus wizardry into a regulated form that presented the magician as the author of serious work. 40 41

42 43

See Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (London: Methuen, 1987). Newton Minow, ‘Television and the Public Interest’ given to the National Association of Broadcasters on 9 May 1961. This touches upon the relay function of television discussed earlier. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), 30.

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29

Frenchman Robert-Houdin, the father of modern conjuring magic, spent most his life as an expert watchmaker and mechanic. He had thought about his own theatre of magic for years and built new and ingenious apparatus for his performances. His ‘Soirees-Fantastiques’ opened in Paris on 3 July 1845. One of his mechanical marvels was a fruit tree that blossomed and bore fruit, as well as the materializing of two butterflies that hovered above it.44 RobertHoudin was also able to be blindfolded before accurately describing objects passed to him by spectators. His contribution to modern ideas of magic, however, was not simply to add charm to a new array of ingenious tricks, but that magic would no longer be associated with older notions of sorcery. Instead, it would be treated scientifically and associated with middle-class sensibilities of good taste and earnestness normally found in respectable forms of theatre. To mark this decisive break with its past and its more circus tradition, RobertHoudin pioneered what would become the de rigueur costume of the stage magician – the bourgeois formal wear of the mid-nineteenth century consisting of the top hat and tails rather than the sorcerer’s gown. His one concession to an older tradition of magic was an elegant ebony wand with an ivory tip that became a part of the accoutrements of the magician.45 Magic had drawn closer to legitimate theatre and used its new form of respectability to entertain the crowned heads of Europe, including, by one of Robert-Houdin’s successors, the court in Russia.46 Later, it was the ability of vaudeville during the first half of the twentieth century to become a respectable medium for audiences that continued to form its dominant practices once it had transferred across to television. In the nineteenth century, vaudeville had often been a raucous, bawdy form of entertainment. However, the censorship that came to control vaudeville morality in the twentieth century meant that its codes of ‘clean’ entertainment became more powerful on the popular medium of television that replaced vaudeville theatre. This was a decisive inheritance from variety that can still be seen in the performances of David Copperfield, as well as perpetuating influences from

44 45

46

A trick that can be seen in the film The Illusionist, discussed in the final chapter. Descriptions of the wand are in Louis Hoffmann, Later Magic (London:  George Routledge and Sons, 1904), 102–32. Le Commandeur Cazeneuve performed to Tsar Alexander II.

30

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Robert-Houdin within conjuring magic. At other times, the magical act on television formed the ideal of the subordinate wife as the magician’s female helper  – one thinks of, perhaps, Paul Daniels and Debbie Magee; or Mark Wilson and his wife, Nani Darnell47 – and respectful children in the audience who watched the performance of magic quietly with little interruption. In the 1950s, variety became a dominant feature of the US and UK TV schedules. Its cultural construction, in which magic expresses the live technology of television’s changing relationship with its audience, helps to explain some of its fascination. The popularity of magic can also be explained by linking it to the broader cultural appeal of variety. It was variety’s ability to replicate the social structure of its audience as a mix of people drawn from many different types of backgrounds that, in many ways, fitted perfectly the diversity that was found especially in the United States: The very nature of vaudeville . . . was representative of the American mystique. The expansiveness of vaudeville, as well, where novelty acts, animal acts, impersonators, acrobats, variety acts, magicians, soloists, monologists, comedy teams, drama sketches, dancers, and even chasers, all got billing and did their separate, highly individual parts, yet all somehow integrating into the whole, served as a symbol of Americanism . . . And the headliners had, for the most part, worked their way up from the bottom, achieving their success only after struggle and fortitude. The individual vaudevillian stood as a prime example of what could be achieved in a land of free enterprise . . . yet, at the same time, the individual was somehow to remain humble.48

Already in the United States, on the Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971), social distinctions were absent as well as differences between American and international acts as audiences watched tumblers from Europe, black comedians and New York crooners. The line-up in magic was often a reminder of the essential egalitarian character of conjuring, which represented a utopian category of success not limited by background, social or racial distinction. Brian Rose declares this to be ‘an affirmation to humanity’,49 and such affirmation exists 47

48 49

James ‘Mark’ Wilson is a magician who pioneered the presentation of magic on American TV in the 1950s in his show Time for Magic. DiMeglio, Vaudeville USA, 199. Brian G. Rose, TV Genres: An Introduction and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 318

31

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in terms of the American Dream, a Horatio Alger hero, who achieves success because of hard work and perspicacity. Similarly, Richard Dyer suggests that entertainment is not simply the expression of capital or the products of a centralized entertainment industry. Dyer’s assessment of entertainment can be applied to the variety and magic show: Two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfilment’, point to its central thrust, namely:  utopianism. Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternative, hopes, wishes  – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realised.50

It reminds us that despite television’s liveness, magic cannot be easily anchored to real life but forms a utopian category that includes discourses to do with aspiration and hard-won success. As we have seen, the pursuit of excellence in magic can be understood as an attempt to achieve material success that escapes social and economic travails and enjoys the plaudits of critics and audiences. The ability of the magician to handle a pack of cards as skilfully as magicians like the great Cardini51 – whose manipulation of pasteboard is an example of the intimacy of close-up magic, as well as dexterous spectacle – is the realization of the immeasurable effort required to attain such prowess and an escape from the everyday. Many of the other observations by Dyer can also be applied to the magician’s art. A magical performance can be interpreted as something that appears as an autonomous mode of cultural production freed from television’s control. In fact, the celebration of the brilliant performer reinforces the sense of utopianism. The ability to hone a particular talent and to thrive by overcoming all the odds, both personal as well as economic, is to present a testimony about individual achievement that the audience might hope to emulate, as well as hopelessly envy. Each magical act is focused on the solitary figure on stage that is both familiar and approachable, as well as separated from the audience. 50 51

Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 18 Cardini is discussed in Chapter 2.

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The balance in magic, as in so much of variety, requires someone the audience might identify with and, at the same time, aspire to be a mythic character. The myth of individuated success had already been constructed in variety programmes. It continues to be a sign of popular entertainment in recent magic shows, such as the talent-based show Penn and Teller:  Fool Us, which was filmed from season two in Las Vegas, a town that emphasizes celebrities and the depiction of personality on the screen as part of a growing consumer culture. The craving of celebrity that a show like Fool Us can bestow, including its own growing popularity, has been a vital factor in also explaining the success of other contemporary big names of magic, such as David Blaine and Criss Angel. Yet, newer forms of entertainment depend on a legacy given to them by older shows that, in turn, were constructed from earlier vaudeville. The use of entertainment forms an important dialectic with everyday realities and the opportunity for the audience to participate in the fascination given to televised acts of magic.

Conclusion The ability of television that appears live to penetrate to the heart of an emotional truth has been one of its attractions, even if elements of the programme have been set up as entertainment and are not authentic. From the philosophical point of view of witnessing, the magic show has, since its arrival on television, produced both sceptical participation at a distance as well as a more cathartic experience – one that demands spectatorship and interpretation and a more experiential form of viewing. The cultural practices of television suggest that a proper understanding of magic depends on definition and interpretation of its appearance at any given historical period. Instead of regarding magic on television as having a proper form that depends on the specificities of the medium, the characteristics of magic touch upon interpretations about particular programmes as well as broader cultural debates about, for instance, television’s relationship to the everyday and the idea of a ‘lived experience’. In this way, the cultural specificity of a homogeneous act of magic, and the values of

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liveness and vaudeville, which had first defined British and US television in the 1940s and 1950s, has become a series of cultural discourses that have been affected, as the 1980s progressed, by changes in the production and consumption of programmes. Consequently, there is a variable nature of signs within televised secular magic, depending on how an illusion has been used inside a particular programme and moment within the continuing search for an aesthetic that has dominated critical thinking about the electronic moving image. The following chapters will demonstrate how some of the dominant discourses of utopian entertainment, as well as the emergence of a more subversive approach to magic, combining elements of anarchic comedy, cannot be explained in reference to one logic – textual, subjectivity or technological, but a combination of all three.

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2

Magic and Entertainment

Magic is real.1

Magic’s live audience The term ‘light entertainment’ is a baffling British term for most Americans. In 1953, Ronnie Waldman, the new head of Light Entertainment at the BBC, was sent to investigate American commercial television. He described how he ‘hated the jungle atmosphere of commercial television’, in particular the power of the sponsors. However, he was ‘bowled over by the intoxicating discovery that the Americans accepted as perfectly natural that television was entertainment’.2 Importantly, he noticed that the Americans did not feel a need to compartmentalize entertainment and create a balance between it and ‘serious drama’ that the public service model within the BBC monopoly demanded at the time. For example, in New York, Waldman saw an edition of the entertaining quiz show What’s My Line?, whose celebrity guest, Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, had chaired the committee that had drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The development of the concept of the mode of ‘light entertainment’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the blurring of generic boundaries can be understood as programming planned, to some extent, by the broadcasters as a flow of more or less indistinguishable sounds and images. Janet Thumim has written how in the UK the commodification of popular taste led to an eventual blurring 1

2

Interview with Jon M.  Chu, director of Now You See Me 2. Accessed at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8_GAHYz409c. Peter Black, The Mirror in the Corner: People’s Television (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 23.

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between light entertainment and ‘serious’ drama, or low and high culture, by creating new forms and categories of television fiction.3 Ronnie Waldman ventured another interpretation of television in his discussion of light entertainment in 1951: We do not pretend that Television Light Entertainment is a complete artform in itself and we realise that its material and its approach must be based on general ideas of Light Entertainment familiar to the public . . . [but] too close an adherence to the forms of Sound Radio, the theatre, or the cinema will prevent the growth of TV as such and although most of the authoritative and experienced comedians in the country have had considerable experience of Sound Radio, we should be careful to avoid using the methods of Sound Radio when employing them. Similarly, purely ‘theatre’ techniques, e.g. Music Hall.

As we can see, light entertainment was not adapted from a single medium – variety theatre, radio or cinema – but viewed as a hybrid of other forms rather than an essentialized live ‘relay’ of a pre-existing medium. It would be validated neither by existing art forms nor the ‘real’ because it was simply live. This was an important concept that resulted in its variable form: as Waldman himself punned, ‘there was no lack of variety in Television Variety’.4 It was the development of light entertainment and the blurring of generic boundaries that, in the 1960s, meant entertainment shows that included magic could use an eclectic as well as a regulated form as a response to television’s flow. Early developments of television at the North London site of Alexandra Palace were primarily concerned with the broadcasting of entertainment. The Reithian imperative of education and information was mostly carried by radio.5 Later, when independent television (ITV) began in the UK in 1955, many of its first recruits – men such as Bill Ward, Francis Essex, Brian Tesler – had already been working in television and as programme executives sought 3

4

5

Janet Thumim, Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women and the Box (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119–21. Ronnie Waldman, ‘The Variety of Television Variety’, Radio Times Annual (London:  BBC Publishing, 1954), 52–53. John Charles Walsham Reith was the BBC’s first Director-General, who developed the concept of public service broadcasting at the BBC. The puritanical Reith was described by Winston Churchill as that ‘Wuthering Height’.

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to bring talent from the music hall and theatre to television. It is little accident that many of the key figures in early television were drawn from the world of theatrical entertainment, including impresarios in the UK such as Sir Lew Grade, who had worked as a theatrical agent, booking British and European acts before becoming head of one of the ITV companies, Associated Television (ATV), in the 1960s. Once at ATV, Grade was to create the broadcaster’s most popular show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium (1955–1969). It would take the form of a high-energy entertainment show by beginning with the action of the high-kicking Tiller Girls, as they performed to music, before a series of Variety acts came on. Such figures as Brian Tesler6 and Grade were regarded as being closer to the audience by having the same tastes and interests than producers and executives of programmes who sought to offer only information. These tastes may have been regarded as inferior to more legitimate art forms both inside and outside television, but almost as a confirmation of the ‘people’s choice’, light entertainment usually relied on a studio audience. The link between the two demonstrated how far the medium appealed to the ‘masses’ and reflected their attitudes. In similar ways, programmes who have an affinity with the magic show – the game show and talk show – incorporate the ‘live’ audience to some extent to become part of its programming. The sense of ‘being there’ raises issues of how light entertainment generally, and the magic show specifically, has managed the problem of communication not only to a studio audience but also an individual sitting at home and the wider community. In other words, the consumption of magic depends on its ability to articulate not only private but also common desires, feelings and experiences, including today’s huge international audiences. The closeness of the image to the performance would give the viewer at home a feeling of being in the front row, as well as among the other members of the audience sitting in the studio and at home. The building of intimacy with the audience and immediacy may make magic less or more entertaining, but such an ontological relationship between television technology and the viewer is never fixed and its social co-presence is variable. 6

While at ATV from 1957 to 1960, Tesler took on control of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, as well as devised other light entertainment specials and shows.

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The magic show quickly occupied a position within light entertainment that includes a live audience and the possibility of a direct access to the ‘real world’. In its formative years, live programming was to create an easy visualization of the magic act, which was relatively cheap to produce. Rather than possessing a rich visual style that could be created by expensive scenery or sophisticated camera movement, magic shows – although they became large event spectaculars, including big-name acts like the American Doug Henning in the 1970s and 1980s – continued to use relatively simple sets and techniques in the 1950s and 1960s. Such sets were appeared to be devoid of technological trickery and relied on a relatively spare style that fitted the ideology of liveness. In some ways, this was a reversal of the performance of magic in the theatre. Television eschewed the special machinery that had been a feature of earliertwentieth-century theatrical magic, preferring magic that mainly relied on simple illusions. Robert-Houdin had used gaudy stage decorations that imitated a Louis XV drawing room.7 His theatre had been constructed using traps, electrical wires, hydraulics and mirrors that were hidden from the audience. The biggest theatres might boast of the construction of an ‘Asphaleia’ stage, which could be operated by hydraulics capable of raising sections of the stage if desired and which provided a series of traps and bridges for the performance of large-scale illusions.8 It was in the theatre that scientific principles had become necessary in the nineteenth century for the accomplishment of a range of optical tricks that deployed mirrors, including the famous ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ invented by John Henry Pepper and Henry Dircks.9 In the case of Pepper’s Ghost, an invisible glass plate in front of the stage reflects the image of a concealed and brightly lit actor, which the audience perceives as superimposed onto the stage. Moreover, theatre magicians would rely on the use of mirrors for levitation, vanishing and decapitation acts. However, unlike theatre, television directors were warned in its formative years not to depend on complex machinery or effects:

7 8

9

Simon During, Modern Enchantments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 119. Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography (New York: Dover, 1976), 280–82. Katharina Loew, ‘Magic Mirrors: The Schüfftan Process’ in Dan North, Bob Rehak and Michael S. Duffy (eds), Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 62–77.

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Don’t let the success of your show depend on your scenery, an animal, or trick effects like snow, fog or rain. But do let it depend on the performances of your actors. Unless you have unlimited production funds that will allow you to go on location and record on motion-picture film the fight-to-thefinish between your hero and a man-eating shark, don’t choose that type of production.10

Before the advent of videotape, during a live broadcast, tight planning was required to keep the action continuously flowing without a break. Even after the arrival of videotape, the ideology of liveness was maintained within light entertainment, and television continued to operate as a relay device. Therefore, if conjuring magic consisted of effects performed on stage, the possibility of something going wrong would be reduced by the limiting of complicated engineering or else large-scale illusions. Seen like this, street magic is less of an innovation and rather an affirmation of the original need to maintain a high degree of control of the ‘stripped-down’ image on television with very little set and the focus of attention on a small number of people. The physical quality of the small black-and-white TV screen in the 1950s and 1960s could set other limits on the type of performance in light entertainment, including the use of close-ups and direct address that would be most suited to the medium. Such techniques encouraged the belief that the viewer at home was being addressed personally. At the same time, the performers would be natural and accessible for the benefit of viewers, which demanded a more naturalistic style. This could be at odds with the expressive gestures from a magician used to performing in the theatre.

Magic’s absence The first magic shows on television in the 1930s were from Alexandra Palace in the UK and predominantly for children. After the Second World War, between 1950 and 1953, the appearance of Geoffrey Robinson on the children’s TV magazine show, Whirligig, was transmitted from the BBC’s new Lime Grove 10

Garry Simpson, ‘Give It Content’ in William I. Kaufman (ed.), How to Direct for Television (New York: Hastings House, 1955), 12–13.

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studios on alternate Saturday afternoons. In 1955, ITV, the UK’s commercial channel, was launched and broadcast the first series on magic called Focus on Hocus, shown at 7.30 p.m. on weekdays, featuring David Berglas, with Michael Bailey and his wife appearing as Mr and Mrs Magic.11 In these early shows, the images shot live by television cameras may have looked superficially like an edited film sequence, but they were a record of realtime continuity and not, as in the case of film, the construction of an apparent continuity. At the same time, the electronic cameras of the television studio, because of their bulk, were unable to move much. Instead, movement by the actors would be observed by ‘correctly’ positioned cameras. One advantage of this was that, instead of using a single film camera and the time-consuming business of organizing and shooting separate set-ups, multi-camera studio could shoot continuously. Although most early television was broadcast live, increasingly drama would be filmed. The shooting on film would be regarded as widening the scope of visual style and editing, and programmes, unlike live television, would be regarded as free from certain technical and institutional constraints of the electronic studio. The combination of image capacities designed for a domestic audience and the adjustment of generic setting and the types of tricks and illusions is important to understanding how the original fixed meanings of magic as a relay of a live event changed later to its more fluid form that incorporated a variety of different styles. Although filmed-for-television content would create an international market by the mid- to late 1950s, Variety remained live and watched by a national audience because it demanded a rapport with its audience. At the same time, the reluctance to film a performance within the studio can be understood by the difficulty of recording the live image, which can be judged by contemporary reports. It was a remarkably elaborate method that used a specially adapted large, high-grade flat television screen, and a film camera aimed at the screen shooting at a frame rate synchronized with the television frame rate:

11

Edwin Dawes and Michael Bailey, Circle without End: The Magic Circle 1905–2005 (London: Jeremy Mills Publishing, 2005), 147. Berglas would become the president of the British Magic Circle (1989–1998) and make numerous appearances on television, including on the British Channel 4 programme The Mind of David Berglas (1985–1986).

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The recording is not made by a camera on the set but from a picture of the scene produced on a monitoring set with a large cathode ray tube. An extra deflection coil is wound on the neck of the tube, which causes the electron beam to wobble up and down at a high frequency and so spread the light spot over the whole of the scanning-line space.12

The image, as can be imagined, was of poor quality and the process complicated and expensive. The difficulty of using what became known in the UK as telerecordings – or in the United States, kinescopes – meant the possibility of film did not seriously challenge the belief that television was essentially a live medium until the introduction of videotape after 1956.13 Initially, the only obvious advantage of the new tape process was that of immediate replay, but it was not a substitute for film because it was not possible to edit the taped image. Although it was possible to physically splice the tape on a quadruplex recorder (not possible on helical-scan systems) and making a clean edit, it could cause electronic roll (picture tearing) on the viewer’s home screen and risk damaging the recorder’s head. Instead, early video was a time-shifting technology: it was used to transcribe whole shows for later retransmission and not to preserve them for posterity. It should be remembered therefore that the original VTR system was never designed for anything but transcription of complete shows without the editorial flexibility of film. It can be argued that the lack of recorded programmes that could be stored and later reviewed, and improved on or reinterpreted, essentialized much of television into a perpetual present during the 1950s and 1960s, reinforcing its earlier relay mode. The problems of recording and an adherence to the simple relay function of television meant that, for example, the material related to many early programmes is the remains of what Jason Jacobs refers to as ‘ghost texts’ that ‘do not exist in their original audio-visual form but exist instead as shadows, dispersed and refracted amongst buried files, bad memories, a flotsam of fragments’.14 For example, the thirty-nine episodes of the children’s 12

13

14

T. J. Morgan, The True Book about Television and Radio (London:  Frederick Muller, rev. edn., 1961), 88. The first broadcast-standard videotape recorder was developed by Charlie Ginzburg and Chuck Anderson in the 1950s at the American corporation Ampex. Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen:  Early British Television Drama (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000), 14

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variety show Whirligig, which featured magic, no longer exist.15 In many ways, what remains is not the recorded performance but the mimetic impression that has been left of televised magic until the routine preservation of programmes began from about the 1970s. If a magical show was recorded and preserved for the future, it was the exception to the rule that made much of early televised magic ephemeral. It is a sobering observation that even magical acts that are lauded in the official histories of magic by the British Magic Circle as belonging to the top echelon of the craft are barely visible today in the television archive. These include outstanding acts such as Cardini. Cardini, whose real name was Richard Pitchford, was a British card manipulator whose dexterity, since his death, has been rarely matched. Cardini entertained London and New York, performing in the London Palladium and Radio City Music Hall. However, there exists, from 1957, a single recording of his entire performance that was originally broadcast in colour, but now consists of a black-and-white telerecording. The telerecording was shot on 16-mm film and owned by fellow magician Milbourne Christopher, who, at the time, was the National President of the Society of American Magicians and had appeared on the same show. Such absence rather than presence in the archive reminds us that magic may have become a legitimate form of entertainment after Robert-Houdin and had also benefitted from the increased respectability of Variety. However, as the craft of magic found acceptance and appeared to more people, it retained an ephemeral status as its major performances became restricted to live television.

Festival of magic Besides children’s shows, conjuring magic had first appeared on television as part of the Variety show, a form inherited from the music hall or nightclub, which became transferred to television in the 1940s and 1950s. Such shows as Café Continental (1947–1953), Sunday Night at the London Palladium (1955– 1969) and Saturday Spectacular (1958) were to showcase such international 15

Anon, ‘Lost UK TV Shows’. Accessed at http://lostshows.com/default.aspx?programme=ea94799d87a2-4f0d-9dfd-398dcb73cef3.

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names as Channing Pollock, a master dove prestidigitator, and Marvyn Roy, a specialist with lighted electric bulbs. Café Continental was part of a trio of shows, including Rooftop Rendezvous and Casa D’Escalta that were assorted nightclubs that had been created in the BBC’s television studios at Alexandra Palace as a way of presenting top European cabaret acts. The powerful theatrical influence later represented by men such as Lew Grade, as well as a modified form of liveness on television, would mean that TV magic would continue to consist of a performer on a platform stage entertaining people – the reproduction for viewers of the traditional sharing of entertainment in an auditorium. In the 1950s, the TV set was yet to evolve into a ubiquitous domestic accessory. Instead, because it was a status symbol, it continued to use the legitimate theatre such as the London Palladium off Regents Street to boost the idea of its being a theatre-of-the-air.In the UK, Saturday Spectacular and Sunday Night at the London Palladium were two series that appeared weekly and included magic within their Variety acts. In fact, this idea of TV spectatorship as a method of enjoying a high-status form of culture was reinforced in numerous advertisements that: showed couples in evening attire gathered in their living rooms as if in a private box at the theatre, and gazing in rapt attention at on-screen ballet, opera, or drama from the legitimate stage. Television in the living room was thus offered . . . as an excursion out of the household and into an expensive private box for an experience of high culture.16

Sometimes, considerable investment and advance publicity would go into creating an ‘event’, as a particular item appeared in the TV schedule, with the aim of lifting it out of the flow of ordinary television by according it a special status. In the United States, in 1950, NBC transformed New  York’s Center Theater into a TV studio and welcomed its guests to the ‘biggest theater premiere of all time’.17 Similarly, ABC invited civic figures to New York’s Palace Theater to watch a vaudeville show.18 One important example of the live special to come from these newly equipped studios was Festival of Magic, in which magicians 16

17 18

Cecilia Tichi, Electronic Hearth:  Creating an American Television Culture (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1991), 94. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 139 Spigel, Make Room for TV, 139.

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such as Cardini were filmed performing. Festival of Magic appeared on US television on 27 May 1957. It was shown as part of the anthology TV series, Producer’s Showcase, which was shot in colour, although this would have been seen only by about 1 per cent of television owners at the time.19 The anthology had been devised in 1953/1954 by the stage producer Leland Hayward to create ninety-minute colour, live spectaculars to be shown monthly on NBC, which were longer than normal thirty- to forty-minute shows. NBC was hoping that its schedule of at least one major colour programme every night of the week would stimulate interest in colour television.20 Moreover, Brian Rose mentions that NBC was eager to champion live television being broadcast from New  York to counter the threat of the growing production of telefilm by the Hollywood studios and had scheduled numerous special attractions to champion television’s electronic immediacy.21 Due to the fact that television was an expensive consumer item, producers were eager to show off the promise of television as a new miracle of science and entice prospective buyers by the offer of sophisticated forms of entertainment. However, the technical problems of remote broadcasting from a theatre meant that Festival of Magic would eschew an auditorium such as the London Palladium but be broadcast from inside a TV studio. Festival of Magic opens with the promise of ‘outstanding entertainment’ as two stylish doors swing inwards to reveal a precious metal statuette of John Hancock – the prominent patriot of the American Revolution. The association with such a key cultural-historical figure is an endorsement of the quality of the forthcoming show. The sequence cuts back to the set of swinging doors, and a second ringing patronage of the show by RCA and Whirlpool, manufacturers of the highest-quality electrical domestic products, completes the series of endorsements. The idea of cosmopolitan sophistication is central to the show’s appeal, and it is made in several ways, albeit not always successfully. First, the show mentions that it is coming from New York, the home of live and theatrical forms of entertainment before most of TV production migrated

19

20 21

Charles S. Aaronson (ed.), International Television Almanac (New  York:  Quigley Publications, 1957), xxii. Aaronson, International Television Almanac, xxii. Brian G. Rose, Televising the Performing Arts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 4

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to the west coast in the 1960s. The host of the show was Ernie Kovacs attired in formal evening dress who introduces each of the different acts. Although Festival of Magic is intended to present a sense of cosmopolitan high culture, the use of Ernie Kovacs is awkward. Kovacs was a comedian, whose ad-libbed style made him suitable for live broadcasting. However, on Festival of Magic, his delivery is too low key and idiosyncratic to project the correct amount of sincerity or warmth. Instead, he appears either disinterested or at worse cynical about the various acts. There are seven acts, and each is drawn from the four corners of the globe. At the same time, one striking feature is how small the studio is in which they have to perform – no more than thirty-by-fifty feet. There is very little scenery, and instead black velour for the backdrop is used, suggesting a lack of depth through the proscenium. Overall, there is only the possibility of limited movement for each forthcoming conjuring act, due in part to the size of the studio and the relatively inflexible equipment. The show utilizes two cameras within the generally cramped studio setting, although the sense of intimacy is reinforced by each act consisting of the magician and usually one assistant. In the schedule, the previous weekly broadcast, at the same time, of The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–1957), a British swashbuckling telefilm drama, may have put the viewing audience in the mood to receive a different sort of fanciful visit to a magical realm.22 However, the contrast between a telefilm using a range of different shots and editing in Sir Lancelot and live production is more noticeable because Festival of Magic visualizes its conjuring acts using a minimum number of camera shots. Equally, the proscenium offers an inevitable flatness without the types of mobility or framing to construct a more dramatic sense of showmanship and tempo. Moreover, the imageorthicon camera used at the time was not able to transmit a pure black-andwhite image,23 and, as a consequence, mood lighting was never too effective on television compared to motion picture or theatre lighting. Finally, the use of colour to produce successful unrealistic and fanciful mood shows may have

22

23

Sir Lancelot was replaced once a month by Producer’s Showcase between 8  p.m. and 9.30  p.m. See Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, The TV Schedule Book: Four Decades of Network Programming from Sign-on to Sign-off (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984). Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1942 to 2000 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 36.

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been the intention of the producers of Festival of Magic, but because no colour version now exists, how successful the use of colour was remains a speculation. Magic works because it relies on the ability by the magician to arouse a certain response or otherwise construct a defined emotion from the audience. In fact, the conventional magical performance is constructed using distinct groups of tricks to create both a sense of ‘balance’ in the show as well as a series of carefully calculated effects on the audience at specific moments. A dull performer will not be made better by camera movement. The content must start with a stimulating personality that is arresting, and the cameras can augment the show by adding mood and tempo to the sequences. By the process of edited shots, the audience enters the action, feels it is part of the show and participates in it. Yet, some of these key techniques are either absent or otherwise awkwardly executed in Festival of Magic. For example, Li King Si, a Frenchman masquerading as a pseudo-Chinese sorcerer, performs a knife act. The knives withstand the laws of balance in an apparent defiance of natural laws. However, there is a tension between the kinetic performance – the obvious desire for greater movement and action – and the restricted space. Others, including the South African Robert Harbin, the Englishman Cardini, and the Frenchman Rene Septembre, are similarly forced to perform to one camera that is centrally positioned and occupies the imaginary seat of a front-row spectator. Live television relies on the skills of its camera operators, but with two cameras, there is what can be termed ‘straight coverage’ with little attempt at cutting to a reaction shot or when the trick takes a particularly intense turn. The second camera occupies a centre-right position to the stage for a closer view of the performers. In this way, the process of directing Festival of Magic is the utilizing of two cameras that requires switching between them, obviating the need to move the cameras. A  camera in a larger studio may have been on a pedestal to produce a vertical adjustment to the height of the camera. However, again, it is striking that this type of movement is restricted in Festival of Magic. The field of view of the two cameras is a series of long and medium shots, while the depth of field of each shot is necessarily shallow due to the framing, creating an overall flatness in the picture. This was probably

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because the difficulty of shooting a live magic show caused problems of focus and the smooth movement by the cameras as they attempted to capture each performance. Sing Si is the most kinetic of the seven acts and would have set a challenge to the camera operators. The solution by the studio director to these problems was to shoot in long shot with no use of close-ups, which sacrificed some sense of intimacy. Instead, the idea of intimacy in Festival of Magic is characterized by its address to a small domestic group – as well as another key feature of television: its ability to convey its sense of making direct contact with an authentic event and the link back to the time-based nature of television. Television, conceived in these terms, exists as a medium that, despite using similar production techniques as the cinema, would in this live special avoid the cinema’s expressive imagery. But by bringing together many different acts from separate parts of the world, the performance of magic relies less on linguistic patter. Rather, it focuses on gesture and other non-verbal methods of communication that have remained part of the repertoire of magic and a sign of its ability to transcend borders. If Festival of Magic was characterized by intimacy, it also hoped to offer global reach. The act of television spectatorship within Festival of Magic champions the role of television to be an omnipresent medium as it relays the diverse peoples of the world. Here the space of the electronic theatre of the air has the potential to be all-at-once and anywhere. Festival of Magic is from New York, but because of the nature of its production inside a small studio, the normal referents that locate it specifically in any one place are erased. Instead, the show is shot within a setting that consists of curtains suspended from tracks or travellers, and other modular units on which set pieces are erected onto. Each act of magic derives from far-flung South Africa, India, China, England, France, as well as the local United States but appears in the nonplace of television. They are reassembled to produce a complex reordering of presence and absence. On the one hand, Festival of Magic emphasizes the potential of television as a broadcast medium – the sleight-of-hand of television as ‘anywhere-at-once’ that is guided by a boundless approach, which recognizes no geographical borders or constraints. On the other hand, there

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is the attempt to create the familiar setting of the theatre space that reassures the spectator of real events unfolding in the now and the lack of artifice or trickery in each act. As well as the entertainment special, other televisual forms of secular magic were appearing, including in the children’s show. After Geoffrey Robinson had appeared regularly on the live children’s BBC magazine programme Whirligig, shows such as Hey Presto! (1955–1966) followed, which were performed in front of an audience of young children and included puppetry, song as well as guests from the world of magic. Hey Presto! was the first show to be broadcast from the new BBC’s TV studio in Birmingham at Pebble Mill. Each week, its eventual host, Rolf Harris, would introduce his guests from the world of magic such as Pan Yue Yen Troupe, a novelty act from the Orient that appeared to flout the law of gravity24, as well as puppetry by Bob Bura and John Hardwick. There were other magic shows that catered to children and served to confirm the idea in most minds that magic as entertainment was a discourse that occasionally aspired to be educational, but was mainly a light-hearted distraction. In the UK, the genial host David Nixon would appear in It’s Magic (1952– 1958) with Tommy Cooper, described by Radio Times as ‘a miscellany of mischief, music and mystery’.25 In the United States, Wonderama (1955–1986) featured Bob McAllister (the Crazy Magician). From 1967, McAllister would entertain an audience that were aged between four to fifteen years old, as well as supervise games and contests on the show. In the same way as Hey Presto!, McAllister worked with Chauncey, a ventriloquist’s dummy, as well as Ralph, his shaggy dog. Notwithstanding live specials for older children and adults such as the Festival of Magic, magic shows established their viability on television in the 1950s and 1960s within the tradition of ‘light entertainment’. Mark Wilson and his children’s show, Magic Land at Allakazam, on CBS from 1960 until 1962 followed by ABC until 1964, is commonly regarded as the pioneer in this respect in the United States. It adapted theatrical magic to television by including the live audience that had become a feature of light entertainment. 24 25

Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 9 October 1954, 3. Radio Times, 9–15 March 1952, 47.

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Live television may indeed have to be viewed as a mode that has dominated much of the history of broadcasting and which assumes a congruent importance today. However, the role of the magician within the realm of light entertainment was less prescriptive in its intent and overall meaning than has been suggested by live transmission. Instead of the suggestion of a fixed relationship between the medium and the viewer, the type of entertainment that magic offered was more than the ontological characteristic of liveness that promised only immediacy. Shows such as Festival of Magic or the children’s Magic Land at Allakazam may have been shot continuously without much editing, but it was also a performance that was under the tutelage of the magician. If such shows were live in the 1950s or else continued to use the ideology of liveness after the arrival of videotaping, the later development of light entertainment in the 1960s and 1970s provided a set of connotations that relied on a popularizing imperative as well the development of extra modalities rather than a strict fealty to the idea of liveness. We will see that television was no longer following the logic of remaining a transmitting medium, but was becoming one that could produce images that might manipulate visual information.

Honest trickery Before considering how the conjuring show on television has been adapted since first appearing as an example of light entertainment, it should be acknowledged that the personality behind the magic act has tended to be always more important than the need for spectacular effects. The magician, in many ways, can be compared to the compère of a gameshow who, because for magic to succeed, must not simply fool the audience but move it emotionally as well. One way to move the audience is to use laughter as a signifier of the intimate and the sharing of a common experience. On British television during the 1960s and 1970s, the conjuror David Nixon represented how performance can be used to move the audience by employing his anarchic charm. Nixon came out of panel games, including What’s My Line? (1951–1964), and it would be a fair claim to make that he was a television personality first and a magician second, although he became a member of the British Magic Circle in 1938.

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Nixon had appeared with Tommy Cooper in It’s Magic (1955–1958)26 before being contracted by the BBC to host a new show, Showtime (1959–1961), in which he was compared to Perry Como or Ed Sullivan.27 In a memo, he was told he should ‘abandon his shy ad-libbing and take the stage as a charming authoritative host to the very big stars we are engaging as his guests’.28 This was the performance style required of ‘Television Theatre’ at peak time. Other qualities that were familiar from Perry Como, which Nixon was supposed to adopt, were ‘ingenuity, preparedness and modesty’. Although naturalistic, his performance would be more ordered and controlled than had been acceptable on earlier live television. The small lounge with a bar would be retained from It’s Magic to retain a friendly, informal atmosphere. Rather than only magicians, Showtime would include personalities from any branch of the entertainment or artistic world. At the same time, Nixon liked to use comedy magic to entertain his audience alongside visual effects, which he referred to as ‘switchcraft’. Nixon had used the ‘magic’ of television since It’s Magic. Later, switchcraft, in programmes such as The David Nixon Show, which saw Nixon interacting with himself, relied on chroma-key insertion techniques made possible using a vision mixer that switched between electronic inputs from different studio cameras and a prerecorded source. Once inside the mixer, the shots could be manipulated and combined. Using a colour-keying process, the operator could select the colour or tone within an area of the particular shot, and the mixer would be used to insert and superimpose an image of Nixon or another background from the prerecorded source. Nixon’s shows on the UK’s ITV London franchise, Thames Television  – Magic Box (1970) and The David Nixon Show (1972) – unlike earlier conjuring shows, are still extant, and they consisted of a thirteen-week series of magic. Each forty-five-minute show followed the same light entertainment formula that had been established in earlier magic/variety shows, combining music, magic and comedy patter. For example, on Magic Box, Anita Harris, a wellknown British actress of the time, was the resident songstress in the series. 26 27 28

It’s Magic ran from 1952 with Cooper, but Nixon’s time on it started from 1955. Memo, 9 September, 1959, BBC WAC, David Nixon, File 11, 1959–1962. Ibid.

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Meanwhile, besides Nixon as a reassuring, familiar figure, exotic flavours were added by the introduction of global acts, including the sword-swallower Stromboli, and Robert Harbin who had been in NBC’s 1957 Festival of Magic with his new illusion ‘Aztec Lady’. The show’s magic advisor, Ali Bongo, who had appeared in the ‘Paris Festival of Magic’, had spotted most of the international acts that appeared in the series. For the producer of Nixon’s shows, ‘All the acts must be original and new to television in this country.’29 Nixon’s use of switchcraft and the possibility of TV trickery using either the camera or vision mixer had been controversial and would later be criticized by the British magician Paul Daniels. Examples of TV trickery serve as a reminder of how television’s dominant mode of liveness has been used to connote truth value as well as its significance as a realist medium. An attempt to disrupt or violate this ideal draws attention to this assumption. It was the troubled history of one of the earliest mind-reading acts on television that demonstrates the extent to which magic has been affected by concerns about verisimilitude and ‘honest trickery’. Chan Canasta was a mind-reading illusionist or mentalist who had been born in Poland and had recorded his first TV show in 1951 for the BBC. He was later to appear in the United States on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Jack Paar Tonight Show (1957–1962). In 1953, a short film of his act was released at the cinema in the UK. Described as a novelty short, it used ‘willing stooges’ and the commentary was provided by Ronnie Waldman, the BBC Head of Light Entertainment, as an example of the appearance of a ‘live’ act that was released on film. The film is unusual because it is, in many ways, a re-enactment of the programmes made by the BBC with Canasta explaining his system of memory training at the end. Not billed as a magician but as ‘a remarkable man’, Canasta referred to his tricks as ‘experiments in psychomagic’. For his performance as a mentalist, he required a minimum number of props with books playing an important part in the act.30 Canasta was also said to speak seven languages and had been an ex-university student of psychology. He had lectured before academic societies 29 30

Thames Television Press Office Release, no date. Deposited at the British Film Institute. Denis Gifford, ‘Obituary: Chan Canasta’, Independent, 30 May 1999. Accessed at:  www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-chan-canasta-1097073.htm.

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all over the world, including the London Society for Psychical Research.31 The edification of his audience underlined the educational function of the programmes he made for the BBC, which was helped by the inclusion of John Freeman, the editor of the respected left-liberal New Statesman journal. Freeman was chosen to chair the demonstration of mentalism within the television studio. Crucially, Freeman’s presence as a distinguished public figure would lend honesty and authority to the show, which would be paramount in establishing the authenticity of Canasta’s performance. The use of intimacy on television would be different too. Rather than encourage a cosy feeling, Freeman would later go on to become the interviewer of Face to Face (1959– 1962), which, using the camera, sought a strict fealty with the interviewee. Freeman’s probing style aimed to penetrate to the authentic core of his guests. Notoriously, Tony Hancock had been forced to reveal his ‘real’ self so that the viewers could literally see his personality.32 The importance connected to the type of intimacy that Freeman would bring as a cypher for authenticity would aid Canasta. However, early on in his career, he would commit a deliberate deception that violated meanings and feelings about live television and magic. Canasta performed a trick that the BBC regarded as a gimmick:  a ‘tubedestroying machine’. A gimmick exists as a trick or device intended to attract attention, publicity or trade. With the power of thought, Canasta claimed that he could break every TV set in the country. He exhorted his audience to concentrate, and in homes across the country, TV screens went black with a diminishing white spot. After forty seconds, the screen reappeared with Canasta admitting that his stunt was only ‘a leg-pull!’ He demonstrated how one of the cameras in the studio had been trained on a screen, which had been switched off before switched back on again. The ‘gimmick’ was amusing but also caused a lot of acrimonious correspondence from viewers alarmed at the damage to their sets.33 It had been an attempt by Canasta to be ‘different’, but it heightened other tensions between televisual magic and suspicions that camera trickery was being used. Trickery conceived as a crude piece of artifice or

31 32 33

Untitled profile of Chan Canasta from the Harry Lowe Agency. Found in BBC WAC, T12/47. Face to Face, originally transmitted 7 February 1960. Eric Maschwitz, Head of Light Entertainment, 24 October 1960. BBC WAC, Chan Canasta, 1952–1962.

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gimmick rather than a clever use of psychological effects was something that John Freeman was determined to avoid. Freeman argued that Canasta’s use of auto-suggestion in his mentalism should be informed by expert understanding of the workings of the human mind. Importantly, when Canasta presented his mind-reading act, he relied on a few simple props consisting of some cards, books, chairs and guests. Rather than skilful trickery, Freeman made it clear that what he expected was the offer of literalness that he had achieved on his own show Face to Face. There had to be a transparent, unmediated series of moments that were at the pole end of a mediatized, recorded culture, in which everything was recreated rather than a direct access to the real world. In a long letter to Eric Maschwitz, the BBC Head of Television Light Entertainment, Freeman was to ask: you as Head of Light Entertainment for your written assurance that so far as the BBC is concerned Canasta is totally unaided and carries out his ‘experiments’ or tricks entirely on his own in the conditions seen to both myself and the viewers; his props [i.e. cards and books] are what they seem to be; and that, as far as it is humanly possible to check, members of the panel are not in league with him.34

The reply from Maschwitz was forthright: I can assure you that to the best of my knowledge and that of the various producers who have been responsible for the Chan Canasta programmes there has never been any ‘rigging’ of his tricks with the connivance of anyone engaged professionally on the show . . . the library of books is to be changed every time . . . I  hope that this unfortunate business [tubedestroying machine] will not have impaired your faith in the programme as honest entertainment and that you and Canasta will be working together as happily as ever in what is one of the most delightful entertainments on television.35

Freeman regarded favourably the possibility of the educational value of Canasta’s act and what the human mind was capable of and how it could be trained to accomplish great feats of memory. A gimmick implied a stunt that 34 35

John Freeman, 7 October 1960. BBC WAC, Chan Canasta, 1952–1962. Eric Maschwitz, 10 October 1960. BBC WAC, Chan Canasta, 1952–1962.

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might create maximum dramatic effect but had very little to do with presenting factual evidence; the entertainment imperative within the magic shows by David Nixon and others was regarded as a baleful influence. As a consequence, Canasta’s appearances on television were structured differently from the professional norms of light entertainment and sought a more restrained style that was helped by the close spatial proximity of the audience to the performance. Unlike a stage, the act would be set in what appeared to be a small, domestic space like a simulated living room if actually built inside a studio. The formula for the shows was to have Freeman present the show and introduce the guests by, initially, directly addressing the camera. The guests would be dressed in evening dress and dinner jackets as if attending a soirée at a friend’s house. Canasta’s own delivery was affable if slightly nervous.36 Consequently, Freeman’s presence became critical in allowing for the rapport between viewers and performance to develop that also added an ethical dimension:  the show was endowed with signifiers of authenticity, including the presence of Freeman, as a marker of the difference between Canasta’s seriousness and forms of entertainment embodied by Nixon and other magicians.

Now that’s magic! Parallels with the game show in David Nixon’s own shows suggest that such programmes were designed to encourage both the studio audience and the one at home to ‘play along’, while viewing Nixon talking to his double in the dressing room using the gimmick of switchcraft. Nixon had a relaxed, confident manner and was bald, elderly and slightly eccentric. After his death in 1978, a replacement was found who would continue to fulfil the role of a favourite member of the family. The best known magician in the history of (British) televised magic (and, conversely, later one of the most derided)  – Paul Daniels  – became a household name due to his memorable catchphrases – ‘Now that’s magic!’ – to further encode the participatory role of the viewers into the show. 36

He had been described as the nervous type in a memo, 19 September 1960. BBC WAC, Chan Canasta, 1952–1962.

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Paul Daniels initially featured in two series of the BBC’s For My Next Trick, next in The David Nixon Show and in BBC’s Pebble Mill showcase before having his own show that ran for fifteen series from 1979 to 1994  – The Paul Daniels Magic Show. He had also appeared on Shirley Bassey’s Variety Show (1976–1979). Daniels was to display his quick repartee and the ability to inject a chirpy humour into his act, which became a feature of his performance. Like Nixon, in his own show, he employed the services of Ali Bongo, a magician who, unlike Nixon or Daniels, used little or no dialogue and could possess more universal appeal.37 However, much of Daniels’ attraction relied on his particular brand of patter and another of his catchphrases that became his trademark  – ‘you’ll like this:  not a lot, but you’ll like it’. The aim in all his TV appearances was to make the viewer like him and like his magic, in that order. Daniels had also fulfilled the role of vaudevillian hero: his professionalism over thirty years of hard work had brought the confident, singleminded eleven-year-old from the English county of Cleveland to the top of the entertainment tree. Authorship was an essential part of the presentation of each episode of the show and would become not simply embodied in the figure of Paul Daniels, but also be the distinctive outcome of a collaborative work practice between the creative personnel of Daniels and his producer, John Fisher, and finally be a marker of institutional and corporate (BBC) identity. If the show was to remain broadly faithful to the format of a traditional studio-bound TV magic programme, for Daniels, rather than the use of any technical trickery, he would rely on classic misdirection and control of the viewing position of the spectator: When I’m doing a trick I  can make you or an audience look away at the critical moment. You won’t know you’ve done it but you will. I control your vision. It’s not deception. Nothing is left out or edited out. Just a change of vision. Now David Nixon did have a problem. He came out of panel games and went into magic and the viewer saw him as a personality rather than

37

Bongo’s magic show was in the mid-1980s produced by Link House, a publishing company. Link House preferred to concentrate on children’s programming in which there were publishing spinoffs and merchandizing possibilities. Bongo’s show was sold to Japan and comprised of thirteen five-minute programmes. See Broadcast, 4 May 1984, 42.

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a magician. Then came the era of technical trickery – David would talk to himself and that sort of thing. After a while the viewer couldn’t tell the difference – he didn’t know whether a trick was genuine or, so to speak, a ‘trick’.38

The intention was to recreate the sense of a relayed liveness followed by the claim that anything Daniels did on television could be replicated on stage. However, in the studio control room was Fisher, his producer and accomplice, who would choose the camera shots. One of Daniels’ most celebrated tricks performed in 1984 was to make a studio TV camera weighing half a tonne disappear, which later featured on Fifty Greatest Magic Tricks on Channel 4 (2002).39 The trick can be understood as Daniels’ answer to his detractors that he had used camera tricks: in fact, the trick was the camera. The opening consists of a shot of the audience through the viewfinder of the camera, which is positioned inside a wooden box to disprove that Daniels is using prerecorded material. The box is lifted by a forklift truck and falls apart when he fires a gun into the air. A shot appears of Daniels in front of the camera before the image dissolves into ‘snow’ to indicate the loss of a TV signal and before the revelation that the camera has miraculously dematerialized. At the same time as presenting grand illusions, Daniels was able to offer magic that was suitable for the viewing experience of the 1980s on British television: it avoided the type of large-scale effects, deploying spectacular illusions with vanishing lions and elephants, which had been used by Doug Henning or would be used by David Copperfield in the United States. For example, Copperfield would create one of the grandest illusions ever performed on television of walking through the Great Wall of China in 1986.40 However, this use of spectacle, albeit using familiar and famous architecture to emphasize real-world performance, was not thought suitable by Fisher and Daniels for the values embodied in British television. The epic scale of monumentality and spectacle would be difficult for a performer who claimed, ‘When I’m doing television I try and think of my act reduced to the size of a tiny theatre in the corner of a living room.’41 38 39 40 41

Anon, ‘His Own Blend of Magic, Personality and Line in Patter’, Television Today, 26 July 1979, 18. Originally broadcast 6 May 2002. The illusion was performed for his ninth TV special The Magic of David Copperfield VIII. Chris Greenwood, ‘Laugh and Be Baffled, Daniels’, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 20 September 1981, 30–36.

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Instead, Daniels would perform the same tricks sans large animals with a metaphorical mouse and box, but the effect was more arresting because the tricks were shot in close-up. The early episodes of the Paul Daniels Show from their inception in 1979 until the mid-1980s were shot inside the electronic TV studio before, occasionally, shooting outside. Nevertheless, Daniels’ performance on his TV shows recalled an earlier pre-television form of magic, as he aimed to repeat the magic sketch format that had occurred every week at the old St. George’s Hall in London in the pre-war days of John Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant.42 The role of entertainer was important to Daniels, because without it there would have been more need for spectacular effects. Daniels was to also make several appearances in the Royal Variety Show from the Palladium and made several appearances in the BBC’s hit quiz show of the 1980s, Blankety Blank. Such an eclectic mix of modes was both reassuring from the Nixon days but also, with its renewed emphasis on ‘real’ magic, could bring a touch of further originality into what was in The Paul Daniels Magic Show a welcome variation to the TV variety show.

Televisionland’s nostalgia The invention of television had brought with it an electronic world of phantom images. But the belief in a living diegesis would give such a shadow world a tangible autonomy. As we have already seen, a heightened sense of realism was further suggested by the use of direct address to the audience by the magician. Reality on television would rely on the privileged proximity to an audience as well as on further techniques such as the close-up of the intimacy of the camera. Equally, the magician would be a type that the audience could accept as real, usually supported by the aspiratory mythic notion of a Horatio Alger 42

John Nevil Maskelyne (1839–1917) and David Devant (1868–1941) belonged to the famous Maskelyne and Cooke Company, which performed for thirty-one years at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London.

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that Paul Daniels would promote within interviews. Newspapers would report how, in the 1980s, he was the UK’s magic millionaire and had learnt the trick of turning conjuring into cash.43 On the other hand, the risk of an excess of quirkiness is that the audience will perceive any magician as being too ‘eccentric’ to be relevant to their own lives. Hitherto, the grotesque very rarely was able to intrude into the magic show, although this was to change with such acts from the United States as Penn and Teller and the British magician Simon Drake in the 1990s. Both magicians would perform on the UK’s Channel 4, which promised to be different in its output from the existing duopoly of the BBC and ITV.44 By the mid-1970s, there had been a shift in attitudes to television and a growing nostalgia for older shows. After accusations of a ‘vast wasteland’, the growing cultural legitimization of television within the term ‘Televisionland’ helped to describe the electronic maelstrom of a ceaselessly mediated succession of programmes that also performed a second function of accepting television not as a reflection of culture but as culture. In this way, television exists not as a reflection of reality but constructs the cultural myths that Roland Barthes suggests are encoded inside media content.45 Neil Postman, a critic of television, writing in the 1980s, believes: Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture. This means, among other things, that we rarely talk about television, only about what is on television – that is, about its content. Its ecology, which includes not only its physical characteristics and symbolic code but the conditions in which we normally attend to it, is taken for granted, accepted as natural . . . Television has become . . . the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe . . . so thoroughly integrated into American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background.46

43 44

45 46

Alasdair Riley, ‘Mr Magic’s Millions’, Sun, 29 November 1980. Sylvia Harvey, ‘Channel Four and the Redefining of Public Service Broadcasting’ in Michelle Hilmes (ed.), The Television History Book (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 50–54. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Grant and Cutler, 1994). Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (London: Methuen, 1987), 80

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The 1970s marks the beginning of television’s historicity or the discourses of memory and history. This integration of television into everyday life can be seen using the example of David Copperfield, who in many ways epitomizes not only secular magic on television but the mediated magic of television as electronic space. The Magic of ABC with David Copperfield was a TV special starring the eponymous Copperfield, first broadcast in 1977.47 Copperfield was twenty-one years old when he hosted the show and made his official debut on television. His first trick on the show was to make a TV set appear from inside what had been an empty box – establishing the centrality of the medium to his type of magic. In fact, the purpose of the show was to publicize ABC’s upcoming season of programmes, and after the first trick, the show cuts to the line-up of TV stars and acts that will appear in the show, including TV and entertainment stars of the time – Laverne and Shirley, Donnie and Maria Osmond, and the female cast of Charlie’s Angels. A fresh-faced Copperfield performs his second trick using cards that he makes randomly appear on his person. The trick appears on a TV screen before the camera pulls back to reveal Copperfield performing the trick for television. This doubling of the unreal/real is further alluded to as the concretizing of the phantom world of ‘Televisionland’ as he starts a confession that he is a full-fledged member of the TV generation. Any cultural anxiety of television that might have been expressed by a commentator such as Postman is absent. Rather, Copperfield’s confession exists as an unproblematic acceptance of television. As a twenty-one-year-old, he reports that formatively television has been his baby-sitter, his school book, his best friend, his first love. Tonight, he will host his first TV special and work with fourteen of the biggest stars of the ABC network. As always, the magic includes music and comedy. The comedy sketches consist of re-enactments of some famous moments from the history of cinema, including the shower scene in Psycho and a scene from The Maltese Falcon. But, if cinematic films, they have clearly only been watched on television by a younger Copperfield, who is now incorporating them into his repertory. Already by 1973, Ed Buscombe had made the point that films 47

Originally broadcast 7 September, 1977. Accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaR-pdtT8BI.

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made for the cinema are enjoyed on television rather than in the older form of exhibition: Feature films regularly appear among the top ten most popular programmes in the ratings, so it is not surprising that the BBC and ITV schedule films at the peak viewing hours, such as Saturday and Sunday nights. Films on the BBC regularly achieve audiences of 10  million, and higher. When Hitchcock’s The Birds was shown (February 1972), it was seen by 20 million people.48

In the Magic of ABC, there is a great deal of emphasis on Copperfield’s youth – it is mentioned several times  – and how he watched television as a kid. In this way, television is not an instrument that directs our knowledge of the world with its technology of vision-from-a-distance but forms a virtual space of memories and the popular culture of favourite TV shows and movies that begins to replace the real. By the 1980s, Copperfield would continue to mine the vein of nostalgia that was affecting popular culture as recirculated programmes on television became watched by a newer generation and reminded an older generation of their own formative years. In his TV special, The Magic of David Copperfield VIII, he interweaves television’s historicity with his conjuring trick, the Banana Bandana,49 deploying the humour and music of Mr Rogers’ Neighbour (1966– 2001), a children’s programme starring the eponymous Fred Rogers. Rogers, an avuncular figure in the show, would wear his trademark red cardigan and start each episode with the song – suitable for pleasing small children – Won’t You Be My Neighbour? Copperfield would use the cultural memory of the show to entertain an adult audience, who had grown up in the twenty years since the show’s beginning and possessed fond memories of a culturally well-regarded programme. Part of Copperfield’s act is to imitate the characteristic mannerisms of Mr Rogers, causing a great deal of hilarity from the audience, due to the familiarity. In such ways, Copperfield was apt at exploiting the growing heritage of television. Derek Kompare suggests that this ‘new

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Edward Buscombe, Screen Pamphlet 1: Films on TV (London:  Society for Education in Film and Television, 1972), 3 Originally broadcast 14 March 1986.

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legitimation of television was based not on the canon, as it had been with film, nor with the scientific principles of mass communication, but on the idea of heritage’.50 Rather than a canon that was separated from everyday life, the heritage of television was part of a lived, historical experience of growing up with and not simply among the icons of popular culture. Kompare makes the point that television is the prime leisure activity of Americans; and TV Guide, the nation’s most widely circulated periodical. Consequently, the country’s collective memories, which structure identity and create a sense of who we are, are centred on television. The nexus between magic and television is prominent within the magic of Copperfield as he makes the bandana disappear. A live voice-over in the style of Mr Rogers enunciates the trick, which Copperfield performs. Although presented as ridiculous, there is also a sincere admiration of what television has done  – it has been his baby-sitter, his school book, his best friend, his first love. . . The confusion Copperfield experiences between the words banana and bandana during the trick is also a reminder of an infant’s confusion with words that sound similar and the embarrassment they may have caused, which is alluded to in the performance as a common formative experience. Copperfield exploits such feelings in the same way as other shared experiences have been discussed and rediscussed on television, which have sought solutions to particular problems using the authority of its presenters such as Fred Rogers for children or on the various talk shows for adults.

Spectacle and liveness in secular magic In the final episode for CBS of the Magic of David Copperfield,51 the blurring of the real/non-real is repeated to create television’s vital sense of presence within temporal and spatial simultaneity. The act of secular magic is performed within a very large live auditorium. By now, production values and spectacle

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Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 105. Magic of David Copperfield, originally broadcast 3 April 2001. Accessed at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yjY0eSsH81Q.

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have come to dominate Copperfield’s shows to create a larger, more exciting environment. The sense of a live event is heightened as Copperfield brings numerous guests and members of the audience onto the stage to participate in the magic. The show consists of an in-the-round platform to offer the audience a closer intimacy with the stage, but there are also large TV screens to relay the show back to the audience as each illusion unfolds. The reinforcing of the view of the camera through the use of large TV screens maintains the illusion that the diegetic time of the live show is aligned with that of the viewer of the screens. Meanwhile, this reversal of the usual ontological relationship between the medium and the spectator creates not so much parallel worlds – real and non-real – and the comparison between them, but a hyper-diegesis of the electronic and the live in which the boundaries between them have been collapsed. The screens act as ringside seats and the cameras try to take in as much of the show rather than snippets of Copperfield or his guests. The aim is to provide the best sense of the occasion and to make it more personal. But such techniques do not necessarily appeal to an audience or else may only incorporate varying degrees of spectator participation. To be put into the middle of an event requires another imaginary between the performer and the spectator – which is an understanding that the technology is appropriate to the story the magician wishes to surround the illusion. The tale that Copperfield offers fits the spectacle he creates as he builds a bridge between the real and the fantastic. He explains to the audience that he wants them to imagine that they can travel to the other side of the world in the blink of an eye. It will be the perfect place for when you want to get away from your problems. He implores the audience to really have the feeling of being there. On the large TV screens appears a little island off the coast of Hawaii. Copperfield mentions that you can feel your feet in the water – ‘really there, right now’, he insists. The feelings about presence and tactile sense of the island offer a greater authenticity. A volunteer from the audience has with them a picture of their father, and Copperfield is able to apparently dematerialize his guest and deposit them both on the tropical island. Text appears on the big screens in the auditorium – LIVE HAWAII 3:44 PM – to confirm the simultaneity of the dematerialization and transmigration (of souls?) to the island. Copperfield has taken his guest (audience?) to the island not by travelling to it in a split second but by taking

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advantage of the co-temporality that an electronic presence on a live screen can offer. More wonderfully, this transmutability has created the reversal of a fragmented world because the boy’s father impossibly appears on the island. The utopianism once promised by TV light entertainment becomes manifest in this epic illusion, and becomes ‘real’.

Conclusion The glitzy values of light entertainment within the form of the glossy studio production that magic would seek to use did not place it in contradiction with the older values of liveness. However, the form was never stable, and competing discourses of the time about television’s electronic ‘presence’ sought to mutually enrich each other from the 1950s to the 1990s. Television was able to foster the illusion of access to an indexical reality using a variety of means that helps to explain magic’s appeal. The willingness to use signifiers such as direct address to create an immediate presence would be the reversal of the loss of transparency of film using editing. The loss of spectacle that had existed in the largest theatres and of complex, large-scale events was a further affirmation of the ‘honesty trickery’ of magic that, because of its technically defined realism, promised a greater possibility of its truth value. The type of visualization that magic depended on was its co-presence with the viewer watching at home a relayed transmission without editorial interference. Yet, the development of light entertainment would rely on the variable nature of the TV image, which incorporated other values borrowed from the live auditorium, including nightclubs and music halls. The tension shown by the range of forms within television suggests that any proper understanding of mediated magic must rely on an appreciation of the co-existence between evidential credibility, on the one hand, and values of entertainment, on the other. The mind-reading acts of Chan Canasta, including his apparent nervousness during his performance and obvious Polish accent, were reminders of the sense of ‘being there’. Yet, David Nixon shifted magic to a tradition of comic performance that relied upon its audience to sustain interest and appeal. Paul

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Daniels inherited this tradition but was able to use the camera to misdirect the audience for the successful outcome of a trick. The growing cultural importance of television, which, at first, was noticed in the United States rather than in the UK, represented another shift in attitudes that affected how the magic act was televised. In 2013, David Copperfield, in an interview for the Wall Street Journal, explained that the fantastic fictions he created in his magic were now less about live theatre or television and more the wish-fulfilment of a film by Frank Capra that took the audience on a journey and combined telling stories with moving audiences.52 By accomplishing impossible things in their lives, Copperfield believes he is giving people hope. Certainly, the affective intensity to his shows constructs dialectic between alienation and the struggle for empowerment and, ultimately, happiness. Yet, the disembodying and transmigration of the self that Copperfield accomplishes within his illusions continues to incorporate into its narrative part of the everyday lives of Copperfield’s guests with its possibility of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Such repurposing of the everyday is a reminder of television’s continued legacy as spectacular acts of magic in the hands of magicians such as Copperfield became an increasingly mediatized event. In the next chapter, we will see how magic, by adopting further aesthetic and narrative possibilities, especially since the advent of reality TV, has capitalized on specific modes relating to performance and display of the body by the illusionist. Since the 1990s, the act of magic on television has sought to immerse a reflexive experience of illusion with everyday life. The construction of reality as entertainment has meant the boundary between reality and television has become conjoined, but exhibition of the trauma offered to the body can suggest the real again.

52

Interview of David Copperfield by Lee Hawkins. Accessed at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tV9DS4g8_Hk.

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One of the reasons I love doing these stunts is because as soon as you take away all the extravagances and superfluities that we live with every day of our lives . . . the simplest things become the most amazing.1

Innovation in TV entertainment We have seen how the analysis of the live performance of magic and the mediatized culture of television establishes a theoretical framework for rethinking how the operation of liveness continues to be complex with overlapping topographies between the live image and the mediatized image. However, recently, contact with the audience and the relationship between television and everyday life has served to produce newer forms such as reality TV. These forms that rely less on what can be regarded as the outmoded binaries between the real and the fictive have become categories of programming. Moreover, hitherto, separate categories between drama, documentary and entertainment have collapsed to produce parataxis – distinct forms side-by-side that seek to address the audience. These often work differently from true hybrids or fusion between forms, although they destabilize the ontological boundaries between forms in many of the same ways. The simple dichotomies between modes of the live/recorded, factual and fictional programming, the real/authentic and the non-real have become difficult to sustain when attempting to obtain a more complete understanding of the cultural and technical significance of recent secular magic on television. 1

Adam Kimmel, ‘David Blaine’, Interview Magazine, October 2010, 104–8, 119.

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To begin to explain the disruption of older forms of entertainment inside the electronic studio, the phenomenology of television has to be explored further. We have seen that television promotes an impression of phantom worlds of images and sounds that, due to their immediacy, appear to be living. This illusion is made more powerful because of direct, personalized and immediate contact with the audience by the entertainer-host and a simulated first-person address. However, we have also seen that a form such as light entertainment on television cannot exist as an absolute, fixed category – ‘there was no lack of variety in Television Variety’. Rather, as Raymond Williams has argued, ‘one of the innovating forms of television is television itself ’.2 The interpretative flexibility of television and its innovating form have been described by Heath and Skirrow like this: Television cannot be allowed to confine ‘television itself ’ to a technology or a single isolable element of the viewing experience: ‘television itself ’ is everywhere in television, everywhere in the operation of ‘form’ and ‘content’ that a communication based analysis takes for granted.3

Taken like this, entertainment on television is never static and, as we saw with David Copperfield, because of its link to the everyday, the resulting permanent flow of information forms a larger meta-textual aesthetic – a vast realm that can be labelled ‘televisionland’ in which distinctions between the real and unreal, true and false, lose coherence and its conscious boundaries. Such possibilities suggest once again how TV form has been shaped not so much by formal possibilities such as flow but by the interpellation of the everyday. Since the 1980s and 1990s, television and the method of its reception have changed. Today, viewers in the UK and the United States consume television not simply to watch it but as part of an active choice to inform their ability to socialize. The rise of consumer choice has meant the formation of TV3 has moved away from the idea of a mass audience.4 Instead, viewers have become 2

3 4

Raymond Williams, Television:  Technology and Cultural Form (London:  Fontana/Collins, 1974), 76–77. Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, ‘Television: A World in Action’, Screen (1977), 18, no. 2, 7–60 (8). S. Behrens, ‘Technological Convergence:  Toward a United State of Media’, Channels of Communication, 1986 Field Guide (1986), 8–10. TV3 is a loose categorization of the period since the 1990s when broadcast television channels and other forms of distribution have begun to proliferate.

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members of micro-cultures that can be defined in terms of niche markets after the development of networks devoted to popular lifestyles. The proliferation of channels due to the digitalization of the delivery of television, including cable, has enabled it to provide more information than was possible during the limited offering provided by older broadcast networks. However, rather than the structured flow proposed by Raymond Williams, which can be picked up at predictable times on the schedule, it is better to say that the viewer, transformed into a self-actuated consumer, is able to synchronize their life with the medium using catch-up services and other methods of repeated television. It is this rootedness into daily life that suggests that secular magic is linked further to the discourses of everyday life, including types of self-actualization, than has been the case in the past. As we have seen, if light entertainment has historically been able to offer a discourse of entrepreneurialism and selfmanagement, many of today’s most popular magicians are successful because they continue to embed their magic within lifestyle cultures while capitalizing on newer discourses. Crucially, the discourses of self-actualization have become a vital component of a dispersed network of programming about magic that encompasses many types of reality TV, which provide a complicated mix of entertainment as well as a sense of personal empowerment. It is within the array of a dispersed number of programming that secular magic has been made to operate and help to make sense of many discursive practices in television.

Street magic’s authenticity Many of today’s magic shows – whether of the large-scale illusion or close-up variety – no longer maintain the specially constructed space of the TV studio in order to immerse the operation of illusion into everyday life. As magic has left the studio, the discourses ranging from a desire for abundance to intensity or the affectivity of living have changed and been reinvented to support existing cultures or else add to the formation of new ones. In programmes by the Americans David Blaine, Criss Angel, and the British conjurors Paul Zenon and Dynamo aka Stephen Frayne, real people in real places continue

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to be used in ‘street magic’ to represent direct access to live happenings. Street magic is easier to produce because it lacks the more complex structure of a stage performance. It also strips away the show business or light entertainment element and the need to perform. Arguably, the magic becomes the renewed focus rather than the personality of the magician. The level of direct control that may have appeared in the electronic studio, especially for technically difficult scenes, such as the use of multiple lights at once, would have signified technical quality. However, the filming within street magic signifies a loss of control. The use of a light-weight portable camera compliments street magic because it signals the loss of the vast machinery of the electronic studio; the controlled environment and its dominant TV practices within an industrial medium are subverted. Unlike earlier shows, programmes such as Paul Zenon’s Trick or Treat (2000), reminiscent of a late-night party atmosphere shot in the back streets of historic Prague in the Czech Republic, are made to offer an increased subjective experience. In street magic, the visual rhetoric of liveness suggests emotional registers and communicates the experience of a communal happening. Again, entertainment has a duality: it reaches people as individuals as well as knitting them together as a collective audience. The difference between ‘street magic’ and earlier forms of stage magic in the studio is that the social value and pleasure assigned to the magic show further capitalizes on its affective appeal. Moreover, in spite of appearances, unlike studio magic, street magic is far less about the ephemeral live event and the promise of an entertaining, utopian sensibility. Instead, the discourse offered by street magic and its stylistics articulate wider cultural processes while continuing to use techniques of participation and membership. Paul Zenon first performed for children’s television, including Tricky Business (1989–1991) and Tricks n Tracks (1993). Tricky Business can best be described as ‘street-wise’ and was a mix of comedy and drama. Zenon’s routines consisted of magic with headphones and everyday objects. Later, in Channel 4’s Turning Tricks (1998), he used his experience gained at the London Comedy Store in order to reinvent the performance of magic.5 5

Originally broadcast 18 November 1998.

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Dressed all in black, he had the persona of a ‘benevolent con-man’. John Fisher was to commission the show. Fisher was a magician himself and had produced The Paul Daniels Show, and he sought the best of magic for Turning Tricks. The show attracted a large audience (1.5 million), which was remarkable for a show scheduled to appear at 11.30 p.m.6 In December 1999, Zenon made Paul’s Tricky Christmas.7 The show consisted of a hidden camera, and the comedy sought ‘ordinary people’ and not celebrities. It had an urban, gritty aesthetic, which was used again in Zenon’s Halloween special – Trick or Treat – set in Prague in 2000. The lack of editing or lighting within the filming of street magic was made possible by the use of lighter and more portable cameras that were becoming available in the 1990s. The fact that some of the tricks in Trick or Treat do not quite work or, at any rate, lack the crisp precision of a performance by, say, Paul Daniels inside the studio suggests it is unscripted. In one trick, Zenon is accompanied by four young women, one of whose ring he has hidden. He leads them to a rose bush outside a restaurant and demolishes the first rose hoping to find the ring. Finding it empty, he tears part the next two roses but fails to find the ring. Frustrated, he declares that the ring has been ‘stolen’ and finds it at the bottom of the pot in which the rose bush was growing. After returning the ring, still angered by the apparent failure of the trick to work entirely, Zenon marches off leaving the women bemused. Although the ‘failure’ is staged, it restores a sense of uncertainty about the validity of magic. To further underline this point, the trick is shot using a single camera rather than the carefully controlled multiple camera system within the electronic studio. The precision of the studio is replaced by an apparent randomness: Zenon tries to perform a trick; he becomes frustrated as the trick goes wrong; he becomes upset and after returning the ring storms off. The sequence quickly cuts to the next trick shot in a new location with the hope that this time it will work correctly. The technical equipment – its potential to be portable – lacks the mastery of the studio, and the idea of complete artistic control over the production dissolves. 6 7

Broadcasters Audience Research Board, weekly TV audience network report, 22 November 1998. Still available to view on 4oD. Accessed at www.channel4.com/programmes/paul-zenons-trickychristmas/on-demand/29155-001. Originally broadcast 30 December 1999.

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The replacement of one mode over another in the 1990s appears to have been driven by a desire to increase the credibility of the televisual image. However, the shift was not entirely motivated by a need for credibility but was also driven by the search for new directions in entertainment that sought to appeal to a younger demographic. Nevertheless, the flexibility of TV programming is a reminder that credibility as much as entertainment is discoursespecific. As there have been an increasing number of TV practices, the trust in images of secular magic by the audience has depended on an understanding of the varying practices and conventions of different forms of programming. The cultural discourse of value, quality and judgment within television has been derived, in large part, from production practices and its professional ideologies. But as these practices have become diverse and the power of large organizations has become dispersed by the growing availability of cameras and production equipment, there has been, what Arild Fetveit paradoxically describes, an increased use of rules if not precision in regard to what is real – a compartmentalization of truth.8 The appearance of David Blaine and the young British magician Dynamo in his show, Magician Impossible (2011–2012), can also be referenced to contribute to a debate about how different modes on television – the live, signifying immediacy and what ‘really happened’, and the mediatized – can be used to form parataxis – two distinct forms side-by-side. In fact, Annette Hill has discussed how in much of reality TV there is an intermediate space between fact and fiction: The experience of watching a factual programme can feel like being in a dream, working through what is real or not, occupying a space between fact and fiction. This is where the viewer participates in the constructed real world of the programme and also reflects on the nature of this real world and how it has been staged for us to watch. Being a factual viewer means taking on multiple roles, as witness and interpreter, and occupying multiple spaces, between fact and fiction. The intermediate space of factual genres is transformative, and at times we will personally connect with something in a

8

Arild Fetveit, ‘Reality TV in the Digital Era’ in James Friedman (ed.), Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 119–37.

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programme, reflecting on what that person or real event means to us, creating a powerful self-reflexive space.9

What is being suggested here is the method by which reality shows have capitalized on the tension between appearance and reality on television. There is in reality TV an increased use of rules to create a ‘structured reality’ or, to quote Grierson, the creative treatment of actuality. However, as Hill points out, the purpose of shows that use this type of structured reality is not to offer a simple phenomenological reproduction of the external world, but to allow a show to exist in its own right. The question is not how close to physical or even social reality such shows have become but whether they have added purpose. The appropriation of magic of the modes of reality TV to penetrate to the heart of an emotional truth has been one of its recent attractions.

Chaos and comedy: Penn and Teller Notions of authenticity on TV magic are a reaction to earlier televised magic that relied on an immediate presence but included the typologies of light entertainment that were guided clearly by institutionalized conventions. In such ways, it was possible for television to offer a basis for comparison between the ontology of liveness and of a specific televised discourse of entertainment. The use of authenticity can also revalidate television’s own authority and counter a position of mistrust in its programming. It can be used to challenge narratives of distrust by seeking to prioritize personal experience as well as evidential rationalization, including paranormal beliefs. For many magicians, audiences are rarely invited to adopt a critical position. Rather, they are expected to enjoy the utopianism of the show. However, other magicians have demonstrated an entirely different approach that begins with a position of distrust, acknowledging that the performance of magic is affected by cultural hierarchies, avoiding critical reflection.

9

Annette Hill, Restyling Factual TV (London: Routledge, 2007), 89.

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Two American magicians were first introduced to a British TV audience after they appeared on one of Jonathan Ross’ New York specials in the early 1990s.10 Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller11 began performing magic together in the late 1970s and were noticeable because their act combined comedy with magic. The use of more comedy was a major factor in the repositioning of magic within the mapping of entertainment in the 1990s. In 1994, on the UK terrestrial Channel 4, they appeared in The Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller and set a clear agenda of reclaiming magic from the showbiz glitter of light entertainment, which within The Paul Daniels Show had become overtly mannered and controlled.12 The comedy anarchy of Penn and Teller is the major difference between it and The Paul Daniels Show. Besides Daniels’ own use of catchphrases, his shows were highly controlled within the technical and economic conventions of the TV studio. Nevertheless, the anarchy of Penn and Teller was not quite as unconstrained as it pretended to be and continued to deploy many of the same TV craft practices observed in the previous chapter. For example, the use of a multi-camera TV studio meant that the shot scale does not gravitate towards close-ups but preferred medium shots. In the much earlier Festival of Magic, this was because the rapid movement of performers made reframing difficult with bulky studio cameras. Later, the lack of precision in framing in a show like Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller, unlike a well-crafted studio production, indicated how far the show was influenced by other forms of television such as location footage for the news, which strives hard to create the illusion of uncontrolled and unmediated reality. The chaos of Penn and Teller is, therefore, in part, a comment on television’s own standards of ‘good television’ as opposed to ‘bad television’. The notion of ‘good television’ has been equated by Stuart Hall with ‘professional’ and high technical standards.13 For Hall, this would serve television’s need to fulfil its commitment to mass entertainment without the distraction of a lowquality picture that would continue to suggest an invisible technical medium 10

11 12 13

Tonight with Jonathan Ross, originally broadcast between 1990 and 1992. Ross is a British TV celebrity presenter and talkshow host. Raymond Teller officially dropped his first name and is now known by the mononym Teller. The Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller, originally broadcast January–February 1994. Stuart Hall, ‘Television and Culture’, Sight and Sound (1976), 45, no. 4, 246–52 (250). Hall is discussing the apparent transparency of the TV studio.

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to an audience.14 The resistance to studio codes of good television by Penn and Teller, in fact, is to reset the purpose of magic – rather than make an illusion appear impossible it becomes, in the words of another prestidigitator, an honest lie.15 The phrase an ‘honest liar’ was first derived from the approach to conjuring magic by noted US magician James Randi, who has built his professional reputation as a charlatan.16 The oxymoron becomes explicable with the realization that any illusions performed are for the purpose of sceptical forms of entertainment. Rather than the mystification of the audience by the glamour of the big-name magician – a David Copperfield – there is an alternative interpretative purpose of secular magic that offers a measure of plausibility. Clues are offered as to how a trick was done, which aligns the performance with more naturalistic registers of participation. On Unpleasant World, the revelation of how a trick was done, which caused considerable upset with the British Magic Circle, the magician’s professional body, did, however, enable an objective understanding of magic. The revelations may have upset other professionals, but as Channel 4 switched to a younger audience, it preferred forms of entertainment that relied more on the types of participation that could be found already within alternative comedy and game-shows. Each week The Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller would have one celebrity guest, and in four out of the six episodes, that guest would be a comedian. Dawn French and Stephen Fry would be some of the celebrity comedians but with the mundane rhythms of fresh-faced twenty-somethings. One aspect of the performance by Penn and Teller is to overturn many of the assumptions that earlier magicians had enjoyed, especially on US television. The notion of the magician as a celebrity and whose image creates a presence transcending each individual performance has made a function of the domain of entertainment – that of maintaining the power of the show business professional. Meanwhile, the audience remains subordinate to the entertainment ‘star’. It can be seen that David Copperfield’s longevity, as well as his status not only as a magician but more as cultural icon, marks him as an entirely

14 15 16

Hall, ‘Television and Culture’, 250. An Honest Liar. Accessed at https://vimeo.com/59194295. James Randi was born as the Canadian, Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, and has completed several books about charlatanism.

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mediatized figure. The construction of an auratic star in the domain of entertainment, which is similar to film, offers pleasures and meanings that must always be recognisable as the products of stars, of individuals whose signifying function exceeds the diegesis . . . It is by varying the ostensiveness of their performance, as well as external reframing signifiers (such as publicity and reviews) that they can manage this without disrupting the representational mode of the performance as a whole.17

Yet, the performer as a performance star who is distanced from their fans becomes problematic on a medium such as television, which relies so much on its connection to everyday life. Jane Root, in Open the Box: About Television, observed in 1986 how television employs people ‘to be ordinary . . . and the real person’s job is to be just like those watching, to act as viewers momentarily whisked to the other side of the screen’.18 The guests who participate in a trick are ordinary members of the public, who have been invited to enter a privileged space. Unpleasant World destabilizes the boundaries between the once privileged space of the star/performer and spectator and denaturalizes the ‘rules’ of entertainment that have been constructed. The accretion of glamour, sophistication and the signifiers of a more socially upward world, which have been deployed since the days of Café Continental and performers such as the cool and sophisticated Channing Pollock, are absent in the performance by Penn and Teller. The fact that television offers the potential of disrupting the dichotomous boundary between the staged space and a ‘real’ audience can, more broadly, be understood as the disruption between media people (celebrities) and non-media people as an example of the function of the everyday within television. It is as if the media world, in order to appear to be more intense and more special, has within the world of televised magic, at the same time, learnt to provide a shared space that is familiar and continues to be relevant to its users. In this way, the everyday of television exercises a very different appeal from the types of secular magic that depend on star performance such as Copperfield’s.19

17

18 19

Philip Drake, ‘Reconceptualising Screen Performance’, Journal of Film and Video (2006), 58, no. 1–2, 84–94. Jane Root, Open the Box: About Television (London: Comedia, 1986), 97. Nick Chouldry, The Place of Media Power:  Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (London: Routledge, 2000), 44, 47.

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Penn Jillette has explained that ‘Magicians have this condescending attitude towards people . . . They’re the only entertainers who draw an “us” and “them” line. Jerry Seinfeld says magicians are like this: Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone, you’re a jerk, now it’s back, you’re an idiot, show’s over.’20 Jillette has also been quoted as saying that ‘Magicians have always drawn the battle lines between them and the audience, we wanted to draw the battle lines between us and other magicians.’21 Mervyn O’Horan, who represented Paul Daniels, remarked about Penn and Teller; ‘They give their tricks away . . . In other words, they’re ridiculing the magic world.’22 In fact, the duo’s savage clowning would be at odds with the codes of good taste normally found on television. Unpleasant World is less a magic show than a show about how mediatized the performance of magic had become on television. The Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller would subvert the codes of ‘good television’ – the unified set of aesthetic criteria that aims to produce the smooth coordination process of continuity between the magician as presenter of the show and an essentially passive audience. Within programmes such as The Paul Daniels Show, there is never an interruption or loss of continuity to disrupt the sense that what is being watched is anything but a manipulated medium. The utopia of straight transmission is also maintained within earlier magic shows, but Penn and Teller sought to counter these by adopting to deploy the opposite of the codes that normally signify immediacy and entertainment, including the catchphrase  – ‘Are we Live?’ − on their Channel 4 show, to be a self-reflexive chant by the audience, as magic manipulation was brought upfront to the camera. The opening credits of Unpleasant World consist of atonal music accompanying the title of the show being cut into concrete by two construction workers with hammers and chisels. The opening is a declaration that gone is the formal transparency, but the rest of the show is not simply about the loss of normal TV codes. In many ways, it is also an acknowledgement that Penn and Teller’s comedy magic is less conceived for a live auditorium but acts as a sign of the innovating form that is identified by Heath and Skirrow as televisual. The loss 20 21 22

Kevin Jackson, ‘Right Before Your Eyes’, Independent, 30 January 1993, 30. Anwar Brett, ‘Gruesome, Twosome’, What’s on TV, London, 12 January 1994, 33. Anna Blundy, ‘The Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller’, The Guardian, 19 January 1994, 20.

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of the cachet of a live culture is the attempt to make visible television’s own idioms and practices, and the comedy magic of the 1990s acts as a reminder of how far television has been able to exploit the belief in an immediate presence and the feelings of immediacy and spontaneity. Jillette makes clear that another feature of television is not only the willingness of guests to participate in a show but to submit to a hierarchy in which an ordinary member of the studio audience accepts the TV ‘professional’ as an unquestioned source of authority. In an episode of Unpleasant World, Penn calls out to members of the audience who repeat back to him what he has told them to say. His response back to the audience is this is why so much of magic works; people agree too easily and are readily complicit with claims made by the magician. The suggestion by the magician, ‘Can you confirm there are no wires or anything holding the box’, usually involves the guest being directed by the magician to simply confirm that trick wires do not exist without actually checking to see if they are present. The acceptance of the TV host as someone who can be trusted is satirized in Unpleasant World. An egregious example of this comes in episode one when the duo perform a trick by the River Thames in London.23 Jillette announces that one of his greatest heroes in magic was the escapologist Harry Houdini. He tells us that Houdini was capable of escaping from the most perilous of situations, and a volunteer is chosen from the audience, tied up in chains in the same way Houdini would have been and pushed into a box. The volunteer is asked by Penn whether it is possible to escape from the handcuffs and reminded of how easy Houdini would have found it. He is also asked whether the box has a trap-door in it and acquiescently agrees with Penn that he could not escape from the handcuffs and that the box has no trap-door. Next, the volunteer is locked inside the box, which is unexpectedly set alight before being thrown into the Thames by Penn and Teller where it sinks without trace.24 The final comment from the volunteer in the box before he apparently drowns is, ‘Excuse me, I can’t breathe.’ The satire on television’s implicit authority and its highly directed nature was appropriate to Channel 4, which at the time was seeking to overturn many of the assumptions about

23 24

Originally broadcast 7 January 1994. This caused several complaints to be made to the TV regulator at the time.

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content on television, as well as a desire for producing experimental shows that transgressed standards of good taste and decency.25 One explanation for the acquiescent attitude to television by audiences is that the medium accrues authority because of its ability to foster its grand and grandiose access to the world – ‘distant vistas’. More recently, according to Gary Carter from Endemol, this attitude has changed. He reports that audiences have moved ‘to a more critical and savvy engagement . . . Today the man on the television is just another voice amid the hubbub of a multimedia age’.26 Yet, this claim seems to be self-motivated by a desire to promote an interest in reality TV – a major line of income for Endemol. Instead, an acquiescent attitude from a figure in authority, however temporary, is something that continues to bother Penn, who states, ‘[James] Randi taught me that lying is the only – although I’m an atheist, I’ll use the word “sin” – is the only sin that, once you put a frame around it, it’s okay.’27 Such a claim demonstrates that if audiences are more ‘savvy’ about television, this does not necessarily indicate a more sceptical position. Members of the audience may defer to a subordinate role because it is the expected mode of behaviour within the domain of entertainment, including magic.

Disgust and horror: The Secret Cabaret (1990–1992) The boundaries of belief and doubt, magic and the limits of what the audience is willing to accept were tested by Channel 4 in the early 1990s. The Secret Cabaret was fronted by its creator Simon Drake, a magician specializing in ‘Bizarre Magick’. Simulating Black Magic, it incorporates elements of the grotesque, including mock executions in the form of decapitation and being burnt alive. Channel 4 referred to the show as a ‘dark entertainment series [that] presents in a cabaret setting not only the gothic/punk illusions of its host but also a mixture of acts, magical, illusory and bizarre’.28 The show would also be 25 26

27 28

Michele Hilmes, The Television History Book (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 97. Cited in Dolan Cummings, ‘Introduction’, in Dolan Cummings (ed.), Reality TV: How Real Is Real? (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002), xiv. Interview with Penn Jillette in Andy Lowe, ‘Great Pretenders’, Comedy Review, May 1996, 48–9. Broadcasting Standards Council, ‘Finding: The Secret Cabaret ’, February 1994, 19–20. Deposited at the British Film Institute.

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populated by cheats and swindlers, including Frank Abagnale, who was later to be immortalized in the film Catch Me if You Can (2002). The Secret Cabaret was produced by Sebastian Cody, who had been responsible for another risktaking show on Channel 4 – After Dark.29 Cody wanted to make the audience’s flesh creep, and the first commercial break in the third episode of the second series was presaged by a tableau featuring a severed hand previously owned, according to Drake as the ring-master, by a gifted pickpocket, its fingers still twitching in a solitary manacle.30 The show was to receive complaints from six viewers about three of the programmes in the repeat series broadcast in the autumn of 1993. The show, like many others shown at the time, marked cultural shifts in the attitude of audiences as well as a desire by Channel 4 to shock. Michael Grade, the chief executive of the corporation, was attacked in the popular press that demanded the sacking of ‘Britain’s pornographer-in-chief ’.31 John Willis, the Director of Programmes, reflected, ‘We were in a moment of cultural change. The audience was dividing into two: on the one side there was this younger more independently minded relaxed audience . . . And on the other their parents and grandparents, who were outraged. They had seen what might happen at a teenage party. The audience was culturally divided, in an interesting way, and we, Channel 4, were at the sharp end of it.’32 The complaint against The Secret Cabaret was about various incidents, especially an act of bizarre magick broadcast on 9 November 1993. In the episode, Simon Drake was seized by his assistants in a popular uprising and had his neck placed in a noose. Drake wears his trademark black leather costume throughout the second series – a post-apocalyptic echo of the Mad Max films.33 A white curtain is raised and the audience watch as he is apparently hanged. When the curtain is pulled back, it reveals a side of (fake) slaughterhouse meat hanging in the noose. The camera pulls back to view Drake sitting at the top

29

30 31 32 33

After Dark was a late-night live discussion programme broadcast between 1987 and 1997. It has been described as the ‘most intelligent, thought-provoking and interesting programme ever to have been on television’ by Jaci Stephen for the Daily Mail, 9 May 1997, 45. Originally broadcast 29 January 1992. Paul Johnson, Daily Mail, 8 June 1995, 8. Scott Inquiry into The Word, Channel 4 archive. The Mad Max films starring Mel Gibson were produced between 1979 and 1985.

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of stairs positioned by the side of the stage. The illusion was a novel reinvention of a classic and dramatic magical illusion; it had been performed by Alice Cooper in the 1970s, albeit Cooper had been shown hanging.34 The Secret Cabaret was accused of being the Magic Circle’s answer to the rock shocker Cooper.35 In some ways, it is a reversal of the ‘dismemberment’-themed illusions that usually had seen an attractive female assistant being decapitated or disarticulated in some way. The magician – the black clothing rendering him less visible – is hung instead of his assistant. The fascination with death and the possibility of transcendence refers to the belief that lives are precarious. But the sleazy glamour was hard to capture on television, and the staples of The Secret Cabaret − violent annihilation and vertiginous and thrilling spatial displacements − were not contrived to be suitable for the respectable classes, or to some extent edifying. They were echoes back to the funfair and circus rather than Robert-Houdin’s dinner-jacketed magician. The self-conscious, invocative style of the circus served as notification of the show’s intentions, which was demonstrated by the synthesized music lurching in time with the opening credits. The first episode of The Secret Cabaret was interspersed with unusual speciality acts associated with illegitimate forms of entertainment, such as circus freaks and mutilation; the world’s strangest married couple are a bearded lady and the ‘alligator boy’, whose reptilian skin is viewed as being repulsive. The couple recount their lives as ‘freaks’ in the travelling sideshow. Alongside them appear other speciality acts such as the self-skewering act of Stromboli using long needles, and strongwoman Jeanin Lionet hanging in the air by her own hair. Each episode would climax to a piece of Grand Guignol – the graphic form of horror entertainment also taking on the form of a conte cruel. In the second series, a typical climatic act begins with a female fire-juggler being forced to kneel in chains before a sneering Drake, who sits in a throne. He kicks and spits at her before condemning the juggler to be guillotined by his black, leather-clad minions. However, the tables are quickly turned when, after smashing him with a bottle over the head, he is dragged to the guillotine and decapitated. The remaining section consists

34 35

Accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3OkEcdOtb0. Garry Bushell, The Sun, 23 January 1992, 32.

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of the juggler lifting his head from the basket and kissing the ghastly remnant of what we imagine must have been a past sadomasochistic relationship between them. Set within the theatre and pantomime, The Secret Cabaret was a magic show able to denaturalize aspects of television that signalled its infinite vision and ideal visual record. By its deliberate use of theatrical techniques such as Grand Guignol, the show sought to reveal, rather than conceal, the artifice of the performing space. Although this worked to demystify magic in ways similar to Penn and Teller, the aim was to communicate narrative information through gesture rather than dialogue. Secret Cabaret deploys both a dramatic form that disrupts the experience of illusion as well as unsettling the spectator’s belief in their own existence by being faced with the obliteration of the self. It also attests to a segmented televisual form that structures interspersing various acts, including the various lectures about carnival tricks by James Randi and others. The segments of televisual textuality are made to cohere within one unified subject, but the viewing subject occupies numerous fleeting positions as the show shifts from one fragment to the next as it continually acknowledges and even confronts the viewer with its bizarre magick. The reactions to Secret Cabaret demonstrate how the imbrication of dramatic and televisual form has sought various techniques suggesting authenticity. For instance, the dramatic technique of shock and horror would be followed or presaged by a talk from the world’s strangest couple to present the genuine experience of the speakers. Despite the repugnance of the critics in The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, one of the critics admitted his interest for some of the acts but not others: ‘What I find most fascinating, as the clumsiest shuffler of a pack of cards, is the dexterity and control of someone like Ricky Jay – a man one would be ill-advised to join at the poker table. And a Mr Munart from Las Vegas gave an instructive little lecture on methods of cheating employed at the gaming tables over there.’36 Television spectatorship of the same programme can vary widely, consisting of a range of different and opposing reactions. Secret Cabaret was able to provide different modes of address, assuring that it could never be characterized by a single form of enunciation. 36

Peter Paterson, Daily Mail, 24 January 1990, 33.

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In many ways, if the performance of magic always deals with the ordinary and extraordinary, it has been able to find multiple modes that stretch the limits of what the audience is willing to understand as types of magical entertainment. Magic can exist as a multivalent text because it can be engaged with at more than one level; in other ways too, the short-lived Secret Cabaret extended active audience involvement and promoted the understanding of magic for acts that were to follow later.

David Blaine: TV shaman David Blaine was born and raised in Brooklyn before becoming a New York performer – an expert at card tricks and sleight-of-hand illusions. He has written that when he was eighteen years old he became interested in Orson Welles, another celebrated magician as well as film-maker, whose documentary about truth and art, F Is for Fake, quotes the father of magic, Robert-Houdin:  ‘A magician is just an actor. Just an actor playing the part of a magician.’37 Blaine explains that, ‘While most people’s image of a magician is that of someone who walks up to you and pulls quarters out of your ears, I sensed that magic, at its best, could be an intense and emotional experience – not just a series of amusing little “tricks.” ’38 Blaine no longer wanted to be referred to as a ‘magician’ because of its association with petty trickery. Instead, since the 1990s, he has spectacularly demonstrated the very limits and extremes that a human body is capable of surviving. In 1999, Blaine lay for seven days in a claustrophobically restrictive clear coffin at Trump Place in New York for his stunt ‘Buried Alive’. The spectacle transformed him from one more magician to a body artist who challenged an understanding of stamina, control and survival. Other tests of endurance followed separating him from a magician such as David Copperfield. In 2000, he was ‘Frozen in Time’ by being encased in massive blocks of ice for sixty-three hours. In 2002, for ‘Vertigo’ he stood on a hundred-foot pillar in New York’s Bryant Park for thirty-six hours without a safety net. In 2003, for ‘Above the 37 38

F Is for Fake, Orson Welles, Speciality Films, 1974. David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger (London: Macmillan, 2002), 80.

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Below’ he sealed himself in a plexi-glass box suspended over the south bank of the River Thames in London for forty-four days without food. In 2006, he was submerged for seven-and-a-half days underwater in a glass orb at the Lincoln Center, New York, and then tried – but failed – to break a world record for holding his breath. He subsequently did break another breath-holding record in 2008 on The Oprah Winfrey Show, going without air for seventeen minutes and four seconds. In 2008, in ‘Dive of Death’, Blaine hung upside down in Central Park for sixty hours. The purpose of these feats is to redefine magic not as ‘petty tricks’ but by the linking of TV technology to the discourse of self-actualization that has emerged particularly within reality TV. But this is not the self-management or care of the self that is claimed by representing particular life-styles that have been shown on various make-over or life-coaching shows. Rather, Blaine performs the role of a shaman to act out the innermost fears of society. He undergoes the experience of death on behalf of assembled watchers. This can be understood as a therapeutic exercise, which helps society to come to terms with its fears: Public appearance, language and conduct are not valued for what they can achieve, but are interpreted in terms of the inner personality that is manifested; closeness, warmth and the frank expression of the inner self have become the supreme values. The psychotherapeutic is intimately linked to this obsession with personal identity, to this tyranny of intimacy in which narcissism is mobilised in social relations and the self is defined in terms of how it feels rather than what it does.39

Since the 1990s, the increased role of television has been to shape its viewers and directly fashion people’s tastes. In doing so, it continues to retain television’s authority intact. The conceptualization of the act of witnessing first encountered in Chapter 1 can also be applied. John Ellis argues that Witness is a new modality of perception, which positions the viewer within a ‘quasiphysical documentation of specific moments in specific places [that] has brought us face to face with the great events, the banal happenings, the great horrors and the incidental cruelties of our times’.40 It is in his TV specials that 39 40

Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul (London: Routledge, 1990), 215–16. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 9.

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Blaine has created, in places such as New  York and London, extreme emotional returns, which start with the core belief that life is a series of challenges that the empowered person overcomes. The narrative of what can be described as ‘TV shamanism’ may be argued to be at odds with the scepticism that Penn Jillette makes implicit in the magic he practices – it’s a trick – and which has found its most forthright expression in Penn and Teller’s more recent show, Bullshit! (2003–2010). Bullshit! is a challenge to shamanism and intends to promote rationality rather than the popular cultural script of beliefs that can be provided by the TV shaman. At the same time, the shaman is not on the side of corporate institutions such as television selling a life-style, although they may appear on it. Instead, the sounds and images of television are used to create the mediated perception that the shaman is surrounded by the uncertainty of a live event that cannot be controlled by the industrial desire for ‘good television’. In each of the high-risk, static stunts performed by Blaine, he acts as a metaphor of human potential that usually is boundless. He is unmoving because he is either buried in the earth or high up on a pillar while the rest of the world revolves around him. The dialectic of stillness/movement is an inversion of the usual relationship between passive spectator and active performer. The reversal is an opportunity for an alternative form of TV intimacy – no longer established by the removal of physical barriers by the instantaneous transmission of faraway places into the home. Instead, television’s grandiose access to the world ‘out there’ relies on less physical proximity and more on interior, psychological and emotional proximity. Audience contact relies on the power of simultaneity and the process of ‘working through’ that Ellis refers to in relation to the idea of Witness. The term is drawn from psychoanalysis and describes the process by which material is continually interrogated until it is exhausted. The absence of bodily action by Blaine during his performance is the use of the tableau vivant – stasis rather than the kinetic performance of the moving image – in an effort to induce a state of self-consciousness and reflection. Into this is the conflict of comparing the real as a pristine state against a disdain for television’s links to commercialism. By rendering realism as an ethical category, Blaine’s shamanism is judged by how close it is to ‘truth’. His personal

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experience requires legitimization. This can be achieved by the working over of the stunt as television creates narrative, harnesses speculation and discusses the event so as to make it intelligible. For Drowned Alive, Baine was submerged in an eight-foot-diameter water-filled sphere in front of the Lincoln Center, New York, for seven days and nights. He used tubes for air and nutrition but, according to his official website, suffered liver and kidney damage as a result of the stunt.41 Blaine was contained in the sphere, whose actions were restricted to small movements. In such circumstances, it would be difficult to legitimize Blaine’s emotional experience without its proximity to the crowd surrounding the sphere. The New Age songs from musicians at the event help to establish an understanding and feeling of the TV shaman. The noise of the crowd, the comments from bystanders about Blaine, the chants of David, David! contrast with the inner unity and harmony of the shaman. The programme of Drowned Alive also visited other people who had undergone incredible physical distress, including Aron Ralston, who amputated his own arm with a pocket-knife while trapped by a boulder, as well as the greatest dare-devil of the twentieth century, Evel Knievel. Both Ralston and Knievel are used to develop the script offered by Blaine of the shaman and the sense of ritual within his stunts, and what had become popular during the 1990s and 2000s  – the experience of trauma. The popularity of trauma on television is one that has been explored by Susannah Radstone.42 Within TV magic, the process of Witness and its corollary of working through are linked to a greater and greater desire to push against extreme physical boundaries. Kirby Farrell argues that the conflation is between the traumatized subject and a media discourse: Efforts to objectify and express distress require the renewal or even the escalation of narrative conventions, because over-familiarity may dull the perception – and reception – of an injury, even though its pain persists. As a result, imagination keeps trying to devise more forceful and convincing vocabulary. Today’s horror is tomorrow’s cliché.43 41 42

43

Drowned Alive. Accessed at www.davidblaine.com/drowned-alive/. Susannah Radstone, ‘Trauma and Screen Studies: Opening the Debate’, Screen (2001), 42, no. 2, 188–93. Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 33.

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The avoidance of the commercialization of personal experience has contributed to the discourse of fakery about television and, more broadly, the media, which can be traced historically to seminal texts such as The Hidden Persuaders.44 Blaine’s attitude to demonstrating his magic on television reveals the suspicion that television will usually act as an anti-intellectual, anti-aesthetic force. He describes how ‘I . . . knew that I’d have to do my magic on television. The only problem was that growing up I had never watched TV. My mother never allowed a television in our house; she would rather have seen me reading a book or learning by interacting with real people’ [my italics].45 The notion that television is vitiating and can be characterized as the ‘goggle box’ is a familiar form of opprobrium, whose antecedents in the UK are very deep indeed.46 In the history of British broadcasting, the synthesis between commercial and public service broadcasting – with its suspicion of popular culture, as an encomium, it was hoped – would create a discourse of television avoiding the problems of ‘Americanization’. Yet, the problem of cultural status and television’s perceived trivialization of culture, due to its interest in fame and celebrity, lies at the heart of understanding Blaine’s success and, as we will see, the British magician known as Dynamo. Equally, these magicians have both resisted and sought an alternative against the ‘corniness’ of TV magic, which echoes Neil Postman’s critique of American TV culture as one that allows its audience to be amused to death because it excludes any serious public discourse.47 For this reason, for Blaine’s next ABC series, Magic Man, broadcast in 1999, executive producer Daniel Kellison was to say, ‘There’s a stigma attached to being a magician. But David is different. He’s so compelling.’48 Blaine’s own attitude to television is revealing and contrasts strongly with the one David Copperfield used in The Magic of ABC (1977), in which he compared television as his best friend among other superlatives. In his book Mysterious Stranger (1999), Blaine regards himself as an artist rather than a magician. Such a claim both supports and counters the narrative of magic as trivial and the status of popular culture as a form of ‘amusement art’. In his 44 45 46 47 48

Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (London: Penguin, 1960). Blaine, Mysterious Stranger, 92. See, for example, the 1953 Ealing Studios film Meet Mr Lucifer, produced by Michael Balcon. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (London: Methuen, 1987). Cited in Jennifer Graham, ‘Magician Charms’, TV Guide, 47, 15, 10–16 April 1999, 34–37.

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first show David Blaine: Street Magic, broadcast in 1997 by ABC, the US TV network, he was to perform feats of sleight-of-hand and clairvoyance on the streets of New York, Memphis, Nashville and New Orleans. Blaine describes his first attempt at using a camera to record a performance of his street magic: My first step was to shoot a demo tape. I persuaded a friend who had a video camera to go out on the street with me one afternoon and film me doing magic to people who weren’t ready for it. We hadn’t walked more than a few blocks from my apartment . . . when I  approached three people. They had their guard up when I did the first card effect, but by the second one they’d started screaming and jumping up and down. One of the guys was so astounded he actually ran into traffic and narrowly avoided getting hit by a car. Right then I knew we had a show.49

Real people in real places are used to represent a direct access to live happenings. Here, the element of control present in so much so-called ‘live’ television is missing. Yet these unscripted moments and improvised events were not as unmediated as initially suggested. Blaine makes the point that after returning to his apartment, he borrowed a friend’s VCR, plugged it into another friend’s VCR and performed a ‘crash’ edit, to end with fifteen minutes of ‘really strong footage’. The implication is that mistakes were eliminated and footage was selected that conformed to the normative codes of television, which, as Stuart Hall pointed out, are characterized by neatness, rapidity and nervousness to avoid low-key visuals, eliminating ‘bad television’.50 In Blaine’s Street Magic, many of the tropes of ‘street magic’ are used. Ordinary people become showcased as drama however mundane they might be; in fact, the more ordinary they appear, the better. To help create a sense of the opposite of celebrity glamour, fashion and excess, so often the world that is shown on popular television, Blaine describes, in typical vernacular, how ‘we were just a bunch of young . . . people, touring the country in a beat-up bus, living out of Motel 6’s. We didn’t have a fifty-person crew’.51 The front cover of the US listing magazine TVmag on 11 April 1999 was quick to christen 49 50 51

Blaine, Mysterious Stranger, 94. Stuart Hall, ‘Television and Culture’, Sight and Sound (1976), 15, no. 4, 246–52. Blaine, Mysterious Stranger, 100.

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Blaine as ‘The man who fell to earth’, suggesting what Landy and Saler have termed the ‘re-enchantment of the world’.52 They perceive modernity as both enchanted and disenchanted at the same time. Blaine appears to draws upon this imbrication to demonstrate not so much reality but the notion of a higher truth that is linked to a spiritual dimension. The representational codes for this are low production costs and the lack of a built set. Furthermore, as a counter to the consumer society, there appear truck drivers, old Chinese men, Jewish women on an excursion of Atlantic City and tattooed, pierced people in the old Hipppie domain of Haight-Ashbury. Social theorist Ulrich Beck has proposed that we are living in a ‘risk society’.53 A TV shaman cannot exist without a sense of risk. Rather, Blaine’s popularity raises issues such as whether society possesses more risk than in the past. For Beck, risk is felt because people have lost the traditional forms of social support: The explosion of anxieties about risk takes place in the imagination of society as a whole. The constitution of this imagination is subject to a variety of influences, which form an integral part of the prevailing social and cultural climate, and express a mood, a set of attitudes, which cannot be characterised in terms of rational or irrational any more than the individual expression of happiness or sorrow.54

Others like Ib Bondebjerg argue that the popularity of reality TV has coincided during a period of economic and social fragmentation and decentred identity.55 He argues that its popularity is because of the growing uncertainties of everyday life and the loss of a coherent identity based on nation, workplace and stable society due to the pressures of globalization. As older types of identity have been eroded by global political and economic forces, audiences have sought to create new, alternative identities, and television has contributed to a discourse, although mediated, about these changes in 52

53 54 55

Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (eds), The Re-Enchantment of the World:  Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Ulrich Beck, Risk Theory: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). Cited in Frank Furedi, The Explosion of Risk (London: Cassell, 1997), 17. Ib Bondebjerg, ‘The Mediation of Everyday Life: Genre, Discourse and Spectacle in Reality TV’ in A. Jerslev (ed.), Realism and ‘Reality’ in Film and Media (Copenhagen:  Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), 159–92.

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everyday life. Consequently, according to Bondebjerg, television using further discourses of privacy and intimacy has transformed the public nature of TV discourse. The transformation is signified by the shift to an informal, relaxed conversational mode in reality TV that is constructed around memory, personal beliefs or individual dilemmas. At the same time, reality TV seeks the spectacular and melodramatic aspects of everyday life. It is this ensemble that helps to explain Blaine’s specific appeal in the way that risk is staged and edited. The audience is compelled to believe that the extreme conditions of each stunt bring forth the true character of the participant. The representation of risk becomes drama; it includes tricks and miracles as the TV shaman wields popular power. The drama takes on the form of a ritual that enables engagement rather than participation. The engagement has to be total with the performer in order to experience the same feelings as Blaine as the audience waits tensely to see if their hero will emerge from the jaws of death. The insecurity of the age, its discontents and anxieties become collapsed in the figure of Blaine as metaphor as he submits to being frozen to death or buried alive. The fantasy of magic is not so much rejected because, unlike other types of secular magic, there is increased intimacy between the performer and the audience. Within a show by Penn and Teller, there is the possibility that ‘disenchanted reason coexists with an enchanted imagination; wonders have become interiorised and are enjoyed with a certain ironic distance’.56 No such possibility can exist with the Shaman. The stunts by Blaine, as well as by others such as Criss Angel and Dynamo, utilize an autobiographical mode; as originators, they are the authors of its representation as well as its subject. The stunt, including the use of trauma, is less about the magic and more about the personality behind it. Biographical selfexposure in light entertainment, studio-based programmes and daytime chat shows in which confessional talk is the crux has been exploited in many recent magic shows. The magician appears in a quasi-documentary that makes the presentation of an intimate life the subject of investigation. Such biographical

56

Michael Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review’, The American Historical Review (2006), 111, no. 3, 692–716.

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moments are recounted by the magician. Asked about his rationale for each of his tests of endurance, Blaine explained the mortification of his flesh on the talk show Oprah: One of the reasons I love doing these stunts is because as soon as you take away all the extravagance and superfluities that we live with every day of our lives – the things that we adhere to as being so important, like cell phones . . . the simplest things become the most amazing . . . I went for the Guinness record for holding my breath on Oprah in 2008. My heart beat normally starts at 40 and drops down drastically to 8 to 10 beats a minute. But because everything was awkward and not prepared and it was done live on Oprah, it was really tricky for me . . . My heart rate just escalated immediately and began at 120 and was up to 150. I started having ischemia to the heart, so it would jump from 150 to 20 to 140, skipping beats. I was going for the world record, which was 16 minutes and 32 seconds. At eight minutes, I  knew I wasn’t going to make it . . . I overrode that and figured I’ll just push, push, push until I black out . . . But for television it will be a big disaster . . . My heart was jumping beats, but I kept pushing . . . and I was certain that I was going to go into cardiac arrest. They had paramedics on standby to jump your heart. The pain was overwhelming, but I just kept going. I surrendered to the situation and rode it out with the energy of the audience and finally made it to 17:04 – the world record.57

Mindfreak: blue-collar soap opera and re-enchantment Dictionary definition of Mindfreak: 1. A modern-day mystifier who utilises skills beyond the category of magic. 2. The result of something incomprehensible. 3. Supernatural. 4. Criss Angel.

The opening of the episodes of the first series of Mindfreak includes the definition of a mindfreak as well as its identification with the star of the show, Criss Angel. In 2005, Angel became the creator and director of the hit US show. His illusions, which he likes to refer to as ‘demonstrations’, are similar to the repertoire performed by other prestidigitators such as levitating, being buried 57

Adam Kimmel, ‘David Blaine’, Interview Magazine, October 2010, 104–8 (108).

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alive, burnt alive and trapped in claustrophobic or suffocating spaces before escaping. Unlike Blaine’s TV specials such as Street Magic58 and Magic Man,59 Mindfreak was the first magic show to be broadcast in the United States on a weekly basis in forty years.60 More than any other performer, Angel has been compared to Blaine, and yet, though they appear similar in the somatic and affective effect of their performance with the same immense success, they possess several striking differences. Angel appeared first on the Arts and Entertainment Network (A&E). At the time of Mindfreak, A&E was rebranding itself for a third time and, in search of cost economies, moving to produce reality programmes, including Dog the Bounty Hunter (real-life bounty hunters, 2004–2007), Airline (the daily activity at Southwest Airlines, 2004–2005) as well as Criss Angel Mindfreak, which ran for six seasons (2005–2010). The success of the show continued to depend on Angel’s impressive live events, including a death-defying stunt in New York’s Times Square, in which he escaped from a box before crashing to the ground. By the end of the season, the show was attracting 2.7 million viewers and, critically, attracting significant cross-demographics; it was up 7 per cent among viewers aged eighteen to forty-nine and 18 per cent among those aged twenty-five to fifty-four.61 During season one, in the opening of Mindfreak Uncut,62 Angel suddenly points his finger at the camera and explains that ‘magic is not about tricks and illusions but about the connection with you and getting inside your mind’. Again, there is the notification that the magician – in fact, Angel prefers to be called an artist  – offers heightened intimacy and the promise of engagement. Nevertheless, Angel is far less of the TV shaman than Blaine. Despite his death-defying illusions, he is less a liminal figure on the threshold of this world and the next, although this does vary from one illusion to the next. Blaine has created an auratic persona that is, at times, non-televisual and at odds with the superabundance of information of the TV actuality-event seen on reality 58 59 60 61

62

Street Magic, originally broadcast 9 May 1997. Magic Man, originally broadcast 10 May 1998. Laura Fries, ‘Criss Angel Mindfreak’, Daily Variety, 12 July 2015. Diego Vasquez, ‘Magic Trick:  Criss Angel Stunt Pumps A&E Show’. Accessed at www.medialifemagazine.com/magic-trick-criss-angel-stunt-pumps-ae-show/. Originally broadcast 2 November 2005.

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TV. Thus, it usually creates a tension in his performances, which is never quite resolved. On the other hand, however extreme Angel’s illusions are, he is constructed as possessing a dominant self that embodies a shared culture of growing up in the United States, in order to facilitate identification between the magician and the viewer. The ordinary may become the extraordinary as Angel performs his illusions, but as each illusion unfolds, the cut to interviews with his friends and family makes the scenario less of a sacrament and more of a soap-like melodrama. Suspense, humour and emotional intensity are part of the mix; together, they present Angel in the melodramatic mode and help to describe the viewing experience. The use of melodrama/soap-opera coding places Angel within his intimate family circle and among close associates. Such proximity and its familiarity back to the audience secure his accessibility as, ultimately, an ordinary person – a regular blue-collar guy – who happens to be a performer of wild illusions rather than the other way round. Although the show focuses on cultural taboos such as mortality and body trauma, the issue is only ever explored in soap-opera fashion through domestic affairs, relationships, family and careers. Angel’s dominant persona is ordinariness within the extraordinary. The act of performance is secondary to the person with a biography. Daily Variety, reviewing the premiere of the first series, reported: But what makes the show fascinating are the down-home touches in which we see the kid from New York, who first honed his magic skills at the age of 6. Keenly aware of the camera at all times, Angel manages to offer some personality, especially where family is involved. Viewers follow the illusionist as he contemplates new and more dangerous stunts, while his crew, including his often- fretful brothers, offer insight as to what, other than ego, drives someone in his profession.63

When Angel performs his death-defying stunts, including a live burial, the camera inside the coffin in which he is entombed is close-up and personal, signifying verisimilitude. The dramatic conflict between Angel and the female members of his family (but never the male members) serves as reminder of the gendered blue-collar environment that Angel was raised within and aspects of 63

Fries, ‘Criss Angel Mindfreak’.

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his Greek heritage that celebrate the tight filial relations between mother and son. His mother and girlfriend are often left to pray for his safety; meanwhile Angel risks his life. The all-American family, despite its moments of delirium represented by its awkward son, is also referenced to the idea that the illusions are no more than actions taken by Angel to fulfil less a personal desire for danger but a striving to be economically productive to support the family. The idea of illusions as work is emphasized by the intense preparations undertaken for each of them. During the stunt to be buried alive, Angel discusses the hazards with others in his team, including his brothers. The determination that the problem of escaping from a live burial is solvable by using the correct skills suggests a form like that of (male-dominated) precision engineering. The commitment by the team to the successful completion of the illusion and the trust that Angel places within his team of loyal employees displays a sense of security that may appear out of place or absent within the ordinary work place in an era of economic dislocation. Yet, the social and economic fragmentation, explored by Bondebjerg,64 as a feature of contemporary everyday life is contrasted by the ‘can-do’ attitude that Angel popularizes for television: For Angel, magic is a job for him and it is something that he loves to do. ‘I work about 18 hours a day and I have been doing that for many, many years. To get to the top is one thing, but to remain at the top, is even harder and you need to work harder at it. I do what I do and I take each show one at a time, and do the best show that I am capable of. Hopefully, they will be talking about it and telling all of their friends about it and want to come back and see it again,’ he said.65

The work ethic is, therefore, the basis of Angel’s autobiographical account that idealizes the hard-working, self-made individual. The programme focuses on developing a work ethic that, in Mindfreak, encourages ‘real’ people to objectify their lives and care for the self with the aim of promoting the philosophy of self-motivation and belief. A central section of the narrative in Mindfreak Uncut is how Angel as a child practised magic until he was polished enough to become professional. He is shown reuniting with an old friend who ran the 64 65

Bondebjerg, ‘The Mediation of Everyday Life’, 159–92. Anon, ‘The Magic of Criss Angel’. Accessed at www.neomagazine.com/2015/02/the-magic-ofcriss-angel/.

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shop where he bought his first magic trick. The childish trick was the foundation for Angel’s success, and the programme proceeds to show us his successes over the years encouraging real people to emulate his belief in self. The behind-the-scenes footage assembles this form of the stylized self as an example of demonstrating how free enterprise will fulfil one’s life goals: Each day, Angel is motivated simply by his desire to remain the No. 1 magician in the world. ‘My show plays in 103 countries currently and I have been very fortunate to have the most-watched magic show in Internet and television history, with more views than anyone. I just love what I do, and I want to be the best at it. I try to work really hard and I surround myself with an incredible team of people. It’s the constant work ethic that allows me to continue to do what I do, at the level that I do,’ he said.66

The labour and energy involved in his illusions forms a key component to each show: For those who say that Criss does not create his effects, they would be so very, very wrong. Criss is involved in every single aspect of his creations, from beginning to end. He diagrams, builds and works on each new creation till it is perfected, then he does not stop. He sleeps less than anyone else. He works harder than anyone who works for him. There have been many times that Criss has had an idea, and as a friend I have told him I don’t think it is going to work. There is no way. Yet Criss has his own vision and pulls gold where others thought there was only lead. His drive is relentless to perfect the area where he has decided to hang his hat.67

In episode one, Buried Alive,68 a video is played of the failed attempt by an earlier performer to escape a live burial. The performer died in the attempt, underlining both the extreme danger faced by Angel and the requirement of unstinting professionalism from everyone involved, which his survival depends on. The risk of accident and worse is normalized as a male activity that counters many of the ‘free floating anxieties and fears’ within contemporary 66 67

68

Anon, ‘The Magic of Criss Angel’. Robert Leach, ‘It’s Getting so Frustrating and Ridiculous to Criss Angel That People Are Blatantly Taking His Stuff ’. Accessed at http://lasvegassun.com/vegasdeluxe/2015/sep/30/its-getting-sofrustrating-ridiculous-criss-angel-/. Originally broadcast 20 July 2005.

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western societies that are mentioned by Furedi.69 Instead, ordinary men congruent with an entrepreneurial zeal based on the previously discussed virtues of hard labour and enterprise will make the demonstration-illusion a success. The mythic shamanism of Blaine’s illusions is replaced by an almost homebased education of how to escape from an entombment. This becomes clearer when Angel is accompanied by his friend, the Master of the Macabre, Rob Zombie  – another enterprising small businessman who directs low-budget horror movies.70 The introduction of Zombie is intercut with Angel’s business manager and the stunt being discussed matter-of-factly by the men. A consultant on Mindfreak explains how Angel will be handcuffed during the stunt and what Angel will have to do to survive, including digging himself out of the ground in a side-to-side fashion rather than straight up because of the risk of the ground collapsing on top of him. On the other hand, the women, including JoAnn, Angel’s girlfriend, complain that she has not slept, has knots in her stomach and does not know how much more a person can take. She is joined by Angel’s other female supporters, including his mother, who discusses her reaction to the stunt direct to camera and tells the viewer that her son’s favourite words to her is that she will be OK. The rules are clear: if the stunts are extreme, at least the family is not dysfunctional. The fascination with the distorted and the freakish is thoroughly normalized. Mindfreak is also the opposite of the glossy, slick and superficial design grammar of television; professionalized TV packaging is absent. The show uses the production values usually regarded as ‘trash TV’. John Caldwell explains that ‘trash television privileges techniques deprecated by the higher televisual guises . . . the handmade look of trash television . . . invoke[s] the aggressive violence of trash physicality’.71 Mindfreak uses visual excesses to represent a street culture interested in heavy metal music and trash horror. The use of low culture aesthetics is another shift away from Blaine’s often more stylized 69

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Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear:  Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation (London: Continuum, 2002), 20. Zombie has a portfolio of skills and has been a singer, songwriter, screenwriter, film director, film producer and record producer. John T. Caldwell, Televisuality:  Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 194, 196.

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shows of the noughties and an attempt to appeal to a younger demographic. For example, as Angel lies in the coffin, there is a cut to a short sequence that uses the stylistics of performance art and music video to produce an imagistic stream of consciousness. Angel’s pursuit of an anti-aesthetic notion in TV magic is deployed in order to puncture through a cathartic beauty and obtain a greater self-realization. Yet, Angel remains non-narcissistic nor selfaggrandizing. The projection of Blaine as TV shaman has heroic connotations, which, at times, have invited ridicule when he was suspended from a box near the River Thames in London in 2003.72 In Mindfreak, the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary contains reminders of other reality TV shows such as American Idol (2002–2016): It’s always a journey. It was designed as a journey . . . music was only one part of the story. It is about creating heroes. It’s about creating a hero, and that’s what it’s about. Basically, it says, it’s very simple, it’s what happens to everyday people who don’t give up, yeah, that’s what heroes are, that’s what you’re building. You’re building people surviving and winning, defying the odds.73

Dynamo Dynamo, the pseudonym of Stephen Frayne, appeared on screens initially in March 2006 on the upmarket UK chat show Richard and Judy, broadcast by Channel 4. Next, Dynamo appeared on Watch, part of the portfolio of channels owned by parent company UKTV. This channel, led by its controller Matthew Littleford, has for a number of years focussed on ‘bigger and noisier’ shows for its entertainment channels rather than high-volume, low-cost programming. Watch, launched on 7 October 2008, was part of the wider company positioning of its other channels, and the launch of Watch saw UKTV’s budget of £75 million rise ahead of the budget set for channels such as BBC3.74

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In early September 2003, Blaine was sealed within a plexi-glass box and suspended near Tower Bridge in London with the aim of starving himself for forty-four days. It was roundly ridiculed by the press that reported the verbal abuse directed at Blaine by spectators that gathered beneath him. Alan Boyd on Idols, cited in Jean K. Chalaby, The Format Age:  Television’s Entertainment Revolution (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 153. Alex Farber, ‘UKTV Hikes Content Spend’, Broadcast, 9 September 2011, 3.

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Consequently, new transmissions were and continue today to be more ambitious in terms of size and scale. The success of the twenty-eight-year-old Dynamo would establish Watch as a mainstream commissioner of entertainment shows and significantly help to improve its appeal to the younger demographic tuning into the channel. Steven Frayne is from Bradford, England, and has a rich Yorkshire accent that signifies a local base of culture outside the large commercial mainstream. Historically, if popular culture has been defined by television, it became in the late twentieth century the product of a centralized entertainment industry that disseminated what it produces to a nationwide audience. However, television has also relied on signifiers of authenticity that can be referred back to a local base of culture. On his show Dynamo:  Magician Impossible, originally broadcast in 2011, Dynamo extensively discusses his childhood background during the extras on the blu-ray disc as well as during the actual shows. The audience discovers that his childhood was spent growing up on Bradford’s Delph Hill and Holme Wood Estates, two fairly grim urban estates. Dynamo is also a sufferer of the debilitating Crohn disease. The series does not dwell on trauma as a popular cultural script as in many other reality TV shows, but, again in the extras, Frayne’s small size due to his illness – a grown man, he only weighs eight stone – and his frequent stays in hospital are referred to and how he came close to death before a vital, lifesaving operation to his bowel. We have seen how the use of personal trauma has become an important part of the appeal of David Blaine, and it continues to play a role in Dynamo’s popularity. However, unlike Blaine, there is far less of a self-indulgent, almost Christ-like form of suffering. One thinks of Blaine’s attempt, while suspended in a glass box outside Tower Bridge, to starve and create an almost sacrificial image of suffering. After Blaine had become a figure of national ridicule, street magic became less popular. Frayne’s self-effacing humility, on the other hand, was underscored by a song on the flash movie of his website (www.dynamomagician.com),75 which was accompanied by the lyrics ‘I am strong, when I am quiet’. Overall, in his shows there is a modality of audience subjectivity 75

Accessed in 2013, but no longer on the web.

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that life is precarious and unpredictable, but there is the possibility of a magical transformation of feeling empowered. This back-story, far richer than the narrative of social mobility in media celebrity, enabled Magician Impossible to become by far the most popular show on Watch. Tipped as the most exciting British magician to emerge in decades on account of this show, Frayne, in his guise as Dynamo, became the story of an ordinary boy from Bradford living an extraordinary life. Nevertheless, in his programmes, Dynamo has a list of celebrity fans that reads like a Who’s Who of the media elite, including Lennox Lewis the boxer, Rio Ferdinand the footballer, Ian Brown the musician, Natalie Imbruglia the singer-songwriter, and Noel Fielding the comedian. All are young celebrities who often appear in the tabloid press, as well as on the panel show BBC2’s Never Mind the Buzzcocks, which Frayne has also appeared on as a guest.76 The use of celebrity stardom draws on Frayne’s own experience of ‘making it big’. For example, though relatively self-effacing, Dynamo is capable of witty remarks and good-natured small talk. With Lennox Lewis, he discusses the word ‘swag’ as the mixing of South London with a bit of the (wealthy and fashionable) West London. This, of course, is part of the ‘misdirection’ of the trick. If his eyes are turned in a certain direction, all eyes are turned in the same direction, and his dexterous hands are free to perform a trick that involves, for example, a card that mysteriously transfers from one location to another, usually the pocket of the person on whom the trick is played. The need for social interaction and gossip has led Peter Bazalgette, the head of the largest UK independent production company Endemol, to say that reality TV shows are about human interest, rather than ‘reality’. As we have already seen, such shows can be argued to exist in their own right, rather than be defined against a paradigmatic model of reality. Rather than the realism in the text, as Annette Hill explains in her discussion of the intermediate space created by reality TV, the effect on the audience is as important in deciphering their appeal and, as a corollary, the authenticity of the contributions.77 Hill has written about how Bazalgette is primarily interested in ‘an entertainment

76 77

Originally broadcast 24 October 2011. See pp. 70–71.

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idea that can be instantly accessed by audiences/ users across different types of media – TV, radio, telephone, and the internet’.78 The need to bring in new viewers and build younger audiences was also leading Watch to the exploitation of social media, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. Meanwhile, unlike television in the past, tricks on the internet need to stand up to many viewings. The audience is watching it up close, and there exists a debate whether magic is less or more disposable today than it has been. The secular rituals of Blaine foster the illusion of extraordinary power, but the possibility of repeated viewings of the same trick can distract from the imago of the slick, master illusionist. The difficulty for the magician such as Dynamo is having a secret revealed because of the internet, which with a click on Google can demonstrate how an illusion was performed. Nevertheless, Magician Impossible generated 42,431 social media items with Twitter, the most prominent social media type, accounting for 93 per cent of coverage. Influential Twitter users included the celebrities Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame and Stephen Fry, ensuring that posts peaked at 5,795 in July 2011.79 Websites such as Facebook and Google have helped to build a bigger brand and is why the format holds so much value for Watch. Dynamo’s style of performance – which can be shown to be direct and intimate, his disarming, underweight meekness – is calculated to address individuals, but also knit them into an audience as a group, which can be expostulated by social media. In this way, Dynamo is able to balance small-scale intimacy with a much wider appeal and fulfil the need of the channel to bring in new viewers and a younger audience. For Dynamo, the focus by UKTV on producing bigger and ‘supercharged’ shows has meant that there is a mode in Magician Impossible that relies on the creation of large-scale events as well as the use of a live mode to signify authenticity and intimacy. Street Magic as a brand has translated easily to overseas markets, and Magician Impossible incorporated a wide range of locations, including those from Bradford and London, but also abroad. Exotic locales have featured prominently, ranging from Miami Beach and Little Havana and

78 79

Annette Hill, Reality TV Audience and Popular Factual Television (London: Routledge, 2005), 45. Anon, ‘Dynamo: Magician Impossible’, Broadcast, 22 June 2012, 47.

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the removal of a girl’s tan line to the transformation of snow into diamonds in the Austrian Alps during a snowboarding festival. Part of Dynamo’s success was to perform to both a ‘street’ audience and a celebrity one, creating a rich mix. In this way, live events satisfy generic requirements; we have ‘ordinary’ people, but these people lead to the creation of a specific narrative line for the show. Frayne repeatedly talks about his desire to inject the ‘marvellous’ back into people’s lives and restore a child-like sense of wonder. His own narrative of what motivated him to become a magician, his love for his grandfather Ken, who nurtured his interest in magic, is a constant reminder of the desire by Frayne to transcend what Dyer refers to as the monotony of an exhaustive urban life.80 The loving relationship between Frayne and his grandfather can be understood as the father-and-child relationship between the magician and the audience. Such a relationship moves the audience further from the sceptical approach adopted by Penn and Teller, whose magic wishes to destabilize the rules of the performer and the spectator. Frayne announces in voice-over how he wishes to ‘take away the stress of everyday life and show them [the audience] something truly amazing’. Each episode of Magician Impossible is about Frayne taking the mystified spectators on a journey into his world, although, it should be recalled, a consultant from the shows starring David Blaine was hired to achieve the programme’s slick feel. This is a world characterized by signifiers of the intimate and the natural, including the home photography of a series of faded, private photographs of Frayne as a boy with his grandfather, along with footage of Frayne performing magic in his mother’s hairdressers as he puts on a show for her customers. Frayne also performs many of his tricks using the newest icon of social interaction – people talking to people – as well as a sign of augmented reality, the smart phone. His usual trick is to ask for a phone from a member of the public and rematerialize it into a bottle. However, another version of essentially the same trick is to lose the phone or damage it, only to return it to its owner untouched. Coverage appears to react to the events as smart phones vanish into thin air and reappear elsewhere, rather than the events being created for or through the images themselves. Equally important are the reaction shots 80

Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 24.

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of the impromptu expressions of astonishment and bewilderment from bypassers awed by his tricks. Dynamo brings a renewed sense of community but, crucially, also agency. After its initial success in 2011, Magician Impossible was recommissioned by Watch in 2012. The new series was to benefit from a larger budget, but the format would remain the same – a series of tricks climaxing in a large set-piece marvel, such as walking down the side of a tall building. Thus, the format of the show exemplifies how mediatization is embedded within the live experience. Elements in the show are being set up purely as entertainment due to their scale. One of the most memorable set-piece illusions appeared in series one, when Dynamo walked across the River Thames adjacent to the Houses of Parliament in London and the Victoria Embankment.81 Once again, the emphasis on witnessing and first-person narrative of the spectacle is tied up with assertions of authenticity. We see a crowd gathering on Westminster Bridge to watch Dynamo. A member of the crowd shouts, ‘a man’s walking on water’. The absence of a commentator or voice-over reminds the audience of the transparent view of real-time events, and the sense of immediacy is further directed by the idea of the unlikelihood of the use of digital compositing to fake the setting. Nevertheless, there is a displacement of the live. The viewer is forewarned that the event will be shown at the end of the show, not at the opening – coming up, as the show tells us. It has an equivocal temporal status. For example, the use of close-ups of the crowd, jostling to get a better view of Dynamo from the vantage point of the bridge, suggests the copresence of the performer and the audience. But equally, its use of intimacy, signified by the use of the close-up, suggests a mediatized event. Moreover, the opening sequence is cut together with shots taken from Russia Today and other forms of news media reporting the illusion, including examples of online foreign-language reportage. However, in this instance, televisual immediacy is maintained because there is no prolonged point of view or reflection or analysis. The editorial cutting appears to be happening as ‘up-to-the-minute’ coverage. It is the now of the present. In this way, multiple mediations, which might have drawn attention to the medium itself, help to provide greater immediacy. 81

Originally broadcast 7 July 2011.

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We can say that the viewer feels both powerful and disempowered by this. At once, they have the ability to witness an extraordinary event by watching a set of images with a strongly evidential character, but, at the same time, the unfolding images on the screen are of a situation that we, the audience, cannot intervene directly in. Dynamo acknowledges the large odds of having become successful in his life, a reference to the odds of surviving Crohn disease.82 The unscripted events of Dynamo’s own life, the pleasure of uncertainty and ultimately survival transcends the boundaries of the ‘live’ TV programme. This is more fully dealt with by John Durham Peters who explains that: The live event is open to unscripted happenings, chance . . . Accidents are a key party of media events . . . That so much of live coverage involves some sort of trauma suggests the draw of the unpredictable and of those occurrences that leave a mark in time . . . Presence is fragile and mortal . . . Why should liveness matter? . . . Because events only happen in the present. In a word, gambling . . . The past, in some sense, is safe. The present, in contrast, is catastrophic, subject to radical alterations. In a single second a swerve of the steering wheel or a pull of the trigger change history forever . . . Of course, the present is rarely so dramatic, but without a live connection its explosive possibility – its danger – is missing. Nothing quite excites like an event about to take place.83

The blurring of the boundaries between Dynamo’s private and public life is the secret of his charismatic success. His claim – that ‘magic is not about fooling people but is about creating a moment of wonder in which for a short while anything is possible’ – suggests that the act of witnessing is more intimate than the usual promise of liveness: it is the witnessing of the inner drama of the man. From a subjective POV through the bars of a gate to the River Thames Embankment, we watch Dynamo followed by a sudden zoom to signify shock, a gawking disbelief, that anyone would undertake such an obviously hazardous undertaking. The shot cuts to observers taking photos on their phones as more people run to see what is happening, creating a growing sense of excitement. 82

83

This may be Dynamo’s manipulation of the facts – Crohn disease is a chronic, life-long condition but not usually considered to be fatal. John Durham Peters, ‘Witnessing’, Media, Culture and Society (2001), 23, no. 6, 707–23.

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The spectacle and noise of the gathering crowd are as ordinary as the following shots are exceptional. They help to locate magic in the daily lives of the spectators, whose reactions are a mix of anxiety and exhilaration of watching a death-defying stunt performed by the flimsy, ethereal figure on the water. The narrative of risk-taking and the hint that death has been a constant companion within the protagonist’s mind, since battling his life-threatening illnesses, is dramatized by voice-over: ‘Sometimes, I wonder if my life has all been an illusion.’ Trauma as an account of survival is the narrative of the invulnerable hero. That this lends Dynamo a special kind of strength is endorsed by the idea of the crowd as not only enacting the role of complicit witness, but a conjoining of the everyday and mastery of the extraordinary. The finale of the illusion, and the overdetermination of danger as Dynamo walks on water, arrives when the police in a boat shout for him not to move and attempt a rescue. The unfolding event and its explosive possibilities are brought to a dramatic end.

Conclusion Aspects of reality TV have become discernible in a wide variety of genres, and none more so than in the magic show. The aesthetic changes brought about by single, lightweight cameras have altered the performance of the magician and the participants. However, there are precursors to the change in performance such as Penn and Teller and the formation of the challenge to historically constructed conventions of light entertainment. These conventions that relied on a three-camera set-up in the studio required a greater amount of precision of framing and camera angle to neatly record each trick in its entirety. The overall look was to make the rendering of the trick appear highly structured with little opportunity for the unexpected or unscripted. Penn and Teller were not the first to do so, but Unpleasant World’s demonstration of comedic chaos was able to break the fourth wall that had been built in the electronic studio. The primary task of Penn and Teller’s show can be argued to have been to deconstruct various televisual forms, notwithstanding the traditional magic show, but also how entertainment interacts with its audience. The control and authority given to the host ridicules the compliance given to not so much a

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conjuror on a magic show but television itself. The magician has been a repository of invisible, boundless powers as much as the institution of television, thereby raising the possibility of an audience that can be manipulated by a powerful medium. However, the presentation of secular magic in the 1990s and noughties relies on a more complex understanding of how television may have discounted its show business heritage and replaced it with a multi-modal set of programmes. David Blaine, Criss Angel and Dynamo have been quick to use a co-existence of forms that raises new difficulties in how such shows should be perceived. For instance, are they a form of entertainment or a method of education about self-actualization in some capacity? In order to keep the presentation of entertainment fresh, the ability of their various acts has been to balance the demands of entertainment with the claims of realism. The confession, which is so important in the magician’s new repertory of affects, is assertive, empowering, and its modalities from acts by Dynamo to Criss Angel are structured into new TV formats. At the same time, such programmes are interpreted to have an educational mission – the elimination of anxiety by offering an affirmation of the ability of the individual to overcome all odds. Many of the specials of David Blaine and Criss Angel are a televisual packaged version of therapeutic narratives.

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Magic as a Game

The magician, the augur, the sacrificer begins his work by circumscribing the sacred space.1

Hypnotism and television Since it began in 1982, the UK’s Channel 4 has sought new and innovative content that directly counters the accusation of television’s debasement of the process of knowledge. In the United States, the ‘vast wastelands’ identified by the Head of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow, was an attack on the apparent overwhelming desire for entertainment, which eliminated other values of information and education. As we have seen, Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was a polemic work that acted as an appraisal of the ill-effects to society of this misuse of a powerful medium like television. The British weekly, New Society, was to say about the book that, ‘Postman illuminates something ominous:  a society being rendered unfit to remember or to think, taking its ignorance as knowledge.’2 However, unlike in the United States, John Ellis argues that, since the 1960s, within the tradition created in a highly regulated system of public broadcasting in the UK, the notion of quality television emerged, which stressed the social values in programmes rather than their technical proficiency: ‘This definition of quality stressed both citizenship and creativity. It saw quality as providing a varied

1

2

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens:  A  Study of the Play Element in Our Culture (London:  Temple Smith, 1970), 39. Cited in John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies, 110.

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service which enhanced the life of its citizens and enabled them to participate more fully in their society.’3 In some ways, Channel 4 was able to inherit public service responsibilities first created within the BBC, while it challenged notions of television as an institution. There was the recognition in the desire by Channel 4 for a ‘licence to be different’ that broadcasting and television are not necessarily the same thing. As we have seen, television is a device whose sense of ubiquity that can range over places in the world simultaneously with the viewer at home has been appropriated by various institutions and is historically contingent. Broadcasting, therefore, is about how the medium is being used. Ellis refers to some of this difference as the further shift that came during the 1980s from offer-led to demand-led television and from a less passive consumption of a diet of packaged programmes that have been decided somewhere else. Therefore, the older form of magic contingent on tricks of enchantment that relied less on interpretation was adapted, reshaped and stretched as new definitions of the medium emerged, which sought to explore newer understandings of subjectivity and different types of experience on television. One of the types of magic that has become increasingly popular as these new definitions have opened up is the act of mentalism and its use of suggestion and autosuggestion. Stage hypnotism has long been regarded as fakery based on the assumption that all the subjects are confederates of the magician and are in on the performance or part of the act. On the other hand, the history of hypnotism on television has raised concerns about the danger to the viewer who is vulnerable to being mesmerized. Such fears predate the invention of television and first appeared in the form of the evil character of Svengali in the novel Trilby, when he hypnotizes the beautiful but tone-deaf young woman who becomes transformed into a talented singer. The book, written by George du Maurier in 1894, popularized the idea that a subject’s mental state could be controlled by a more powerful will. The book also used the theme of an older man using hypnosis to dominate a usually guileless younger woman. Later, most successfully, the theme of hypnotism was used at the cinema in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) starring Frank Sinatra. This time, rather 3

John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 149.

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than a guileless young woman, the victim was a US soldier, who had been subjected to ‘brainwashing’ techniques employed by both the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War (1949–1953). The message was clear: it was now possible for anyone to be hypnotized using the correct methods. The Hypnotism Act 1952 in the UK forbids the broadcasting of hypnotic procedures because of the risk it poses to audiences watching at home. In the United States, hypnotism is not permitted on live television because of the campaign against it by two psychiatrists  – Dr Harold Rosen, chairman of the committee on hypnosis of the American Medical Association Council on Mental Health, and Dr Herbert Speigel. According to present Office of Communication (Ofcom) rules in the UK, elements of the hypnotist’s routine may be broadcast to set the scene, but it is permitted to neither broadcast any routine in its entirety nor elements that cause a member of the audience to believe they are being influenced in any way.4 Such fears about mind control exercised by television is an echo of the suspicion directed at the medium as a potent psychological manipulator that was capable of influencing the unwitting ‘mass’ audience. Yet, the multiple and complex meanings around hypnotism and other types of mind control reveal how experiences of such acts have been understood on television. In the United States, one of the first mentalists on television was George Kresge, who is best known by his stage-name The Amazing Kreskin. Since the 1960s, Kreskin has been a student of hypnosis and has been trying to educate the public about forms of human psychology associated with it. Kreskin first appeared on talk shows in the 1960s such as The Mike Douglas Show (1961– 1982) and later demonstrated that he was the master of suggestion in his own show, The Amazing World of Kreskin, which ran from 1970 to 1975. He would perform a range of mentalist acts, including mind-reading and hypnotism. In one demonstration, he apparently reads someone’s mind while the volunteer has her hand on his shoulder and he is able to offer to her the names of the people that she chose earlier without telling him first. Meanwhile, while Kreskin is busy reading his guest’s mind, the names he correctly guesses

4

Rule 2.9. Accessed at www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/27633/broadcastingcode2013. pdf.

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mysteriously appear on a blank slate in full view of the TV camera. Kreskin’s aim was to educate the TV audience about hypnosis as a method of understanding the power of suggestion. Such efforts can be compared to similar attempts by psychologists, including US academic Professor Nicholas Spanos, who wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer.5 Yet the act of hypnosis on television, as well as being an exercise for revealing the complexities of human psychology, is another example of the multiple meanings created around magic as it seeks to make entertainment out of the other worldly. Once again, mediated magic produces a cultural experience of viewing to replace the formats and modes of address of ‘ordinary’ television while continuing to be embedded in the history of entertainment.

Derren Brown: man of mystery Peter Reveen, a highly successful stage hypnotist, has argued that the ability to convince a subject that they may be cataleptic or display other trance-like symptoms – for example, muscular rigidity – should be regarded as a form of ‘superconsciousness’.6 Although beyond the purpose of this book, such psychological possibilities indicate how programmes by the British mentalist Derren Brown – in Trick or Treat (2007–2008) or Pushed to the Edge (2016) – continue to persuade the viewer that they are presenting authentic events. Moreover, they touch on how television as a medium with its ability to cause ways of thinking about identity and pleasure in everyday life has created the possibility of a more interactive audience. Reveen, writing in 1987, speaks about how the study of hypnotism has hitherto ignored the attention given to ‘pleasing the operator’. The desire to please others and the reconstruction of subjectivity between programme-maker and audience lies at the heart of some of Brown’s most notorious demonstrations of his mentalist skills for television. It is within this range of multiple meanings about the live and the reimaginings of the irrational that Derren Brown has established his popularity on 5

6

Nicholas Spanos, ‘Past-Life Hypnotic Regression: A Critical View’, Skeptical Inquirer (1988), 12, no. 2, 174–80. Paul Reveen, The Superconscious World (Montreal: Eden Press, 1987).

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Channel 4. Using a mixture of psychology, suggestion, hypnotism and stage craft, Brown has made mentalism as popular a form of magic on television since the acts of Kreskin and Chan Canasta.7 According to Andrew Newman, the commissioner of Brown’s shows and chief executive of Objective Productions, ‘Derren has pushed the boundaries of what is entertainment and what is a thought-provoking event. There aren’t many people who can pull off hypnotizing someone to shoot Stephen Fry in a public forum.’8 In 2012, Channel 4’s Head of Entertainment, Justin Gorman, summed up Brown’s appeal: ‘Derren brings not just brilliant skills but an incredible personality and, on top of that, he has intelligence.’9 Brown’s mind tricks and illusions have appeared in his live stage shows – including Svengali – as well as his magic on television, whose projects have sought to demonstrate how morality, the mechanisms of conformity and acceptance of social norms are affected by an innate social complicity within people. In Derren Brown:  The Experiments (2011), he was able to hypnotize a member of the public into ‘assassinating’ Stephen Fry on stage. The premise is clearly linked to films like The Manchurian Candidate, which is about a hypnotized subject who becomes an unwitting assassin who will shoot the US presidential candidate. The show is concerned with popular culture claims that ‘sleeper agents’ are possible, and Brown offers the example of the assassination of Robert Kennedy by his killer, Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan later claimed that he had no memory of why he had chosen to kill Kennedy, suggesting that he had been ‘programmed’. In The Assassin,10 Brown discusses to camera how he will prepare a hypnotic state from scratch by first using a test devised with the help of an academic expert in hypnotism, Professor Zoltan Dienes.11 The inclusion of Dienes signifies the programme’s seriousness but also its sensationalist appeal because the test is to see if subjects will throw acid into the face of a volunteer to discover if the subject is in a trance or ‘playing along’. The aim may be to educate as well as entertain, and Brown’s programmes such as The Experiments have sought an appeal that works on the level of spectacle 7 8 9 10 11

See Chapter 2. Balihar Khalsa, ‘The Magic Ingredient’, Broadcast, 10 August 2012, 18–19. Khalsa, ‘The Magic Ingredient’. Originally broadcast 21 October 2011. Dienes is based at the University of Sussex, England.

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and pedagogy. The possible assassination of Stephen Fry, a British celebrity, was used to reveal the complex components of human behaviour, but also how television itself creates a model of representation that makes it clear that the audience is the show. In the acts by Brown, the programmes are not an end in themselves. Although they include sensationalist material, they are inspired by events that occur within the community that the programme wishes to serve or appears to care about. This can be seen when Brown demonstrates how scams and other deliberate acts of deception are made to work and how to avoid them. The point is less about the programme and its ability to provide a clever or better sense of entertainment, but how it helps to inform its audience. Although Brown’s programmes have the gloss and spectacle of professional production on television, there is also the emphasis within each show of being personal and employing the familiar worlds of home and work. This can be seen in the series Trick or Treat, where weekly episodes focused on particular individuals. Brown may have the mantle of the man of mystery, but Trick or Treat demonstrated how far the show’s production was a wish to serve its purpose of empowering its viewers while conforming to strict Ofcom rules on not containing ‘life-changing advice directed at individuals’. On television, the perception that it performs such incidents of mind control can suggest a remote-controlled viewer – the opposite of the empowered, selfaware individual actively promoted within the discourse of self-actualization on reality TV shows. This fear of being remotely controlled testifies to the ubiquity of television to both reveal but also ‘capture’ the world that it brings into the living room – the medium simultaneously acting as an agent of social authority, which controls the anonymous mass audience as it provides the viewer with information about the external world. The risk is that the listener’s participation is limited to passive viewing or otherwise positioned as the receiver of communication. However, the mode of realism in Brown’s programmes invites viewers to engage with the possibility of encyclopaedic knowledge that allows him to detect the hidden clues that can solve complex forms of behaviour. Brown’s mentalism relies on this greater knowledge to

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distract from the codes that imply the manipulation of plot and character in favour of a greater ‘reality effect’.

Television surveillance Brown first began broadcasting for Channel 4 when he made the series Mind Control (2000). In many ways, he was chosen to be Britain’s answer to David Blaine as the performer of extraordinary feats, and his televised acts of mentalism are mainly for the sixteen- to thirty-four-year-old audience. In Mind Control, Brown established his approach to mentalism, which he would continue to use for future programmes. The role he would adopt may be of the directing scientist controlling the measuring and testing of the body of the volunteers. Since he has first appeared, the aim of his shows has been to make the audience aware of the constituent parts of the human sensorium and the wide array of its possible reactions. The programmes encourage an awareness of how easily the human sensorium can be controlled, which adds to the intellectual understanding of ourselves and others. Television is used to celebrate science as an investigatory and revelatory tool. In shows such as Mind Control and Trick or Treat, science is on display as the means to authenticity. Mind Control, The Experiments and Trick or Treat engage the mind, although there is a tension in each show between claims about the universality of human nature explained by science and the singularity of the individual. Many of Derren Brown’s shows utilize the rise of a slick visual style on television that also implies an increased tendency for excessive visibility in the form of a greater use of close-ups and footage of an unsuspecting subject. The possibility of surveillance has become more probable with the advent of compact and lightweight types of camera equipment, although there are historical precedents such as Candid Camera. Surveillance cameras capture the activities of everyday life, and this rise of the panoptic appears in many TV programmes, including those that handle reportage of clandestine or otherwise criminal activity such as undercover police work. For Deborah Jermyn, the decision to incorporate closed circuit television (CCTV) into TV programmes

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is because of ‘our perennial and enduring cultural fascination with making criminals “visible” and with seeing authentic visual records in crime stories; with actuality evidence’.12 The use of such footage is another reminder of television’s ability to be anywhere, anytime. In addition, the markers of authenticity of video and CCTV have been pointed to by Jon Dovey. For him, low-grade video images are an indexical reproduction of the real world because they offer a transparent correspondence between what is in front of the camera and its recording. He argues that ‘the camcorder text has become the form that most relentlessly insists upon a localized, subjective and embodied account of experience. Finally, the video text has become the form that represents better than any other the shifting perimeters of the public and the private’.13 The act of mentalism on television continues to claim that it possesses a greater realism than much of the drama appearing on television, which has been accompanied by new digital technologies. Such technologies have created many more manipulated images that are examples of highly textured forms of style. However, Brown has combined a slick fast-cutting style, while combining it with what appears to be CCTV and clandestine footage in shows such as Trick or Treat. Monitoring, furthermore, incorporates the reflexive project of the self on television, which has become the form of ‘self-branding’. Television shows such as American Idol have invented a narrative of branded personae. At the same time, such branded personae are a feature of the aesthetic interest of television. For Stanley Cavell, television’s way of revealing its medium continues to be characterized by its ‘current of simultaneous event reception’.14 Simultaneity is what Cavell calls the ‘signs of life’, and it is television’s monitoring of these signs that becomes central to its aesthetic. Successful televisual formats ‘are to be understood as revelations (acknowledgements) of the conditions of monitoring’.15 For Brown, the signs of life that need to be monitored are the discovery of psychological complexities, which are extracted from his audience. Yet, the advantages of surveillance in many of his shows are not necessarily for the 12

13 14

15

Deborah Jermyn, ‘“This Is about Real People!” Video Technologies, Actuality and Affect in the Television Crime Appeal’, in Sue Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (eds), Understanding Reality Television (London: Routledge, 2004), 83. Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 55. Stanley Cavell, ‘The Fact of Television’, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 241–53, original emphasis. Cavell, ‘The Fact of Television’.

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watchers but for the watched. The acts of mentalism do not facilitate the benefits of self-disclosure – the confession of reality TV shows like Big Brother – but offer the benefit of surveillance.

Brown’s ludology It was the Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga who originally explored the significance of the element of play as a cultural practice. Huizinga defines play as a temporary and voluntary activity. Participants willingly submit to the rules of the game, and Huizinga conceives of play as having only a temporary status: Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration . . . It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning . . . It is a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.16

Within this temporary status, the rhetoric of the self is idealized, and it exists for the players to have desirable experiences such as fun and relaxation. At the same time, the adaptive function of play allows for a safe zone in which the boundaries between fantasy and reality are explored and fully played out. Huizinga goes on to say that: Any game can at any time wholly run away with the players. The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath.17

In this way, all play means something, as well as the loss of a distinction between it and the real world. In fact, the deployment of play is used to create rhetoric of the self on television. Before looking at Brown’s most sensational TV experiments Trick and Treat and Pushed to the Edge,18 it is worth reviewing television’s status as a medium capable of operating a powerful presence that is stronger than the volition of 16

17 18

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens:  A  Study of the Play Element in Our Culture (London:  Temple Smith, 1970), 26 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 27. Originally broadcast 12 January 2016.

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the audience to look away. The fear of television as a device that can mesmerize its audience has deep roots. The quality of make-believe on television and the idea of televisionland separates the medium from the real but, at the same time, endorses its preoccupation with the everyday and its indispensability in the pleasure it offers as it collapses the real with the televisual. Television has benefitted from this duality and the possibility of making mediated magic ‘real’. The prospect of witnessing and possessing the capability of experiencing emotions as if actually present in the same arena helps to form the definition of presence on television. Crucially, the role of improvisation in the form of either a game or play is re-emphasized due to the contingency of time-space on television, when everything or anything can possibly happen. The potential for comedy from the improvisation arising from ludology has been exploited in earlier shows that relied on surveillance and the use of a hidden camera. The production of knowledge about ordinary people and the scenarios of social psychology have permitted a tension between pedagogical presentation and sensational entertainment. Such tensions between the popular and the scientific have created dilemmas about the exact intention and role of programmes that can be accused to be a pseudo-educational form of entertainment  – and suffer from the most egregious retort that they are no longer real. To be able to justify such shows, older practitioners had to develop a sociological realism. In the past, programmes such as Candid Microphone (1948–1949) and Candid Camera (1949–1967) used humour to disturb the strictures of everyday life when observing the behaviour of their unsuspecting subjects. Candid Camera was able to make use of a non-interventionist realism when, in 1976, Allen Funt, the creator of the show, told social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, ‘I wish I could use Candid Camera’s humanness and non-threatening approach to help parents, teachers, or salespeople re-examine what they are doing to learn from their mistakes.’19 The belief was that Candid Camera may entertain and provide a high degree of humour while offering an educational presentation that was founded on an instrumental model of culture. Gone would be the idea that television was an authoritarian monster

19

Cited in Philip Zimbardo, ‘Laugh Where We Must, Be Candid Where We Can’, Psychology Today (1985), 19, 42–7.

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and the disappearance of anxieties about the power of television to dominate its viewer. Rather, Candid Camera’s improvisation would incorporate its role of onscreen prankster as well as educator. Brown has sought to accomplish this in shows Trick or Treat and Pushed to the Edge. In Trick or Treat as well as some of Brown’s other shows, the notion of an elaborate prank continues to be present. The loss of control by a volunteer is regarded as fun  – a topsy-turvy disruption of the everyday. Brown’s performances may go beyond the concept of magic, but they are also characteristic of a deliberate ambiguity that makes him popular with audiences. Such ambiguity has been used to describe Brown as a ‘Jedi Master’ in Empire magazine in May 2002. At the same time, he is genial and able to suggest without revealing how his sage-like powers are essentially a type of fakery: The issue of honesty ties in with an inherent problem with any form of magical entertainment. Unless the performer is an out-and-out fraud, claiming to be absolutely for real, there exists in the bulk of any audience an acceptance that some form of jiggery-pokery must be at work. Now this experience of being fooled by a magician should be made pleasurable and captivating by the performer, otherwise he has failed as an entertainer. However, he is entering into an odd relationship with his audience: he is saying in effect, ‘I am going to act as if this were all very real; but you know, and I know that you know that I know, that it’s really a game’ . . . we . . . will play along with that game as long as we are rewarded by an entertaining show.20

In other words, the relationship between Brown and his audience is a system of play that demystifies authority on television – his insistence that what he performs on television is fake – as it takes full advantage of other currents on television of the productivity of seeing that probes and examines every human facet.

Trick or treat In the first series of Trick or Treat,21 the audience is informed that each volunteer has been carefully selected based on how they answered a series of 20 21

Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind (London: Transworld Publishers, 2006), 19. Originally broadcast 13 April–18 May 2007.

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questions. They were chosen if they were found to be suitable. The suggestion of a psychological process that weeds out unsuitable candidates is one that Brown uses in other shows, which reflects the asymmetrical power relations of the workplace and the role he purposely adopts as employer, which he enacts more visibly in other shows.22 Once selected, the candidate is faced with tasks that are completed in order to proceed to the next stage of the illusion. The volunteer is subordinate to Brown, who controls the panopticon that records their words and actions if required. The logic of the type of mentalism that Trick or Treat deploys is of a surveillance-based sphere that, no longer, maintains clear distinctions between the private and the public. Rather, the volunteer accepts perpetual surveillance, which is used to signify authentic individuality. However, crucially, this understanding of surveillance is defined as a different type of subjectivity – one that is no longer fearful of the idea of being closely monitored. Nevertheless, in spite of the surveillance, the result can be understood as a loss of control by the programme-makers because if the programme exists as a category of social experiment, its outcomes remain uncertain. To this end, the purpose of Brown’s programmes is to demonstrate how far our decisions to act cannot be indicative of a stable form of reality or else possessed of predicted and measurable outcomes. According to Jacques Derrida, the notion of a society that works by controlling its actions using the certainty that comes from knowledge is fraught with difficulties: When I make a machine work, there is no decision; the machine works, the relation is one of cause and effect. If I know what is to be done . . . then there is no moment of decision, simply the application of a body of knowledge, of, at the very least, a rule or norm. For there to be a decision, the decision must be heterogeneous to knowledge as such . . . Even if one knows everything, the decision, if there is one, must advance toward a future that is not known, that cannot be anticipated. If one anticipates the future by predetermining the instant of decision, then one closes it off, just as one closes it off if there is no anticipation, no knowledge ‘prior’ to the decision. At a given moment,

22

For example, in The Heist (2006), Brown creates a motivational seminar that tests the potential of each candidate.

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there must be an excess of heterogeneity, regarding what one knows for a decision to take place, to constitute an event.23

In Trick or Treat, such difficulties about the knowledge taken-for-grant and its intended outcome are used to explore the boundary between the uncertainties of fantasy and reality. In episode six of Trick or Treat, a young woman called Jules, a psychologist, is selected. The premise of the series involves a mysterious entrance by Brown who next invites his volunteer-guest to choose one of two cards. One will be a treat; the other a trick, in which something unpleasant will happen. The volunteer is not aware which of the two cards they have chosen. The premise is, therefore, more than the action of a choice between two cards; rather, it is the start of a game. This ludological turn structures the experience of each episode of Trick and Treat within a particular dynamic model of television. Within such a model, the world can be chaotic and random, but the setting of rules allows for a new order to emerge and observable behaviours to take place within a simulated but perfectly logical game space. However, the audience cannot attain a clear understanding of what is happening, and the outcome is uncertain until the game has been initiated and running. Brown keeps Jules under surveillance using a hidden camera in the dashboard of her car. The covert camera automatically records her whenever she is in the car. He notices that when driving she has the habit of dangerously taking her hands off the steering wheel for long moments at a time. Brown now plans to engineer for Jules an out-of-body experience in order to be able to witness her own death in a car crash. He explains to the audience that he will have to create her double to convince Jules that she is dead, and to manufacture her double, he will need an exact copy of her face. Within this unfolding carnivalesque space, the fear of death will be played out as a diabolical prank. Jules’ sense of being corporeally linked to the physical world will be undermined and used to evoke other irrational possibilities of life after death. Such disembodiment, indicative of television’s viewing at a

23

Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2002), 231–2, original emphasis.

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distance, also hints at the possible uncertainties of a fundamental experiential change made possible in our own technological age of computers and the terrain of cyberpsace. Using more subterfuge, Jules apparently wins a free prize for spa treatment and heads to the beauty parlour, which is rigged with hidden cameras. Here, she lies on a trolley while a fake beautician applies a ‘cooling mask’ to her face that covers her eyes. In fact, a swap is taking place between the fake beautician and a Hollywood special effects make-up artist who will seek to take a ‘life mask’ of Jules, using plaster. While the beautician talks to Jules, the plaster is applied and the life mask is created. The duplicate of her face is produced, which, the special effects artist on the show explains, will be like for Jules looking into a mirror. At the same time, the disembodiment of the mask prepares the audience for the eventual transcendence of her physical body into the supernatural realm of an out-of-body experience. The simulation of the double, which is followed by a fake car crash, allows the audience to observe but also to become experientially immersed in the logic of its unfolding. The simulation allows for the viewership to see ‘what really happened’, but, importantly, it is not predictive. Uncertainty continues to exist because of the dynamic nature of the experiment, which, although controlled by the procedural rules devised by Brown, cannot be anticipated until the experiment is running – ‘an excess of heterogeneity’. A tension exists, therefore, in the programme between the preparation of the series of events that have led Jules this far and the random nature of a simulation, which like a scientific experiment may indeed have unpredictable consequences outside its original parameters. After a phone call to Jules that requires her for a photo shoot, we see her driving through a remote forest area. Meanwhile, an actress is prepared as she is fitted with the life mask taken from Jules. Other actors have been cast in the drama of her own death. The voice-over from Brown ends by letting us know that there is a psychologist standing by, presumably because of the unpredictable consequences. This statement by Brown suggests again an experiment that permits a range of different behaviours. The tension and uncertainty between the rules of the games and its possible random outcome is also the tension

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between two distinctive televisual methods – narratology and ludology. The story that has been constructed about the car crash with actors and learnt dialogue will be driven by a desire for greater realism when the simulation will be decided by Jules’ own actions. According to more voice-over by Brown, the narrative of the accident will take place in a cordoned-off section of the Berkshire countryside, and the cameras continue to remain out of sight. Jules receives a call from Brown while in the car and stops to take the call. A piece of white noise is heard from the phone, which puts Jules into a hypnotic state. She is transported from her own car to the site where the apparent crash has been prepared. Still under a hypnotic state, she is made to stand nearby and instructed by Brown that she cannot move from the spot she is standing on. The remarkable simulation now permits her to observe her own apparently lifeless body lying in one of the cars. Full transcendence from the physical body has been achieved using an intricate deception, but it conveys the reality of experiencing an extreme paranormal event. The rhetoric of experience has been constructed by the equation of surveillance with the ultimate anxiety of dying – a dramatic experiment to penetrate ideas about mortality and the survival of the self after our demise. Rather than Theodor Adorno’s claim that in the bourgeois era ‘the experiment became a surrogate for authentic experience’,24 the reverse becomes true, and authentic experience is the surrogate for the experiment. The image of a distraught Jules, due to the shock of witnessing her own death, creates catharsis as we await the final outcome, unsure how it will end – will she lose her mind as she struggles to find a logical explanation for what has happened? What do any of us do when rational thought is no longer sufficient as an answer? Unlike the profusion of reality police pursuit programmes on television, the image of the car crash presented to Jules does not protect the viewer from the messiness of situations such as an unexpected death, which can be dealt with rationally. In short, what Brown is offering is no longer a contrived spectacle for the purposes of entertainment but something that depends on interpreting Jules’ experience by the audience.

24

Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 177.

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In another episode of Trick or Treat,25 a twenty-one-year-old student, Eshanee, unlike the unfortunate Jules, is given a treat. Eshanne is a highly nervous individual who lacks confidence but is an appropriate subject to test the possible states of mind associated with hypnotism, including the unconscious state first described in Trilby. Brown uses the opportunity to make her forget her vulnerabilities so that he ‘can start to rebuild her confidence and create a real positive state in which she believes anything is possible’. She is asked to play the piano and replies that her knowledge of playing is basic. After struggling to play a few notes, Brown informs Eshanee that she will not play the piano again but after a week will play at a professional recital. To achieve this he will use six of seven types of unconscious learning. However, such a possibility has already long been disavowed by the Amazing Kreskin in his shows of the 1970s, who argues that the manifestation of hypnosis that depends on notions of an unconscious state has been discredited. According to Kreskin, ‘Everything is within the person.’26 The aim of the show is, therefore, not to validate any supernumerary theories of hypnosis but to use Eshanee as a participant in the process of constructing and managing a piece of performative reality. The partnership between Brown and Eshanee provides a model of the relationship between counsellor and subject to build her life back up to a healthy and stable state. In other words, using Brown, television acts as a resource that teaches the rules by which a healthy mind can be restored. When undergoing hypnosis from Brown, he whispers to her the music – a sort of New Age melody – is in her head. Except this statement can be understood less about listening to an external piece of music but the ‘music’ that exists inside her. Brown’s subliminal techniques on her unconscious mind to remember the music she must play is part of his showmanship to convince her that he is preparing her to become a concert pianist. In this way, television continues to enrich existing cultures of self-help, and Brown’s persona is one not of the dominant TV shaman visible in David Blaine but the role of a partner aiding his subject to explore all experiential possibilities. The benign nature of Brown’s hypnotism allows for an active cultural practice

25 26

Originally broadcast 11 May 2007. Kreskin, The Amazing World of Kreskin (New York: Random House, 1973), 161.

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rather than a passive mode of reception. Nevertheless, the myth of psychological power is, at other times, maintained by Brown, within a visual and aural programme style that incorporates slow, dream-like imagery and soothing sounds. The mantle of the man of mystery is reinforced because each episode of Trick or Treat includes several cut-aways to Brown performing his repertoire of mentalist tricks to other guests before we rejoin Eshanee or Jules and catch up on their progress. For example, Brown performs tricks that enable him to read ideomotor actions − small unconscious muscle movements − of his other guests. However, the narrative of transformation of Jules or Eshanee is the show’s core appeal and provides ‘critical viewing’. The transformation for Eshanee is the journey from being a nervous individual to someone who rediscovers she has always been an accomplished pianist but had previously lost confidence in her skills.

Pushed to the edge The idea of a deceptive game, as well as a realist drama, is central to understanding the appeal of Pushed to the Edge, broadcast in 2016. For Allen Funt in the 1950s and 1960s, as Brown would demonstrate later, the ‘average man in crisis’ was his main concern. Pushed to the Edge involves, as before, a team of actors and collaborators who are expected to manipulate the actions of volunteer members of the public. The four participants in Pushed to the Edge are subjects in an experiment that examines the issue of social compliance. Earlier, Funt would say about compliance that ‘The worst thing, and I see it over and over, is how easily people can be led by any kind of authority figure . . . We need to develop ways to teach our children to resist unjust or ridiculous authority.’27 Yet, the ease that Funt had noticed involving a figure of authority leading people to commit acts they would normally never countenance is misleading. Unlike some of Brown’s earlier shows, in Pushed to the Edge, the elaborate plotting involved, and the sheer amount of careful planning, as well as the use of actors to persuade the volunteers to push a man off the top of a tall building

27

Cited in Zimbardo, ‘Laugh Where We Must’, 47.

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to his death, indicates that this is far less of a social experiment and, in fact, more television drama. Once again, as is common in Brown’s programmes, the deception is structured as a macabre practical joke. Yet, the spectacle of the volunteers as participants in the scripted drama raises suspicions about the authenticity of their actions. This is made clearer by the fact that Brown had taken the precaution of vetting 200 people to find the four he thought most compliant, or the equivalent of 1 per cent of the population.28 The extent of the simulation and its segue into theatricality is revealed at the beginning of the show when Brown announces that, in order to complete the illusion, he requires people with specific skills, including special effects artists, a stunt co-ordinator as well as professional actors. The illusion will also take place in an impressive venue using a cover story of a gala party to launch a new charity called Push. Several UK celebrities – Robbie Williams, Martin Freeman, Stephen Fry – appear in fake promotional videos endorsing the charity and asking for the guests to be generous at the party fund raising. Brown reels off statistics for the creation of the large-scale fake; there are more than fifty hidden cameras, seventy actors as well as the meticulously planned and rehearsed scenario. Meanwhile, he will guide the complex machinery of the deception using hidden ear-pieces while he watches from a secret room in the venue building. A detailed simulation of the real becomes the predictable and consistent performance of a well-regulated machine, as suggested by Derrida. Instead of unrehearsed moments of uncertainty, what we have is the constant interaction between Brown and the actors and the technicians. They are Brown’s real subjects, who perform while he watches and manages them. Potentially disruptive moments are quickly solved to return to the script. This is different from Brown’s earlier shows, including Trick or Treat, whose attempt at social experiment rather than television drama is less controlled. Overall, the intention is of a live diegesis, but the programme’s precision suggests less a sign of an indexical record but a mediated liveness, which is reinforced by the repetition of events that each of the four volunteers walks through. The first test of compliance is when the volunteers are asked to mislabel meat sausage rolls as vegetarian for the forthcoming guests at the gala event. 28

Brian Appleyard, ‘Pushing It too Far’, Sunday Times, 17 January 2016, 18.

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The volunteers are presented to the audience in different segments running consecutively to confirm what happened. The problem of certainty in a show that is designed to be unscripted reality becomes apparent when the scenarios confronting the four volunteers are essentially acted rather than played out. An excessive designation of the roles of the other characters and their actions produces a feeling of frustration with the show. Such frustration is matched by an excessive visualization that prescribes actions rather than describes them. The frisson felt in Trick or Treat, derived from the pleasure of monitoring Jules or Eshanee, no longer holds the same affective appeal. Whereas the lack of borders of the surveillance camera in Trick or Treat solicits viewer attention, it becomes the capture of the actions of each volunteer in Pushed to the Edge. By taking André Bazin’s suggestion that the screen works to connote realism by as much as excluding – as by what it includes29 – the frame that Brown in Pushed to the Edge presents is authored and limited. One of the main characters, Bernie, fakes a heart-attack, and Pushed to the Edge builds to a set of climaxes before each commercial break to maintain its feeling of suspense and heightened audience attention. An illusion that relies on a sense of the live that demands in equal measure instantaneousness and uncertainty is gone. This is made clearer at the end point of the show as we see the other guests played by actors hoping to persuade each volunteer to push Bernie off a tall building to his death. In fact, the climactic moment encountered by one of the volunteers, Chris Kingston, a twenty-nine-year-old, is too overdetermined to evoke more than a dull thrill of fulfilling the expectation that Brown can orchestrate events to produce both an incredible but also an inevitable outcome. On the one hand, the count-down to the climax on top of the building suggests an unfolding reality; however, rather than establish the simultaneity of time between the viewer and the viewed, it reminds the spectator at home that they exist outside rather than inside the event. There is little sense of becoming transfixed in the moment, the feeling of immersion that was experienced in Trick or Treat or indeed in some of the illusions performed by magicians such as Dynamo or Criss Angel. The narratology of Pushed to the Edge requires a single resolution – Bernie’s fall from the building after being pushed – unlike the open-endedness of a game that is being played. 29

Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

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The voice-over comment from Brown is, ‘Designer Chris doesn’t know it but he is fast approaching a big decision where others will try to persuade him to push a living person off the roof.’ This cuts to Brown explaining how they will convince Chris that Bernie is a corpse. The making of a latex dummy of the actor Simon who plays Bernie achieves the pleasure of seeing another type of trick being performed – the production of a special effect at Pinewood Studios, the home of British film production. The cutting back to when the real Bernie became substituted with the dummy deploys the system of cool colours associated with flash-back moments visible in shows such as CSI. However, these moments are not about the falsity of memory or the difficulty of maintaining the truth of what really happened. Instead, the flash-back informs the spectator of the herculean effort taken to persuade Chris that he is handling a dead body. As he disappears back into the dressing-room to fetch Bernie’s pills after his supposed heart-attack, the actors playing Bernie and Tom drag the dummy secreted under a stage before Bernie runs from the auditorium. In order for the dummy to feel like a real corpse, Brown explains that he enlisted the help of Oscar special effects artists Lou and Dave Elsey at Igor Studios. During the production of the dummy, every nook of Simon’s face was covered in plaster to produce an exact replica, followed by his arms, legs, buttocks, ears and even the inside of his mouth. The ghostliness of the simulacra of the human body becomes fully embodied in a latex plastic mould. Simon’s hair growth on his face and arms is photographed and measured intensively to affect a microscopically perfect copy by sewing in artificial fibres individually that can be matched to the latex and silicon skin. After two months of work, the dummy is complete and presented. As Chris handles the human replica, it moves and feels right. However, the simulation here is not representative of a mode that counters actions that are created by the writer or film-maker, and it cast doubts about the deliberate ambiguity that Brown has hitherto used in his shows. It was the inclusion of ambiguity about the status of the extraordinary that, one commentator argues, Brown’s earlier success has depended on: the right amount of psychology to the TV audience so that they forget that he is also a magician and so they always start from the starting point of it being a psychology trick and often miss any physical aspects of it at all! My favourite comment I overheard from one couple after the show whilst

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waiting at the stage door (they were talking about the Oracle act) was ‘There’s no way that you can tell that just from the way someone says “Yes” – that’s convinced me that they must have all been paid stooges!’ They were gutted that the whole thing had been ‘staged’, yet when the logistics of paying for thirty actors every night for a tour was pointed out to them by their partner the realisation sank in and they were fooled again. All thanks to the misdirection that everything is purely mental.30

Recently, Brown has served as a producer of other types of magic on television. He has teamed up with ITV to use the format of a talent show like X-Factor to search for Britain’s next top magician. His independent production firm, Vaudeville Productions, is producing shows that revert to an older form of stage performance, when five competing magicians will perform their most sensational tricks in front of a studio audience, although also on location with the public and using celebrities. The object of the competition is to go through to the final and – if the contestant wins – to be given their own television special. Brown’s role is to serve as executive producer. After Pushed to the Edge, this is his second commission for Vaudeville Productions and may be a sign that the limits of the use of simulation and dissimulation as a form of TV magic have now been reached by Brown.

Conclusion To witness the truth on television, an authentic experience is required and, in the case of Jules or Eshanee in Trick and Treat, how it can have life-changing repercussions. The connection between hypnotism and empowerment has become a developmental act that strengthens or, in some way, transforms the life of the subject. The attraction of Derren Brown on British television as its leading mentalist for the past decade-and-a-half has been to use hypnotism to create narratives of the extraordinary in order to explore many different experiences and possibilities. By creating a series of programmes as ostensibly within the genre of popular social science, experience is regarded as self-knowledge

30

Blogger posted 12 May 2007. Accessed at www.talkmagic.co.uk/sutra169362.php&highlight.

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that can be attained by the benefits of surveillance. Consequently, the style of the programmes is about self-exposure, perpetual monitoring and a willingness to participate in a game. In this sense, the audience has become the show. Brown’s secular magic is less about television as a set of professional codes and practices, and more about broadcasting as a living diegesis – a reversal of the media paradigm that suggests the power of the media. Rather, the loss of focus on Brown, coupled with the degree of audience participation, is a qualitative difference between shows that operate as a mediated form of conjuring. The mentalist instead relies on an interactivity that democratizes television. Broadcasting becomes a site that revitalizes the community it serves, and its authenticity becomes the guarantee of self-realization. The use of simulation allows for the looser, more dynamic construction of reality that triggers a greater volatility from Brown’s volunteers than the amused spectators enjoying a trick by, say, Paul Daniels. Nevertheless, the requirement for drama is a constant pressure for television. Since its inception in 1982 and despite many changes to its original remit, Channel 4 with its public service ethos has championed new ways of listening and watching the production of narrative and non-narrative spectacle and pedagogy. The visual style that accompanies Brown’s programmes has meant that there exists, at times, a fierce tension between a slick visual presentation that promises entertainment, on the one hand, and a related approach that considers the individual audience within its use of multiple mobile camera footage, on the other. But the style has achieved its purpose of simulating viewing subjectivities that provide knowledge and pleasure as it integrates the everyday fully within the act of watching television.

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5

The Magic Film

You have to embrace illusion to get to the truth.1

Magic and film The birth of cinematic film coincides with the popularity of stage magic during the nineteenth century.2 The emergence of the modern stage magician in the nineteenth century, as well as the development of the magic lantern, inaugurated a century of close links between the performance of magic as education, entertainment and screen projection to the masses.3 Already by the eighteenth century, the exhibition of optical illusions produced by the magic lantern, whose provenance dates to about the mid-1600s, permitted figures in the show to rapidly increase or decrease in size, to advance and retreat, dissolve and vanish in a manner thought marvellous. Later, the development of the popular magic lantern show, referred to as the phantasmagoria, would be a sign of the interest in fantasy, including out-of-the-body manifestations – a reminder of the enduring fascination for the transcendent. Equally, the recurring attempts to deploy the magic lantern and its compendiums of optical tricks to dispel superstitious belief formed a further desire for wonder. In 1776, a professor at Leipzig University published, ‘Prefatory Remarks to His Audience at the Beginning of His Course on Natural Magic’, which examined the use of the

1 2 3

Chief Inspector Uhl in The Illusionist. Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Mervyn Heard, Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern (Hastings:  The Projection Box, 2006).

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magic lantern for the projection of ghosts and phantoms.4 The phantasmagoria – the name deriving from its inventor Paul de Philipsthal, in 1792 – was operated by a stage magician, who with the aid of the magic lantern would produce the aggregation of spirits that strayed from funereal forms of spectacle into the wider realms of fantasy to fulfil a variety of experiences. Each novel projection of ghosts would less form proof for superstitious belief because it could be shown how bogus phantoms might be produced, but it also created an engagement with its subject on many levels, including fear and surprise, as well as interest and curiosity. By the 1850s and 1860s, the new technical innovation of photography had become a device used by spiritualist mediums hoping to contact the ‘spirit world’. In 1856, Sir David Brewster had published on how to create ghostly images using long exposure times: For the purpose of amusement, the photographer may carry us even into the realms of the supernatural. His art . . . enables him to give a spiritual appearance to one or more of his figures, and to exhibit them as ‘thin air’ amid the solid realities of the stereoscopic picture. While a party is engaged with their whist or their gossip, a female figure appears in the midst of them with all the attributes of the supernatural. Her form is transparent, every object or person beyond her being seen in shadowy but distinct outline.5

For later spiritualist mediums, it was possible to make the claim that photography could record spectral presences not usually visible to the human eye. According to Terry Castle, the relationship between the supernatural and photography meant that the ‘carefully staged double exposure . . . is a kind of self-reflexive commentary on the uncanny nature of photography, the ultimate ghost-producing technology’.6 Both spirit photography and the magic lantern in the nineteenth century combined a technical apparatus with the possibility of supernatural powers and became symbolic of things that were beyond explanation. 4 5

6

Cited in Heard, Phantasmagoria, 51. David Brewster, Stereoscope:  Its History, Theory and Construction (London:  John Murray, 1856), 205. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer:  Eighteenth- Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 167.

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The desire to attach a supernatural discourse to a rational technological marvel indicates how far the interest was in already transcending the material world with the invention of film and the cinematograph. Lynda Nead mentions how ‘the Lumière Brothers advertised their first public film exhibition in the 1890’s with the words “for only one franc see life size figures . . . come to life before your very eyes.” It was an invitation to a séance in which the medium – in all senses of the word – was film.’7 Journalist Henri Clouzot described an early film projection by paralleling it with mediumship to contact the spirits. They would be ‘anxious like spiritualists around a turning table . . . they squeeze into the little room where the cinematograph gives its séances. Shhh! The incantation begins. The mysterious device takes off with the click-clacking of a sewing machine gone wild, and the image comes alive’.8 By the 1890s, and the invention of various types of moving image, the publication of The History of the Kinetoscope, Kinetoscope and KinetoPhonograph would become a celebration of the new technological marvels described in semi-religious language.9 The book drew parallels between the occult practices of the spiritualists of the nineteenth century and the exhibition of film in a darkened auditorium. Such conditions of viewing would underline how film technology inherited a presence from older forms of optical projection and capture, which existed as a replacement ‘medium’, substituting the older spiritual mediumship longing for contact with the uncanny with a device capable of delivering extraordinary experiences but still in the style of the séance. Co-authored by W.  K. L.  Dickson, Thomas Edison’s chief assistant on the Kinetoscope project, and his sister Antonia Dickson, The History of the Kinetoscope was able to associate motion pictures with occult wonders: [The Kinetoscope] is the crown and flower of nineteenth century magic, the crystallisation of Eons of groping enchantments. In its wholesome, sunny and accessible laws are possibilities undreamt of by the occult lore of the 7 8

9

Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1. Henri Clouzot, ‘Les photographies animee’, reprinted in Jacques and Chantal Rittaud-Hutinet (eds), Dictionnaire des cinematographes en France (1896–97) (Paris: Honore Champion, 1999), 195. W. K.  L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetoscope, Kinetoscope and KinetoPhonograph (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000). Reprint of the 1895 original.

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East, the jealous erudition of Babylon, the guarded mysteries of Delphic and Eleusian shrines.10

In other words, film might provide indexical evidence of the otherworldly. By doing so, it would operate to open new epistemic channels because of its ability to produce a universal living picture, testifying not only to the objective world but also the occulted one. By embodying the powerful experience of moving images, similar to the photograph and magic lantern before it, the ‘age of cinema’ would be a cultural experience that offered particular forms of subjectivity, including those within its omniscient gaze that could be considered to be ‘magical’. By the early twentieth century, early film pioneers such as George Méliès in France and Walter R. Booth in England were quick to develop new modes of magic on film. They began a series of trick films that aimed to deploy spectacle to create a greater sense of novelty and emphasize how magic could be combined with the cinema. Cinema’s dissolving views through the devices of montage and special effects were to create trick films that came to be understood not only in terms of its ability to mystify but by its affect. According to Tom Gunning, these early films by foregrounding the act of display formed a ‘cinema of attractions’, whose difference with later narrative-based films was that they acknowledged the spectator rather than creating a fictional universe.11 It should be recalled that many early films were first watched within a fairground and sought a very different purpose from later Hollywood cinema. Gunning argues that many early films provided ‘attractions’ that were able to address the spectator in a manner impossible within the later classical diegesis – which would dominate film-making – because of how early film texts addressed the audience. The ability of film to alter the sense and meaning of perception suggests how far spectacle in a cinema of attractions was able to supply an aesthetic of astonishment – the inclusion of magic on the early screen by Méliès and Booth conjuring up new attractions. Yet, film’s transformative abilities have continued to affect the spectator’s response to contemporary films in

10 11

Dickson and Dickson, History of the Kinetoscope, 52. Tom Gunning, ‘Now You See It: Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions’, The Velvet Light Trap (1993), 32, 2–12.

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which magic plays a central role, such as in The Illusionist (2006), The Prestige (2006) and Now You See Me (2013).

Magic as attractions Visual deceptions of the laws of nature within the act of magic and the demonstration of extraordinary things suggest that secular magic on film and television should be understood primarily as a category of spectacle rather than storytelling; and, in part, spectacularity has become the story of magic within its various acts since Robert-Houdin of the mid-nineteenth century. On the other hand, we have already seen how secular magic on television does not necessarily demand spectacular images but rather a sense of immediacy that can be offered by the transparent view of real-time events to connote a sense of authenticity. This is handled differently in film and television; but, as in the manner of television, to understand magic within film, it must be finally defined through its mode of reception as well as textually. For example, on television, the magical performance often addresses audiences to produce a communal ‘happening’, which is simultaneous with the act of viewing but which film cannot repeat as an example of a recording medium in which events are already ‘captured’ and preserved. Nevertheless, these understandings are complex and do not always rely on clear distinctions between media but are rather part of an active process that, ultimately, opposes different media having some form of intrinsic nature.12 Instead, ideas about ‘presence’ and the spectator’s relationship to the medium begin to defy the suggestion that film can only ever match its true cinematic essence as a recording medium rather than one that is ‘live’. The understanding of film as a medium of attractions has been used to suggest clear categorical differences between film as a form of presentation and film as a narrative form with all the implications that storytelling offers by the modelling of the spectator as a voyeur. For commentators such as Gunning, 12

Max Sexton and Malcolm Cook, ‘Adaptation as a Function of Technology and Its Role in the Definition of Medium Specificity’, in Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs and Eckart Voigts (eds), The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2017).

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attractions were the devices that early film used to denote its fascination with novelty and the foregrounding of the act of viewing. Gunning describes the ‘view aesthetic’ as providing theatrical spectators with relatively unmanipulated views: ‘[A] view makes a greater claim to recording an event . . . Views tend to carry the claim that the subject viewed . . . maintains a large degree of independence from the act of filming it.’13 As we have seen, for magic in most mediated forms to be successful, it should be shown as ‘live’. The display of magic in film, if it is to be understood as an attraction as Gunning describes it, would seem to consist of an invitation that constructs a spectatorial position whose requirement is the heightened engagement of its repertoire of conjuring tricks. This form of presentation was demonstrated clearly at the beginning of the twentieth century when the magician Harry Houdini used film to record his acts. Houdini (1874–1926) was noted for his sensational escape acts when he first appeared in vaudeville. Around 1907, he began to film his outdoor escapes and present them as actuality films as part of his act. Houdini’s intention was to extend the live space of the theatre into the urban streets in much the same way that modern street magic continues to do so. As an essential complement to his live performance, the films were a success, but his later films of the 1920s left audiences dissatisfied. Houdini believed that film would increase his appeal in vaudeville as one of the most popular performers. His original idea was to star in films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Instead, he made his debut in a fifteen-episode serial called The Master Mystery, released in 1918–1919. He would play an undercover agent in love with Marguerite Marsh. His nemesis in the film was a giant robot called ‘Q’. Importantly, each episode was shot without stopping the camera to avoid accusations of cinematic trickery. However, many of the stunts claimed by Houdini to have been performed either by him or without a camera trick or edit are proven to be fallacious. In The Grim Game (1919), directed by Irving Willet, Houdini had ample opportunity of performing his famous stunts, including a sequence where he jumps from one plane to another as the 13

Tom Gunning, ‘Before Documentary:  Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic’, in D. Hertogs and N. de Klerk (eds), Uncharted Territory:  Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 14.

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planes collide and crash-land. Houdini walks from the crash only bruised. The event was filmed using a third plane, and, as publicity, a reward of $1,000 was offered to anyone who could prove the collision was a fraud. In fact, when the planes collide, the figure seen dangling from a rope beneath one of the planes during the accident was stuntman Robert E. Kennedy.14 The problem of creating a virtual presence, an imagined being-there, had been overcome in the earliest ‘actuality’ films by Houdini. Such films assembled crowds and familiar urban locations to become guarantees for the film’s authentic record of a live event. However, unlike his audience, Houdini failed to notice the difference between mediated magic and the ‘magic’ of the films. The Master Mystery and the fraud perpetuated in The Grim Game failed to bring performer and audience together in the space of the filmed performance. It has been said that: The reasons for Houdini’s screen failure are obvious . . . he could not act convincingly before a camera. Although each of his films had a leading lady, Houdini was bashful and unconvincing with all of them. And worst of all, his stunts and escapes, so convincing and spectacular on a stage, looked artificial and contrived on the screen, where almost any leading male star could have duplicated his feats via a double and/ or trick photography.15 [original italics]

In recent films that incorporate magic, such as The Illusionist and The Prestige, the attractions are the various acts of magic from disappearances to apparent mental phenomena that form a display that draw attention to the difference between an act of unmediated magic and the ‘magic’ of the movies. The director of cinematography for The Illusionist, Dick Pope, claims, ‘I always wanted the audience to be thinking, “How does Eisenheim [the magician] do it?” rather than “How do the filmmakers do it?” ’16 Nevertheless, if an act of magic appears in The Illusionist or The Prestige, the signifiers of immediate presence of such attractions rarely overwhelm the narrative and its fictional world of places and characters. 14 15 16

A. Ronnie, ‘Houdini’s High-Flying Hoax’, American Heritage, April 1972, 106–9. Alan Grossman, ‘Letters’, Films in Review, 12, no. 9, November 1961, 572–3. Patricia Thomson, ‘Conjuring the Past’, American Cinematographer, September 2006, 50–59 (56).

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Since 2006, the cycle of recent Hollywood magic films has been affected by recent advances in CG (computer-generated) effects, rendering digital facsimiles almost indistinguishable from real settings and objects. Films such as The Illusionist, The Prestige and Now You See Me draw attention to the power of illusion and make viewers aware of cinema’s propensity for deception and the uncanny verisimilitude of digital manipulation. Yet, in these films, the act of magic comes with a fresh promise to provide a sense of connectedness  – an application of the ‘certificate of presence’, suggested by Roland Barthes, within which there is a sense of connectedness between the mage on screen and the spectator. The fascination with connectedness can be found in early accounts, as we have seen in Chapter 1, including Barthes in Camera Lucida, who relates his experience of seeing a photograph, taken in 1852, of Jerome, Napoleon’s youngest brother: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’17 Similarly, for the film theorist André Bazin, the moving image has been able to provide transference of reality from the thing itself to its reproduction. However, whereas the experience in photography can be of a greater sense of embodiment, the act of magic on film can purposely recreate a sense that the image is the here-now. In fact, the rhetoric of a simultaneous experience is predominant in each of the films to be looked at. Such possibilities complicate any account of magic in a recorded medium like film and re-emphasizes the need to become conscious of the paratactic role of magic in film, as much as we have seen within modes on television. In contrasting ways, distinctive modes are made to work at different instances that offer several understandings to do with the performance of magic in each of the films that are being looked at.

The Illusionist: illusion and disillusion The Illusionist was written and directed by Neil Burger, who had earlier made the pseudo-documentary Interview with the Assassin (2002), which blurred the boundary between fantasy and reality. Based on a short story 17

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1981, 3. Accessed at https://monoskop.org/images/c/c5/Barthes_Roland_Camera_Lucida_Reflections_on_Photography.pdf.

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by Steven Millhauser, The Illusionist is a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician that is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century and tells the story of Eisenheim (Edward Norton), a brilliant magician, who becomes entangled in a love triangle. Eisenheim is attracting large crowds with his stage performances that defy rational explanation. His magical abilities provoke a reaction from the scheming Crown Prince, Leopold, and his fiancée, Sophie. The Prince searches for an explanation for the tricks, dismissing them while frustrated by his apparent incapability of both conquering and mastering the challenge set by Eisenheim. The sentiments of Uhl, Chief of Police in the film, sums up the feeling of why Eisenheim is considered to be a threat: certain distinctions must be strictly maintained. Art and life constituted one such distinction; illusion and reality, another. Eisenheim deliberately crossed boundaries and therefore disturbed the essence of things. In effect, Herr Uhl was accusing Eisenheim of shaking the foundations of the universe, of undermining reality, and in consequence of doing something far worse: subverting the Empire. For where would the Empire be, once the idea of boundaries became blurred and uncertain?

To some degree, the Prince is identified with modernity; he sits in his booklined office surrounded by electric lights, and inside the bookish atmosphere, we first see him at his desk. The literate and literal culture of the Prince is a rejection of the dark superstition of the past. However, it is also a refusal to fully embrace the values of modernity by an attempt at democratizing the private sphere he inhabits, unlike the public spaces of the theatre that Eisenheim occupies, with the magician’s clear appeal for the masses. Unlike the Prince, the film represents Eisenheim as someone who is both master of the material world – tricks he has in his hands – but also a master of the emotions associated with the creation of wonder. At the same time, for the audience, the experience of the performance by Eisenheim becomes a movement between a successful illusion followed by disillusion that Eisenheim is a fake. The superstitious nature of the masses is contrasted with the rationality of the Chief of Police, who arrests Eisenheim. Uhl asks the magician to address the crowd and tell them that the tricks they have seen him perform are an illusion, and go home. The film makes clear that the system of rigid thought that Uhl represents

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and the superstitious credulity of the masses outside can only be reconciled by the integration between illusion and disillusion; otherwise, we cannot see the truth. Only when illusion is no longer separated from the real can there be a realization about the complexity of reality itself. The tension between the Prince and Eisenheim can be further understood as that which exists between the desire for modernity and its machine-like, clear-cut certainties and the opposing forces of wonder. In an era of new forms of communication and technologies at the beginning of the twentieth century, there is the dialectical tension between what the two characters represent – the Prince’s ratiocination that underpins the ‘iron cage’ that Max Weber had in mind, when he wrote about modern capitalist society that everyone was destined to live inside. For Weber, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, society was becoming transformed to form a common denominator regardless of the individual. Masses and elites, artists and scientists, capitalists and workers would be moulded to form the common modern social experience that threatened the individual. For Weber, we would live in a cage because individuals are necessarily members of the masses:  ‘For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’18 In his desire for modernity, in the form that is identified by Weber, the Prince represents the lack of authentic freedom. Meanwhile, Eisenheim’s creation of wonder is the rebirth of the individual broken free from the iron cage. The magician promotes belief in the invisible world of spirit, and his unsettling of reality undermines the distinctions that Uhl declares are what he is sworn to uphold. Furthermore, Eisenheim’s illusions  – an out-of-the-body experience by summoning Sophie, the ghost of Leopold’s murdered fiancée – proclaim the film’s strategy of dissimulation and manipulation, serving two purposes. Firstly, to fulfil the desire by the audience for the uncanny; second, to acknowledge how multiple explanations for illusions suggest an increased mode of engagement made possible by the increased cognitive participation by the audience within the film. 18

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2005), xix.

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Mediated magic and movie magic According to the director of cinematography Dick Pope, the film was an experiment for creating an earlier period by its vivid evocation, which sought to be real, but also otherworldly. For example, Pope ensured that he was able to deploy techniques such as autochrome – a colour photography technique that was almost contemporaneous with the story. The technique acknowledges the period of early cinema, and the flickering images in particular scenes further suggest the era within which magic was exploiting the spectral quality of the early moving image: Invented by the Lumière Brothers in 1903, autochromes involved unique transparencies created by coating a sheet of glass with microscopic starch grains dyed red, green and blue, which formed a screen of color particles. Carbon black was applied over the plate, filling in the spaces around the starch grains . . . When the plate was exposed, the base side was turned toward the subject, and the color screen acted as a filter over the emulsion. The developed plate rendered a positive color image with delicate color qualities that resemble hand-tinted photographs.19

In addition to using autochrome, other techniques of early cinema were used, particularly during the film’s prologue, set in 1885. They include the flicker effect of a hand-cranked camera, and techniques of vignettes, distressing the film and making use of iris transitions. The relationship between the film-maker and the spectator resembles in The Illusionist and The Prestige that between the conjuror and the spectator. As we have seen, the performance is one of illusionism and disillusion; it engages the audience in a game about historical veracity and invites reflections on its playfulness as it challenges our desire for reality or truth. Any sense that it is only a trick detracts from the ‘magic’ of the illusion. Moreover, interest in the display of virtuoso special effects, which rely on novelty, are difficult to sustain once the novelty has been demonstrated and becomes repetitive. Derren Brown describes how the sense of wonder in magic should be maintained: It is a question of finding out what does lie at the heart of magic that is relevant to what art is about today. For me, and the artists to whom I speak, one 19

Patricia Thompson, ‘Conjuring the Past’, American Cinematographer (2006), 87, no. 9, 50–54 (52).

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major role of contemporary art is to make the audience leave the viewing and look differently at things. In other words, to challenge perception and preconception . . . It is here, and not in the concept of wonder, that we find the potential for magic to be relevant to art. Wonder might be the vehicle for that challenge to thought and perception, for it is the peculiar product of magic, but in itself is far from enough.20

The position of the film-maker is, therefore, to not to impress with what Tom Gunning has suggested is the deployment of an ‘aesthetic of astonishment’ that supplies an immediate thrill, summarily fulfilling visual curiosity rather than encouraging contemplation.21 Instead, The Illusionist dramatizes the constructedness of the historiography of magic by letting the audience from the start know that it is all an act but asking it to judge the film by its ability to deceive. However, rather than an exercise in mystifying the spectator with wonder as to how illusions are enacted – the ‘false bottom’ school of conjuring, which relies on machinery22 – The Illusionist sets out to accomplish the challenge to thought and perception that Brown believes is necessary for success in magic. Later, in The Prestige, the character of Harry Cutter, played by Michael Caine, a designer of illusions, appears to address the audience when he asks ‘Are you watching closely?’ Such a question is an invitation not to simply look closer but reflect on our perception of events. The theme of ‘watching closely’ is established in the Prologue of The Illusionist, which relates how, as a boy, Eisenheim was to meet an itinerant magician on the road. The tale contributes to a state of uncertainty about the status of Eisenheim’s own origins, because it is remarked that the fantastic events that transpired when Eisenheim met the magician may, in fact, not be true. If the Prologue should serve to anchor the narrative, it instead raises more questions than it answers. Next, in-camera tricks remove the tree that Eisenheim was sitting under as he speaks to the magician, symbolizing 20

21

22

Derren Brown, Absolute Magic: A Model for Powerful Close-up Performance (Humble, Texas: H&R Magic Books, 2003), 241. Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment:  Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions:  Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–33. Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, Conjuring and Magic or How to Become a Wizard (London: George Routledge, 1878), 29.

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the subjective temporality of memory the film appears to be interested in. A  scene transition marked by an iris effect brings us to the first trick performed by the young Eisenheim for the aristocratic Sophie. A  blossoming romance between them culminates in Sophie being kidnapped and snatched away from Eisenheim because she has broken the taboo of falling in love with someone beneath her in rank and social class. Finally, we return to the present-day Vienna with the adult Eisenheim performing the illusion of the orange tree. Neil Burger, the film’s director, shot Eisenheim’s performances before a live audience. The production used two historic theatres, an opulent theatre in Prague and a more dilapidated one in the rural town of Tabor. Both were active stages, and filming had to be squeezed in-between shows. One of the first illusions performed by Eisenheim is the growing of an orange tree, inspired by the trick first invented by Robert-Houdin – the Fantastic Orange Tree – and which has been performed by magicians such as Paul Daniels.23 Similar to its presentation on television, the trick was meant to be a period illusion and had to be achieved in-camera as much as possible rather than the result of digital manipulation achieved later in post-production, although shooting it in-camera was a logistical nightmare. Robert-Houdin’s original version of the trick was based on the techniques of nineteenth-century conjuring and illusion and made to operate using a system of mechanical gears. The blossoms were constructed using tissue paper and pushed through the hollow branches by a piston rising in the table and operating against similar pistons in the orange tree box: When these pedals were relaxed the blossoms disappeared and the fruit was gradually developed – real fruit, too, which was distributed among the spectators. The oranges were stuck on iron spikes affixed to the branches of the tree and hid from view by hemispherical wire screens painted green and secreted by the leaves. When these screens were swung back by pedal play the fruit was revealed.24

23 24

Accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZb4nw7_hGY. Albert A. Hopkins, Magic:  Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Photography (New  York:  Dover, 1976), 18. Reprinted from the 1898 original.

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In similar ways, the orange tree in The Illusionist uses an intricate set of gears that are designed to push out leaves folded within the stems, which then bloom. Meanwhile, the camera moves around Eisenheim without interrupting his performance, which is shot continuously. However, the key problem that Burger and Pope faced was obtaining the shot that would show Eisenheim, the growing orange tree and the audience’s reaction in a single camera movement without edits. Pope explains that: Eisenheim was to step up to the table and begin the illusion. As the orange seed in the pot began to sprout and grow, we were to track in towards it, then circle it 180 degrees, then track back out over the front of stage and then out over the audience, skimming their heads as we pulled right back towards the rear of the theatre stalls, while all the time the shrub was to continue to grow into a fully mature orange tree bearing fruit, but now with the camera angle diametrically opposed to where we had started.25

Michele Pierson considers reception as a key factor in understanding how special effects function in contemporary cinema and comments that, ‘effects sequences featuring CGI commonly exhibit a mode of spectatorial address that – with its tableau-style framing, longer takes, and strategic intercutting between shots of the computer-generated object and reaction shots of characters – solicits an attentive and even contemplative viewing of the computergenerated image’.26 Yet, according to Pope, the aim of the complicated camera manoeuvre of Eisenheim and the orange tree, which was done in-camera, was to make it more believable rather than rely on a CG effect. It was important to Burger and Pope that if a mode of spectatorial address was used, CG effects were eschewed as ‘the credibility of The Illusionist hangs on the very authenticity and believability of its illusions’.27 The magician consultant on the film was Ricky Jay, who also appears in The Prestige. Jay has been described as the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive and has more recently devoted his energies to both scholarship on magic and

25 26

27

Ian White, ‘Conjuring with light’, British Cinematographer (2007), 20, 14–17 (16). Michele Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 124. Thompson, ‘Conjuring the Past’, 56.

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functioning as a consultant on motion pictures.28 Jay was responsible for helping Edward Norton, playing Eisenheim, to be able to learn the tricks his character performs in the film and to perform these without the benefit of CG. The orange tree seemingly grows from a seed and fruits in a few seconds, but the reaction to it signals the difficulty of deploying non-CG. One reviewer commented that, ‘Eisenheim . . . grows an orange tree from a seed before the very eyes of his astonished audience. The famous turn-of-the-century trick was actually done with finely tuned machinery, but in the film it’s plain ol’ CG.’29 This was a case of the reviewer rejecting the spectacle because the appearance of an impressive effect in a film had to be CG. Another reviewer found the spectacle unimpressive:  ‘[T]he great Eisenheim grows an entire orange tree in his hands from the mere speck of a pit . . . it looks like time-lapsed photography, which explains why our eyes are less than astounded.’30 The suspicion about the special effects is a reminder of how in the film the methods of digital manipulation and prestidigitation draw attention to the medium’s differing capacities for creating illusion. Pope’s next task was to shoot a mirror illusion – again almost entirely incamera – without the benefit of CG. Eisenheim concludes his performance of tricks with a discussion of the soul and what it means to die. The character of Sophie is brought to the stage as a volunteer and shrouded in a hooded cloak. An eight-inch-tall mirror is brought before her. Initially, her reflection is as it should be, but soon its movements no longer reflect hers. The trick is a version of Death and the Maiden and similar to Melies’s film The Vanishing Lady (1896), which he had performed at the Robert-Houdin theatre in Paris. This act of magic is about disappearance and reappearance. A  puff of vapour or ectoplasm rises and exits the mirror to symbolize the breath of life escaping, and Sophie’s reflection collapses to the floor. The trick is both reflective and reflexive of magic in the film. The mirrors literally reflect how special effects in film have the power to copy the real world, while seeking to draw our attention to the process behind the reflection. The ghostly ectoplasm, itself adapted

28

29 30

Mark Singer, ‘Secrets of the Magus’, The New Yorker, 6 April 1993. Accessed at www.newyorker. com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus. Steffie Nelson, ‘Magic Pics Pull Conjuring Tricks’, Daily Variety, 9 January 2007, A5. Rick Groen, ‘Disillusioned? You Bet’, Globe and Mail, 18 August 2006, R12.

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from the nineteenth-century ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, is both a performative act that appears to be simultaneous with the act of viewing it and a form of film magic. To achieve the illusion, mist was sent through a hole in the mirror and was only digitally enhanced as it began to dissipate. Authenticity becomes the goal as the scene indicates the presence of the audience watching the events in the sense of being-now – the time of telling and not the time of the thing told.31 In this way, according to Robert Allen, the film’s spectator ‘actively participates in the existence of illusion that the cinema affords’.32 In The Illusionist, it is the requirement for a type of live action rather than re-presentation of the performance by Eisenheim that reveals the tension in the film: We wanted to create magic that was ‘real’ as opposed to CGI . . . The basic principal is that we as a film audience are actually sitting in that theatre in 1900 enthralled and believing in these illusions. We mostly photographed the stage with Eisenheim on it performing real tricks. Off screen Edward (Norton) constantly practiced card tricks and rolling a ball around his hand, as did Aaron (Johnson) who plays Eisenheim as a boy. When you see him practising as a boy, it’s the same sleight-of-hand trick that Edward uses later on stage. This makes Eisenheim believable – so much so that, when he appears to slow the ball down as he throws it from one hand to the other, you momentarily forget about CGI and wonder how he did it.33

The desire for authenticity can be understood as the test for transparency – a particular relationship between time and space, delineated in this case by Edward Norton’s performance  – while marking it off from other types of Hollywood cinema. When we see Eisenheim on the theatrical stage, concentrating to conjure up a spectre, the spectacle of the ghost becomes a demonstration of proof of life after death due to the emphasis on Eisenheim himself. Beads of sweat are visibly hanging from a body held in extremis – a look of intense concentration wrinkled onto his exhausted brow. The engagement with performance signals the film’s preoccupation with interior states as a testament to the authenticity of Eisenheim’s ability to work magic. 31

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Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1974), 18. Robert Allen, Projecting Illusion:  Film, Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3 White, ‘Conjuring with light’, 16.

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The medium of film may not be live but it is too simplistic to claim, based on the sense of presence with the audience, an apparent division between magic in film and on television. Earlier, in the opening of The Illusionist, as the camera is directed from Eisenheim on the stage, we see the audience and its tableau of faces fulfilling the familiar role of bearing witness to a forthcoming extraordinary event. The appearance of the audience at so many intervals in the film helps to shape its experience as a collective one, and the spectator at home is further encouraged to identify with the audience when there is a sudden exclamation from a woman at the sight of the ghost summoned by Eisenheim that ‘it’s her [Sophie]!’ The declaration that ‘it’s her’ is an indexical mark and removes suspicion of the gap between representation and reality. Once more, the indexicality of the image is tied to realism and the notion of witnessing. The woman shouts that she knows it is her and that she wants to tell us something. The requirement of wanting to tell us something, to reveal or otherwise bear witness to the secrets of the act of magic, establishes the double mode within the film, of watching as well as reflecting on the experience of watching. The audience both inside and outside the film engages with a variety of experiences of magic. The complex narrative demands an emotional and psychological engagement with the multitudinous explanations as to whether Eisenheim’s conjuring powers genuinely are a sign of the paranormal or more mundane. The Illusionist is a meditation on the indexical connection to the real world and the object inscribed by light and lens onto celluloid, unlike digital imaging. The suspicion that the digital image is vulnerable to manipulation returns us neatly to the ideas of some of the early critics of cinema. For André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, the cinema is ‘real’ because it happens to be a photochemical process of capturing what really happened.34 The attempt in The Illusionist to return to a ‘purer’ state of film-making before an imagined ‘Fall’ nevertheless masks how post-production was applied when, for example, the puff of vapour rises and exits the mirror but had to be digitally enhanced once it dissipated.

34

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).

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Nevertheless, although Stephen Prince argues that celluloid is ‘no longer a condition for cinema’,35 arguments about indexicality limit how audiences approach film, especially as film is consumed on television and on the internet. Digitalization may have disrupted the sense of it being in contact with the phenomenal world by way of indexicality, but it is the broader sense of the cinema that The Illusionist and The Prestige seek to explore. D. N. Rodowick explains that, ‘As “film” disappears in the successive substitutions of the digital for the analog, what persists is cinema as a narrative form and a psychological experience – a certain modality of articulating visuality, signification, and desire through space, movement, and time.’36 The use of computer technology to produce a form of CG realism may create effects that directors might choose because they realize that the effect is possible in the digital world. They might choose to shoot some scenes using a blue screen and digitally composite the background. A blue screen permits the use of digital technology that is capable of rendering matte effects without painting backdrops or going on location. However, the avoidance of digital manipulation in The Illusionist is the acclamation of the acts of ‘live’ magic. In the same way that a magician predetermines the amount of viewing information of the world for the spectator, there is also a coterminous heightened involvement in The Illusionist because of the multiple meanings within magic – disbelief, amusement, fear and curiosity that demand careful viewing. Such porous meanings flow from the deployment of the act of ‘live’ magic. Within The Illusionist, magical acts are constantly synthesized as a lived body experience, especially in the form of a personal history centred around Eisenheim. The lived body sense of film was for Bazin how, unlike photography, film was able to indicate a present ‘presence’: Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike . . . of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process: for photography does not create eternity, as art does,

35

36

Stephen Prince, ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images and Film Theory’, in Graeme Turner (ed.), The Film Cultures Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 115–28. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 184– 5, original emphasis.

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it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption . . . [On the other hand], the film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber.37

In The Illusionist, the implied presence of the rest of the world rejects the experience of the photograph, which results in a phenomenological frame that is extensible and contractible as it organizes the reality of the world. Rather, the use of magic in the film can be linked to the idea of an ‘open film’ that reveals a world beyond the actual frame of the film.38 Of course, this links again the real with the magical and its complex experience. The magic in films such as The Illusionist as well as in The Prestige and Now You See Me, depends on an ability to search the periphery of the worlds they seek to explore, wishing to disturb the sense of ratiocination and evoke the uncanny. The ordinary and the extraordinary are revealed not to be mutually exclusive but rather they exist within a broader narrative of the self. Specifically, the characters in The Illusionist are associated with both the traditional uses of realism in cinema, while becoming dominated by discourses of disembodiment. The evocation of magic in them raises questions on the nature of the world the spectator exists in – of a sense of the real as well as the fantasies of subjectivity and virtual reality, as they form a new cultural logic of simulation and dissolution. The articulation of this cultural logic as it creates a new sense of presence is bound up in notions of it emulating both reality and consciousness.

Acts of witnessing in The Prestige The supernatural discourse of life after death is repeated in The Prestige directed by Christopher Nolan and includes many of the motifs of The Illusionist. The film starts with an account of how an act of magic is made to work, which is in three parts. The magician shows the audience something ordinary, but, of course, it probably is not. This is the Pledge and is followed by the Turnover 37 38

Bazin, What Is Cinema, 14. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame:  What We See in Films (Garden City :  Anchor Doubleday, 1977), 48.

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when the magician makes an ordinary thing do something extraordinary. The final act is The Prestige – a transformative act that raises questions about the nature of magic once more. The performance of an illusion and the metamorphosis of the ordinary into the extraordinary demonstrate how The Prestige is intimately bound with an interest in ideas to do with charlatanism and deception. It does this by locating a relationship between uncertainty and authenticity after finding the borders between them. The failure to be able to detect the truth because the evidence is unreliable is a reminder drawn to our attention of not only magic’s power to deceive but the inability of the spectator to provide a witness to ‘what really happened’. This appears at odds with other assertions that we have seen in earlier chapters about the evidential value of bearing witness, complicating notions of a ‘century of witness’, which have the power to evoke the utopian potential of television. Conversely, if the moving image has been the major contributor to the age of information, the problem has been historically to ascertain the status of personal testimony. Peter Lamont has argued that nineteenth-century accounts of well-known Victorian psychics such as Daniel Dunglas Home raise issues about the failure of eye-witness evidence to establish whether psychic abilities are fraudulent. The attempt to uncover Home as a charlatan echoes the difficulty of knowing what anything is in The Prestige as we watch the two competing magicians – Robert Angier aka The Great Angier; and Alfred ‘Borden’ aka The Professor. Moreover, as Trevor Hall remarks, ‘Most of the accounts of Home’s performances have come down to us as anecdotes scattered throughout volumes of Victorian memoirs and are scarcely evidential. Others suffered from a lack of essential detail.’39 Lamont discusses the problem of witnessing and evidence in the light of claims that were made in support of Victorian mediumship: [I]f witnesses can report such seemingly inexplicable events, and be so certain that they were not deceived in any way, then we might become more sceptical about testimony in general. And that might change how we read the news or listen to others. Then we might be even more sceptical, and wonder just how plausible deception and unreliable testimony are as explanations. 39

Trevor H. Hall, The Enigma of Daniel Home (New York: Prometheus Books, 1984), 49.

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Are we really prepared to accept that so many people could be deceived so often, and that what people say can be so utterly unreliable?40

The problem of bearing witness when confronted by the duplicity of magic and how we deal with uncertainty about truth claims is explored in the initial encounter in The Prestige between Angier and Borden and another magician Chung Ling Soo. Soo was the stage name of an actual American magician, and the trick he performs is to make a large goldfish bowl filled with water materialize on stage.41 However, to accomplish the feat, as Borden correctly deduces, Soo must have created the illusion of appearing physically decrepit for years. No one, therefore, suspects that such a frail figure can be keeping a heavy bowl between his legs, which even Angier fails to accomplish while attempting to repeat the trick. According to Borden, the ‘true’ nature of magic is to lose oneself in its performance and live the illusion. The intimation is to exact a ‘plausible deception’ that is able to synthesize a replica of the original. Such reproduction possibilities predominate thematically in The Prestige to create an added occult discourse about the power of secrets. The replica or double in The Prestige is a mutual corroboration of truth and deception and forms a crisis of faith about evidence and what we can believe. Instead, as The Prestige makes clear, magic’s combination of act and fraud, deceit and the selection of evidence are tied to the problem of knowledge and witnessing what is real. At the beginning of the film, Borden is the assistant to a magician performing a trick with a canary in a cage. A young boy with his mother watching the show realizes that for the cage to disappear must mean the canary is killed. This early death foreshadows a more important one when, due to Borden’s pride about his skills, Angier suffers the loss of his wife when she drowns during a trick to escape from a water tank while tied-up. Death is the fundamental barrier and a comment on the fascination for the invisible world of the supernatural in moving images since the invention of the phantasmagoria in the eighteenth century. As Ann Heilmann states, ‘[Nolan] can then be compared to . . . a conjuror: like the audience of a stage magician, we know from 40

41

Peter Lamont, The First Psychic:  The Peculiar Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard (London: Abacus, 2005), 273. Chung Ling Soo was the stage name of the American magician William Ellsworth Robinson (1861–1918).

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the start that is all an act, but judge the quality of the performance by its ability to deceive and mystify us.’42 The desire to believe the unbelievable is, however, less about the gullibility or naivety of the spectator. Rather, it is the association between separation and death, a theme that recurs in the film, as Angier is separated from his wife and later Borden is separated in an interesting twist from his own wife and finally his daughter. Borden’s wife commits suicide because she undergoes the trauma of not recognizing a form of misdirection about her husband; the man she believes she is married to is, in fact, an imposter. The misdirection of the story reminds us of the film’s insistence on a series of unmasking and revelations that parallel the structure of the performance of an illusion. The visual sleight of hand reappears in the form of a puzzle, whose secrets need to be deciphered for a final resolution. The Prestige is an example of a type of film that has been described by Thomas Elsaessar as a motion picture that takes ‘delight in disorientating or misleading spectators (besides carefully or altogether withheld information, there are the frequent plots twists and trick endings)’.43 The aim of the ‘puzzle’ film is to produce a plausible deception, which re-echoes Lamont’s observation that the challenge of puzzling phenomena is not to dismiss them but to be able to engage with them. A puzzle film demands to be rewatched as each secret is made to yield more information in order to obtain pleasure from its consumption. Often in The Prestige, the audience is reminded that a refusal to see is costly and acts as a reminder of how things are never quite as you expect.

Interpreting misdirection Transposition, an object changing position in space, is a major concern of The Prestige and Now You See Me. Transposition can be defined as ‘a translocation, which amounts to a vanish from one place and a reappearance elsewhere. 42

43

Ann Heilmann, ‘Doing It with Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist ’, Neo-Victorian Studies (2009), 2, no. 2, 18–42. Thomas Elsaessar, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films:  Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 13–41 (15).

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A  transposition may involve two objects exchanging places, such as the Substitution Trunk (in which the magician and assistant change places despite one of them being tied inside a sack and placed inside a trunk)’.44 Transposition in The Prestige offers the possibility that perception is uncertain as in The Illusionist as well as a series of events that are duplicated and which present a cluttered narrative line that follows multiple directions. The unravelling of a final resolution for the main trick in The Prestige, called ‘The Transported Man’, continues to be elusive because the misdirection by the film’s director, in ways similar to a magician, suggests that the film’s reconstruction methods have been kept deliberately disingenuous. This makes it difficult to recover reliable sources of information that could provide the vital insights required to have total confidence of explaining the trick of The Transported Man. By using physical as well as psychological misdirection, Nolan the mage as much as Nolan the director is directing our belief in what we think we have seen by controlling the spectator’s attention. The stratagem of misdirection can be related to postmodern concepts of hyper-reality. The ability to use CG to create astonishing images permits them to extend the principles of perceptual realism to unreal images. According to Albert La Valley, the ability of digital special effects is to ‘show us things to be untrue, but show them to us with such conviction that we believe them to be true’.45 In films about magic, unlike other films that rely heavily on the use of special effects, the issue is less about the building of a diegetic world that can be supported by state-of-the-art technological effects. The ability of digital imaging to disguise the boundary between an apparent photographic realism and the referentially unreal is not the only concern of mediating magic on film. By positioning the film-maker like a conjuror, the stratagem of misdirection requires an awareness of the medium, which, in turn, requires an awareness of the digital environment the film is operating in and the induced realism of the final CG image. The strategies of dissimulation and manipulation capitalize on the desire for the uncanny, while The Prestige continues to stress by its credible 44

45

Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman, Magic in Theory:  An Introduction to the Theoretical and Psychological Elements of Conjuring (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1999), 4. Albert La Valley, ‘Traditions of Trickery: The Role of Special Effects in the Science Fiction Film’, in George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (eds), Shadows of the Magic Lamp (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 144.

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representation of places, characters and experiences  – the link between the materials that are to be transformed and their changed status. Alfred Borden has devised an impossible, transformative illusion  – the Transported Man. To perform the trick, he steps into a cabinet from one side and emerges from an identical cabinet on another side of the stage. The teleporting effect appears to have been performed miraculously and worked by magic. However, the effect has been apparently achieved by the borrowing of technology from the eccentric inventor – Nikola Tesla – played by David Bowie. Tesla – inventor extraordinaire – was another real-life personage, who, it has been claimed, created the modern era and remains one of the world’s greatest geniuses.46 Tesla created a series of electrical wonders, including highfrequency currents, which he sought to utilize to bring the Earth unlimited power. The most iconic photographs left of Tesla are of him sitting in a metal (Faraday) cage surrounded by bolts of artificially generated lightning. The fiery imagery has inspired magicians such as David Blaine to emulate Tesla by surrounding themselves with the same type of heavenly spectacle. At the turn of the twentieth century, when The Prestige is set, Tesla was at the height of his fame as he strove to complete an invention that would enable the possibility of communicating without wires. The dream of ‘universal communication’ and the relationship between the ether and wireless offer a utopian discourse and the extension of the human sensorium touched upon in Chapter 1. However, the machine in The Prestige is not a transposition device that links the world together but a duplication machine and a symbol of the multiple signs that are each a signifier of the truth. The emphasis of material science in The Prestige – its use of Tesla’s invention  – equates rationality with common sense. However, the possibility that the events have not unfolded as we may have expected touches upon the cognitive thought processes of human beings; and, though beyond the scope of this book, a few final observations can be made. In the film, Tesla explains that ‘exact science is not an exact science . . . things never work as you expect’. The failure of the eye to see correctly as the character of John Cutter mentions is linked to limits of cognitive rationality. The separation 46

John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (Hollywood, CA: Angriff Press, 1981).

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between what can be regarded as ‘common sense’ and the outcome of a trick like the Transported Man demonstrates the deficiencies of looking for the same causal links that exist in daily living. Such a demonstration indicates that rather than a positivist philosophy, the film’s deployment of magic is the assertion that, rather than direct observation, the search for indirectness is necessary for the explanation of an illusion. Science-based observation cannot decipher the full meaning of the mechanisms within the trick of transposition because direct observation starts with a priori notions of what is possible and what is not. The possibility that Borden is a double and may have visited Tesla on a previous occasion to obtain the gift of transposition/duplication is signified not through a character-based enigma narrative. Instead, the audience is left with a riddle that can be solved by interpreting surface traces that also form the analysis of a transposition/duplication of the facts. Such an indirect approach matches the strategies of dissimulation of secular magic on stage, television and film as the main characters conceal identity and motive under the pretext of the magician’s traditional obsession for secrecy. Borden’s secret is The Transported Man, whose explanation is written in cypher in his journal. His rival magician, Robert Angier, forces Borden to write down and describe his method for the trick but is left frustrated by the fact of its uselessness without the cypher key. In a scene set in London’s Highgate cemetery, hinting at the interest in spectral forms, he forces Borden to reveal the key, which is TESLA. The revelation appears to add to the audience’s cumulative knowledge of the central enigma but raises more questions than it answers. What exactly has been the relationship between Borden and Tesla until now and is it possible that Tesla has built a previous machine that duplicated Borden? In which case, why is it that Tesla appears not to be capable of building a similar machine for Angier until much later? Other questions are how Borden afforded the cost of the machine and – after witnessing Angier’s illusion ‘In a Flash’ – did not reach the sudden realization he has been watching a version of the trick he had already purchased from Tesla. These questions reveal that the film’s theoretical framework is rooted in misdirection. If the position of Nolan is like a conjuror, the film is not structured as a linear character-motivated enigma, but utilizes a multiplicity of detail that

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is primarily concerned with what the spectator perceives and with what the spectator thinks s/he thinks they have perceived. A further revelation is that the journal has been written with Borden’s intention of being deciphered. Initially, the journal held the promise of the potential key to the explanation of The Transported Man and the clue as to how Borden may have obtained the technology from Tesla. It functioned as the evidence for the hermeneutical task of fathoming the mysterious Borden. However, the journal is like the small rubber ball that Borden uses during the performance of The Transported Man: it exists as misdirection by the conjuror, who directs what the spectator thinks by controlling its suspicion. In reality, the magical phenomena did not have a solution that can be arrived at by possible clues and rational forms of deduction – the casual links that indicate common sense. In magic, the truth is never ‘out there’ but exists as an indefinite number of events that are indifferent to cause-and-effect relationships.

Being-there in Hollywood Now You See Me is a crime caper about The Four Horsemen, a group of illusionists who are members of an ancient magician’s alliance called the Eye. The director, Louis Leterrier, is known for directing many Hollywood action blockbusters, including The Incredible Hulk (2008) and Clash of the Titans (2010). In its preamble, the film introduces the four illusionists to us:  prestidigitator J. Daniel Atlas; escape artist Henley Reeves, who was once Atlas’s assistant; hypnotist/mentalist Merritt McKinne; and card thrower, pickpocket and street magician Jack Wilder. Each magician receives a cryptic tarot card that brings them to a New York loft space, and they become part of an elaborate holographic light show organized by the mysterious entity that brought them together in the first place. Next, the film travels forward a year to the home of the large spectacular live entertainment show, Las Vegas. The film uses the standard fiction of a heist movie, but the concept of presence and interaction between performer and audience appears in a simulated live auditorium in Vegas. The fact that it is simulated suggests a reality– unreality spectrum  – material is arranged with total reality at one end and

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unreality (fictitiousness) at the other end. However, another way to express it is that the plot of the four characters has been planned, but once in the auditorium, the illusion from The Four Horsemen offers the possibility that events will be spontaneous and unpredictable. This is accomplished by using the views of the audience in the auditorium as real personalities, although they exist in an already structured and preplanned event as entertainment. Moreover, within this complex mix, there are further ontological possibilities that establish a discourse of witnessing the impossible. Atlas explains that ‘magic is deception designed to delight, to inspire’, but also about ‘belief, faith and trust’. By doing so, the film celebrates much of the appeal of live magic rather than the spectacle-based action of ‘movie magic’ and its use of digital technologies. The investment in ontological realism in Now You See Me should not present a claim that the film avoids the appeal of the manipulation of the image using digital means. On the other hand, the film at some level wishes to embellish its appeal by providing a spontaneous form of performance in the various illusions. Indeed, the possibility of astonishing acts watched as if live in Now You See Me draws attention to the need for the audience to be familiar with the protocols surrounding liveness on television as well as in the theatre. The melange of forms in a key scene where a man commits an impossible robbery due to a spectacular form of transposition demonstrates the difficulty of sometimes clearly separating film from television and the live and mediatized. For example, in this scene, Now You See Me repeats the impossible possibilities of theatrical shows such as The Illusionists, which in 2012 showcased the talents of the best magicians from around the world. The Illusionists premiered at the Sydney Opera House and since then has been performed in over 165 cities in twenty-five countries, playing simultaneously in London, Sydney, Mexico and Broadway.47 The show has created two spin-offs:  The Illusionists 2.0 – The Next Generation of Magic; and The Illusionists 1903 – The Golden Age of Magic, which also tour internationally. The characters of The Four Horsemen in Now You See Me and their personas are, in fact, simulations of live talent and draw parallels with the speciality prestidigitators in shows 47

The Illusionists: Witness the Impossible, Souvenir Programme for Shaftsbury Theatre, London.

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such as The Illusionists. Here, the line-up includes stars of magic such as ‘The Deductionist’ aka Colin Cloud, whose speciality is forensic mind reading; ‘The Escapologist’ aka Andrew Basso, whose speciality is death-defying escapes; and ‘The Inventor’ aka Kevin James. As a further complication when thinking about media specificity, many of the acts in The Illusionists also appear on the internet. Another of the magicians who made up one of the regular cast-lists, Jamie Raven, appeared on Britain’s Got Talent in 2015, and his opening audition has been watched on YouTube over twelve million times. Over thirty million people across the globe have seen his Britain’s Got Talent video on Facebook.48 He is one of the most viewed magicians online in the world while appearing live. Crucially, mediatization of the live event on television and, more recently, the internet are drawn on to create the paratactic stylistic treatment of illusions in Now You See Me. The Four Horsemen perform in Las Vegas to a ‘live’ audience. The sequence begins with impressive credits that morph and move as a reminder of what John Caldwell refers to as television’s obsession to make images that ‘spectacularise, dazzle, and elicit gazelike viewing’.49 The use of digital graphics also creates the logo of The Four Horsemen, and a voice-over announces the names of the illusionists appearing within the Las Vegas auditorium. The opening simulates introductions to talent shows such as Britain’s Got Talent and other forms of spectacular live entertainment on television. If the Hollywood film has fully utilized advances in CG imagery, the appeal of live magic has been maintained because it has become possible to render impossible events using digital facsimiles that are virtually indistinguishable from real settings and objects. The magic in Now You See Me authenticates ideas of ‘belief, faith and trust’ mentioned by Atlas. Magic’s romantic ideology is evident when the impossible event of a bank heist is committed during the performance and watched by the ‘live’ audience. Later, the robbery is explained – the moment of disillusion – as a play of events that works because it breaks from habituated concepts and disrupts notions of common sense. 48 49

Ibid. Not paginated. John Caldwell, Televisuality:  Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 1995), 158.

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The actions of the volunteer chosen from the audience, who is transported to commit the bank heist in Paris, is relayed to large mounted screens surrounding the auditorium that emulate a performance by magicians such as David Copperfield. The screens are fed using a camera fixed to a moving crane or jib as it swoops across the immense auditorium. Again, this serves as a reminder of other large-scale illusions performed in Las Vegas such as Siegfried and Roy50 as well as Copperfield. Nevertheless, if the camera glides over the auditorium, the event is not mediatized in quite the same way as the act of walking on the river Thames, which was performed by Dynamo. Many of the signs of mediatized culture on television are absent in the scene, including the use of graphic and other interpretative possibilities that afford a superabundance of information of facts normally associated with such events on television. The scene lacks the requirement of ordering an incoherent world that television has produced and which, as Ellis explains, is a method of ‘providing layers of information in one frame, compressing material into a single but fractured space’. Ellis argues that graphics are designed to ‘suit a glance-like mode of attention which is all that television can assume of its audience’.51 It is at this point that the handling of the scene in Now You See Me may be compared to similar happenings on television and in the theatre, but differences remain. The audience within Las Vegas is an added guarantee of authenticity, but the film relies ultimately on a different type of spectatorship, which allows for the construction of a complex narrative. In Now You See Me, the structure of a puzzle film, which was seen earlier in The Prestige, demonstrates how a discussion of secular magic and medium specificity continues to be nuanced. If the structure of a puzzle film is about how to distinguish fantasy from reality, it can be used successfully to point to themes set by magic. In Now You See Me, the bank robbery during the Las Vegas illusion is of a French bank in Paris. A member of the audience, who is from Paris holidaying in Vegas, is invited onto the stage to help perform the illusion and apparently transported to Paris where he robs his own bank.

50

51

Siegfried and Roy are German-American magicians who have become known for their appearances with white lions and tigers. Their act, Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage Resort and Casino, has been one of the most visited shows in Las Vegas. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 100.

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What the scene and other similar moments in the film delight in is the use of the rules of magic, including the Pledge, when the magician turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. Such rules seem not to be restrained by the laws of the physical world although, equally, they provide a narrative that has the promise of reliable rules. That this reduces the sense of a spontaneous form is where the tension in the presentation of magic in film resides most of all. Clearly, this can never be resolved in the way that television may do so with its ability to relay an event that is co-present with the act of viewing. Any simulation of the live in film strives to deal with this tension, but the idea that performance establishes the authenticity of the magic being produced and the sense of ‘being-there’ always has to be negotiated by the film-maker.

Conclusion The phantasmagoria of The Illusionist and The Prestige disrupt the sense of empiricism and the evidential quality of the image. Yet, strategies of dissimulation also attest to the desire for reality or truth and the boundaries involved in performing illusions. The Illusionist, The Prestige and Now You See Me use misdirection as a further stratagem to disclose what may have really happened until the audience discover that the solution to problems has been a performance of illusionism to mystify and deceive. The films operate to exploit the reality status of what is being depicted. Consequently, there is a movement between illusion and disillusion as illusion suggests separateness from the real. At the same time, the engagement with the audience is in the form of a game or puzzle in the films that invites reflection on its playfulness. As the relationship between the director and the audience is more like that of the magician and the spectator, the aim is to look at things differently: ‘Are you watching closely?’ Such tales of uncertainty rely on narrational complexity that, in turn, can afford new insights into the spectator’s experience of magic. Importantly, the truth in film is not traced in an authenticity within images of secular magic but how it is told and the role of the director to position the spectator to derive visual pleasure from the knowledge we gather or as an exercise of epistemophilia. In this way, if viewers are positioned with the magician, the attempt to

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restore some semblance of order to a disordered world creates a multivalent text that is treated as an elaborate game. Film as a medium is, unlike television, not live and its engagement with the spectator is different in many ways from an electronic medium. Nevertheless, the false binary between the two and the failure to address similarities as much as the differences ignores how each has used secular magic. The relationship of secular magic to screen media can chart the relationship between film and television due to its sense of being-there with the audience. Gunning has already pointed out how film has addressed the spectator in ways that vary from dominant modes of the cinema. It is the ability of The Illusionist, The Prestige and Now You See Me to alter meanings about perception and its multiple uncertainties that demonstrate how distinctive modes offer a range of meanings about liveness, mediation and movie magic.

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This book has shown that secular magic and its use on television and film can heighten an awareness of the difficulties of definition and interpretation of particular types of texts. It is possible to analyse them texturally, but the diverse range of conjuring magic from stage magic to mentalism and street magic demonstrates the challenge of conceiving magic as a set of pragmatics. Instead, it has been shown that programmes by Penn and Teller, Paul Zenon, Simon Drake, Derren Brown, among others, beyond being historicized, operate outside the bounds of the text. The founder of modern conjuring, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, conceived of magic in terms of naturalism and modernity and the absence of any obviously specialized props. Other magicians have adhered closely to this precept and sought to elevate the performance of magic to an art form rather than as entertainment. However, assumptions about entertainment ignore that magic depends on a variability that has made it especially suitable for a medium like television that is capable of constant hybridization. While magic on television has been popular when it has been about the everyday, including the use of catchphrases or workingclass origins of many magicians, it has also reached beyond the everyday. The example of David Blaine is a reminder of how far his acts of endurance depend on transcending the ordinary. The presentation of magic has been sufficiently fluid over time to realize that the medium of television and film either cannot be entirely understood in terms of its specific technology or made increasingly uncertain due to digitalization. This book makes it clear that if the specificities of each medium should be examined, the lack of a stable formation of magic indicates how far critical approaches can go. Rather than relying on core arguments about a

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medium such as television offering a living diegesis, it is possible to develop further discourses about magic that includes its construction of a variety of experiences. From the sense of enchantment offered by David Copperfield to magic presented as a confidence trick by Derren Brown and the requirement to search for deception, magic both mystifies and demystifies. The emotional and psychological engagement of secular magic with the belief system of its audience on both television and film can be understood as to how it expresses particular desires, often about transmutation of the self and the transcendent. The seguing of magic into other discourses and, as an example of hyperdiegesis, its representation using the concept of televisionland touches upon further discourses as it becomes conceived in terms of a lived experience. This book has shown how these discourses help to demonstrate the social and historical contexts within which the cultural practice of television operates within, and how secular magic has transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary, as well as the extraordinary into the ordinary using a co-existence of forms. As we have seen, magicians offer a repertory of magical acts that incorporate a series of modalities within their programmes that are structured by narratives of the self that empower while overcoming the multiple uncertainties that form a feature of contemporary living. Magic seeks to empower its audiences by juxtaposing its transcending possibilities against the social conditions of contemporary existence. At the same time, the presentation of reality has become formatted according to screen media specifications: magic on television has become a site of shifting bodily drives and experiences. This is also visible on film, albeit in different ways. The use of a complex narrational mode in film has provided ‘live magic’ the means to derive authenticity from the general unpredictability of the concept of persona in the guise of Edward Eisenheim or Alfred Borden. The quest for authenticity has been managed on both television and film using the idea of game-worlds. In this way, for example, it is possible for a magician such as Derren Brown to devise a space that is executed within fixed limits of time and space whose rules declare the space to be different from ordinary life. Such a space functions as a game that equates self-disclosure with authenticity, although play is not always associated with desirable

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experiences, which is evident in Brown’s Trick or Treat or Pushed to the Edge. The use of simulation within the game-world is the dominant mode of Brown’s mentalist acts where stories are top-down and preplanned but knowledge and experience is created by the players’ actions. This model is deployed to overturn a rule-governed world and represents the chaos at the heart of ‘what really happened’. Once the model is set running, it is no longer possible to predict confidently how an act of magic will be completed. This book shows that magic is not about static media texts, but they exist as a set of activities. The forces of narratology and ludology are being brought to bear in each medium as distinct forces and are made to master a complex process of knowledge and experience within the performance of magic. The magician’s interaction with the audience creates a space in which the boundary between fantasy and reality is explored as it becomes less precise and more flexible. The moving image has been stretched and reshaped where imagination and creativity can be pursued with an emphasis on the self and identity. This emphasis has been used in this book to address concerns about medium specificity, including complicating ideas about critically dominant realist traditions. These concerns on television began with the desire to preserve a sense of liveness when magic initially appeared on the small screen; the everyday normality of television was disrupted by magic until the completion of the conjuring act when normality would be restored. Since then, the phenomenological sense of presence through which the user feels corporeally linked to the world has been used to raise questions of embodiment and subjectivity within contemporary magical acts. Performances by magicians cannot be understood any longer as a contrived spectacle for the purposes of entertainment. The rhetoric of many types of experience, especially of trauma, has been adapted to magic to offer a greater sense of reality. Similarly, the equation of surveillance with self-actualization continues to provide a renewed sense of the spectator being connected with the subject and the provision of an authentic experience. The popularity of magic on television is assured. It is likely to be adapted again to satisfy future needs, while it continues to focus on scepticism and belief and blur the boundaries between rationality and irrationality – transforming realism and evoking reinterpretation and multiple explanations.

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The continued negotiation between television and film and the appearance of magic on newer forms of communications, including the internet, will be forthcoming developments where the values of entertainment will once more be adapted. One thing is certain: the power of deception has never been more uncertain.

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Filmography 50 Greatest Magic Tricks, originally broadcast 6 May 2002. The Assassin, originally broadcast 21 October 2011. The Grim Game, released 1919. The Illusionist, released 2006. The Magic of ABC, originally broadcast 7 September 1977. Magic of David Copperfield, originally broadcast 3 April 2001. The Magic of David Copperfield VIII, originally broadcast 14 March 1986. Magician Impossible, originally broadcast 7 July 2011. Magic Man, originally broadcast 10 May 1998. The Master Mystery, released 1918–1919. Mindfreak Uncut, originally broadcast 2 November 2005. Mindfreak Uncut: Buried Alive, originally broadcast 20 July 2005. Never Mind the Buzzcocks, originally broadcast 24 October 2011. Now You See Me, released 2013. Paul’s Tricky Christmas, originally broadcast 30 December 1999. The Prestige, released 2006. Pushed to the Edge, originally broadcast 12 January 2016. The Secret Cabaret, originally broadcast 29 January 1992. Street Magic, originally broadcast 9 May 1997. Trick or Treat, originally broadcast 13 April–18 May 2007. The Tonight Show, originally broadcast 9 October 1981. Tonight with Jonathan Ross, originally broadcast between 1990 and 1992. Turning Tricks, originally broadcast 18 November 1998. The Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller, originally broadcast January–February 1994.

Referenced but not accessed The Vanishing Lady, released 1896.

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Index Abagnale, Frank 78 ABC 43, 48, 59, 85–6 Adorno, Theodor 119 Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The 45 aesthetic of amazement 8 After Dark 78 Airline 90 Alexandra Palace 36, 43 Alger, Horatio 31, 57 Allen, Robert 142 Amazing World of Kreskin, The 107 American Idol 95, 112 amusement art 28 Amusing Ourselves to Death 105 Angel, Criss 2, 6, 14, 32, 67, 88–95, 103, 123 Angier, Robert (aka The Great Angier) 146–8, 151 art of enchantment 7 art of illusion 2 Arts and Entertainment Network (A&E) 90 Asphaleia stage 38 Assassin, The 109 Associated Television (ATV) 37 Atlas, J. Daniel 152–4 attractions, magic as 131–4 audience participation 6 authorship 55 Bailey, Michael 40 Bakewell, Joan 17 Bakshy, Alexander 27 Banana Bandana 60 Barthes, Roland 19, 58, 134 Basso, Andrew (aka The Escapologist) 154 Bazalgette, Peter 97 Bazin, Andre 11, 18–19, 25, 123, 134, 143–4 BBC 51, 52 Beck, Ulrich 87

being there, sense of 37 Berglas, David 40 Big Brother 113 Birds, The 60 ‘Bizarre Magick’ 77 Blaine, David 1, 2, 7, 14–15, 25, 32, 67, 70, 81–9, 90, 94–6, 98–9, 103, 111, 120, 150, 159 Blankety Blank 57 blue-collar soap opera 89–95 Bondebjerg, Ib 87, 88, 92 Bongo, Ali 51, 55 Booth, Walter R. 130 Borden, Alfred 146–8, 150–1, 160 Bordwell, David 14 Brewster, Sir David 128 Britain’s Got Talent 154 British Magic Circle 42, 49, 73 Brown, Derren 3, 7, 108–11, 112, 125–6, 137, 159–61 Brown, Ian 97 Bullshit! 83 Bura, Bob 48 Burger, Neil 8, 134, 139–40 Buried Alive 81, 93 Burnett, Al 22 Buscombe, Ed 59 Café Continental 22, 42–3, 74 Caine, Michael 4, 138 Caldwell, John 94, 154 Camera Lucida 19, 134 Canasta, Chan 6, 51–4, 63, 109 Candid Camera 111, 114–15 Candid Microphone 114 Capra, Frank 64 Cardini 31, 42, 44, 46 carnivals 10 Carson, Johnny 23 Carter, Gary 77

174

174 Casa D’Escalta 43 Castle, Terry 128 Catch Me if You Can 78 Cavell, Stanley 112 CG (computer-generated) effects 134, 140–2, 144, 149, 154 Channel 4 56, 58, 68, 72–3, 75–8, 95, 105–6, 109, 111, 126 chaos and comedy magic 71–7 Charlie’s Angels 59 Chauncey 48 Chester, Giraud 26 Christopher, Milbourne 42 Clash of the Titans 152 closed circuit television (CCTV) into TV programmes 111–12 Cloud, Colin (aka The Deductionist) 154 Clouzot, Henri 129 Cody, Sebastian 78 Collingwood, R. G. 27–8 comedy magic, see chaos and comedy magic Como, Perry 50 confidence trick 7 conjuring magic 5, 10, 23–7, 42 conjuring tricks 2 Cooper, Alice 79 Cooper, Tommy 48, 50 Copperfield, David 3, 6, 25, 27, 29, 56, 59–61, 64, 66, 73–4, 81, 85, 155, 160 Criss Angel Mindfreak 90 CSI 124 cultural discourse, magic as 8 Culture and Society 28 cup-and-ball trick 10 Daily Mail 80 Daily Telegraph 80 Daily Variety 91 Daniels, Paul 14, 16, 23, 30, 51, 55–8, 64, 69, 72, 75, 126, 139 Darnell, Nani 30 David Blaine: Street Magic 86 David Nixon Show, The 6, 50, 55 Death and the Maiden 141 Derren Brown: The Experiments 109

Index Derrida, Jacques 11, 116, 122 Devant, David 57 Dickson, Antonia 129 Dickson, W. K. L. 129 Dienes, Zoltan 109 digitalization 144, 159 Dircks, Henry 38 discourses 4–7 disgust and horror magic 77–81 disillusions 134–6, 156 ‘Dive of Death’ 82 Dog the Bounty Hunter 90 Dovey, Jon 112 Drake, Simon 58, 77–9, 159 Dreams and Nightmares 3 Drowned Alive 84 du Maurier, George 106 Dyer, Richard 31, 99 Dynamo 6, 25, 67, 70, 85, 88, 95–103, 123, 155 Dynamo: Magician Impossible 96 Edison, Thomas 129 Ed Sullivan Show, The 30, 50–1 Eisenheim, see The Illusionist electronic image 3 electronic textuality 14 Ellis, John 4, 12, 19–21, 82–6, 105–6, 155 Elsaessar, Thomas 148 Elsey, Dave 124 Empire 115 Endemol 77, 97 Eshanee 120–1, 123, 125 Essex, Francis 36 Experiments, The 109, 111 Eye 152 Face to Face 52–3 Fantastic Orange Tree 139 Farrell, Kirby 84 Ferdinand, Rio 97 Festival of Magic 43–49, 51, 72 Fetveit, Arild 70 Feuer, Jane 10, 12, 19 Fielding, Noel 97

175

Index Fifty Greatest Magic Tricks 56 film delivery in 2 and magic 127–31 F Is for Fake 81 Fisher, John 55–6, 69 Focus on Hocus 40 For My Next Trick 55 Four Horsemen, The 152–4 Frayne, Stephen 67, 95–7, 99 Freeman, John 52–4 Freeman, Martin 122 French, Dawn 73 Frozen in Time 81 Fry, Stephen 73, 98, 109–10, 122 Funt, Allen 114, 121 Furedi, Frank 94 game shows 13, 14 Garrison, Garnet R. 26 gimmick 52–4 Gorman, Justin 109 Grade, Michael 78 Grade, Sir Lew 37, 43 Grand Guignol 79, 80 Grierson 71 Grim Game, The 132–3 Gunning, Tom 130–2, 138, 157 Hall, Stuart 72, 86 Hall, Trevor 146 Hancock, John 44 Hancock, Tony 52 Harbin, Robert 46, 51 Hardwick, John 48 Harris, Anita 50 Harris, Rolf 48 Hartley, John 12, 13 Hayward, Leland 44 Heath, Stephen 66, 75 Heilmann, Ann 147 Henning, Doug 23, 25, 27, 38, 56 Hey Presto! 48 Hidden Persuaders, The 85 Hill, Annette 70–1, 97 historical antecedents, of magic 9 historical conditions 10

175

History of the Kinetoscope, Kinetoscope and Kineto-Phonograph, The 129–30 Hitchcock, Alfred 60 Hollywood, being-there in 152–6 Home, Daniel Dunglas 146 horror magic, see disgust and horror magic Houdini, Harry 76, 132–3 Huizinga, Johan 113 hyper-reality 149 hypnotism 7, 105–8 Hypnotism Act 1952, The 107 iconography of magic 5 Igor Studios 124 illusionism 7–8, 10, 134–6, 155–6 Illusionist, The 8, 131, 133–140, 142–145, 149, 153–54, 156, 157 Illusionists 1903 – The Golden Age of Magic, The 153 Illusionists 2.0 – The Next Generation of Magic, The 153 Imbruglia, Natalie 97 immediacy, sense of 4 Incredible Hulk, The 152 independent television (ITV) 36 innovation, in television entertainment 65–7 Interview with the Assassin 134 It’s Magic 48, 50 Jack Paar Tonight Show, The 51 Jacobs, Jason 41 James, Kevin (aka The Inventor) 154 Janelle, Don 20 Jay, Ricky 80, 140–1 Jedi Master 115 Jermyn, Deborah 111 Jillette, Penn 6, 26–7, 72, 75–7, 83, see also Penn and Teller Kellison, Daniel 85 Kennedy, Robert E. 133 kinescopes 41 Kinetoscope 129 Kinetoscope project 129

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176 Kingston, Chris 123 Knievel, Evel 84 Kompare, Derek 60–1 Kotha, Ramakrishna 16 Kovacs, Ernie 45 Kracauer, Siegfried 143, 155 Kresge, George 107 Kreskin 107–9, 120 Lacey, Nick 12–13 Lamont, Peter 146, 148 Landy, Joshua 87 La Valley, Albert 149 legerdemain 9 Leterrier, Louis 8, 152 Lewis, Lennox 97 light entertainment 5, 35–6, 38, 48 Lime Grove studios 40 Lionet, Jeanin 79 Little Britain 98 Littleford, Matthew 95 live entertainment 5 live performances/programmes 4, 17–23, 38, 49 London Comedy Store 68 London Palladium 43–4 London Society for Psychical Research 52 Lucas, Matt 98 Mad Max 78 Magee, Debbie 30 magical effects classification 13–14 Magic Box 50 Magician Impossible 70, 97–100 Magic Land at Allakazam 48, 49 magic lantern 1, 127–8, 130 Magic Man 85, 90 Magic of ABC, The 59–60, 85 Magic of David Copperfield 61 Magic of David Copperfield VIII, The 60 Maltese Falcon, The 59 Manchurian Candidate, The 106, 109 Marsh, Marguerite 132 Maschwitz, Eric 53 Maskelyne, John Nevil 57 Master Mystery, The 132–3 McAllister, Bob 48

Index McKinne, Merritt 152 McLuhan, Marshal 19 mediated magic 137–45 medieval village fair 10 Melies, George 130, 141 mentalism 3, 6–7, 9, 51–3, 107–13, 116, 121, 125–6, 152, 159, 161 metatextual analysis 6 Mike Douglas Show, The 107 Millhauser, Steven 135 Mind Control 111 Mindfreak 89–95 Mindfreak Uncut 90, 92 mind-reading illusionist 51 Minow, Newton 28, 105 misdirection 148–52 modern conjuring 8 motion picture industry 3 movie magic 7, 137–45 moving image 2 Mr Rogers’ Neighbour 60 Munart 80 Mysterious Stranger 85 narratives 4, 12 NBC 44 Nead, Lynda 129 Never Mind the Buzzcocks 97 Newman, Andrew 109 New Society 105 New Statesman 52 New York’s Center Theater 43 night-clubs 10 Nixon, David 23, 48–51, 54–5, 57, 63 Nolan, Christopher 8, 145, 149 Norton, Edward 141–2 Now You See Me 8, 131, 134, 145, 148, 152–7 Office of Communication (Ofcom) rules, regaring hypnotism 107, 110 O’Horan, Mervyn 75 Open the Box: About Television 74 Oprah Winfrey Show, The 82, 89 optical tricks 38, 127 Oscar 124

177

Index Palladium 57 Pan Yue Yen Troupe 48 Paris Festival of Magic 51 Paul Daniels Magic Show, The 14, 55, 57, 69, 72, 75 Paul’s Tricky Christmas 69 Pebble Mill 48, 55 Penn and Teller 2, 16, 24, 26, 58, 71–7, 80, 83, 88, 99, 102, 159 Penn and Teller: Fool Us 23, 32 Pepper, John Henry 38 Pepper’s Ghost 38, 142 Peters, John Durham 101 Philipsthal, Paul de 128 Pierson, Michele 140 Pinewood Studios 124 Pitchford, Richard 42 play 113 Pledge 156 Poe, Edgar Allan 132 Pollock, Channing 43, 74 Pope, Dick 133, 137, 140–1 Postman, Neil 58–9, 85, 105 prestidigitation 6–7, 9 Prestige, The 4, 8, 131, 133–4, 137–8, 140, 145–8, 149–50, 155–7 Prince, Stephen 144 Principles of Art 27 Producer’s Showcase 44 Psycho 59 puppetry 48 Push 122 Pushed to the Edge 108, 113, 115, 121–5, 161 radio 21 Radio Times 48 Radstone, Susannah 84 Ralston, Aron 84 Randi, James 73, 80 Raven, Jamie 154 realism 1–3, 19, 144 reality as entertainment 15 reality programming 16 recorded programmes 5, 39–42 re-enchantment 89–95 Reeves, Henley 152

177

Reithian 36 Reveen, Peter 108 Richard and Judy show 95 Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugene 8–11, 15, 29, 30, 38, 42, 79, 81, 131, 139, 141, 159 Robinson, Geoffrey 39, 48 Rodowick, D. N. 144 Rogers, Fred 60–1 Rooftop Rendezvous 43 Roosevelt, Eleanor 35 Root, Jane 74 Rose, Brian 30, 44 Rosen, Harold 107 Ross, Jonathan 72 Roy, Marvyn 43, 155 Royal Variety Show 57 Russia Today 100 Saler, Michael 87 Saturday Spectacular 42–3 Secret Cabaret, The 77–81 secular magic 2–4 spectacle and liveness in 61–3 Seinfeld, Jerry 75 self-actualization 6, 16, 67, 82, 103, 110, 161 self-branding 112 Septembre, Rene 46 Shirley Bassey’s Variety Show 55 Showtime 50 Si, Li King 46 Siegel, Lynn 22 Sinatra, Frank 106 Sing Si 47 Skeptical Inquirer 108 Skirrow, Gillian 66, 75 ‘sleeper agents’ 109 sleight-of-hand 9 Soirees-Fantastiques 29 Soo, Chung Ling 147 Spanos, Nicholas 108 Speigel, Herbert 107 spirit photography 128 St. George’s Hall 57 stage hypnotism 7, 106, see also hypnotism stage magicians 3, 6 stratagem 8

178

178 street magic 2, 6, 14, 15, 25, 39, 86, 96, 132, 159 authenticity 67–71 Street Magic 86, 90, 98 Stromboli 51 Substitution Trunk 149 Sunday Night at the London Palladium 37, 42–3 supernatural possibility 15 surveillance technology 7 Svengali 109 switchcraft 50–1, 54 Takayama, Cyril 16 talk shows 13 taxonomy, of magic 10 technique of novelty 3 telefilm 4 telerecordings 41 televised magic 6, 9–17 television delivery in 2 entertainment, magic as 9 genres 12 and hypnotism 105–8 and nostalgia 57–61 mode and expanded function of 23–7 surveillance 111–13 television flow 12 televisionland 57–61, 66 television shaman 7, 81–9 Television Theatre 50 Teller, Raymond 6, 72, see also Penn and Teller Tesler, Brian 36–7 text, limits of 11 Thames Television 50 theatres 22 theatrical magic 3 Thumim, Janet 35 Tiller Girls 37 Tonight Show 23 Transported Man trick 149–52

Index trickery 49–54 Trick or Treat 68–9, 108, 110–13, 115–21, 122–3, 125, 161 Tricky Business 68 Trilby 106, 120 Turning Tricks 68–9 TV Guide 61 Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller, The 72–6, 102 Vanishing Lady, The 141, 27–32, 40, 42 Variety 5, 27–32, 40, 42 vaudeville 5, 10, 27, 29 Vaudeville Productions 125 Vertigo 81 Waldman, Ronnie 35–6, 51 Wall Street Journal 64 Ward, Bill 36 Warshow, Robert 11 Watch 95–8, 100 Weber, Max 136 Welles, Orson 81 What’s My Line? 35, 49 Whirligig 39, 42, 48 Who’s Who 97 Wilder, Jack 152 Willet, Irving 132 Williams, Raymond 12, 28, 66, 67 Williams, Robbie 122 Willis, John 78 Wilson, Mark 30, 48 witnessing 145–8 Won’t You Be My Neighbour? 60 Wonderama 48 X-Factor 125 Zenon, Paul 67–9, 159 Zimbardo, Philip 114 Zombie, Rob 94

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