Bizarrely, I Have More to Say on the Matchbox Penetration
/I never thought I'd be doing multiple posts on block penetrations… but here we are. Apparently it's something people were eager to talk about if my email inbox is any indication.
The problem with these tricks—as mentioned in previous posts—is that they ask a lot of spectators. They have to be certain of what they saw to understand the true power of the effect. And the way it's typically presented, magicians don't establish that certainty.
I tested this out with a Digital Focus Group last week.
Twenty people watched this video.
At the end they were asked: "On a scale of 1-100, how certain are you that you saw all the sides of the matchbox?"
Answers clustered in the 50-80 range with a couple even lower. No one was 100% sure.
But Andy, he shows the box so cleanly.
Yes. If you know what to look for he does. That's my point. Spectators' minds are not video cameras. They need to be cued what to look for before it happens.
Unlike most tricks, these penetration effects have such satisfyingly complex secrets that allow you to be very clean in performance. But if you don't do something to highlight that cleanliness, people will just think, "Oh, the block must have been sticking out the side of the box that he didn’t show me, and then he pushed it fully in somehow." Or they’ll think you somehow snuck it in the box at some point.
That wouldn't work as a method.
You and I know that. Other magicians know it. Spectators, however, will consider anything.
I once performed Out of This World for an intelligent friend of mine. At the end she said, "You must have switched the packets." She thought I somehow invisibly switched four semi-spread packets of cards without her noticing. Spectators will consider anything that lets them dismiss the effect.
This is the issue I was attempting to address in this Salvage Yard post and this post on Weaponizing Contradiction.
Here are a couple of other approaches sent in by readers…
Louis G. writes:
The framing can be anything, from picking up something from one person in the group or asking for mundane help and one person volunteers. The rest are simply hanging out.
You give this person a pen and paper, and tell them to push it through, focusing on the feeling of the pen *piercing through* the paper*. *Then you give them different objects to pierce through and to pierce through with (ideally sth similar to what you're going to use later on to perform the trick). While they do this, you go back to the other people and explain to them that you read about a way to "prime" people so that you look like you perform real magic when you're only doing the stupidest tricks. You show them an example here, by doing a "penetration trick" with the gimmicked props where an object clearly passes *behind* rather than *through.
*Then you go to the person who has been primed and say something like "now I'm going to do the piercing and you simply watch and focus as if you were the one doing it" and perform the penetration trick with your back turned to the rest of the group. The person visibly sees the penetration. But the object is intact as if nothing went through.
And now the fun part begins when both sides of the room have conflicting versions of what just happened. This could be the moment to switch to examinable props as what makes people tick here isn't "how does the trick work?" but "how could you think you saw what you said?" and "of course I saw it go through!".
I think the difficult thing here would be turning your back on people without them thinking you're actually just switching stuff in and out. So the choreography might be difficult.
A related idea is something similar I put in an old issue of the JAMM. You give someone a VR headset, or even just oddly tinted glasses or something. You have him watch the trick through those. "From your perspective, it will look like the match is going directly through the middle of the box. For everyone else they can see it's actually going along the side of it. But isn't it a convincing illusion?"
Of course, everyone else is just seeing the same trick as well without the glasses or VR headset in the way. So it's just a kind of strange moment where they're fooled, but then join in on misleading the other spectator. "Wait, what did you see? It looked like it was going through the middle? Strange. It was clearly going along the side of it."
Steven B. writes:
In Salvage Yard, you wrote:
"I know this doesn't look like much, but imagine it wasn't matches in there. What if it was a block of wood, or ice, or.… imagine something *completely* impenetrable, like a brass block. Then what you're seeing would be truly impossible."
What if the trick isn't the impossible penetration, but it's framed as the penetration is to prove the box is empty, and the act of them imagining something manifests that thing, so have them think about a wooden or brass block in the box, and it appears.
The weakness of this presentation is why not just show them an empty box instead of stabbing a sword into it, but I wonder if there's something to the trick is an exercise in them manifesting reality.
He identified the weakness here. Just show the box empty. That's how you would prove a box is empty.
I think maybe a switch would be the way to go here if you wanted to try something like this.
Talk about a "manifestation exercise." Show a matchbox, empty except for three matches in it. Dump them out. Now switch it for the gimmick.
"Remember the image of the empty matchbox. We can't look into it while manifesting, but we'll place these matches through it as a visual representation of the emptiness of the box." Or something. There's a logic there, I think.
It's so early in the procedure I think a switch wouldn't be that difficult. And the matches do sort of suggest it's still an empty box.
Now I'd allow them to "choose" a material: wood, brass, silver, ice, rubber, etc. A force, of course (DFB, Quinta, Equivoque with small pieces of these items).
"Okay, you selected… brass. So let's imagine a solid brass block in the matchbox. Ignore those matches. Just pretend they're not there, of course."
Focus. Do some quick something-or-other to manifest the block. Pick up the box. Remove the matches and dump out the brass block.
I feel like that has the potential to be very strong. The switch, gimmick, and force are a strong combination. And I think the box sitting isolated on the table, propped up by the matches is a fairer picture than holding it in your hands.
I guess I need to buy one of these now.
Hey, by the way, if you watched that video above, with its very serviceable (on the edge of bland) presentation, and you thought, "Oh shit! That's so good. I need to steal that presentation!" You are, at the very least, creatively bankrupt. And potentially actually braindead.
