Rachel Joesph

Disappearing in Plain Sight:

The Magic Trick and the Missed Event Rachel Joseph During a magic show, an audience misses the production of the trick while it occurs in plain sight. Onstage, the magician accomplishes the trick by using sleight-of-hand. Onscreen, the cut produces the illusion. Both use invisibility to achieve their effects. Using a psychoanalytic lens, this study contends the magic trick stages a fantasy of disappearance and return that mirrors Freud’s concept of fort/da and Peggy Phelan’s concept of performance. Cinematic representations of the trick use the stage as a metaphor for being both “gone” and “there.” Analyzing examples of the magic trick in Christopher Nolan’s [The Prestige] (2006) and Georges Méliès’s trick film [The Vanishing Lady] (1896), this essay argues the magic trick mirrors the traumatic aspect of performance—both onstage and onscreen—which always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event. Invisibility cloaks that which is there and not at the same time. It hovers at the edge of sight, palpably present but still unknown, a trick of vision. One particularly poignant example of this phenomenon occurs in Christopher Nolan’s film, The Prestige (2006). Illusion designer Harry Cutter performs a magic trick for a child. He makes a bird disappear and then reappear. The underside of the trick involves literally killing the bird by smashing it in a collapsible cage and then replacing it with a double. In order to execute the trick, sleight-of-hand requires the violence of repressing the method of production in such a way that the audience misses its essential nature. 1

1 The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan (2006: Burbank CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD.

Octopus Journal £ volume 5: 2011 £ invisibility 2

disappearing in plain sight joseph

The magic trick requires an act by the magician that exceeds what audiences can or want to perceive. The smashed bird hidden from sight operates as this invisible excess, the unseen remainder. A voiceover before the film’s beginning makes the stakes explicit: “Are you watching closely?”2 Perhaps in response to the traumatic nature of the trick, the question should be “Do you want to watch closely?” According to illusion designer Cutter, missing the sleight-of-hand is a choice of the spectator: “Now you are looking for the secret, but you won’t find it because you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”3 Ann Heilmann points out that, “We want to be fooled because the ‘truth’ may be more than we have bargained for.”4 What is “more than what we have bargained for” becomes apparent when examining the mechanics of the trick. Performed onstage, the magician’s sleight-of-hand remains invisible but occurs in plain sight, enacting the traumatic core of performance. As Alice Rayner theorizes about the stage, “The curtain veils appearances at the same time that it frames attention and makes the invisible visible.”5 The audience both sees and fails to see the event. Although the trick we see in The Prestige is designed for the stage, what we are seeing is filtered through the cinematic. No birds died in the making of the film. To create the illusion of the bird’s violent disappearance, the film uses the cut, the seemingly invisible yet visible split at the heart of narrative film. The magic trick renders visible the traumatic aspects of both stage and screen through invisibility. The late nineteenth-century milieu of The Prestige takes place during the same time period that magician, inventor, performer, painter, and filmmaker Georges Méliès produced the first trick films. Early cinema’s trick films showcased magic acts and feats of the camera such as cuts, substitution splices, cross-dissolves, and double exposure, often using a stage setting. 6 Using examples from The Prestige and Méliès’ 1896 trick film The Vanishing Lady, I suggest the ontology of the trick sheds light on the relationship between invisibility onstage and onscreen. Psychoanalysis supplies a useful paradigm for making sense of invisibility. Both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan offer frameworks for understanding the interplay between loss and presence at work in the trick. Freud’s concept of fort/da, based on his grandson’s game of hide and seek with a toy while saying fort, “gone,” and da, “there,” rehearses what it means to be gone and there in a similar way that cinema grapples with simultaneous presence and absence. Lacan’s concept of the unknowable Real and its remainder, the object a, illuminates the invisible core of the trick—trauma. The “truth” that the dead bird from The Prestige represents, I contend, mirrors the traumatic nature of the present moment, one the live event makes explicit and that the cinematic can never achieve. For this reason, the spectator misses the production of the trick onstage and onscreen, unconsciously unwilling to see the truth in the illusion and the visible in the invisible. Discourse on the relationship between theatre and cinema has ranged from the ontological explorations of André Bazin and Susan Sontag to theatre and early cinema scholarship’s historical analyses of the variety of ways the two forms borrowed and learned from one

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ann Heilmann, “Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist,” Neo-Victorian Studies 2:2 (Winter 2009-2010): 24. 5 Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 157. 6 Matthew Solomon, “Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film,” Theatre Journal 58.4 (December 2006): 602.



another.7 Charles Musser has argued for a “history of theatrical culture which includes both stage and screen.”8 Seldom, however, do these discussions offer sustained explorations of the questions raised by representations of theatre and performance within film.9 Siegfried Kracauer briefly points to “stage interludes” as instances of a break in the “flow of life” of the narrative.10 Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema” in part argues that when a woman performs onstage in film she attracts the male gaze and that these moments become pure spectacle outside of narrative time.11 Film scholarship engages with the theatrical nature of the early cinema in relationship to its first exhibitions in fairgrounds, vaudeville, and variety shows.12 The stage frames the trick and conjures the illusion of presence in a spectacle framed and set off from the rest of the attraction or narrative. The magic act onscreen and onstage manifests an impossible yearning for presence embodied in the trick’s structure of vanishing and appearance.

T he T rick of Film The relationship between spectacle and narrative in early cinema has been explored extensively in the scholarship surrounding Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault’s theory of the cinema of attractions—the exhibitionist and theatrical cinema before 1906.13 This essay focuses more specifically on the ways cinema and the cinematic trick represent and interact with the sleight-of-hand of live magic. Cinematic magic requires the repression of the deadness of the form itself. Through the “sleight-of-hand” of cinematic representation, the live is continually represented yet remains invisible, obscured behind cinema’s various tricks. This repression surfaces in the invoking of theatre and performance onscreen. Trick films based on magic acts

7 For examples, see André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (1967), trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 76-124; Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” in Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 134-151; A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen (New York: Da Capo Press, 1949); Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 8 Charles Musser, “Towards a History of Theatrical Culture: Imagining an Integrated History of Stage and Screen,” in Screen Culture, History, Textuality, ed. John Fullerton (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2004), 3-19. 9 Representation analysis of theatre within film often focuses on screen musicals and occasional thematic explorations. For examples, see Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical: Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Martin Rubin, Showstoppers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Alenka Zupančič, “A Perfect Place to Die: Theatre in Hitchcock’s Films,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 73-105. 10 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 73. 11 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-26. 12 For examples, see essays in Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006) and Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 13 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3/4 (1986): 229-235 and André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès,” trans. Paul Attallah, Journal of Popular Film and Television15.3 (1987): 110-119. Also see, Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).



specifically make use of the structure of vanishing and appearance within the trick in order to come to terms with a lack of presence through the illusion of presence.14 Gunning argues the cinema of attractions creates “a sudden burst of presence.”15 The structure of attractions mimics the vanishing and reappearing acts of the magic show in that the “attraction can appear or disappear and generally needs to do both.”16 According to Gunning, the trick films of Méliès are “emblematic” of the cinema of attractions.17 He points to the fact that the person watching attractions “plays a very different game of presence/absence, one strongly lacking predictability or a sense of mastery.”18 These moments produce an overall effect of traumatic shock and surprise.19 As a frequent trope of early cinema, the inclusion of the magic show and “its ability to show something” also requires a considerable investment in the invisible.20 Gunning distinguishes the cinema of attractions from narrative film by pointing to a fundamental quest for visibility and self-consciousness in the relationship between the performer, the camera, and the spectator viewing the film. Yet, invisibility drives magician-themed trick films both in the illusion produced and its method of production. Invisibility runs the show so that the production of the trick remains out of view. Matthew Solomon asserts that in Méliès’ trick film The Vanishing Lady, concealment is key to the cinematic trick: “like cinema itself, the mechanism of which is a continual oscillation between concealment and revelation as the shutter covers and then uncovers each frame as the film is advanced within the camera and the projector.”21 In a similar vein, René Thoreau Bruckner observes about film, “The image disappears in order to appear….”22 Despite the cinema of attractions’ quest for visibility, it is invisibility that produces the illusion. As a form, the cinema of attractions operates as a realm of excess that is unable to be assimilated. The seamlessness of narrative film is absent here. The invisibility of the camera and cinema’s methods of production is exposed in an attempt to make the invisible visible. Méliès’ trick films illustrate the essential nature of the trick both onstage and onscreen. His involvement appears between cinema’s beginnings and the continuing evolution of theatre, particularly in popular magic-shows of the nineteenth century. Méliès owned and operated the Robert-Houdin Theatre in Paris where he performed magic shows in the tradition of the theatre’s famous namesake.23 During these shows, magic lantern shows—precursors to early 14 For a detailed theoretical and historical look at the relationship of temporality, presence, and early cinema, particularly in actuality films, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002). 15 Gunning, “‘Now you See it, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” in The Silent Cinema Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 45. 16 Ibid., 47. 17 Ibid., 46. 18 Ibid., 49. 19 Ibid. 20 Gunning, “Cinema of Attraction,” 230. 21 Matthew Soloman, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 34. 22René Thoreau Bruckner, “The Instant and the Dark: Cinema’s Momentum,” Octopus 2 (Fall 2006): 22, accessed April 23, 2011, http://www.theoctopusjournal.org/volume-2/. 23 For a historical account of Méliès’ work, see Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, 40-59, and Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 8-10.



cinema—premiered new projection technology, which he invented himself by modifying existing machines, and he performed magic-shows with illusions of his own creation.24 Later, after his interest in the new technologies of cinema intensified, Méliès created the first film studio where he worked at creating his movies during the day while performing and sketching material for his cinematic creations at night in his theatre.25 Méliès replaces the sleight-of-hand of live performance with the cinematic.26 The fact that the trick becomes so clearly entwined with cinema’s origins offers important insight into early cinema’s self-conception: cinema-as-trick, a medium that performs a trick. Solomon notes, “At the turn of the twentieth century, every major international moving-picture manufacturer offered a selection of what were variously termed ‘magic,’ ‘magical,’ ‘mysterious,’ ‘mystery,’ ‘mystical,’ ‘phantasmagoric,’ or ‘trick’ subjects for sale to its clients.”27 Early cinema artists obsessed over appearance and disappearance in that what appears to happen right in front of the viewer on the screen in actuality occurs as just a shadow of an event that has happened at some other time and place.28

The key to Méliès’ trick films resides in newly discovered assemblage techniques. Méliès successfully transforms live magic’s sleight-of-hand into sleight-of-the-cut, substitution splice, and the cross dissolve. What is particular about Méliès is his adherence to the conventions of the live magic show with only the removal of the sleight-of-hand element. The mechanics of the trick are displaced from the live performer to the cameraman and postproduction work. Solomon points to this fact and argues that the advent of the trick film created the death of the trick onstage.29 Gaudreault isolates two distinct moments in the structure of the trick film creating its illusions: first, during filming the camera is stopped and reality is arranged to give the illusion of disappearance or appearance, and second, Méliès manipulates the film by removing frames to “match the actors’ movements” in postproduction.30 When magic shows are represented in the trick films of Méliès, they are most often shown in the context of a stage performance.31 This fact offers up not only the importance of the trick itself, but also the image of the trick as something happening live and onstage.

Méliès’ early trick film The Vanishing Lady provides the first example of Méliès’ discovery that by stopping then restarting the camera and either removing or substituting persons or objects

24 Ezra, 8-13. 25 Méliès the Magician, directed by Jacques Meny (Sodaperaga, La Sept/ARTE, 1997; Facets Multimedia, 2002), DVD. 26 Solomon, “Up-to-Date Magic,” 596-7. 27 Ibid., 596. 28 For more on early cinema’s reception, see Mulvey, “Uncertainty: Natural Magic and the Art of Deception,” in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006), 33-53; Gunning “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114-33; and Musser, “A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality, and Attractions in the 1890s,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 159-179. 29 See Solomon, 595-615. 30 Gaudreault, “Méliès the Magician: The magical magic of the magic image,” Early Popular Visual Culture, Vol. 5, No.2 (July 2007): 167-8. 31 Solomon, 596-7.



the illusion is created of disappearance or appearance.32 In postproduction, Méliès uses the substitution splice to further highlight the film’s illusion. Gaudreault observes, “Méliès’ magic wand was, first and foremost, a pair of scissors.”33 The obvious traces of glue on the upper part of the frames remained because “like every good magician, Méliès knew…one must draw the viewer’s attention towards areas where nothing is happening but where everything appears to be happening in order, as he must, not to reveal his secret.”34 Gaudreault goes on to highlight the fact that the first Méliès film to use the stop-camera technique for magic purposes was a disappearing act.35 Liveness itself stands as the real vanishing object while its return is continually desired and fantasized through cinema. The “magic” of editing and assemblage replaces the magic (and presence) of sleight-of-hand. The Vanishing Lady’s plot combines two stage illusions to create the impression of vanishing and reappearance.36 A magician performed by Méliès bows to an invisible audience. He then opens the door and gestures for a woman to enter. The woman sits in the chair. Méliès picks up a large piece of fabric and places it over the woman so she is completely covered. With a gesture, he removes the fabric, revealing an empty chair. After making a theatrical movement with his hands, a skeleton suddenly appears in the chair. He tries to get rid of it by covering the skeleton in the fabric. With another gesture he lifts the fabric, revealing the woman once again. Both bow to the unseen audience, exit the stage, and then return for a second curtain call. 37 It is notable that the woman within the film changes first into a skeleton and then is restored to her beginning form. The trick of the appearance and disappearance rests on the woman’s skeleton vanishing and transformation back to life. Once again, as in The Prestige, the trick’s relationship to the invisible asserts itself through death. The missed smashing of the bird and the invisibility of its corpse are laid bare in The Vanishing Lady. The appearing and vanishing skeleton exposes the missed core of the trick—the performer’s body. At the origins of cinema, the body being visible yet absent presented spectators, directors, and actors with a new phenomenon: the work of the artistic production was separated from its presentation. Walter Benjamin addresses this separation in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” The aura, as defined by Benjamin, is a concept of authenticity, origin, and singularity that sets the original work of art apart from the mechanical repetition of images produced endlessly in the photographic and filmic arts. Perhaps in no other place does this change affect the cinematic more than in the role of the performer. Benjamin specifies that the actor in a film becomes a shadow that can move from place to place without further enactment of the fiction, divorcing the actor from her body and voice in a way not seen before.38 The cinematic trick gestures to a lost presence that can never be recovered—it is a past event

32 Gaudreault, 171. 33 Ibid., 167. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 172. 36 Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 33. 37 The Vanishing Lady, directed by Georges Méliès, YouTube video from Star Films, 1896, posted by AudioSkore on May 1, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4MnFACzKfQ. 38 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” (1936), trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard, Eiland, et al. in The Work of Art In the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008), 31-33.



not accessible in the present except through its trace on film. The stage trick gestures to liveness that the spectator can never completely experience. The loss of presence of the performer onscreen may account for the continued use of the conventions of the stage throughout the film as a way to make an absent presence, set apart and framed, seem present. Liveness, invisible, but felt, is impossible to capture within cinema, and yet its makers longingly try. The magician’s entrance and fluid gesturing to an unseen audience along with the curtain call suggest a cinematic medium that not only relies on the conventions of the stage, but that also aspires to it as a form. The actors’ bowing to an unseen audience belies the fact that they will not be making a live appearance at the end of the film. There is an unsettling sense of disembodiment with this new technology and the images on the screen both being present and absent at the same time. The structure of the trick film with its vanishings and appearances highlights the trauma (as well as the possibilities) inherent in recorded media. Méliès, as the magician, appears as both performer and creator, and among the things he conjures is the reproduction of the experience of the live event, although this is a gesture to the impossible. In invoking the space and parameters of theatrical convention, however, Méliès creates the image of theatre as displayed by cinema as if it is an artifact flattened yet gesturing to be seen by the spectator. The stage itself offers the screen an appearance of depth that “tricks” the eye into seeing past the flatness of the screen, rendering the screen invisible. The use of the magic show in both The Prestige and The Vanishing Lady focuses attention on the traumatic relationship between the live and reproduced. The ontological stakes of examining the two films together can be found in the similarities and differences of their representations of disappearing in plain sight. In The Vanishing Lady, there is the “burst of presence” that Gunning speaks of that is achieved through attraction. The Prestige is set in the same time period as cinema of attractions but its scenes of magic shows are not attractions; instead they are part of the film’s narrative. The attraction disrupts and shocks the viewer, whereas narrative smoothes the edges and hides the film’s method of production. The Vanishing Lady is a recreation of Méliès’ performed magic onstage. The transformation of the trick from the stage to reproducibility offers something of a merging of stage and screen, much like a cross-dissolve between the two. This merging brings to mind Benjamin’s use of the analogy of the surgeon and the magician in “The Work of Art.” When discussing the differences inherent in film, painting, and the stage, Benjamin describes the gap between the reproduced object and original as akin to the distance in the relationship between the surgeon and magician: “Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue.”39 The magician onstage maintains a distance from the audience yet performs the trick live in such a way that the audience misses its method of production, whereas the trick of the magician onscreen occurs technologically by the stopping of the camera and the cut or substitution splice.40 The trick remains unseen because the cut is hidden in a place away from 39 Benjamin, 35. 40 See also Brigitte Peucker’s discussion of the relationship of aura and the actor’s body to the magician and surgeon in Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995), 42-44. Samuel Weber reads the surgeon and the magician next to the violent vocabulary used to describe the process of filmmaking in Mass Mediauras: form technics media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 90-1.



the portion of the frame that attracts the audience’s attention. The invoking of magic with its relationship to the unexplainable and illusion provokes both the cinematic desire for the live and the wonder of cinematic representation itself. T he M issed Event The magician uses the trick, an act that deceives the viewer, to create the illusion of various phenomena such as vanishing and appearance (think of a rabbit being pulled from a hat), fragments being made whole (think of the “sawing the girl in half”), confinement and escape (think of Houdini escaping from the straightjacket), and levitation (think of the magician’s assistant suspended in mid-air). The use of the word trick in the context of the magic show offers an important clue; the viewer expects to be deceived, and part of the fun is trying to figure out how the performer does the deceiving. More importantly, on a theoretical level the trick plays with vision: what the naked eye sees and what remains invisible. The trick enacts the trauma of appearance and disappearance. The most striking aspect of performance, as has been theorized by Peggy Phelan, resides in its unique singularity. This singularity makes its essential ontology one that “becomes itself through disappearance.”41 A performance is unrepeatable: once it is gone it is gone for good and therefore escapes the economy of reproduction.42 As a performance disappears, the audience necessarily misses its essential nature. The cinematic trick gestures to a lost presence that can never be recovered—it is a past event not accessible in the present except through its trace on film. The stage trick gestures to liveness that the spectator can never completely experience. Psychoanalysis teaches that the present moment always emerges with whole fragments unperceived. These missed moments, particularly the ways in which they are reenacted, contain the roots of trauma. Cathy Caruth reminds us:

Trauma is not only the repetition of the missed encounter with death, but the missed encounter of one’s own survival. It is the incomprehensible act of surviving—of waking into life—that repeats and bears witness to what remains ungrasped within the encounter with death.43

The narrative structure of the trick enacts this encounter by beginning with the undisturbed object or person, moving to the trick of disappearance, which is successful only when the audience fails to see the moment completely, and, finally, ending with the return of the object to the opening position, the performance ready to be repeated once again. During The Prestige this narrative is defined like a play in three acts. Cutter defines each act of the trick:

The first part is called the pledge. A magician shows you something ordinary, a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object, perhaps he asks you to inspect it, to see that it is indeed real, normal. But of course it probably isn’t… The second act is

41 Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. 42 Several other scholars have offered different analyses of the relationship between liveness and reproducibility. For a detailed example see Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 43 Cathy Caruth, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival,” Cultural Values 5.1 (January 2001): 10.



called the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you are looking for the secret, but you won’t find it because, of course you’re not really looking—you don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act—the hardest part, the part we call the prestige.44

Failing to see the mechanics of the trick is not only due to the skill of the magician, but also in part because of the spectator’s inability to literally take it all in. The “hardest part,” the prestige, demands exactly what is impossible in performance—its return. Once a performance has passed it is gone forever. In the magic trick the instant of return becomes embodied. Thus the trick stages the fantasy of reappearance with the truth (disappearance) hidden from view. The trick overwhelms vision and the invisible becomes a respite from a traumatic Real. A nalyzing the T rick The desire for bodily and psychic wholeness, as materially represented in the magic trick through the enactment of the vanished object’s return, connects the narratives of such magic acts to the idea of the psychoanalytic cure. The analyst could be thought of as taking the role of a magician who through transference magically gives wholeness to a subject who appears in a state of fragmentation. The very psychic material of psychoanalysis operates in the register of excess: excess of memory and affect leading to repetition through the symptom. The repetition of disappearance and reappearance in the magic trick directly materializes what Slavoj Žižek might call the “psychic coordinates” of trauma.45 There are two separate parts of a magician’s performance that have special bearing here. The first consists of the illusion the magic trick produces: the appearance and disappearance that comes and goes like Freud’s anecdote of his grandson repeatedly throwing and retrieving a spool on a string past the curtains surrounding his mother’s bed saying, “fort” (gone) “da” (there) in an attempt to cope with her absence.46 The repetition of the act of disappearance and appearance conjures the fantasy of the other’s return. Fort/da operates as practice for the child as he learns to internalize the images of the other. Phelan observes that the structure of fort/da is a “carefully rehearsed performance.”47 The play of the spool is structured around an invisible other’s traumatic vanishing and return.

In a magic act, making objects or people disappear and reappear offers an effect of astonishment followed by the desire to know how such “magic” could occur. The audience positions itself in suspended disbelief, pretending to believe in the illusion, yet still actively trying to see what it has somehow missed. Adults, although they can hold internal images of the other that tell them that they will return, still deal with the important aspect of vanishing in terms of death: the object that will never return. The magic trick’s structure of “there” and “gone” embodies the

44 Nolan and Nolan, 2006. 45 Žižek often refers to “psychic coordinates” when speaking of the ways by which a subject structures reality. See The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: Parts 1, 2, 3, directed by Sophia Fiennes (2006; A Lone Star, Mischief Films Amoeba Film Production; P Guide, 2006), DVD. 46 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principal, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1961), 12-17. 47 Phelan, “Converging Glances: A Response to Cathy Caruth’s ‘Parting Words,’” Culture Values 5.1 (January 2001): 27-40. See also “Afterword: notes on hope” in Unmarked, 167-180.



very essence of what Phelan has theorized: “But it may well be that theatre and performance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death.”48 Although Phelan specifies that performance is a rehearsal for an object that never returns, the object that disappears into thin air and then suddenly reappears could be seen as an elaborate fantasy of eternal return.

The vanishing act as represented in Méliès’ The Vanishing Lady, when examined within the psychoanalytic frame, cannot help but be compared to Freud’s fort/da and Phelan’s analyses of fort/da’s relationship to theatre and performance. Cinema in 1896 was in the very beginnings as a new technology, and as such, the new art was grappling with its possibilities and limitations. Can the play of fort/da be said to be rehearsing a new way of viewing what it means to be “gone” while simultaneously being “there” in the context of cinema? Did performers who were present on screen yet, in reality, were also a trace and shadow, not really there at all, redefine the essential meaning of what it means to be “gone” or “there”? The second crucial part of the magic trick is misdirection, a technique made up of what Heilmann defines as “showing but hiding.”49 At the beginning of the trick the magician gestures the audience to look in one direction while he accomplishes the trick unseen. Misdirection offers a vantage point from which to view the relationship between what has been missed in the event to the event itself. The technique of “showing but hiding” occupies two spaces simultaneously—the level of what is seen and the place where the show occurs in plain sight but invisible. Misdirection leads the eye somewhere other than where the invisible resides. This place where the invisible resides could be theorized as belonging to the Lacanian register of the Real. Lacan asks in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: “Where do we meet the real? For what we have in the discovery of psycho-analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter—an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us.”50 Žižek claims that the Real exists as a purely formal category and as such is impossible to integrate or define completely.51 The Real operates as excess that cannot be assimilated. This excess, the object a of the Lacanian Real, Žižek calls “the unfathomable something.” 52 The invisible excess of the magician’s performance (the dead bird) is the object a, Lacan’s term for the remainder and materialization of the Real. The materiality of the performer grounds the theatrical within a corporeal space of the impossible-Real (the Real as a category is always impossible). This simultaneous split between an impossible-Real and the performance invites a destabilizing affect for the spectator, as part of what she is seeing is always missed. In The Prestige, the horror of the film comes from the savagery of the tricks themselves and a narrative dealing with dueling magicians ruthlessly sabotaging and exposing one another’s magic acts. Moments in the film when the death that is at the core of the trick comes to the 48 Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 49 Heilmann, 19. 50 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 53. 51 See Žižek’s discussion of the Real in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: An October Book, MIT Press, 1992), 1-47. 52 Žižek, “Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien” in How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton 2007), accessed April 1, 2011, http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm.

Octopus Journal £ volume 5: 2011 £ invisibility 1 1


surface bring to light the trauma of seeing a glimpse of the Real. Part of this seeing involves not being “tricked” by misdirection. When another young child sees the vanishing bird trick he is not convinced of the illusion, but rather starts sobbing, “He killed it.”53 Heilmann observes that “in the film a child is instantly and painfully aware of the cruelty that lies beneath the bird dis/reappearance trick.”54 The child’s seeing past the trickery of the illusion allows him to see the Real of the trick. Similarly, when the magician Angier’s wife drowns in front of a live audience during an escape trick gone wrong, suddenly the entire traumatic core comes to the fore, much like the skeleton’s appearance in The Vanishing Lady. What is exposed in both examples is the mechanical underbelly and illusion of corporeal presence that cinema usually makes disappear in plain sight. “G one” and “T here” What is the difference between tricks on stage and tricks onscreen, and how does that difference expand our understanding of invisibility? Technically speaking, the trick on stage requires that the performer utilize elements of optical illusion in the present moment. Either by techniques of misdirection, sleight of hand, or technological innovations, the trick occurs in front of the audience even though the spectator misses its method of production. The trick consists of getting the audience to see the narrative the magician wishes while remaining blind to the mechanics of the deception occurring simultaneously. Cinema allows for a fundamental shift in this structure. Although the trick appears nearly exactly the same, the method of its production happens quite differently onscreen than it does onstage through the use of the substitution splice, cut, or dissolve. Psychoanalysis serves as an instructive space in which the live analytic encounter and the recorded, in the form of memory, emerge simultaneously: the present engulfed in the past and the past confronted with presence. Film can be defined by being the trace of reality and only the trace. In this way, film aligns itself with memory. Theatre offers a somewhat different alignment, one that more directly confronts the Lacanian Real through what Phelan has termed the “unreproducable event,” an event that cannot be isolated or grasped, that in some way escapes the gaze and therefore frustrates analysis.55 Psychoanalysis provides insight into this blindness precisely because of its preoccupation with what remains unknown, unseen and unspoken within the subject. Yet, even though the gap between the two forms remains easily observable, important technological differences fundamentally block the recognition of the multiple ways theatre asserts its presence through cinema, and conversely, the ways cinema reveals itself within theatre. The “trick” of theatre within cinema requires the viewer to miss the essential component of the live. The fact that the live theatrical event becomes “smashed” and hidden out of view, much like the bird in The Prestige, points to something important in the relationship between represented images of the theatrical onscreen and their live counterparts. The represented image of the stage (in this case in the form of the magic show) necessarily must repress its existence as a dead image. The illusion of liveness becomes what is shown onscreen. The “dead bird” underneath exists as excess when the trick-of-theatre appears screened as a cinematic image. The traumatic nature of the trick both onstage and onscreen points to the limits of

53 Nolan and Nolan, 2006. 54 Heilmann, 22-3. 55 Phelan, “Ontology of Performance,” 146.



vision, what we see and what we choose to repress. The question, “Are you watching closely?” asks if the viewer is ready to see what is “gone” and “there.” The trick stages a fantasy of return wherein invisible excess conceals that which will never reappear. R achel Joseph is an instructor of Theatre and English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2009. Portions of “Disappearing in Plain Sight: The Magic Trick and the Missed Event” appeared in a different form in her dissertation Screened Stages: Representation of Theatre Within Film. The study analyzes filmic representations of theatre and theatricality as they have occurred throughout the history of cinema focusing on the ways in which they construct presence and absence. W orks C ited: Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 1967. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of

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