Derren Brown among his audience: the masks were for an experiment on the loss of individuality
Over a Coke in an Essex pub, Todd Landman is rummaging through his satchel. “Now, you’ve seen one of these before,” he says, producing a blue crystal on a long silver chain. He is showing me the pendulum trick, a staple of beginner’s guides to magic. A volunteer holds one end of the chain, while the illusionist commands the weight to swing, apparently by sheer psychic force—though any textbook will tell you the volunteer’s tiny, unconscious muscle movements are really responsible. This effect, Landman says, is the basis for “table turning, ouija and all kinds of other magic.” Landman is an illusionist. He’s also a professor of political science, editor of a nine-volume work on human rights, and director of the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution at Essex University. “I don’t present myself as an urban, gritty street magician, or as the all-powerful demonstrator and mephisto—doing the ‘look into my eyes’ stuff,” he says. His on-stage character is that of the “well-travelled polymath.” Landman is an example of how the performance of “magic” has been transformed in the last decade. For this new wave of magicians, shows are sophisticated performance art, far removed from circus-style trickery of sawing women in half. Many of today’s top performers are fervent rationalists, who claim to use modern knowledge of psychology to manipulate perception. Their popularity appears to rest on a new kind of response—that people enjoy being tricked when it tells them something about the workings of their own minds. In Britain, the figurehead for the new magic is Derren Brown. His tricks are the most elegant, his explanations the most ingenious and his TV shows the most watched. And the most controversial: 700 people complained to Channel 4 about his 2004 programme Séance, in which he appeared to contact the dead, although he demonstrated at the end of the show that he had done no such thing. In 2003, 3.3m people tuned in to watch him perform a “Russian roulette” stunt, apparently on live TV; he has never confirmed whether he actually played the game. His touring show, Svengali, is currently winding its way across Britain, with shows in Newcastle, Manchester and Nottingham this May. There are even plans to take it to Broadway at the end of this year. Just 20 years ago, a magic show was the last place you would expect to encounter intellectually sophisticated entertainment. “There was a slew of shows in mid-90s America, called things like World’s Most Dangerous Magic or The World’s Quickest Magic,” says Luke Jermay, a British mind-reader who has written over 50 books and performed in Las Vegas. “In Britain, magic was defined by Paul Daniels,” he says. “It was a variety act. A guy would walk on and do six minutes in his sparkly shirt, then a guy in a tux would walk on and introduce the next one.” The turning point came in 1997, with David Blaine’s first television special, Street Magic. Blaine, born in Brooklyn in 1973, shot his early TV shows on the streets of New York, where he would sidle up to passers-by and casually perform tricks. He wore a sloppy T-shirt and baggy trousers, and the tricks were technically very simple. It was the way that Blaine framed his tricks that was engrossing. In one episode, he approaches a woman with a chicken under his arm, asking her: “do you want to see something?” After an anecdote about an ancient Egyptian magician, Blaine suddenly grabs the animal by the neck—and appears to pull its head off. The woman screams and runs off down the street with Blaine—and the jerky camera—following her. He then appears to re-attach the head, bringing the bird back to life. “No, I don’t want to touch it,” the woman shouts, giggling squeamishly. It is her reaction and the spectacle of the revived bird that are the focus, not the performer. Amid the commotion, Blaine slinks into the background—though in his later stunts he was notoriously exhibitionist. Blaine had resurrected an old approach. Like the Victorian magician Nate Leipzig, Blaine saw the importance of manipulating people, not just objects. Leipzig, a sleight-of-hand master, worked the vaudeville stage, playing to large audiences, but he believed that close-up performance was the most potent. Yet theatre audiences could not see the small details on which tricks depended, such as the faces of playing cards. His solution transformed stage magic: he began inviting people up onto the stage. The audience did not need to react to the trick itself; it reacted to the volunteer’s reaction. Blaine’s casual, personal approach freed performers from the glitzy artifice of the “variety show” style. “There were moments in his shows,” Jermay says, “where people genuinely didn’t know if it was a trick any more. That to me was the beginning of the New Magic.” In 1999, two years after Street Magic was broadcast in the United States, Channel 4 asked Derren Brown to put together a television show. When Brown graduated with a degree in law from Bristol University in the early 1990s, he began performing magic, like Blaine, in public settings. He couched his tricks in the language of psychology, explaining at the beginning of one episode of Mind Control: “All of us can be influenced through psychological techniques. For instance if I say ‘don’t think of a black cat,’ what do you do? You think of a black cat. Because the command ‘think of a black cat’ was there in the sentence.” For one typical trick, performed on the London underground, Brown asked people to tell him their stop; but after a few moments of conversation with him, they could no longer remember it. When the science writer Simon Singh watched an episode of Mind Control in 2003, he was unconvinced that Brown was employing new psychological techniques. In a poker trick, Brown claimed he was reading his opponent’s body language and using psychology to influence his decisions. But Singh proposed that Brown was using an old, well-known technique whereby a combination of cards is selected that leads to a set outcome. Christopher French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths College, agrees, saying “if Derren Brown really has successfully developed techniques to discern the contents of people’s minds in the way that he claims, he has single-handedly achieved more than the collective attempts of psychologists over many decades.” Even if Brown’s pop-science explanations are bogus, the pseudo-psychological framing of his feats is best seen as part of the act, adding yet another layer of misdirection. If the purpose of performance magic is, as Brown says, to “make minds spin,” then he has us spinning in opposite directions, puzzling over both the illusion and its explanation. At their best, Brown’s shows lead his audiences into a hall of mirrors, where they see their own thought processes multiplied and complicated. In this they share the appeal of MC Escher’s geometric distortions, or the narrative labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories. In his “scholarly magic” shows, Todd Landman uses tricks to make people reconsider the way they think. He says that, for a recent trick he performed at a party, he stopped a woman’s watch. She said, “‘That’s fantastic, you stopped the second hand for five ticks.’ But others were staring at me with their arms crossed over their chests, and said: ‘You didn’t stop her watch; you suspended our belief in time for five seconds.’ So I ask: which is more plausible? I love that grasping for explanation.” It is nothing new for illusionists to deconstruct and debunk magic that pretends to be supernatural. Landman follows in the footsteps of James Randi, a Canadian-born conjurer and escape artist, who has been the magic world’s arch-debunker since 1972, when he claimed that self-declared psychic Uri Geller’s spoon-bending could be achieved by sleight. In 1996, Randi established a $1m prize for proof of the paranormal. It has yet to be awarded. Derren Brown makes no psychic claims for his shows. He too is sceptical of the supernatural, and is a vocal supporter of the new atheism that has become a prominent pillar of rationalist thought in recent years. Brown draws parallels between religious or superstitious beliefs and the belief an audience experiences when they are taken in by one of his tricks. Encouraging sceptical thought is something of a personal cause for Brown, who was an evangelical Christian in his teens and twenties. In 2008, he appeared on biologist Richard Dawkins’s Enemies of Reason TV series, telling him: “I wanted to be able to defend my non-belief as strongly as I should have been able to defend [my religion] as a believer.” The internet has, however, exposed the downside of having an analytical, rationalist fan base. A Google search along the lines of “Derren Brown tricks explanation” will lead you to scores of forums dissecting his acts. Sites like YouTube have made it easier to spot sleight-of-hand: shows can be replayed until the method becomes clear. For instance, in Brown’s Evening of Wonders, a stage show that was filmed for Channel 4, there is a belief-defying moment when Brown appears to be in two places at once: both on stage behind a large easel, and also stage-right, dressed in a gorilla suit. It is a stunning trick—the first time round, at least. Repeat viewings show Brown switching places with a double at the side of the stage a moment beforehand. Many in the industry believe that technology presents a reason to move further towards what they call an ideas-based style. When I start to ask Luke Jermay what he thinks of the problem Arthur C Clarke summed up in his so-called “third law,” he finishes my question wearily: “that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?” “I believe that the greatest challenge magicians will face in the next 20 to 30 years will be to separate what they do from that cool app on your phone,” says Jermay. “It’s vital to move magic to the point of emotional impact on a person. I love watching films, but at no point do I say, ‘Well that’s just an image being projected from the back of the cinema onto a white screen.’” Like Brown, with whom he has worked as a creative consultant, Jermay’s routines are structured like scenes in a play, and the words he uses are as important as the tricks he performs: “90 per cent of my effort in what I do is in stagecraft and performance technique. I’m interested in how I can say something, in the same way that a comedian might work a show through.” The future, Landman agrees, lies in emotionally moving shows: “Magic can actually be a disruption and a transformative experience for people. But you have to do it in the right way. You can’t come out with a cheesy tie and start doing card tricks. If you really want to have an impact you have to talk about love, life, money, career and religion, spiritual things.” The performance of “magic” survives—so far—because tricks can make people feel clever. In being deceived, they learn something about their minds, their scepticism and their belief.
Over a Coke in an Essex pub, Todd Landman is rummaging through his satchel. “Now, you’ve seen one of these before,” he says, producing a blue crystal on a long silver chain. He is showing me the pendulum trick, a staple of beginner’s guides to magic. A volunteer holds one end of the chain, while the illusionist commands the weight to swing, apparently by sheer psychic force—though any textbook will tell you the volunteer’s tiny, unconscious muscle movements are really responsible. This effect, Landman says, is the basis for “table turning, ouija and all kinds of other magic.” Landman is an illusionist. He’s also a professor of political science, editor of a nine-volume work on human rights, and director of the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution at Essex University. “I don’t present myself as an urban, gritty street magician, or as the all-powerful demonstrator and mephisto—doing the ‘look into my eyes’ stuff,” he says. His on-stage character is that of the “well-travelled polymath.” Landman is an example of how the performance of “magic” has been transformed in the last decade. For this new wave of magicians, shows are sophisticated performance art, far removed from circus-style trickery of sawing women in half. Many of today’s top performers are fervent rationalists, who claim to use modern knowledge of psychology to manipulate perception. Their popularity appears to rest on a new kind of response—that people enjoy being tricked when it tells them something about the workings of their own minds. In Britain, the figurehead for the new magic is Derren Brown. His tricks are the most elegant, his explanations the most ingenious and his TV shows the most watched. And the most controversial: 700 people complained to Channel 4 about his 2004 programme Séance, in which he appeared to contact the dead, although he demonstrated at the end of the show that he had done no such thing. In 2003, 3.3m people tuned in to watch him perform a “Russian roulette” stunt, apparently on live TV; he has never confirmed whether he actually played the game. His touring show, Svengali, is currently winding its way across Britain, with shows in Newcastle, Manchester and Nottingham this May. There are even plans to take it to Broadway at the end of this year. Just 20 years ago, a magic show was the last place you would expect to encounter intellectually sophisticated entertainment. “There was a slew of shows in mid-90s America, called things like World’s Most Dangerous Magic or The World’s Quickest Magic,” says Luke Jermay, a British mind-reader who has written over 50 books and performed in Las Vegas. “In Britain, magic was defined by Paul Daniels,” he says. “It was a variety act. A guy would walk on and do six minutes in his sparkly shirt, then a guy in a tux would walk on and introduce the next one.” The turning point came in 1997, with David Blaine’s first television special, Street Magic. Blaine, born in Brooklyn in 1973, shot his early TV shows on the streets of New York, where he would sidle up to passers-by and casually perform tricks. He wore a sloppy T-shirt and baggy trousers, and the tricks were technically very simple. It was the way that Blaine framed his tricks that was engrossing. In one episode, he approaches a woman with a chicken under his arm, asking her: “do you want to see something?” After an anecdote about an ancient Egyptian magician, Blaine suddenly grabs the animal by the neck—and appears to pull its head off. The woman screams and runs off down the street with Blaine—and the jerky camera—following her. He then appears to re-attach the head, bringing the bird back to life. “No, I don’t want to touch it,” the woman shouts, giggling squeamishly. It is her reaction and the spectacle of the revived bird that are the focus, not the performer. Amid the commotion, Blaine slinks into the background—though in his later stunts he was notoriously exhibitionist. Blaine had resurrected an old approach. Like the Victorian magician Nate Leipzig, Blaine saw the importance of manipulating people, not just objects. Leipzig, a sleight-of-hand master, worked the vaudeville stage, playing to large audiences, but he believed that close-up performance was the most potent. Yet theatre audiences could not see the small details on which tricks depended, such as the faces of playing cards. His solution transformed stage magic: he began inviting people up onto the stage. The audience did not need to react to the trick itself; it reacted to the volunteer’s reaction. Blaine’s casual, personal approach freed performers from the glitzy artifice of the “variety show” style. “There were moments in his shows,” Jermay says, “where people genuinely didn’t know if it was a trick any more. That to me was the beginning of the New Magic.” In 1999, two years after Street Magic was broadcast in the United States, Channel 4 asked Derren Brown to put together a television show. When Brown graduated with a degree in law from Bristol University in the early 1990s, he began performing magic, like Blaine, in public settings. He couched his tricks in the language of psychology, explaining at the beginning of one episode of Mind Control: “All of us can be influenced through psychological techniques. For instance if I say ‘don’t think of a black cat,’ what do you do? You think of a black cat. Because the command ‘think of a black cat’ was there in the sentence.” For one typical trick, performed on the London underground, Brown asked people to tell him their stop; but after a few moments of conversation with him, they could no longer remember it. When the science writer Simon Singh watched an episode of Mind Control in 2003, he was unconvinced that Brown was employing new psychological techniques. In a poker trick, Brown claimed he was reading his opponent’s body language and using psychology to influence his decisions. But Singh proposed that Brown was using an old, well-known technique whereby a combination of cards is selected that leads to a set outcome. Christopher French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths College, agrees, saying “if Derren Brown really has successfully developed techniques to discern the contents of people’s minds in the way that he claims, he has single-handedly achieved more than the collective attempts of psychologists over many decades.” Even if Brown’s pop-science explanations are bogus, the pseudo-psychological framing of his feats is best seen as part of the act, adding yet another layer of misdirection. If the purpose of performance magic is, as Brown says, to “make minds spin,” then he has us spinning in opposite directions, puzzling over both the illusion and its explanation. At their best, Brown’s shows lead his audiences into a hall of mirrors, where they see their own thought processes multiplied and complicated. In this they share the appeal of MC Escher’s geometric distortions, or the narrative labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories. In his “scholarly magic” shows, Todd Landman uses tricks to make people reconsider the way they think. He says that, for a recent trick he performed at a party, he stopped a woman’s watch. She said, “‘That’s fantastic, you stopped the second hand for five ticks.’ But others were staring at me with their arms crossed over their chests, and said: ‘You didn’t stop her watch; you suspended our belief in time for five seconds.’ So I ask: which is more plausible? I love that grasping for explanation.” It is nothing new for illusionists to deconstruct and debunk magic that pretends to be supernatural. Landman follows in the footsteps of James Randi, a Canadian-born conjurer and escape artist, who has been the magic world’s arch-debunker since 1972, when he claimed that self-declared psychic Uri Geller’s spoon-bending could be achieved by sleight. In 1996, Randi established a $1m prize for proof of the paranormal. It has yet to be awarded. Derren Brown makes no psychic claims for his shows. He too is sceptical of the supernatural, and is a vocal supporter of the new atheism that has become a prominent pillar of rationalist thought in recent years. Brown draws parallels between religious or superstitious beliefs and the belief an audience experiences when they are taken in by one of his tricks. Encouraging sceptical thought is something of a personal cause for Brown, who was an evangelical Christian in his teens and twenties. In 2008, he appeared on biologist Richard Dawkins’s Enemies of Reason TV series, telling him: “I wanted to be able to defend my non-belief as strongly as I should have been able to defend [my religion] as a believer.” The internet has, however, exposed the downside of having an analytical, rationalist fan base. A Google search along the lines of “Derren Brown tricks explanation” will lead you to scores of forums dissecting his acts. Sites like YouTube have made it easier to spot sleight-of-hand: shows can be replayed until the method becomes clear. For instance, in Brown’s Evening of Wonders, a stage show that was filmed for Channel 4, there is a belief-defying moment when Brown appears to be in two places at once: both on stage behind a large easel, and also stage-right, dressed in a gorilla suit. It is a stunning trick—the first time round, at least. Repeat viewings show Brown switching places with a double at the side of the stage a moment beforehand. Many in the industry believe that technology presents a reason to move further towards what they call an ideas-based style. When I start to ask Luke Jermay what he thinks of the problem Arthur C Clarke summed up in his so-called “third law,” he finishes my question wearily: “that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?” “I believe that the greatest challenge magicians will face in the next 20 to 30 years will be to separate what they do from that cool app on your phone,” says Jermay. “It’s vital to move magic to the point of emotional impact on a person. I love watching films, but at no point do I say, ‘Well that’s just an image being projected from the back of the cinema onto a white screen.’” Like Brown, with whom he has worked as a creative consultant, Jermay’s routines are structured like scenes in a play, and the words he uses are as important as the tricks he performs: “90 per cent of my effort in what I do is in stagecraft and performance technique. I’m interested in how I can say something, in the same way that a comedian might work a show through.” The future, Landman agrees, lies in emotionally moving shows: “Magic can actually be a disruption and a transformative experience for people. But you have to do it in the right way. You can’t come out with a cheesy tie and start doing card tricks. If you really want to have an impact you have to talk about love, life, money, career and religion, spiritual things.” The performance of “magic” survives—so far—because tricks can make people feel clever. In being deceived, they learn something about their minds, their scepticism and their belief.
Correction: In the original version of this article, printed in the May 2012 issue of Prospect, the article stated that “[Landman] is explaining the pendulum trick.” This has been corrected to “[Landman is showing me the pendulum trick.” The details of the pendulum trick are explained in many textbooks on magic. Todd Landman did not reveal his methods in this interview.
