Dear Jerxy: Defining Reality
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Dear Jerxy: In the early days of your site you often made disparaging comments about magicians or mentalists who tried to pass themselves off as the “real thing.” More recently it seems like you’re trying to do the same sort of thing. For instance, in your posts on the subject of failure, it seems like the idea was to use failure to make people really believe there is something “magical” or “impossible” happening. What caused the change of heart?
Sincerely,
What’s Real And What’s Not?
Dear WRAWN: I’ve tried to explain this in the past, but perhaps not completely clearly. I don’t believe I’ve had a “change of heart,” about this subject as you put it. I’ve just been perhaps focusing on it from different perspectives.
I still think there’s something wrong with you if you want your performance to be seen as a demonstration of real powers. It seems like a character flaw—or at the very least incredibly low self-esteem—to want someone to truly believe you have skills or abilities which you know you’re faking.
Let’s look at mentalism specifically, as that is where you are more likely to find someone suggesting what they’re doing is real. Not many people are saying, “I actually have the power to make this rope lift up when this other rope on a completely different ‘chinese stick’ is pulled.”
“Bear witness, my child, to your new God’s terrifying powers!”
I can understand the desire to want people to believe you’re great at mentalism (that is, the art of pretending to read people’s minds). I can’t understand the desire to want people to actually believe you can read minds. Especially if you’re performing socially. I think it may come down to something I wrote about in the last post: the difference between a goal of recognition vs. connection. Claiming to have genuine powers you don’t really possess may be a way to get recognition, but it will create a barrier to connection.
But what about all the effort I put into getting people to feel like genuinely impossible things are actually occurring? If I don’t want people to think it’s real, then why bother with that?
Here is my logic… consider these two scenarios:
1. You put up a video on YouTube that has been edited flawlessly in such a way that it makes it seem like you made 1000-free throws in a row. And you tell everyone this is a real feat you accomplished.
2. You put up a video taken by a drone of you shooting a basket from one edge of town to a hoop a mile and a half away. And you put a bunch of effort into making the video unimpeachable. There is no indication of any editing. Other than the fact that it’s completely impossible, it looks 100% real. And you never imply that it’s not real. The video description says, “It took 14 tries, but I finally hit this shot.”
In the first case I would consider you a pathetic weirdo, in the second I would see you as an artist working in the medium of the impossible. I don’t have an issue with a performer who puts a lot of effort into getting people to feel as if something everyone knows is impossible is actually real. To me that’s a very worthwhile endeavor that doesn’t seem manipulative in any destructive way. I discuss this more in the post Feeling and Belief.
Perhaps if you saw me perform a single piece of mentalism in a vacuum, you might think, “Hey, he’s really trying to get them to believe he has the power to read their mind.” But performing socially usually means performing for people who aren’t seeing one trick in a vacuum. They’ve seen a number of tricks over time. And taken as a whole they understand the nature of what they’re seeing. They’re unlikely to think, “Well, there was the time he showed me a trick about a ghost dog who cut the deck to my card, and then there was the time he turned a red sponge ball into a red sponge cock, but now here… where he’s saying he’s reading my mind… you know, I think he’s really doing it!”
The people I perform for regularly are expecting fiction. Hopefully it’s one that they get carried away by to a certain extent, but I’m not trying to seriously reframe reality.
And if I’m performing for someone who doesn’t know quite what to expect, then I make it clear from the start what I’m claiming my abilities are. It’s very satisfying for me to say, “This is fake,” and have it feel very real to them.
Here’s where it might get confusing.
Yes, I want to establish the basic understanding that my interest is in magic and tricks, and that I’m not claiming any actual supernatural powers or anything like that, and that the things they’re taking part in are fiction.
However, once that has been established, I figure, screw it, everything else is now fair game.
So then I include a number of presentational elements that are designed to intrigue the audience and muddy the waters and add some mystery back into this thing I’ve told you was completely fake. There might be intriguing failures, or weird repercussions to a trick. There might be a story about how I learned the trick or a technique that’s used that seems fantastical, but also perhaps somewhat plausible. Are we really texting some world-class magician? Am I really a part of some secret society? Do I really have a headache? Was that really just a coincidence? And so on, and so on, and so on.
The way I think of it is like a good Halloween haunted house attraction. You pay your admission fee and in your mind you know this is a fake haunted house that they built for the month of October, yet they still can instill genuine fear in you. Somehow your mind is capable of both knowing it’s fake and being scared for your life simultaneously. Likewise, I want the people I perform for to know deep-down that it’s a trick, but despite that have I want them to feel genuine wonder and mystery at the same time.
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