by Derren Brown
The Hindu Shuffle
Or at least one East. The other East, meanwhile, is still occasionally and touchingly celebrated by magicians through the portrayal of the fawning, curly-slippered, pointy-hatted laundry worker or comedy mystic, shuffling and bowing intermittently with hands clasped to opposite forearms inside voluminous silk sleeves, who moves on to produce an endless washing-line of flags or undies to the tune of (of course) an Egyptian Sand Dance. Velly solly indeed. Far more extraordinary than any of the illusions these tired and insulting acts can produce is the fact that they can still find employment at all, since magic has now developed a younger, darker, cooler face quite at odds with this painfully outdated yet oddly watchable litter still dredged up for barely sentient audiences at magic ‘gala’ nights occasionally advertised on theatre hoardings along our tired coastlines. Nothing of the glamour and allure suggested by the word ‘gala’ is to be found in the spectacularly low-rent (if bizarrely charming) awfulness of the average magic show. Great acts of course exist – the Edinburgh Fringe hosts a handful of magicians of exceptional talent and originality – but to have a genuine love for magic and wish to be transported by a conjuror is to be almost always disappointed. Imagine if comedy followed the same route: that the tone of stand-up had not changed since 1973, and that everybody told roughly the same jokes.
And women! Since the 1920s, grand illusion on stage has been synonymous with the restraint and mutilation of female assistants, as if the first act a lucky mortal, newly endowed with the ability to overturn the laws of the universe, would wish to carry out would be the casual torture of the fairer sex for our entertainment. Modern cinema is as familiar with this cliché as the conjuring fraternity, and sometimes with a similar capacity for witless mawkishness, but film usually approaches the custom with a dramatic sensibility unknown to most magicians who strap up and stick swords through their frozen-smiling victims purely because questionable convention dictates such unimaginative behaviour. What became an unhappy tradition began rather more spectacularly, in January 1921, with the first Sawing in Half, performed by the conjuror P. T. Selbit, an entrepreneurial giant of magical history who can fairly claim to have been responsible for this most grisly, popular and oft-imitated mise-en-scène of all magic, and to have had the real surname Tibbles, which he sensibly reversed so as not to sound stupid. His flair for the theatrical was the key to his enormous success: when performing his Sawing in Half during a run at a theatre, the publicity-savvy Selbit would rather brilliantly have his assistants slosh out buckets of what appeared to be blood into the gutters outside the playhouse.
Consider those sloshing buckets, for in them resides much of that which is exciting and unique about magic. It was the time of Grand Guignol, a gory form of popular theatre which had become famous for its highly visceral, bloodthirsty visuals. This new French theatre had opened in London a few months before, and presumably appealed to an appetite for naturalistic horror that the real-life bloodshed of the First World War managed to strengthen. But the joy in the buckets of blood has nothing to do with schlock tactics: it resides in the magician’s sensibility towards creating an effect, in his knowing that the buzz created by such a simple but bold bit of business outside the theatre would greatly amplify the spectators’ preparedness to believe events that transpired on stage.
The magician knows that all magic happens in the perception of the audience member; there is no necessary connection between the greatness of a magical piece and either the technical demands or the cleverness of the method behind it. A successful magical career will begin with learning sleights and buying endless tricks, but as he matures, having absorbed many years’ worth of technical knowledge in order to establish a mental encyclopedia of possible means to achieve impossible ends, the performer is likely to eschew tricky and pedantic methods in favour of more gleefully audacious modi operandi. To create a powerful piece of magic through the simplest, boldest method is one of the sweetest pleasures of the craft. Generally, the success of an otherwise childishly simple method relies upon a deception taking place at a level that the audience, when attempting to unravel the means by which the miracle was accomplished, simply wouldn’t even think to question. These are methods that may be considered insulting by the average spectator if he or she were to find them out, yet which succeed as some of the finest methods known to magicians by virtue of the same fact. The best methods are the ones that would never be dreamt of by an audience, and a magician knows that his spectators are more likely to suspect clever and complex methods than brilliantly effortless ones. The method should therefore be the simplest possible, and create the greatest, most disproportionate effect. It may be a crushing disappointment to an enlightened audience member to find out that she had been thinking on an entirely different level, but that is the unavoidable concomitant of such a gorgeously daring subterfuge. Its status as a superior means of achieving the effect is secured by the fact that it consists of the least, and does the most.
As in magic, in science. The finest theories are the simplest ones that explain the most. Evolutionary theory, as Richard Dawkins points out, immediately reads as a better conjecture than Creationism because natural selection is a very simple idea that easily explains a huge amount, namely all of life, whereas a posited supernatural Creator would take far more explanation than the life He is supposed to have created, rendering the latter theory rather unhelpful and topsy-turvy when looked at on its own merits.
Sometimes a bold method may be employed not to create the effect itself, but as a ‘convincer’ – the name given by magicians to describe sub-tricks that act as proofs of the validity of the primary effect. For example, a hoop might be passed over a floating assistant to prove that she is really unsupported. What appears to be a casual demonstration of ‘Look, nothing holding her up!’ may in reality be a very complex procedure and every bit as fascinating in method as the trick itself. It is a secondary piece of conjuring, not presented as a trick, but necessary to convince the audience that the trick they think they are watching (the levitation) is really occurring. Because it is not seen as anything that in itself presents a puzzle to be solved, it usually goes by unquestioned, and the principal piece of magic is made to seem all the more impossible. The audience rarely suspects that a complex, second subterfuge has occurred.
In fact, the history of levitation gives us a great example of one such bold convincer, as described by Jim Steinmeyer in his very enjoyable book Hiding the Elephant. At the start of the twentieth century, a great magician of the golden era, Howard Thurston, performed a levitation that he had bought along with the rest of his act from Harry Kellar, a hugely successful but recently retired fellow American performer. A female assistant was made to float above the stage, and the levitation was contextualised by the type of exotic framing we have already mentioned: it was explained that in certain Indian Temples of Love, such a floating goddess could be seen, and that it was possible for visitors to come and touch her magical bejewelled ring to cast a spell over those they loved. This romantic fairytale scene setting made the levitation all the more mysterious, but Thurston would have been aware that, of course, the audience would suspect some unseen means of support. He developed, therefore, one of the boldest ‘convincers’ I have come across. He would ask a boy to come up from the audience, bring him right upstage and lift him to kiss the ring of the enchanted assistant as his fairy-tale patter reached a touching peak. The child would gape with astonishment, the audience were convinced there were no wires to be seen from any perspective, and magicians were absolutely dumbfounded.
It remained a mystery. Or it did until recently, reports Steinmeyer, when a well-respected magician friend of his began chatting with a fellow diner about magic in a Los Angeles restaurant. This neighbour, as a child, had himself once been invited on stage by Thurston and held up in the magician’s arms to view the floating woman, elegantly proving that there could be no wires. Thurston’s thinking as a showman was revealed as the man described what had
happened. He had been lifted right into a fan of wires which were perfectly obvious to him. But before the boy could react to the supports, the urbane magician, who moments before had been weaving a spellbindingly exotic tale of eternal love, whispered in his ear, ‘If you touch those fucking wires, I’ll kill you.’ The boy had never heard language like it, his mouth dropped open in shock, and the audience, taking his expression to be one of wonder at an improbably airborne female, applauded loudly at the confirmed miracle. The child was far too terrified to repeat to his parents what Thurston had said. And so the miracle was achieved, and achieved every night.
Finishing my brief mix of the cards, I offered them to Joel with a raised-eyebrow expression, thereby wordlessly asking him if he wished to shuffle them too. Happy to help, he took them and shuffled – an encouraging sign of a desire to cooperate playfully. Had I asked out loud whether or not he would like to mix them, I would have interpreted his taking of the cards as a move to establish control of the situation – a potentially tricky customer. The expected and polite response to a verbal offer to shuffle would be a word or gesture that communicated ‘No thank you, I trust they’re real cards and mixed’; to resist that urge and actually demand to shuffle them further is a sign of distrust. However, to take the cards in response to a silent signal from me suggested the opposite: that he and I had an easy rapport, that he understood and would follow subtle cues, and may have a fairly suggestible personality. I imagined that he would perform all the necessary exaggeration in his memory of the trick, which after I had left would turn it into a miracle. At least half of any trick happens after it is over, when the applause has long died and the magician has packed his case and arrived home and is winding down to sitcom, conure and confectionery. This finishing process occurs as the spectator reconstructs the trick, ready to tell his friends; as he edits and deletes all the errors and bias of personal memory; as he ensures the trick sounds impressive enough to enthuse others and save him sounding too easily duped. The magician plants all the seeds needed to ensure that this inevitable process works in favour of a true miracle.
Joel was a good punter. He mixed the cards in the same overhand way, not with particular skill but nonetheless with a deliberate air and a shaky stab at confidence. His efforts caused a silence to hang over the table for a moment, a tension broken by Charlotte whispering a deathly serious ‘Shit, you’re good’, making both Joel and me laugh. His face crumpled and he mimed a retarded, hopeless, clumsy mix with accompanying hapless moans that caused Charlotte to guffaw deeply, then clasp a hand to her mouth in embarrassment at the unexpected timbre of her own sound. This spurred Joel to continue with his unlovely portrayal of mental and physical disability, and to drop his voice two octaves to incorporate an equally cruel impersonation of Charlotte’s mannish laugh. This in turn caused Charlotte to emit the same involuntary sound, which incited more convulsions from us and therefore fuller breathless bellows from her, until she doubled over, both hands thrust between her upper thighs through fear of sudden percolation, which only seemed to amplify her paroxysms and punctuate them with louder, more viraginous and fuller-bellied eruptions.
Meanwhile, Joel’s choice of overhand technique was another sign of rapport and a desire to enjoy the whole experience. Some people, if able, will take the cards and attempt a fancier mix: they cut the deck into two, place the two halves end to end on the table and riffle the short ends together with the thumbs, the cards of each packet (the magician’s term for a group of cards in a pile when not constituting a full deck) neatly interweaving. When this is clearly done to impress, the magician normally makes a mental note that the spectator is not necessarily going to enjoy being fooled and may prove to be a pain. Luckily, having this heads-up at such an early stage allows a deft performer to utilise that challenging nature for the good of the show.
For example, if you were me and were faced with a ‘challenger’ in this way, you might confidently – even arrogantly – tell him that if he were to concentrate on a letter of the alphabet, you would be able to tell him what it is. He should jump at the chance to prove you wrong, and at that point he’ll become every bit as predictable as he is determined not to be. A non-challenging type would think of any letter quite fairly at this point, making your chances of guessing correctly precisely one in twenty-six. The chap (and it is sadly almost always a man) who is determined to catch you out, however, is going to scan the alphabet and, if you have convincingly set it up to feel competitive, settle on Q or Z. He’ll consider these to be the least probable ones anyone would choose. Now you stand a vastly improved chance of guessing correctly.
To cover both options, pick up a pen and paper, and as you stare him in the eye, appear to privately draw his thought. Actually you write a large ‘Z’, without making it clear that you’re doing so.
After this, act as if you are having difficulty reading his mind, then casually screw up the paper and drop it on the table. The feigned uncertainty serves not only a dramatic purpose (by introducing suspense), it also allows for the following ruse, which will bring the trick to a convincing climax.
Say these words: ‘It’s not Q, is it?’ Using an old linguistic trick much employed by psychics (‘He didn’t die in an accident, did he?’), you have covered yourself either way. A negative or affirmative response can be framed as a success. If the answer is a dumbfounded ‘Yes’, then congratulate him on being a good subject as you pick up the discarded paper and put it in your pocket (abandoning your former arrogance here is important, as the success of the effect is meaningless if you are unlikeable with it). If he shakes his head, answer, ‘No, I didn’t think so, but I nearly wrote a Q.’ Push the ball of paper towards him and ask him what letter he chose. Presuming he says ‘Z’, you can still claim an unequivocal success.
If, due to lack of practice on your part or finding yourself with a rare customer, neither is correct,* then apologise and congratulate him on outwitting you. Tickle his ego and plan a greater victory. Or if you prefer, flamboyantly climb upon the table, denounce those watching as the worst sorts of scoundrels, and urinate upon them mercilessly.
* Note, though, your original statement that ‘if he were to concentrate on a letter of the alphabet, you would be able to tell him what it is’. Notice that this statement ascribes some weight to the process of concentration. This is important: not because his concentrating plays any role in reality, but because him thinking he has to concentrate, distracts his attention from whether or not his choice will be predictable. If you merely told him you could foretell any letter he might think of, he might consider things more carefully and come to the conclusion that Q or Z would be a little predictable after all. The distracting business of concentration, which can be played up, is misdirection: he should hopefully think enough about which letter to choose to pick one of those two, but, occupied then by the second issue of having to concentrate, consider the choice of letter no more carefully than that. Such are the things I lie awake at night considering, while my clock radio blinks away the seconds and eventually the hours in the darkness.
Three. The magic number. Three gives us beginning, middle, end; three can give us a story; three can give us drama. Three has power, and the magician knows this well.
Imagine this: the magician takes a card, rubs it on the table, and – hey presto! It reappears on top of the deck that has been sitting to the side. Your reaction to this single event? ‘I must have missed something. Do that again.’
You had not known to watch the deck, you were caught unawares, a repeat performance would only be fair.
So, One does not satisfy.
The magician takes the card again and repeats the trick, this time taking it more slowly and explaining the things you may wish to look out for. But now he uses a different method, as you, knowing no better, watch so pointlessly for what you missed the first time. The weak and strong points of the first method are balanced by strengths and weaknesses in the second, and you, misled into believing you are seeing exactly
the same trick and now paying attention to all the wrong places, are fooled more powerfully than the first time.
Despite the shift in method, Two is mere repetition; it still does not quite fulfil. In fact, having been granted one repetition, we might even expect to be able to ask for another: seemingly it is a challenge-trick that we are being offered as a puzzle to work out. It may be a puzzle, but it is not gratifying magic.
So the magician offers to replicate the effect, only this time blindfolded. Now the stakes are higher. He dons the blindfold, then takes the card and rubs it on the table. Again it disappears. He turns over the top card of the deck . . . but this time it is not there either. He spreads the deck: it has gone entirely. You look, for the first time in a long time, away from his hands to his face for an explanation . . . and see the card peeping out the top of the blindfold.
That is Three. Now there has been magic. There has been beginning, middle and end, and there are no demands for repetition.
This has been the structure behind almost every routine I have performed to create the greatest possible impact from the material to hand:
One – to establish
Two – to invite greater attention; perhaps by raising stakes
Three – to surprise*
Three allows a finale, and flair, and a final ‘no more’. Even the card-to-blindfold third stage has its own dramatic threefold structure:
One – the card is rubbed and has vanished (we expect it to be back on the deck)
Two – the card is not where it should be! Our expectations have not been met: there is a crisis
Three – the card is found, in an unexpected place, and we have ended up somewhere greater and more resonant than where we expected to be
