I recently went to see a one night only touring single showing of my favourite film: Don Hertzfeldt’s it’s Such a Beautiful Day, preceded by a new short musical film from the same animator. My wife came with me and she utterly fucking hated it. Interestingly, she also kind of hated Derek Delgaudios In and Of itself, to my mind one of the greatest magic shows ever concieved.
I also gave my older sibling¹ a copy of the blu-ray of It’s Such a Beautiful Day several years ago as a christmas gift and on boxing day they watched it with their partners and my parents every single one of them hated it.
“It’s depressing,” they say, “It doesn’t make sense,” they exclaim, “What the hell did I just watch?”
So here’s my question: how does one invoke such reactions to a magic show?
So for those of you not in the know, before I conclude my three parter on making magic less appealing, let me give you a quick synopsis of a thoroughly unappealing movie which is my absolute favourite.
A comilation of three short animations, It’s Such a Beautiful Day follows the story of a man named Bill.
Everything Will Be Okay
Opening with a deeply detailed description of a number of minor personal interactions presented in an utterly overwhelming way, we learn that Bill is suffering from some neurological condition. The exact nature of this condition is never revealed but as events continue we realise that at some point we stopped seeing reality and started seeing Bill’s hallucinations caused by his medication, as he first has his mother visit to look after him and is then hospitalised, whereupon he gets better and then goes home.
I’m So Proud Of You
The second section begins opens with a flashback about Bill’s family, starting with his younger brother, his mother, her mother and her mother’s extended family. We learn how all of these people eventually died in unusual, almost nonsensical ways, including Bill’s mother who dies in this chapter. We then see a flash forward to Bill on his own death bed, but with his mind racing Bill is informed by his doctor that he now has a clean Bill of health and on the way home, just as he thinks everything is finally going to be okay, he suffers a sudden relapse and blacks out. his final thought of the chapter is a memory of sitting on the beach as a child, looking out at the ocean, and thinking of all the wonderful things he’s going to do with his life.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day
The final chapter starts with Bill in hospital, undergoing a battery of tests, no longer able to recognise several common objects or remember the faces or names of people he knows or even events from his own life. The doctor explains that in cases like his, the brain fills in the gaps with confabulated memories, similar to the family history stories in chapter 2. Bill goes home under family care and is finally told he doesn’t have long left to live, whereupon his usual walk around the block no longer satisfies him, so he instead rents a car and drives as far as he can, even when he doesnt remember why, returning to his childhood home and then a nursing home where he meets his father, then continues to drive for as long as he can and eventually gets out of the car to lay down in a field and die.
But we are informed, Bill does not die. Rather he lives long enough to learn every language, read every book, create brilliant works of art, father so many children that he can no longer trace the breadth of his own family, and proceed to outlive the human race, the species who come after them and the earth itself, to the point where he drifts through space for eternity, watching all the stars eventually die out one by one.
What Does It All Mean?
My personal interpretation of this film has changed over time. Many of the events we are shown are from the perspective of Bill, meaning obvious hallucinations aside, it is up to us to decide which parts are real and which are not. Similarly it is up to us to decide which of the fake events are hallucinations he experienced in the moment and which are marely false memories confabulated at a later date. The events are told out of order so we aren’t sure if details correlate. Bill ruminates on how many hours of his life he spends doing the same tasks so when we see him perform the same action several time, such as his walk around the block, we can’t tell if these events are far apart. The only thing we can pretty much be sure of is that Bill probably doesn’t actually live until the end of time watching the universe die. That part is probably his final confabulation, the dying stars representing his final neurons going out.
Many people find this film depressing because its the story of someone who loses his family, then his memories and then finally his life, which is alternately punctuated by mundane encounters and extremely unpleasant health crises and subsequent medical interventions. But I am someone who personally suffers from a mundane life punctated by unpleasant health crises and subsequent medical interventions, so that for me is just the baseline of a normal life. Rather I see Bill in his final moments dying in a field and imagining all the wonderful things he will do with his life in the same way he did as a young boy staring out at the sea and it fills me with a kind of radical optimism, that even when everything seems to be over you can hope for something impossible, radical immortality beyond anyone’s expectations, the time to do all the things you have put off until your final breath. I think that’s beautiful.
Before the ending though, what we are shown is that actually there is no real difference between your real memories and the ones you filled in with made up garbage. It’s a hell of a way to recontextualise trauma and overcome past failures. Maybe I’m just weird but this movie which attempts to give the viewer an insight to what it’s like having a degenerative brain problem contains so many insights and philosophical questions about self and memory.
Why can’t you make a magic show like that?
You Can Make a Magic Show Like That, We’re All Just Cowards
Magic has the unique property in that it can blur the line between what is real and what is fiction. I mentioned in an older post that the dictionary definition of confabulation is a fabricated memory to fill a gap in recollection. You know, like in the movie. The magic effect called confabulation is nothing to do with memory. It’s more of a coincidence or prediction effect. But one guy, also mentioned in that post, did a confabulation as a confabulation. Using essentially the same method to instead ask a person their fondest memory and then use the fact that you have it written down as proof that it can’t be real. Like that part in Bladerunner² where Deckard tells Rachael her childhood memories were implanted.
Bladerunner was a masterpiece of cinema and another examination of identity and what it means to be human. In that film suspected replicants are given a test called a Voight Kampff test. Kind of like a Turing test, and we have those in real life. Websites constantly ask us if we’re human. Imagine if there were a way to convince someone they were failing a captcha? Well there is! People use 100th Monkey by Chris Philpott to show off that they can make you forget how to read, but the cards look like early CAPTCHAs³.
The one identity invalidating effect I havent seen anyone manage to replicate is the one seen in the Dr Who episode Extremis, where a book called Veritas asks the reader to think of random numbers, then reveals that those numbers were foretold on the next page. Because the world, and everyone in it is a simulation. This is further proved by revealing that anyone asked to create random numbers will always say the same sequence. That first part could be another confabulation but the second… well I don’t know.
Another episode of Dr Who does a booktest variant to prove that the people present are all participating in a shared dream because reading the same page and line from a book multiple times reveals it to be inconsistant. Lysdexia in Paul Harris’ Art of Astonishment volume 2 will acheive roughly the same thing.
This is a short iterrogation of how to make people question their grasp on their own identity and sense of self, based on the ideas present in media. It is just one alternative way to approach the development of a magical premise, and yet it is pretty much untapped. There are doubtless many others. The world of cinema and literature are full of bizarre premises like this, and very few of them ever leak into performance magic.
So why don’t we have magicians attempting these kinds of effects? I believe it is for two reasons, the first being that as The Jerx points out, most performance is magician centric. That is to say the magician requires the audience to know that they are the source of the magic. This is of course a relatively easy feat, if you’re there presenting a magic show and something strange happens, the natural conclusion is that you caused it. Most magical methods are entirely geared towards obfuscating how you caused it, but they rarely attempt to dissuade the audience that the performer did it. This probably ties into the ego problem in magic and the deep desire of magicians to make themselves seem special.
The other reason is that magic is not an art form, it is a craft. It’s Such a Beautiful Day, Bladerunner and even Doctor Who are made by people with education and experience in the field of humanities studies known as the arts. Literature, acting, screenwriting, acting, film.
I had a tough time coming up with a good example of the difference between arts and crafts and I think I have a good one. If two skilled crafts people can follow the same process and you can’t tell the difference, that’s crafts. If two skilled crafts people follow the same process and you can tell the difference, at least one of them is an artist⁴.
Stencils, stamps, moulds, die cutters, 3D printers… When I was a kid I had a series of plastic discs with slots cut in them which you could turn on a pin and fill each line step by step use to make a perfect picture of Tweety Pie or Sylvester the cat⁵. With each of these you, and indeed anyone else, can produce something with the appearance of art, simply by correctly following a process. Crafts need not be skilless, wood turning is a craft and I’ve seen a lot of near identical wooden bowls. Heck, my wife and I made a pair at a workshop once. But that’s nothing compared to the number of identical ambitious card routines I’ve seen.
Of course its possible to elevate a craft to an art, but in order to prodyce something different you have to colour outside the lines, break the process, try new things, experiment and, worst of all, fail. I don’t mean fail as in get the trick wrong, I mean fail as in all the sleights are perfect but the trick doesn’t land, like telling a joke that just isn’t funny or writing a novel that people get bored of halfway through.
This is how I know Derek Delgaudio’s In and Of itself is art. Not because it was so brilliant that it was universally acclaimed, but because lots of people didn’t like it.
The reason I went to spend a night in hotel in Norwich just to see a cinema screening of a movie I already have on bluray is because alongside It’s Such a Beautiful Day was a short film by the same animator, simply titled “ME”. We laughed, we cried, we were left with awestruck wonder. And by “we” I mean everyone except my wife, who didn’t really get it. That’s how you know it’s art, even though Don Hertzfeldt’s primary medium is the animation of stick figures, which arguably anyone could draw. Despite this, his work is incredible… if you understand it.
In and Of Itself is not a particularly flashy show. I recommend you watch it right now before reading further if you havent seen it.
It has it’s moments but it is at its core an 90 minute monologue punctuated by a sort of coin in bottle, a gambling demonstration with cards, a vanishing brick, a thing with a letter and a full audience psychometry test. There’s also a nice blink and you’ll miss it effect at the very end. 6 tricks total, and when you describe it like that it sounds thoroughly underwhelming. What it actually is is a deeply philosophical treatise on identity and self, explained through the medium of a magic show. Magic is a great medium for this kind of thing because unlike a movie or a novel, the audience can participate in the experience directly.
I’m pretty sure In And Of Itself instils mostly positive experiences in its audience. The recipient of the letter cries but it mostly seems to be happy tears, the person of tomorrow role might be a little annoying but I’d love to go back and see the majority of the show a seond time. The absolute worst thing that might happen to the audience is Derek Delgaudio looks you in the eye and calls you a loser, but only if you called yourself that first.
There’s room to go deeper I think, but to do that you have to risk making the audience feel bad, which will make them not like you as much. This risk is where art resides. Magicians who reach the peak of their career are striving to be the Thomas Kinkades of the magic world. Universally beloved. But magic needs more than paintings of cottages. Magic needs a Hieronymous Bosch and a Francisco Goya, a Bill Plympton⁶ and a Don Hertzfeldt, a David Firth and a Becky Sloan and Joe Pelling.
I think some magicians have known that. Penn and Teller didn’t start cutting live snakes in half because they thought everyone would enjoy it. Rob Zabrecky went from rockstar to potential serial killer for his art. Eugene Burger, may he rest in peace, wrote extensively about the importance of magic having an emotional texture to it, with highs and lows.
The Writing’s On The Wall
The title of this post comes from the music video for an OK Go song. I love the song but the video really is something else. OK Go have had a certain dedication to doing things for real in a single take in their music videos ever since they went viral with their video for an earlier song, filmed in a family back garden for the cost of an afternoon’s camcorder rental. I saw OK Go live a couple of years later and they did the dance from A Million Ways live on stage. It brought the house down, even though they had to perform it to a pre-recorded backing track at an event where all other music was played live.
I would love to be able to experience the warehouse from The Writing’s on the Wall in person. To see the optical illusions and forced perspective effects by walking into the exact right spot for everything to line up. That is what a magic show offers beyond a film or even the theatre. In a magic show members of the audience get to be characters in the performance and feel it from inside, and we have largely squandered that benefit of the art form by limiting the scope of what the relationship between the audience and the magician can be.
We need to be willing to make the audience sad, make them mad, make them hate us and even defeat us in order to grasp the full range of emotions art should be capable of, and we’re never going to achieve that if the primary currency of the craft is applause and laughter, as we try desperately to claw some rizz⁷ from repeating rote actions with a deck of cards like awkward teenagers trying to learn the lindy hop⁸ in order to make our peers think we’re worth paying attention to.
¹ If you encounter mention of a brother in my older posts, rest assured this is the same person, now coming into their true identity as non-binary. Good for them.
² I assume I don’t need to explain the plot of Bladerunner but just in case you’ve only seen the theatrical cut and repressed the memory, Bladerunner is a film about Deckard, a man who hunts down replicants. Replicants are perfect simulations of human beings, only stronger, smarter, and created as adults with a preprogrammed 4 year lifespan. The only way to differentiate them is to use a test of emotional maturity and empathy, the one thing they can’t emulate. In the film Deckard encounters Rachel, a replicant who doesn’t know she’s a replicant, and as such nearly fools the test. This vaguely foreshadows one element of the story only present in the directors cut – the suggestion that Deckard may himself be a replicant and not know.
³ Of course modern CAPTCHAs no longer rely upon warped text against strange backgrounds. Now they ask you to click every picture of a boat or traffic light. To my knowledge no one has released a magic trick that takes away a spectators ability to identify a boat, but I’m sure diffusion illusion AI image generators could be applied to it. Not in my act though, I don’t touch that machine learning garbage.
⁴ Alternately, if two people follow vastly different processeses and you can’t tell the difference, one of them is definitely an artist, like a photograph and a photorealistic painting or a hand carved sculpture of a manufactured object.
⁵ They were called rotadraw and they were all the rage. Kids would compare which cartoons they “could draw” based on which sets they had bought. In that respect it was kind of like a magic club where people show off their magical abilities based on what gimmicks and DVDs they bought.
⁶ I recognise that this is probably the hardest name here to find examples of work for. Bill Plympton is an animator who created such masterpieces as I Married a Strange Person, but in the UK he’s probably best known for doing a Nik-Nak commercial.
⁷ Rizz is gen alpha speak for charisma. I’m in my 40s but I try to keep up with modern lingo.
⁸ The lindy hop is a dance craze which swept america in the 1930s. I contain generational multitudes.