Why Magic Becomes Popular
Great magic touches our souls, not just our intellects.
Magic is like any art form; it resonates strongest with us when it lines up with something real in our lives. This essay will go into detail on a few specific magicians and their work, and how these lined up with the zeitgeist.
I am a magician and a film maker, both professionally. I hold degrees in film, and art, from two major institutions, and I am a member of The Magic Circle, which is the most exclusive magic fraternity in the world, and the closest thing to a trade organization we have, with exacting, high standards.
I worked all over the film and television industry, in many capacities, and can speak to the film medium as well as I can speak to the medium of magic.
Great art almost always has certain common characteristics. Film, art, and indeed magic follow the same guiding rules of the universe with regards to how audiences feel when they see the art. The great films resonate with an idea floating around upon their release date, and so too with music, object d’art, and magic.
This begs the question, “What is magic?”
Magic is not confusion. Magic is not a puzzle. Magic is a feeling.
Magic As Art
Our work is so much about methods that sometimes magicians develop brilliant methods in search of an effect. A lot of magic we magicians do isn’t done because there’s a logical reason to do it; it is done because we can do it. This usually results in bad magic, and separately but quite often, the sorts of magic magicians do for each other. It’s like jokes comedians tell each other, or dada art games students play in art school. Calling it “bad” magic is only my way of saying it’s not for regular audiences because it’s too inside baseball for them.
Why do magician use strange props like random giant metal rings, strange spun metal cups, a strange box with holes to have ropes put through it? In part, because they are there. Someone worked out a trick once using thimbles, so we use them. That’s the whole story.
We like those effects and so we work on them and hope the audience will like them as much as we do, but the effects that resonate most powerfully have to dig deeper into the psyche of the audience and connect with something in the zeitgeist, and randomly producing an effect because you have an applicable technique isn’t the most efficient way to accomplish this.
This isn’t to say magicians deliberately figure out which themes will resonate with their audiences on a profound level and build their acts from that; it is much more likely that magicians simply do what they know how to do and sometimes they hit the bull’s eye.
A Chronology of Magic & Magicians
Religion
The earliest forms of magic performance are most likely remembered nowadays as “that thing my god did once.” The earliest example of a magic trick recorded as such was in ancient Egypt. A magician pulls the head off a live chicken and restores it, bringing the bird back to life. When David Blaine did this trick on TV a few years ago, it still worked beautifully. Who is to say that such a magician couldn’t pass himself off as a god thousands of years ago? Religions have started with less.
Early Days
Outside of the world of religion, magic was primarily a street art. Traveling criminals would employ a magician to draw a crowd whilst they picked pockets, sold contraband, etc. This was true until the 1800s. Enter Robert Houdin (from whom, Ehrich Weiss’s stage name “Houdini” was derived) who brought magic out of the cold and into the drawing rooms of Parisian high society. A little earlier in Austria, Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser (whose name was amazing) did the same. The former magician left us books. Hofzinser ordered all his writings burnt, so only a few brilliant scraps remain. Bastard.
Under these and other magicians like them, magic was born as we know it today: a magician in evening wear, on a stage or in a parlor, performing for a genteel audience. Hofzinser is mostly known for his work with playing cards, which were, of course, the major tool of the gambler, and so in the parties where he performed, an interesting diversion from a card game taking place in the room. Of course, he’s known for what he’s known for because those were the aforementioned scraps that were not burned. Bear in mind: no modern professional sports existed yet, and games like cards and billiards were the primary forms of parlor entertainment.
Houdin embraced the latest science in painkillers, creating “The Etherial Suspension” in which he would levitate his son on a cane or a broom handle after putting him into a trance state “by giving him a whiff” of this new anesthetic.
Why did this resonate?
The 1800s had its share of war. Additionally, what we now call outer space was referred to as “the ether” and some scientists actually thought space was full of a substance they called ether. The invention of this anesthetic meant that amputations no longer relied on the speed of a surgeon’s bone saw. This was a miracle.
This is what connected with people. The height of technology in the industrial revolution performing yet another miracle.
The Late 1800s and Early 1900s: Aristocratic Masters and Scrappy Escape Artists
At the turn of the 20th century, magic was hugely popular. The Great Lafayette was one of the most famous people in the world. Magicians were often portrayed on promotional materials in full black tie, with devils whispering to them, and Houdini, certainly no aristocrat and not a master of magic per se, was on his way up. What began to stand out, and remains one of the defining images we have of magic at that time, is the escape artist.
In the early 1900s, labor protection meant a gang of guys with bats and the closest thing to a social safety net was found under a trapeze. People were trying to escape their circumstances, and sometimes even their countries. Whether you were a peasant in Eastern Europe, or an immigrant in The Five Points, the image of a magician like Houdini, a little guy being chained by a bunch of burly policemen (back then the NYPD required officers to be at least 5' 10") was a symbol of their lives. These were people who were stepped on by social systems and leaders who had little accountability. In the age of Robber Barons, Houdini and magicians like him were super-heroes. Their struggles in chains embodied the struggles of the masses. Of course, much of his legend was actually born after he died, when his widow hired a publicist to increase his profile, so she could capitalize on it. I don’t blame her.
Escape artists of the time were not often magicians in the sense of David Copperfield or other stage magicians. They usually were not very good at the techniques of “magic”, ie card sleights, gaff construction, psychological techniques, etc. They were really escape artists first and foremost, and magicians a distant second, often performing store-bought effects with little personal flourish added. Houdini in particular, who billed himself as “The King of Cards” was anything but.
After the depression, the escape artist remained, but was diminished, and never returned to its former glory. Michael Vine, a magician, and the manager of Derren Brown, said in 2016 that when he found Derren in the late 1990s Michael’s company was on the lookout for two magicians to add to its stable: a mentalist and a dapper escape artist. Michael found the mentalist he was looking for in Derren, but he still hasn’t found the escape artist he was looking for. Michael’s failure to find his dream escape artist is likely because as a society we just don’t connect to escapes in the ways we once did. Thus, such a performer simply can not exist in this day and age.
The Early 20th Century: Sawing a “Girl” in Half
Another early example of early 20th century magic latching onto the zeitgeist was when magician P. T. Selbit invented “sawing a girl in half”. Most people these days will substitute “girl” for “woman” or “person”, and it’s worth noting he didn’t do this to a child, but rather a young woman. Selbit had just been through a divorce and was contending with The Grand Guignol putting on a gory horror show directly competing with his magic act. As The Grand Guignol were employing the latest in special effects (realistic stage blood, etc.) the public thought they were really murdering actors on stage. Naturally, this hurt Selbit’s bottom line. Selbit had to compete.
Perhaps inspired by his divorce, he decided to have two burly men splice a female assistant in twain by placing her in a crate, sawing it in half with a two-man saw, and dropping the curtain. He would even douse the foot of the stage door with pig’s blood to complete the effect. This was a hit, as expected, but perhaps not for the reasons he thought that it worked.
Many in his audience would have been veterans of World War 1, many of them amputees. These veterans were sitting in the audience watching an illusion that perhaps brought them some catharsis. Soon, other magicians would take up this illusion in various forms, starting by the addition of restoring the subject, then having the magician saw himself or herself in half, and recently, sawing a man and a woman in half, then swapping their legs and restoring them. To a world familiar with the horrors of war, such illusions represented a way of addressing their traumas, and when the restoration was added, a form of wish fulfillment.
Midcentury Modern: Bloodless Magic
In the middle of the 20th century, Vaudeville and Music Hall were on the way out and television was on the way in. For the most part, magic struggled. In order to become acceptable for television, it became family-friendly. P. T. Selbit’s sawing a lady in half became The Zig Zag Girl.
Magic felt safe. It was a cool image to have on the tiny, terrible TVs of the 1950s-1960s, and it could be made family-friendly, which meant it would work for primetime. Broadcasters were wary about putting anything on television that could offend, so popular magic became inoffensive and staid. Magic had to censor itself.
Gone were the days of Selbit dousing the stage door with blood.* As the magic of this period was arguably weaker than that which preceded it or followed it, the appeal of popular magic at the time was more to do with the personalities of the performers than their routines. Magic became much more about the singer than the song. In my opinion, this is why there aren’t a lot of effects people can point to from this period that really connected with people in a visceral way. Magic had lost its edge and wouldn’t connect with the zeitgeist again until the 1970s.
The 1970s Through The 1980s: New Age & Transcendence
In the 1970s, popular magic saw a break from the past. In particular, four magicians connected with the zeitgeist and left a mark on magic that changed its direction. In no particular order:
First, Doug Henning. Doug wasn’t doing “new tricks” so much as he was presenting magic in a different light.
Before him, magicians wore black tie or suits. Doug wore crazy outfits and long hair. He looked like a hippie and embodied all the positive qualities we ascribe to hippie culture, something the country was nostalgic for following the riots at the Chicago DNC and disillusionment with the government after a decade of Vietnam, and Watergate. Whether or not Doug Henning was a hippie is up for debate, but what can be said for sure is that he introduced into the art of magic the sort of eastern mysticism expected more from the likes of John Lennon.
Second, Kreskin. From 1970–1975 his television show introduced that generation of American television audiences to mental-magic, or mentalism. Others came before him, but Kreskin was the most successful in the medium of television. For the uninitiated, mentalism is an area of magic defined by mind over matter, mind reading, and other mental, pseudo-psychic effects. This fit in really well with the new age, TM, Indigo Child, woo movements of the 1970s. People desperate for real magic in their lives, some of whom were likely being taken in by genuine con men, ate up Kreskin’s act. Kreskin isn’t a con artist, but his act appealed to the same line that con artists were using to dupe their marks, and that played to the cultural hunger.
Third, Uri Geller and his spoons. Uri didn’t have a huge repertoire, but he did present so well that people thought his act was real. For whatever reasons he chose, he encouraged this, finding success with the same crowd that Kreskin attracted: people looking for magical solutions in a decade of horrific real-world problems.
Finally came David Copperfield, and the transition to the 1980s. As time marched into the Reagan era, magic had to change.
The Cold War had escalated into a who-has-the-biggest-ICBM contest. If you didn’t knock someone down with your shoulder pads on your way into the subway, you weren’t cool. Think Big was in every location now occupied by a Starbucks.
Magic had to get big to impress.
Copperfield made trains, airplanes, and the Statue of Liberty disappear. He walked through the Great Wall of China. Copperfield’s best “magic power” was in taking large-scale symbols of power and wealth and transcended them with the power of his magic.
Copperfield was followed by a lot of imitators, and the bigness of their tricks was their conspicuous distinction. The 1980s were an era of consumption dominated by the “me generation” and the resonant themes in magic of the time were around transcending the superficiality and materialism of the 1980s through the power of magic.
The 1990s: Small Magic Becomes Big
By 1997 audiences were pretty savvy about technology and how it might benefit a magician. Cell phones and laptops came on the scene. This made magic with playing cards or coins suddenly relevant. Technology had caught up to magic, so simple magic free of the suspicion of technological influence was suddenly more magical than the biggest box trick.
In David Blaine’s first special he wasn’t making anything big disappear. He did card tricks. He didn’t fly around a theater with an audience member in his arms like Copperfield; he floated a couple of inches off the ground for a second. With bigness comes apparatus and that apparatus moves magic onto the stage and away from the audience. By doing small effects, Blaine made magic new for an audience who only knew Harry Blackstone Jr. and Copperfield. Furthermore, Blaine turned the attention from the trick to the reaction of those who saw it live. The reactions of his TV specials’ live audiences inform us on how we should react, confirming that, yes, we saw what they saw. At the dawn of the reality television age, Blaine gave audiences the authenticity they craved.
While most people identify Blaine’s success with his endurance stunts, it didn’t start out that way. His first special was just close up magic, and his more recent descendants such as Dynamo don’t bother with holding their breath or enduring temperature extremes, they stick to the original formula. In fact, there have been times David Blaine was mocked and even assaulted for his stunts by a public that didn’t understand. Still, even Blaine’s endurance stunts appear similar to his magic; apparently devoid of apparatus.
As if to punctuate the changing of the guard, Blackstone died a few days after Blaine’s first special aired.
The 2000s: An Age Where Technology Has Surpassed Magic
While he has yet to make an American TV special, Derren Brown is a household name in the United Kingdom. This is largely because Derren helped usher in a 21st century era of mentalism.
A hypnotist and a mentalist, it’s hard sometimes to tell where one skill ends and the other begins. His stages tend to be spare, devoid of dancers or large props, and very cerebral. Derren’s act connects with people because in a world where every decision made online is cataloged and sold to advertisers, and every awkward moment of life is photographed, filtered, and published, the mind is the last bastion of privacy. Just as critically, in a world where people feel powerless in the face of world events, much of Derren’s show concerns our abilities to harness the potential of our minds to make positive change.
The 2010s: The Age Of The Disillusionist
Live with a magician long enough and you’ll want to know the secrets. In this age of The Amazing Randi, Wizard Wars, and Penn & Teller’s show Fool Us, audiences want a peek behind the curtain.
There are many theories on what is happening right now in magic, and it is, of course, impossible to know the true meaning of it all until after it’s said and done, but I have some ideas of my own.
Magic needs to say something now.
For centuries, magicians haven’t needed to do much with their effects in order to get an audience to watch, but seeing Derren Brown’s specials (Google Apocalypse, Hero At 30,000 Feet, and The Experiments) and comparing them to their serialized counterparts particularly in the US, I’m struck by a feeling that one is about something and the other isn’t.
People are used to actors speaking out about their political opinions on awards shows, or science fiction films having a subversive subtext. To connect with something deeper, magic has to mean something now. A good trick will always be a good trick, but legends need meaning.
More pertinent to the wider world, we live in a cynical age, where a quick Google search can support any predetermined conclusion, and where confidence that the bankers knew what they were doing plunged the world into a deep recession. Everyone feels like someone is trying to take advantage of them, so magic is under greater scrutiny by audiences, and simply “fooling” someone is no longer, nor in my opinion has it ever been, enough.
Conclusion: Looking Forward
Despite the differences between popular magic from across the ages, one thing is certain: magicians will always want to break out our old favorites even when they don’t seem to make sense anymore, and that’s how it should work. The current surge of interest in mentalism relies largely on material at least a hundred years old, and most card magic has been around at least that long. Besides, maybe one day an egg cup will resonate with people for reasons we can’t even imagine, and a new age of great magicians will begin. Assuming magicians can create magic that touches people in their souls, the art form will thrive, and continue to evolve for thousands of years.
I have faith magic will be around forever because, for magicians, the impossible is our specialty.
Footnotes:
- * While artists of this period like Tony Slydini, Dai Vernon and Ed Marlo (among many, many others) were certainly creating beautiful classics of magic and mentalism that endure to this day, these were not household names outside of the houses of magic. Thus, I’m not including them as popular magic subjects in this essay.
