by Derren Brown
Thinking it might be in the corduroy (Cor du Roy = Cloth of Kings) jacket that I wore a few nights ago, I look for that, but now this jacket is not to be found either. The jacket is not in the coat cupboard where it should be, so I look all over the apartment for it, and it’s nowhere. How can I lose a jacket? Eventually I find it, in the coat cupboard after all. Pen not in pocket. Anger: 98% – oh for Christ’s sake . . .
I loathe myself
Why do I always do this? I gave myself plenty of time and now I’m properly late. I can’t just buy another pen – I keep doing that and it’s just revolting to spend that much on replacing pens that I lose so readily. I’ll be late again and that means I’m the guy who’s generally late. Late not because I’m lazy but because I can never find things when I want to leave. But if I was better organised I would sort this out earlier or have a system that works and I wouldn’t lose the pens and then I wouldn’t be late and look like some crapping starry wanker who thinks he can keep everyone waiting and just roll in when he wants to. I want to be the guy who’s always a bit early. Anger: 112%. (Pen invariably in pocket of trousers I’m wearing.)
The fury and loathing I feel towards myself and anyone else in my flat at such times is disastrously out of proportion to the offending grievance of a mislaid roller-ball or wayward fibre-tip. There are acts of genocide and unspeakable cruelty happening on this planet right now that I am appalled to say don’t bother me at all in comparison. I cannot bring myself to feel anything like the same kind of furious rage towards such reported atrocities as that to which I involuntarily submit in the mocking face of a missing biro. It seems as if my entire environment – the pen, my jackets, my cleaner, my meeting – have conspired against me to reveal what an insultingly ill-organised shirker I am and always will be. The fuming, flaming ire boils my blood, and I leave the flat in a proper stink.
Charlotte, at least, if not the others, was hopefully experiencing genuine astonishment at the transformed card, despite the moment’s lack of gravitas from any other perspective. In this case, the reason why the transformations of the card from one to another to another had been hopefully magical, as opposed to merely puzzling, was above all due to a single important detail: the covering of the card with my hand while the change seemingly took place.
In the mid-nineteenth century, after the wave of Spiritualism had taken grip of America, Ira and William Davenport became well known as the Davenport Brothers, astounding audiences with supernatural feats on stage. This was the grand age of the stage medium, of ectoplasm, floating ghosts and tambourines thrown in the dark, of screaming audiences and hysteria. One aspect of the demise of such fraudulent histrionics, following relentless exposure from magicians, is that we have lost the showman’s vision for séance and mediumship and replaced it with camp, anaemic cold-reading demonstrations, which do nothing but witlessly fool those eager to believe.
The highlight of the Davenports’ act was the ‘Spirit Cabinet’. A large wooden cupboard of sorts was introduced, and the brothers were tied into it in such a way that they appeared quite restrained and certainly unable to move their hands. Musical instruments were also placed in the box, seemingly out of the reach of the brothers, and the door of the box was closed. The audience would then hear the sounds of the instruments, blowing and clattering and scraping inside; yet when the box was opened, the brothers were still tied and clearly unable to reach anything that could have made those noises. The spirits had played the instruments, the audience was told. There seemed to be no other explanation.
The Spirit Cabinet is still presented, albeit in a modern form attributed to Glen Faulkenstein and his wife Frances Willard: the wooden box has been replaced with a red curtain on a frame, which can be pulled open or closed by the stage performer while the medium is tied within; and rather than instruments being played, tambourines, plates and other noisy items are thrown impossibly from the cabinet, despite the fact that the only living entity in there, namely Frances, is restrained quite securely. Faulkenstein and Willard set the bar; now various magicians have their take on this classic. Some of you may have seen my own Spirit Cabinet routine included in the Séance programme or Enigma stage show. Although nowadays we are arguably not expected seriously to attribute the noisy goings-on inside the cabinet to actual ghosts, the cabinet still retains its eldritch appeal for a simple tantalising reason.
The Davenport Brothers’ Spirit Cabinet
The Davenports had appreciated the value of the darkness in the séances they had attended, and, unable to create such pitch blackness every night on stage, created a controlled area of darkness to work in on stage. In the domestic dark séance, the blackness was necessary for two reasons: firstly, for the medium to cheat without being seen; and secondly, for the sitters to fall prey to their own imaginations and believe they had experienced things that had in fact never happened. Again, allow me to refer you to my own televised Séance special: the pitch-black finale produced a wave of screaming terror among the group that we can more accurately attribute to their over-active imaginations than the occurrence of anything especially threatening. This blind, hysterical aspect of the séance is lost with the Spirit Cabinet, as the audience sits in only the half-darkness offered by the dimmed house-lights of the auditorium. Yet the Cabinet offered the tied mediums inside the same cover to free themselves and create the pandemonium, and more interestingly, by closing the door (or, later, the curtain), the audience are still allowed free rein to imagine what might be happening inside. The result is less of a visceral scare, but there is an undeniable chill to be felt when clattering objects are thrown from the top of the cabinet and Faulkenstein whips back the curtain a second later to reveal scattered debris and the beautiful, black-clad, hypnotised Frances still securely tied to her chair, sleeping soundly, not having moved an inch.
The true impact of the Cabinet does not come from an instrument playing on its own or an object being thrown over a curtain. It is the power of cover that makes it remarkable. A magician could easily enough create the illusion of an object picking itself up, playing itself or being thrown into the air, and an audience would perhaps be amused but no doubt presume wires or the usual trickery. Far more unnerving is to be denied the ability to see the animation, and instead only to hear it: now our imagination plays with us; we imagine the impossible. The closing of the curtain may be the only way of hiding the prosaic method of the trick from the audience, but it also, conversely, can create the necessary magic for it to be unforgettable theatre. When the curtain closes, we are in the realm of The Unknown, and something primal stirs us. This taps into a truth missed by most magicians: that when we watch a magical performance, we are still hoping to relate to it on a human level, and that the presentation of process in one form or another is vital for us to connect with it. Process may be based in struggle (and therefore drama), or whimsy, or anything in between, but without it there are only puzzles offered for solution. The Cabinet is powerful because it pulls all focus towards the process at the same time as it hides it with the front curtain. It flaunts process, and forces the spectator to speculate madly from moment to moment what could be happening, and to watch, alert and wide-eyed, in case he spots anything that confirms the suspected culpability of the medium.
A playing card changing beneath a hand does not have these eerie undertones, but when the magician covers the card the participant is suddenly forced to imagine what may be happening beneath the palm – here, probably sleight of hand rather than machinations from beyond the grave. Thus, when the hand is removed (clearly empty) and the card on the table has changed, she mentally returns to that moment of cover and wonders what on earth could have happened to change the card. Of course, the cover played no part in the method (the card had already been secretly exchanged with a sleight before the cover happened), but was vital for the effect.
Card Switch
For me to have placed the card face-down on the table, looked at it for a moment, and then picked it up in its altered state
would have only caused Charlotte and her friends to mentally rewind my actions back to before the point of placing it down, working on the presumption that the card put down had already been somehow substituted for another. The covering action says eloquently, ‘It’s happening now, whatever it is, and something fishy must be happening, otherwise I’d have no need to cover it up. There’s something I don’t want you to see that’s happening now.’ It curtails the post-trick rewinding process at a plausible but misleading moment.
Open cover, as we might think of it – of a card, or of a medium in a cabinet – is a coy move. It teases the audience and asks them to enter into a relationship where they are to enjoy being fooled. To insist on seeing the trick again but without the employment of cover misses the point: the magician is saying I’m going to hide this, and something will change while you can’t see it, and hiding it like this will frustrate you, but that’s the game we’re going to play. This coquettish ploy of unavailability makes what is denied us (a view of a Jack of Hearts while it changes, or of the sounding instruments in a Spirit Cabinet) a source of potentially immense curiosity.
For this reason, while we happily love, we may still lust. Requited love is a wonderful prize, but the very ease with which our partner returns our interest denies us the particular pleasures of furtive obsession and fantasy. Meanwhile, the partners we cannot have – the prizes we are not allowed to touch – remain inevitably appealing and occupy a particular place in our minds, even though we may be content to devote ourselves to a single real-life individual. With happy love, the Spirit Cabinet door is flung open; no questions remain; we may still marvel at what the medium does now that we can see her clearly, but there is no dark mystery to invade our thoughts, no illusion left to weave its web. When we consider doing the most delightfully unforgivable things to a flawless but entirely unavailable specimen of humanity, or when we wonder about the hidden cabinet interior or covered Jack of Hearts, we are free to imagine such things as impossibly wondrous. The card, we decide, gently morphed from one to another; the instruments floated and were played by invisible hands; equally these imagined lovers are insatiable, sweet-breathed, and strangers to flatulence.
To make yourself unavailable is therefore to have the greatest potential of exciting this desire in those who seek you out. The opposite approach, that of the abundantly available prostitute, might provide the uninitiated with an initial guilty thrill, but her (or his) obligation not to withhold denies the client the pleasure of yearning. True, these Daughters of Joy (though rarely the Sons, tasty lot as they are) have frequently featured as romantically desired objects in bohemian songs and stories since La Bohème itself, but of course it is the fact that the courtesan in question is never quite available enough that provides the pathos: she will not truly love, and she has other clients to serve.
The most enticingly unavailable people are the celebrities who on the one hand daily trumpet their desirability in near-nude photographic spreads, and on the other are safely tucked away from the musty, sweaty reach of the admirers they taunt. Here we are consistently invited by the publicity machine to wonder what goes on behind the Cabinet curtain: we are given titbits and insights into private lives that act as clues, and once a tear has been spotted in the fabric of that curtain, and a celebrity becomes vulnerable, a frenzy of fascination begins.
It is entirely unfair, however, to blame the public’s interest in celebrity for the stinking affront to kindness and dignity that pours from the bottom-hole of the modern media in the form of hateful stories or candid photographs of these celebrities at their early-morning worst. I, like almost all performers, can read a review of a performance I have given and be tormented by the one point of criticism otherwise lost in hundreds of words of glowing kindness, the latter entirely forgotten in favour of this lone negative comment. I can quote you every point of denigration I have read in a review but would be hard pushed to remember more flattering remarks. And these are from informed and professionally written reviews; the accessibility of online blogging and even Twitter (the mentioning of which I’m sure will date this book very quickly if the references to DVDs haven’t already) has meant that truly witless spite is easier than ever to accidentally stumble across, even if one is very careful what one reads. Perhaps a flip-side to public adoration is inevitable, but I pity a sensitive performer who, having done nothing wrong but seek to entertain, opens Heat or a similar publication devoted to hurtful, hateful hearsay to find herself listed as number three in a list of the Top 10 Ugliest Celebrities, lampooned for looking imperfect in a bikini, or tarred with a fabricated, mean-spirited story.* Just imagine. The publications in question wrongly insist that the fault lies with the public, that they are merely catering to a demand for such sensational tales and cruel invasions of privacy; but this is the equivalent of opening a sweet shop and then blaming children for flocking to it.
At the opening night of one of my stage shows I was honoured to have a particularly popular television actor among the guests. A few days later I read a clearly silly article in the Sun claiming that he had made a fuss about the price of the drinks at the theatre’s VIP bar. It was an extraordinarily vapid non-story, accompanied by a picture of him clearly in a rage. Seemingly, he had cried ‘How much?’ when told the price for a drink, much to the alarm of some ‘shocked bystanders’ who said he ‘grabbed his change and left the bar’. The story itself was so oddly limp, wholly flatulent and without interest or drama from any perspective that I teased the chap in question about it when we next spoke. Of course he had paid no attention to the story, accepting it as part of the strange symbiotic relationship between stars and the press, but what I found quite staggering was his revelation that the drinks at the VIP bar that night had been free. Free! We imagine that tabloid stories might exaggerate, even wildly, but for the paper to have entirely made this up in order to be able to mention his name and include a picture (even the close-up ‘angry’ image was taken not from life but from his television show) struck me as quite confounding, even after years of experience with the press.
I am neither famous nor interesting enough to have stories frequently invented about me, let alone one as bone-dissolvingly lurid as that of a man caught in the act of unashamedly thinking drinks were expensive and literally taking his change. I have been lucky with only one case of an entirely fabricated story in the press, but it happened to be so entertaining that I took no offence. It was clearly a publicity piece for a stripper hoping to push her career up a notch: the article, in which she ‘revealed all’, as we might expect, described her experience of me coming into the strip club where she worked and paying her for a private dance, and then how I caused her to have an orgasm, using only my mental powers. It also contained the quite brilliant sentence ‘I bent over in front of him and he read my mind’, which certainly clarified where this girl kept her brain.
I grumbled a little more heavily into my morning Raisin Wheats and Earl Grey a few years later after hearing of a Sun exclusive that had just run.
I had some months before ‘come out of the lavatory’ in an article for the Independent and clarified for those still in any doubt that, given the choice, I was a stickler for man-on-man action over the more mundane heterosexual variant still promoted in right-wing pamphlets and throughout the internet. Such declarations are a necessary evil: I was privileged enough to have met my beloved and had no desire to hide him away from public events for fear of people thinking they had happened upon a juicy story. So a little mention in a broadsheet article had elegantly ‘got it out there’, and I had walked through the more avant-garde streets of Soho on the morning of publication expecting a reaction from the lounging locals reminiscent of the last scene from Dead Poets’ Society. I thought no more of it, and it all seemed rather tastefully done. Then, several months later, I was interviewed by the Sun about an upcoming series, and during our conversation the journalist asked me why I had felt I needed to make the whole dirty matter public. I explained that it was certainly
not in my nature to ‘feel the need’ in the sense of wanting to make public anything that was personal, but it had been a required move on my part to ensure that it didn’t become seen as a silly secret. The chap on the phone understood and seemed pleasant enough, and we moved on to other things.
A few days later, the (inspired) headline appeared in the Sun, EXCLUSIVE: I’M A MINDBENDER!, alongside a picture of me tagged with the line ‘Ginger Beer . . . Derren Brown’. The article was written to heavily imply that I had myself chosen the ignoble mouthpiece of this iniquitous tabloid to proclaim ‘exclusively’ to the (presumably non-Independent-reading) world the nature of my fascinating private life. This was rather humiliating: the thought that people would think I had chosen such a crass route. And worse, the suggestion that I was ginger. I’m not. And I don’t mind if other people are, as long as they keep it to themselves.
* Those are their real names. I implicate them here in case I get into trouble.
* It was while living in Germany that I learnt to stop using handkerchiefs. Until then they had seemed to me to be the preferred gentlemanly option to the simple tissue: somehow innately elegant and unable to dissolve into tissue-fluff in the pocket. Upon blowing my nose into my cotton pocket square one day in Nuremberg while among friends, I was treated to a round condemnation from the natives who strongly expressed their disgust with square-jawed, purple-clothed, exhaustingly joyless German indignation. They were revolted by the idea of me evacuating my sinuses into a piece of cloth that would then sit heavy and full in my pocket to act as a receptacle for further explosions of mucus as need or comfort dictated; horrified by the notion that it would need to be brought out and audibly peeled apart for a clean spot to be found; that this cloth would, rather than be thrown away, be kept as something precious, to be washed with clothes and used again. What perverse, retentive impulse would cause Englishmen to do anything other than expel waste into a tissue and throw it away? I saw their point, could offer no defence, and have not used one since without guilt and self-disgust. I was reminded of a boy at school known for his adventurous approach to personal hygiene, who boasted of carrying two handkerchiefs with him, one in each trouser pocket: he would use the first until he had filled it with his dense snot, before changing pockets and moving on to the second. By the time the latter was also glutted with nose-gloop, the first would have dried to a crust, and therefore was deemed useable once more. And so this cycle of drying and filling would continue, for up to a week, without either handkerchief being replaced. We really hated him.