Media Mindfulness

Be forewarned, a movie about magic employs the principle technique of enchantment: misdirection. Thus any film claiming to be about magic has as its subtext the fact of the film itself, which is a carefully constructed illusion, just as any Hollywood motion picture about spectacle is ultimately self-referential (such as Gladiator being a veiled commentary on the studio system). Curiously, this year there have been two films that deal with fabricating reality, locating their narrative in Victorian-era 19th Century: The Illusionist and The Prestige. Both situate themselves at the early stages of media spectacle, a time when phantasmagoria—the predecessor of modern film—was a popular form of pubic performance that utilized the proverbial smoke and mirrors. That there would be a cultural curiosity about this nascent period of magic, performance and spectacle is not coincidental. As we are facing ourselves in a fully engaged mirror of mediation, we are innately curious about the origins of our societal identity crises as we encounter our interdependent relationship with media.

Of the two films, The Prestige is particularly relevant. The foreground of The Prestige is a war between two rival professional magicians. The background is the enmity between two magicians of a different sort: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, the inventors of our modern electrical system. The film’s subplot concerning the life and work of Tesla (played by the quintessential space cadet, David Bowie, no less) alludes to the ambivalence the society had with new technology at the advent of electricity. One of the most repressed figures of modern history, Tesla, we may recall, invented/discovered alternating-current (AC) electricity, which competed with direct-current (DC) electricity championed by Edison. As the cliché goes, history is written by its winners, and it’s no wonder that Edison, a brazen self-promoter and showman, engaged in a number of public spectacles and dirty tricks to discredit his nemesis, Tesla. Edison publicly electrocuted stray animals to shock people into believing in the dangers of AC (one scene in The Prestige alludes to such a public war). Not coincidentally, Edison was one of the earliest innovators and promoters of moving image technology, something that eluded Tesla who preferred to experiment privately with this radical, newly harnessed energy. But even Tesla was known to be a bit of a show-off. When his studio was in New York he was known to entertain celebrity visitors like Mark Twain’s entourage and dazzled them by conducting high voltage electricity through his body that produced an eerie aura, and used wireless florescent light tubes (one of his many inventions) that were powered as if by magic. Witnesses reported also seeing Tesla hold “balls of lightening.”

In a sense we could say that in the 19th Century our society faced two alternate visions of power: Edison or Tesla, and the one that ultimately was selected by finance has fashioned the world we’re in, literally. Among Tesla’s many inventions, the one that irked his backers the most was his desire and effort to create free electricity. In a poignant scene during The Prestige, Tesla’s assistant amazes the magician Rupert Angier (played by Hough Jackman, better known as the X-Men’s Wolverine) when he reveals that the Earth can light bulbs (infused with AC powered by Tesla’s Colorado Springs lab). The film’s narrative only references these experiments, but what Tesla went for was developing a system that harnessed the earth and atmosphere as natural conductors of electricity. He dreamed of wireless energy, long before our current age of wireless phones and Internet (which are still dependent on limited battery life and a physical grid). There remains a debate today as to who discovered radio first, but many claim it was Tesla, not Marconi. Not surprisingly, towards the end of his life, when he was destitute and broke, Tesla worked for the US military designing wireless communication between ships and other projects we still don’t know about.

When George Westinghouse learned of Tesla’s fundamental designs for free power, he pulled the plug, literally, telling him that he would not finance an operation that would give free power to Africans. When you look at the history of the “war of currents” between Tesla and Edison, all the early financiers of our electrical system ultimately became the military industrial complex, in particular Westinghouse and General Electric. That these power and technology companies eventually became media corporations as well sums up the situation quite nicely. Control requires illusion, i.e. misdirection, and it is fitting that the most dominant military contractors, innovators of nuclear weapons and electrical power would also be in the business of fantasy, i.e. magic. Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of Disney, produced The Prestige. As a member of the global corporate elite, Disney is one of the few media companies that doesn’t also make physical weapons, but as the quintessential trademark of capitalist “magic,” it’s deployment of electrically fuelled dreams softens up targets/markets/marks for the inevitable appropriation of energy resources. Our lives are powerfully formed by the convergence of the forces of magic, militarism and the power grid, yet we are rarely conscious of their nexus. Did the filmmakers have this in mind when they conceived The Prestige? No matter, they reveal to us the three stages of the magician’s performance, and perhaps they can be used as a deconstruction tool: the “pledge” (a declaration of intent to make something vanish), the “turn” (the disappearance), and the “prestige” (the return of that which has been disappeared). There is a subtle proposition that the film itself is a trick. Are we paying attention?

These techniques mirror to some extent the three-act play of our civilization since the discovery of the force of electricity. There’s quite a bit of academic theory about the psycho-spiritual turn modern civilization took in the Victorian era. For Benjamin it was symbolized by phantasmagoria, for Adorno it was Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.” For more contemporary scholars, early recording technology were efforts to capture time, contingency and ultimately catastrophe. It was an unconscious coping mechanism for Western society to contain conditions that were radically destabilizing pre-established notions of the world. Not surprisingly, in the early days of photography and then later with wax cylinder recording and wireless communications, people associated electricity with supernatural forces and linked media technology with spiritualism. As people were adjusting to these new technologies, they were unsure of and spooked by their capabilities. We take all of this for granted because they immerse us, but recall that there was a time when electronic media were new and incomprehensible.

In regards to this scenario, McLuhan draws an analogy with the myth of Narcissus. In his version, Narcissus is not enamored with his reflection, but is rather trapped in it. He extends himself into his reflection as we do with our electronic media, but gets ensnared by his iteration. Having lost the sensation of ourselves, we amp up the input into the sensory circuit to re-stimulate ourselves, and the cycle goes on so now it’s normal to watch half-second edits on TV and to be tussled by movie previews as if we are on a rollercoaster. So like the turn in which the magician disappears himself, we are transported into an illusion facilitated by electrically powered media, but the question remains, have we yet to reappear in the final act, the “prestige”? Are we lost somewhere between the trap door in which the magician falls away, and his inevitable return from behind the mirror of our fascination? Or maybe in our “prestige” a digital doppelganger is what returns.

Tangentially, Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land deals with the revolutionary convergence of magic and psychology. The alien-raised human protagonist, Mike, who has an incredible capacity for empathy and psychic prowess, decides to transform human society when he discovers his powers are best understood when combined with magic (and a Bohemian lifestyle that includes free love). People like a good show, and “marks”—as stand-ins for citizens of the Rocket Age—are in a sense the buying public of the corporate dream world’s media torrent. Mike is also the product of a technological magic act. His is the result of a birth by humans who disappeared on Mars (as a result of an accident), and returns to Earth as a reconfigured human—a posthuman whose global perspective and ability to “grok” cannot be contained by the prevailing society, and ultimately ends with his assassination.

Stranger in a Strange Land does an excellent job of illustrating the particular American skill of combining religion with entertainment, but ultimately for no good. One wonders if the gig is up as transparency (”groking“?) becomes one of the prevailing characteristics of new media.What The Prestige demonstrates is that though we insist that good magic be illusory, we also want to know that there is a conscious trick. We are ultimately skeptical of miracles. We want to believe that we are partners in the illusion’s construction; it gives us a modicum of control. But to know the solution of the trick is also to destroy its allure. Ultimately, maybe it’s better to know not God. We want our toys, and to watch TV, but we really don’t need to know how they work.

The film asks us, “Are you looking closely.” What The Prestige draws our attention to inadvertently is the relationship between entertainment and power. Do we have the sophistication to see though the film’s own misdirection to get to a critique concerning the ideological core of our contemporary nexus between the military, entertainment and power? I believe anti-television crusader Jerry Mander is correct when we assess the true implications of our electrical power system choice, which incidentally is the number one cause of carbon emissions. Choosing nuclear power or coal means a devil’s pact, so-to-speak, with a highly centralized, bureaucratized, military complex. A renewable energy system is decentralized and is not dependent on a massive security apparatus or infrastructure delivery system predicated on scarcity. Through his inventions, Tesla proposed an alternative foundation in which power could be obtained freely. The society, or rather, an elite core of financiers also known as robber barons, chose another path. We’ll never know if his theories were correct; he wasn’t given the chance to test them. Consequently, it’s no coincidence that the 20th Century was the American Century. The core triumvirate of electricity, military and entertainment was consolidated in the United States, funded by pirates of the Industrial Revolution. That power matrix is further fueled by the petrol economy, and ultimately characterizes the prevailing paradigm of the era. What remains to be seen is to what extent we have been altered by the “turn.” Ironically, it’s the magic trick, “The Transported Man,” that corrupts and destroys the film’s protagonists in an era when we began doubling and transporting ourselves into media space. In our “prestige,” what will be our ultimate fate?

I’m avoiding writing further about the film’s content because I don’t want to spoil your viewing. But I’ll pass a few quick notes. Ultimately I thought Jackman’s acting was a bit flat. In fact, the cast is underwhelming, with the exception of Bowie and Michael Caine. The actors are mostly refugees of various sci-fi movies, a pedigree that doesn’t necessarily bode well for Victorian Britain, but than again, the whole genre of “steampunk” (pre-technological cyberpunk, or Victorian sci-fi) tends to veer on the cheesy (i.e. A League of Extra Gentlemen). But David Julyan’s ambient and otherworldly soundtrack hauntingly infuses the picture with tension that transcends the weakness of the performances.

The film’s complex parallel editing keeps you guessing and wondering whose narrative is whose, thus making for a highly engaged narrative that is as much thriller as treatise on magic-making. The Prestige is by far one of the more enjoyable films I’ve seen in quite a while; rarely does a movie inspire such a philosophical diatribe nor bite so severely into my writing time. If you have nothing else going on, do your own disappearance trick into the theater and transport yourself to an alternate time that is also our own.

Related merch:

“The Prestige” (Christopher Priest)

“Tesla: Man Out of Time” (Margaret Cheney)

“Stranger in a Strange Land” (Robert A. Heinlein)