Magic

I think there's two kinds of people in the world, one kind who wants to know how magic tricks work and another who does not. Of course, people change types depending on the kind of trick they're seeing. A couple goes to see a magic show, one is happy seeing David Copperfield's car disappear, the other looks for the strings and mirrors behind the scenes. Yet put those two people in a restaurant and they'll be the opposite, one having no interest in how the food is made, the other sneaking glances into the kitchen. They go home, rent a movie, one captivated in rapt attention while the other is looking at the camera angles, set design, sound, and auteur imprints.

I was thinking about this today, trying to figure out at what point exposing the trickery behind the scenes ruins and when it improves the product. I don't really want to know how Criss Angel does his illusions but I'd love to know how he does his street magic. The last thing I want to see is how the greasy 17 year-olds at Wendy's put together my burgers but when I worked at the Chinese food restaurant, I loved watching the cooks work their sweet and sour skills. Love knowing stories from movie sets about what lines were improvised and who hated whom, but there's nothing more boring to me than watching some white-haired engineer talking about how they had to built a whole city, with a working sewer system and everything, just because they couldn't find a city that, you know, looked right. I don't know how one can unify all those contradictions into a cohesive explanation, except that most couples I know, or am involved with, will contradict each other as often as possible.

What must be universal certainty, however, is how people hate finding out that great art was actually created out of economics. I was listening to a film critic on the radio once talking about how the increasing DVD player and disc sales were affecting film photography. The idea was that DVD sales are so high, and for many the preferred viewing method over the theatre experience, that directors are using more close-up shots in their movies to cater to the smaller size TV screens at home. That kind of takes the artistic pleasure out of movies, doesn't it? I like the idea of directors stomping their foot in their producer's office, refusing to allow his artistic vision to be contradicted. Finding out that they've capitulated to market factors really de-values the viewing experience.

That's kind of annoying, but not annoying enough to warrant a blog post. A better, more aggravating example is with the Transformers movie. No, not the new one, that was awesome, but the 1986 animated movie, which was also awesome. This is a great movie, relatively speaking. Lots of new characters, a truly epic plot, the death of Optimus Prime and Starscream, the evolution and promotion of secondary characters into headliners, and a massive villain worthy of the movie's grand scale. I remember watching this for the first time and being incredibly emotionally involved, far moreso than a 19 year-old should be. But come on! Killing off Optimus Prime and Starscream? That's ballsy. It's the equivalent of killing Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader halfway through Empire Strikes Back, or doing away with Peter Parker and Harry Osbourn. I mean, you're talking about the most important Autobot and second most important Decepticon. That's epic stuff! Congradulations to the filmakers for taking chances and working with the audience's expectations!

Ah, but the backstory cuts out the artistic heart of the movie. The reason they killed off Optimus Prime and the all the rest was because Hasbro was launching a new Transformers toy line featuring a bunch of new characters. The new TV show would feature only the new toy characters, so the writers had to "tie off" a number of the old characters. Pretty weak eh? And Orson Welles voicing Unicron? In declining health during his last film role, Welles really didn't have much idea what he was doing, and was completely oblivious to the cultural phenomenon of which he was excitingly a part.

I guess neither of those are surprises, that companies like to make money or that old people don't care about transforming robots. The appeal of watching a magic trick is that your senses are convinced of something you rationally know to be impossible. Like a computer being presented with statements like "this sentence is a lie," the human brain gets locked in this nexus point between imagination and reality. You can go one of two ways: remain in your state of confused bliss, or attempt to regain your hold on reality and try to make sense out of the incongruity of the experience. It's much the same, I suppose, with old cartoons. You know there's strings and mirrors and marketing ploys that you should be aware of, it's up to you to avoid rooting around backstage after the show's over.