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.” Continue reading →