The Mystery of "Now You See Me" (2013)

Two years ago I saw a trailer for a movie about magicians who rob banks to give to the poor.   I never heard much about it and thought maybe it had gone straight to video.  But no, it was released, but with very little marketing and then a number of odd things happened.

I may as well tell you up front that I believe that this film is actually an important and intellectual French film masquerading as a trivial popcorn movie. There are a number of things about this film that reveal that it is not mere cinematic fluff but is of interest to the readers of this blog, compelled as we are by the appropriate and innovative use of visual effects and our study of the esoteric knowledge that is hidden from the average, uninitiated member of the filmgoing audience.

On the surface the movie is an action / caper film about 4 street magicians who are brought together by an unknown person to create a new act, called the Four Horsemen. They nearly instantly become very famous and successful and their shows sell out and become media events not just because they have great style but also because they rob banks as part of their show and then give the money to their audience. Since in fact there are laws against robbing banks, unless of course you are already wealthy in which case you can do what you want, the FBI and Interpol get involved to solve the case and put our heroes into prison. The Four Horsemen have to somehow continue to evade the FBI, continue to rob banks, and somehow do all this in their final show in New York with the whole world watching and the FBI closing in.

But from the very beginning, the film confounds expectations.

A young man stands in front of a mirror practicing various sleight of hand flourishes with a deck of cards (see below). As he does so, there is a voice over, the voice of a young magician and he says to his invisible audience:

Magician: Come in close. Closer. Because the more you think you see, the easier it will be to fool you. Because, what is seeing? You're looking, but what you are really doing is filtering... interpreting... searching for meaning. My job? To take that most precious of gifts you give me, your attention, and use it against you.

So you see, the movie begins with an idea, an idea from the philosophy of magic. It is very unusual for an American movie to begin with an idea, or to even have an idea anywhere in the movie for that matter. That was the first clue that something unusual was going on.

Lots of style and glitz in our magic shows these days.

Superficially, the plot holes of the film, perhaps more appropriately called plot chasms, might signify the film as not serious. But this unusual opening monologue also suggested that there was something else going on, something behind the scenes, something mysterious.  These clues suggested to me that perhaps it was made in the cinematic tradition of another country.

Let us review some of the other unusual things about this film.

First, Hollywood (in this case, an American & Canadian studio) rarely makes movies about magic, that is, the profession of magic in this country. Whether the magicians are stage magicians, close-up magicians, famous escapists, mentalists, whatever, they rarely make films about these people, no matter how fictional. Such films are said to not make money, according to the standard received wisdom. But this movie was made nevertheless.

Step into my bubble, he said.

Second, the film, when released got lukewarm and mixed reviews, and received almost no marketing from the studio and it was expected to die a quick death. But, strangely enough, it didn't. Instead it proceeded to slowly build business by word of mouth and made over $100 million in this country for a total of at least $230 million in first release. That is very good for a film that cost $75 million to make and was expected to flop. In fact, it made more money than several other very expensive summer movies of that year and they are even making a sequel.

Third, this film was made by a relatively unknown French director and it is very rare for this country to finance a film by a foreign director because such films rarely do well in this country. Unless of course the foreign director makes films that are like American films in which case he really isn't all that foreign, now is he? Hollywood from time to time will co-finance a film by a famous foreign director, but that is not what happened here.

She is beautiful.

He needs a shave.

Fourth, the film is very, very French. It is not just an American caper film done by a foreign director. No. From beginning to end, this film feels like a French film in spite of the fact that Canal Plus did not finance it. How could I tell? Well of course there was the opening already alluded to, but beyond that French filmmakers have a very firm grasp of the essence of a film and have no problem sacrificing plot credibility at any time if it contributes to the style of the film or to the film's higher purpose. Plot, character, plausibility? Poof, that is irrelevant. Second, the French seem to have an affection for sophisticated and intelligent women who are not 22 years old as all the women in Hollywood seem to be and who, generally speaking, have an affair with the male lead. Third, they are very partial to male leads who do not shave. Fourth, the French as a culture have a strange appreciation for the big budget nightclub Vegas-type of show, in this case, of Magic. So lots of spotlights and lots of showmanship. Kindof Siegried and Roy without Siegfried and Roy. But most of all it is the cavalier dismissal of reality at any time that just felt so very French to me.

A typical French film might be a romantic action film about a beautiful and well (un) dressed young woman who is secretly a mysterious alien and who knows the secret of the rebirth of the universe and will save the galaxy if only these men in the story would stop screwing around and get out of her way before it is too late. This film is not about that, but it is about 4 street magicians who do the most amazing and implausible things with a good sense of style and outwit the FBI at every turn.

Fifth, the visual effects generally have a lot of panache and are not held back by any old-fashioned concerns about believability. As the French are very much into the meaning and semiotics of modern architecture, the final scenes are a very busy effects sequence with projection on buildings that is actually quite interesting if a little unbelievable.   The problem is that while we can project stereo on a building, I don't think we have the technology to project something such that each member of the audience will have their own point of view and perceive a holographic or stereo image that appears natural and in place.  I think that most of these techniques restrict you to one point of view or at most a very few.   This is a rare example of someone in the film business actually thinking ahead.

Since the police are after them, the Four Horsemen, now reduced to three, make a virtual appearance.

Sixth, the film seems to attribute much of its implausibility to the invisible hand of a secret philanthropic organization from ancient Egypt that may be behind the mystery.

And finally, I normally hate films with plot holes like this. But in this case I did not mind it one bit. In fact in spite of everything, or perhaps because of all the things I have mentioned, I actually found the film charming.

Although nominally the film may be about magicians who rob banks, we also have here a nice Cinderella meta-story about a French summer popcorn film that did well.

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Now You See Me (2013) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1670345/

Hollywood Reporter article on Now You See Me Boxoffice

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-shocker-you-see-601936

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Notes

1. A flourish is the display of a deck of cards in a way that is designed to impress. It may or may not be part of an illusion. A good card player will often use flourishes when shuffling a deck as a way of intimidating his opponents or perhaps just to show off. In magic, it is part of the entertainment value of a show and is often used to distract the audience's attention. It may also be used by the magician as an exercise to develop skill and coordination.

Archaeology of the Cold War: Espionage and Other Compromises of National Security (1975-2008)

Espionage and spying was one of the defining characteristics of the Cold War. It is easy to be nostalgic about the Cold War, of course. It was a time when America had a functioning economy, when the political system had not been destroyed, when we could still believe in the American Dream in one form or another.

It was a time of the Berlin Tunnel, of the silent war between nuclear submarines, of Mutual Assured Destruction, defections and moles, of spy satellites and science education, of sensor nets under the ocean built at vast expense but capable of hearing a whale at 2000 kilometers, or a door opening on a submarine while submerged.

Espionage and the secret service, some think, are the purest expression of the war between civilizations, fought by a nation's elite secret service that manifest the moral codes that define the opposing civilizations. This makes the secret service the first line of defense, the avant garde of the revolution, the keepers of the faith. They are the mujadeen, the soldiers of God who are willing to die for God.

The Defense Personnel Security Research Center in Monterey, CA, set out to write a report that summarized espionage and other breaches of national security in this nation in the last 30 years. It's goal was to provide a series of case studies for educators of security personnel. It provides good summaries of the different types of espionage cases that have been found and prosecuted in the modern period. It has been regularly updated, the latest version adds 20 more recent case studies up to 2008.

If, as mentioned above, the secret service represents people who are Defenders of the Faith and of the Faithful, then many of the people whose cases are summarized in this report are the Fallen, those who by their actions have fallen from Grace with God and are damned forever.

I have selected a few pages at random for your review and the URL for the full report is listed below. You could read it in its entirety, if you were of a mind to do so, in a few hours at most.

"Espionage and Other Compromises of National Security"

http://cryptome.org/2013/02/spy-cases-1975-2008.pdf

The Fall of Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_fall_from_grace

Wm Jones and His Famous Paragraph

[As an aside, I wonder why I feel some responsibility to tell this story, whether in my own words, or not. Surely something as important as the Indo-European language problem is taught to all 1st and 2nd graders in elementary school as part of introductory philosophy, linguistics and dialectics?  Yet, for whatever reason I feel compelled to beat this horse into the ground, or some other mixed metaphor, maybe out of some confused ego need to try and prove that I am smart or something.  No, honestly, its just because I think its a cool story.]

This is the story of a man who made a discovery about language and history and started an academic field with a single paragraph. He may not have been the first to make this discovery, but he was by far the most important in getting the ball rolling. What he discovered turned out, when you thought about it, to reveal something about the distant past of about half of the people of the world.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man who made his living as a lawyer, was assigned to the Supreme Court of Bengal, a part of the British Empire of its time. The year was 1783. At the time, what we now call India was considered the furthest reaches of the earth, with many very alien peoples and a vast and very different history. This was in that period of history, about which I know little, that England was trying to bring order out of chaos in a part of the world that had been managed by the famous, or infamous, East India Trading Company.

Our lawyer was also an accomplished linguist, and was well known for his Persian English grammar and translations of Persian poetry. Apparently back then it was not considered unusual for someone to be accomplished in one field and yet make a living in another. Obviously our lawyer knew English, he also knew Latin and Greek as all well-educated men did back then, he remembered his childhood Welsh and he knew Persian.

The traditional and formal language of India was Sanskrit, attested to at least 1300 BC, far older than the earliest attested Greek or Latin. Indians would come to court and quote legal precedent in Sanskrit but none of the justices knew it, so it was decided that someone had to learn and our protagonist, with his linguistics background, was selected.

He found an appropriate tutor and went away to learn this ancient and very alien language.

Languages borrow words from each other all the time. The fact that two different languages may share a word may not tell us much about their history. But languages rarely borrow grammatical structures from each other, and so if they share such things in common, they may very well share a history. English borrowed "attorney general" from the French, but when we make it plural we do so in a way that is consistent with English and not with French.

Greek looks very different from Latin because of their writing systems (e.g. the Greek alphabet has some different letters which, like Cyrillic, make it look very exotic to us).   But to someone who knows both Latin and Greek it is clear that the languages are related.    How the nouns are declined, how the verbs are conjugated, irregularities in both languages that are unlikely to be accidental and so forth.

Suppose one language uses an internal vowel to determine tense: --i-, --a-, and --u-. Swim, swam, swum. Sing, sang, sung. Now suppose you came across a language that had the verb "ring" as in "to ring the bell" and it was conjugated ring, rang, rung.   You might suspect the two languages were related.  But if there were hundreds and hundreds of those similarities, far more intrinsic to a language than mere borrowed words, then you would really have to wonder if the languages were related in some more fundamental fashion.

So Sir William Jones learned Sanskrit. And he discovered something very odd.  Something he really did not expect.  Sanskrit was like the older brother of Greek and Latin. The structure of verbs, nouns, irregularities, all of it. But that was impossible. Sanskrit was far older, and on a completely different side of the world spoken by a very alien people.

And in 1786 he gave a lecture which contained that famous paragraph:

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

You may wonder what that may have to do with you, or with anything else in the modern world. The answer is, everything. But that will be for another time.