Dear Jerxy: Enchantment's Expiration

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Dear Jerxy: So, reading about your evolving interest in enchantment, it occurred to me:

Who are you/we doing these things for?

I love long jokes with oblique punchlines. Everyone who knows me well knows this. Most of my friends, when I start telling a joke, start laughing, not because anything I’ve said is that funny yet (obviously) but because they know I like long jokes. They’re laughing at/about my indefatigability (for want of a better word.) They know what’s coming. Over time, this makes the delivery chapter more fun, and the punchlines progressively less satisfying. You just can’t do something for/to/with a person that many times and have it achieve the same effect. It’s like dropping acid. At some point, it’s like, “I just want to go to sleep."

So, there’s this category of effect your talk of enchantment made me imagine: effects to do for people you’ve done a lot of effects for in the past.

It’s one thing to short-circuit the typical magician/rube model on a stranger or new friend. But how do you extend and grow this thing…?

No matter how inventive your long con is, “I’m a person who’s interested in the blurry edges of our experience,” it has to increase in intensity, it seems to me. That intensity can take unexpected forms, but it makes total sense that Houdini gravitated towards seances and spiritualism — what can’t possibly be a trick?

…

I’m at a point where I can pull off an “I started with card tricks, but look what I found…” and it will seem credible for me, i.e., I can go from fooling to enchantment or eeriness. But once you’ve done that transition, the clock is ticking. Even enchantment is just “enchantment" the third time.

Signed,
Alliterative in Altadena

Dear Alliterative: I’m going to start with your last line and work backwards.

Even enchantment is just “enchantment" the third time.

I think this isn’t quite an accurate statement. But I think it does suggest the problem of making “fooling” people your sole goal in magic.

Feeling “fooled” is a neutral emotion. It can be positive, negative, (or neither) depending on the context of the fooling.

It’s negative when someone fools you to take advantage of you—to steal your money, or your time, or your anal virginity, for example.

It’s positive when it’s used in the context of entertainment, like a twist-ending in a movie.

The mistake that I think we make as magicians is thinking that being fooled is an inherently positive thing. It’s not. It’s easy to convince ourselves that it is though, because we may show someone a very bland trick—a trick that offers nothing more than being fooled— and get a nice reaction from it. We see this all the time in demo videos—a trick that seems sort of average gets a fully freaked out reaction. Well, in part that’s because these people have a camera in their face, and that “inspires” a good reaction in certain people. And it’s also true that being fooled tends to be a positive experience when it’s novel.

If you’re an amateur, and you perform for the same people somewhat regularly, the novelty of simply being fooled can wear off pretty quickly. Sometimes after maybe just a few tricks—even when spread out over time. After that, they can still be fooled, but it can be a much more neutral experience because they’ve become accustomed to that feeling of seeing something inexplicable.

So if you have a trick that just fools, you’re going to want to hope that your spectator isn’t someone who has burned out on the novelty of being fooled.

But enchantment is not a feeling that diminishes, in my experience. It’s inherently positive. At least as we use it in relation to magic tricks.

So saying: Even enchantment is just “enchantment" the third time…

Is like saying, “Even a delicious meal is just ‘delicious’ the third time.” Or, “Even an orgasm is just an ‘orgasm” the third time.” Or, “Even rolling on the floor with laughter is just ‘rolling on the floor with laughter’ the third time.” I don’t think any of that is true. Because these are explicitly positive experiences.

“So you’re saying if you were ‘enchanted’ once every hour of the day for six months, that the enjoyment of that wouldn’t wear off?”

No, I’m saying you couldn’t be enchanted that much. That’s not how the experience works.

You could, however, be fooled every hour of the day for six months by a magic trick. And before the end of that first day, that feeling would cease to truly excite you.

The concern that they could “burn out on enchantment” is, I think, unnecessary. True enchantment (which is different than just being entertained and fooled simultaneously) is such a difficult thing to generate that I don’t think you have to worry about overdoing it.

Now l want to address this sentence:

“No matter how inventive your long con is, ‘I’m a person who’s interested in the blurry edges of our experience,’ it has to increase in intensity, it seems to me.”

I don’t think this is the case. The analogy I’ve used before, because it’s the one I think about most often, is that performing amateur magic should have all the range of a sexual encounter. You can have a romantic, lingering love-making session where your souls intertwine, over the course of an evening until it becomes morning. Or you can slide your hand down her pants in the back of a movie theater. It doesn’t need to always increase in intensity to be memorable and pleasurable. Variety of experience and intensity is probably more important than just constantly leveling up the experience. Magic is the same way.

When I’m lucky enough to really nail someone with a super-strong, immersive trick that takes them on a wild ride over 40 minutes and they’re legitimately questioning their own judgment regarding what’s real or not, I don’t feel the need to follow that up with something even stronger the next time. In fact, I might intentionally show them something that’s just like a neat optical illusion on the back of a business card or something. I want them to feel like they can’t be sure what to expect when they find me moving into a trick. And I find that refractory period is helpful to reset their expectations. Constantly trying to top yourself can be draining and it can make the experience more predictable. So mixing up the intensity is a perfectly valid way to perform, in my opinion. And that’s just one variable we can use to create different types of experiences in amateur/social magic. (In an upcoming post I’ll be going into some others.)

You asked the question “Who are you doing this for?” For me it’s because I’m doing these things with the spectator in mind that I don’t worry about making each moment bigger than the last. I don’t see the trick as a reflection on me. It should hopefully be something worthwhile for the spectator. And because it’s a “gift” in that sense, I don’t need to raise the stakes each time. For the same reason I don’t feel the need to get my girlfriend a nicer present each time I give her a gift. And if she said, “Hmm… I don’t like this. This isn’t as nice as the last thing you got me.” I’d say, “Beat it, bitch,” and find someone else to be the recipient of my efforts.