Mail: The Power of Frustrating Logic

I got a bit of a confused email yesterday, but it introduces a point that I want to cover. It’s in regard to the idea I posted on Monday of adding your own notes to Chris Rawlin’s effect Declassified, in order to have a reasonable justification why you won’t just hand over the document at the end of the effect for them to flip through.

The email said:

Rare that I think an idea you come up with is not so good,  but yikes, your justification for the partial examination of the document in Declassified (I don't have it) is pretty lame.

No, no one is ever going to accept that excuse. It will just make them more curious about the document than ever.

"You can then tell them you’ll send them a pdf of the full document if they want to examine the contents more closely. "

No. Would you say, "I can't let you examine this pack of cards, but come by next week and I'll show you one just like it."

Only possible way I could begin to accept that is in a highly structured narrative presentation for one person--you go to the painting of Whistler's Mother's above your bed, move it aside and reveal a wall safe. You crack the safe open and take out the document from there. Maybe, just maybe, then I'll accept the excuse of personal notes too explosive to read, but in a casual setting, no way.

Gotta be a switch, an envelope or folder or something, somehow. They are going to want to look and not be satisfied until they do. —JS

I don’t think anyone else quite misinterpreted the post in this way (I heard from a number of people who own the trick and liked the idea), but just in case, let me clarify things before moving on:

First, writing the notes on the document is not intended to allay suspicion on the document. It's intended to give a story-based rationale for why they can't get a close look at your personal copy of the document. You still give them a look through the doc, showing all the pages as different. That's really all they want to see in that moment. They want to confirm there was lots of different pictures to look at. (If they're thinking "svengali document" you've already lost them.)

Second, the offer to send them a pdf of the document is to reinforce the reality of the document as something that exists in the real world. Again, not to allay their suspicion on my copy of the document. That's why I said it would allow them to examine the contents of the document more closely. So the trick deck analogy is irrelevant. (I've re-written that sentence to remove the word "examine" so people don't misread it similarly.)

Third, putting the document in a safe isn't congruent with my story where I'm someone with an interest in magic, I got a copy of this document, and I've been making notes on how I can use these techniques for mind-reading purposes. I guess if you want to convince people you have state-secrets that they can't look at, that would make sense. But I'm going for something more based in reality.

Think of it this way… If I do a trick involving a photo on my camera roll, I don’t give them free rein to go through my photos. If I do a trick with my Notes App, I don't let them freely look through all my notes. That’s understandable, yes?

So the goal is to turn this from just a print-out of a document to a personal item. One that I’m happy to flip through and show to them. But not something they can have unfettered access to.

I think most people got that, but I wanted to clarify.

Sure, you could put the document in an envelope or folder and switch it, but that doesn’t make the suspicion go away. It just focuses the suspicion on the moment where you’re putting the document in an envelope or folder before giving it to them to examine. Which is similar to doing the shuttle pass before handing something out to be examined.

In this case, I’m not trying to eliminate their suspicion. I’m trying to put a little poison pill into it.

And we do this with a story and a motivation that makes sense.

The thing about saying, “I’ve been keeping some personal notes on this document, so I don’t want to let you look at everything,” is that it’s FRUSTRATINGLY LOGICAL to people watching.

This is the power of a logical story. It’s the power of a reasonable motivation.

The problem so often in magic is that our actions seem unmotivated and unreasonable. “I made these two rubber bands link. But I’m not going to do the most obvious thing and let you look at them in their linked condition. Instead, I’ll ‘magically unlink’ them and then hand them to you to look at.” Oh, okay, Mr. Magician, that makes sense.

But a cohesive story can frustrate an audience by never letting their suspicion coalesce 100%.

This doesn’t mean they’re not suspicious. It just means that they don’t have the comfort of knowing they’re right 100%, because there’s a logical explanation for why they might not be. There’s always that niggling doubt.

If spectators have a little suspicion about something, and there’s no story/motivation in place to counteract the suspicion, then the suspicion takes over completely.

But if they have a lot of suspicion about something, but there’s a logical motivation in place to combat that suspicion, then you at least have a stalemate.

My friend used to do a visual coin bend with a gimmicked coin and a switch at the end. There was always at least a little suspicion at the end on the switch, and that little suspicion ended up killing the effect. “He did something with the coin at the end,” was the feeling.

So then he started performing it this way. He would concentrate on the coin and say it was getting hot. It would begin to bend. “Fuck,” he’d say, “this hurts.” The coin would continue to bend and he’d grimace his way through it. Eventually, he’d say, “Goddammit,” and start shaking his hand in pain and the coin would go flying. After a few seconds, he would go to retrieve the coin from under the couch or behind a chair or wherever he “accidentally” tossed it, and would pull out a normal, examinable, bent coin in the process. “Don’t touch it yet, it’s still hot,” he’d say, and blow on the coin until it had (supposedly) cooled enough that he was comfortable letting them look at it.

Obviously, reaching under a couch allows for much more duplicitousness than just taking the coin from one hand to the other. But because the motivation made sense (“the coin got so hot I dropped it”) they couldn’t dismiss that completely as being part of the deception. It just makes too much sense. It’s frustratingly logical.

Yes, in a perfect world you would visually bend the coin and drop it directly in their hand to look at. In a perfect world you would have them look at any picture in a document, read their mind, and slide the document directly to them for a full examination. But in the real world (the imperfect world), one of the ways to prevent them from latching onto some Easy Answer regarding what happened is to give them a frustratingly logical alternative that they just can’t quite dismiss completely.