Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/30/magician-and-audience-make-two.html
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hmm… is it just me, or anyone else having a hard time believing they weren’t actors, as well…?
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Yeah the second guy is too “actory”. More importantly how did he make the first guy disappear? That’s the amazing part.
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Not to mention he never made the first guy re-appear!
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There is the part at the beginning where a stooge is vanished, which looks amazing and is the only illusion here. Then there are a bunch of actors pretending to be a part of a mentalism trick–including the second invisible stooge. I can’t believe anybody is as stupid as he and the other stooge appear. Did the ‘invisible’ persons not see the camera crew following them around? So, if ‘Magic for Humans’ is willing to fake the second part, I assume they are also willing to fake the vanishing illusion here with video editing. The reason for filming tricks in front of a crowd is to sell that it actually happened as the camera sees it. But everybody in the crowd was in on it, so you can’t trust that part. This is basically what Priest called ‘The Pledge’ in ‘The Prestige’, and Glen David Gold discussed at length in Carter Beats the Devil.
It leaves me uninterested even if they carried it out with conventional means. It is sort of like the ‘now you see me’ movies–a narrative about a magic trick full of CGI tricks.
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It’s definitely possible the mark was an actor, but I’m not sure. I think when people are faced with a conflict between what they are thinking (e.g physics, invisibility is impossible) and what they are experiencing with their senses, it is much more natural to think your ideas must be wrong than your senses—especially when you have a whole bunch of seemingly independent people confirming your senses. It takes a lot of stubbornness to be really sure of certain ideas in the face of contrary evidence.
Edit: Ok, my willingness to entertain the idea that the mark might not be an actor has expired. Both are definitely acting. I think everyone is an actor. Even the audience is not behaving like people randomly recruited from Craig’s list. (Note the magician says he put an ad in Craigslist—but he doesn’t say these are people from that ad, or that the ad wasn’t for actors). They are all behaving like actors. The real target of the trick is not the person becoming invisible, but the TV viewer.
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Good point. There’s an invisible man running around out there.
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If I were doing this, I’d do it indoors and have the entire environment altered like The Upside Down or something similar. Maybe have some other “invisible” spirits there, desperately trying to communicate, then being chased by a giant horned demon. (Doug Jones cameos.)
Then just as the demon notices the subject, we whip them back to “visibility”, the audience claps like it’s a little 15 second lark of a thing. I wink mischievously.
An assistant leads them off stage, acts bewildered about anything they say, and points to the next person having the trick done hiding in a crawlspace “just like they did.”
Six days later, the demon knocks on their front door.
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I agree, but it also seemed as if they were over-playing it…
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This.
Of course they’re both in on it.
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Yeah. I started watching this show the other day but stopped because it didn’t seem genuine at all. I feel like a lot of these TV magicians have a very narrow definition for what constitutes a “camera trick”.
It’s like when David Blaine did his levitation trick in Street Magic and made it look like he was a foot off the ground (from several camera angles) when in fact he was performing a simple illusion that relies entirely on the viewing angle being perfect (and only raises you up as far as you can lift yourself with your toes). He justified it by saying the effect of the exaggerated illusion on TV viewers was equivalent to the real illusion on live viewers.
But maybe I’m just getting too cynical as I get older.
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Assuming for the moment that the mark was not an actor, having the cameras out in the open when the mark arrives and discovers the scene, would just make him think the act was being filmed for TV. He knows he isn’t part of it because he just happened across it.
(But also, it is really easy to hide small TV quality cameras these days, so it’s not clear to me they couldn’t have a lot of hidden cameras around—see lots of other hidden camera TV shows.)
I’m not saying it definitely wasn’t fake, I’m just saying the camera argument isn’t a good argument.
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+1 to them being in on it. How do these invisibles not notice they cast a shadow while the stooge does not? And +1 to their (invisible #2 more than #1) expression of irritation pretty much smacking of acting.
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Watched it and came away convinced that they both were actors based on their performance. I fancy myself skeptical and perceptive.
What never occurred to me is the much more obvious point of the camera crew. I’m so culturally conditioned to receive video documentation as authentic, or maybe to assume that people live with cameras in their faces at all times, that I never considered the plain implications of how this footage was captured in the first place.
I was scammed by a short-change artist about twenty years ago when I worked at Kinko’s. I knew exactly what was happening from the moment he first asked for change. But I thought I was smart. I thought “the first step to avoiding a trap is knowing that a trap has been set.” I was very wrong. He walked away with $50 from the till while I stood there feeling proud of myself.
That’s what moving images are in 2018. They are an obvious trap set to sell you something or manipulate your read on reality. You know this. It doesn’t help you.
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Jumping in to say Carter Beats the Devil is fantastic and I wholly recommend it!
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What struck me immediately was the fragility of the trick. You’re telling me that you can assemble a crowd and a spectacle in a public place and somehow control the general public such that only one rube at a time can join the fun? If my drunken park buddies and I stumbled across this scene, you better believe there’d be some loud wtf-ing going on.
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If no one can see you, why wear clothes? I would be doffing those and performing lewd acts.
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Totally. They both look like really, really bad actors to me.
The joke is on anyone who thinks that anyone really thought they were made invisible, I think.
In addition, the first invisible guy holding the soda can was so terrible as you can see it swinging from wires. Even the other invisible guy would have been going “ok, that looks fake af, there’s no person there.” Instead he has a (fake) amazed look on his face.
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