by Jonah Lehrer
As code breaker Jerry Roberts observes, the military intelligence provided by Tutte’s achievement was unprecedented. “It was the first and perhaps only war in which one side had such detailed ongoing knowledge of what the other side was planning, thinking and deciding,” Roberts writes. “Without Lorenz decrypts, the war in Europe would have lasted many more years. This was a war which was costing tens of millions of lives a year.”31
A few months after the war ended, Tutte traveled to Germany. He met with a senior German intelligence official, who showed off the Lorenz machine, explaining how the complex interactions of the rotors created an unbreakable code. Tutte listened, pretending to be impressed. When the German was done talking, Tutte shrugged and said, “No one is ever going to break that.” What Tutte couldn’t say is that he already had.32
Nobody knows why Tutte’s work on the Lorenz cipher was kept secret for more than fifty years. (The breaking of the Enigma cipher by Alan Turing was declassified in the 1970s.)33 One theory is that the British didn’t want the Russians to know that they’d cracked the code, since the Russians used captured Lorenz machines during the first years of the Cold War.34 By the early 1950s, however, the Soviets had adopted their own cryptographic systems. Another theory is that being able to read the Lorenz messages required the Allied leaders—Churchill in particular—to make excruciating trade-offs during the war. Time and time again, they had to consider the risk of acting on their secret Ultra intelligence, and thus giving away its invaluable source. These decisions likely meant that innocent people died, and soldiers were sent to their death, all to protect Tutte’s breakthrough.
When Tutte retired in the early 1980s, he was known as a distinguished academic who had made significant contributions to graph theory in general and to the four-color-map theorem in particular. Only after he retired, still holding the secret he was obliged to keep, did the British government declassify his Bletchley Park breakthrough. Tutte was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a public memorial to his wartime achievements now stands in his birthplace of Newmarket. In his final decade, he received new accolades from his colleagues and attended cryptography conferences to reminisce about breaking the Lorenz cipher with a sharp pencil and reams of paper.
He remained humble and soft-spoken to the end, eager to share credit and minimize his role. At the cemetery in West Montrose where his ashes are interred, a small polished stone is set into the ground with only his name and the dates of his birth and death. A visitor might notice that this William Tutte, whoever he was, lies beside Dorothea Tutte. With no claim to fame engraved on the stones, few would know that here lies the man whose incandescent curiosity cracked the ultimate code, saving the world with the secrets he revealed.
The Puzzle of Life
All writing about magic is limited by the first rule of magic, which is that one should never talk about how magic happens. Ever since those ancient street artists baffled strangers for spare coins, magicians have policed their secrets, exiling anyone who dares reveal a method, principle, or tool.
There are good reasons for this self-policing. The thrill of a magic trick is that we can’t explain it; the mystery is what generates the feeling of wonder, as confirmed by those brain scans. But the secrecy also exists for another reason, which is that the solution to most tricks is heartbreakingly banal. The Statue of Liberty disappeared because the audience was slowly turned; the vanished donkey is hiding behind an angled mirror; the secret of the card trick is some fast fingers. It’s not supernatural. It’s just thousands of hours of tedious practice.
When I was with Mohan, the geological statistician who broke the lottery, in Toronto, during the last cold days of a long winter, he kept asking me if I really wanted to know how Jan Rouven performed his puzzle trick. He warned me that I’d be disappointed, that it might be better if I just preserved the mystery. But I was in too deep. I needed to know.35
Mohan set up the trick in his girlfriend’s living room. We snacked on cheese and crackers as he assembled the puzzle. He repeated Rouven’s performance, filling in the narrative with his own childhood memories. He took the puzzle apart and put it back together, piece by piece. And then, after adding those two extra blocks, he slid the frame back over the puzzle. Jim Steinmeyer, a celebrated inventor of modern magic tricks, and the man who figured out how Charles Morritt vanished the donkey, says that the best illusions have a particular tell: right before the crowd applauds, there is a brief silence, a “split second when the entire audience shares a gasp of genuine amazement.” When Mohan fit the frame over the puzzle, I gasped.
Mohan then let me look over the parts of the illusion. My best guesses were quickly falsified. I held the wooden frame and looked over the wooden pieces; they all seemed solid, ordinary, perfectly muggle. A bit rough, perhaps, but only because they had been fashioned by the hands of a geological statistician who is not a professional carpenter.
“Do you give up?” Mohan asked. I nodded, and Mohan began describing his solution. “When I was thinking back on Rouven’s performance, I realized that there’s just that one moment when we don’t see all the puzzle pieces,” Mohan says, referring to the brief section when the magician has stacked the wood blocks in his hand. Although Rouven seamlessly weaves that procedure into the narrative—each piece represents one of his essential memories—Mohan knew that all the talking was just a feint, a clever distraction.
What was Rouven really up to? Perhaps holding the blocks gave him the opportunity to “ditch” one of them, thus clearing space for the extra pieces he would later add to the puzzle. But Mohan realized that it couldn’t be a typical ditch, such as palming the piece, since the wooden blocks were way too big. “That’s one of the neat things about the trick,” Mohan says. “If Rouven had used smaller pieces, it would be easy to just think he hid one or two of them up his sleeve. But by choosing such large pieces of wood, he’s leading us away from that explanation.”
Mohan was stumped, but he couldn’t stop thinking about those seconds when Rouven was holding the disassembled puzzle. Something happened there, he could feel it—he just didn’t know what it was. “Magic works because magicians understand our attention,” Mohan says. “They know exactly where we’re looking.” Mohan focused his detective work on where the audience wasn’t looking, as that’s likely where the trick was happening. At the top of the list were the puzzle pieces themselves. “That’s the elegance of it. The last place we’d think of hiding the blocks are within another block. And then I thought about how, when Rouven’s holding all of the pieces”—they’re stacked in his arms—“he might be able to quickly slide one into another.” It’s an ingenious use of functional fixedness. Blocks are for building; they are solid and sturdy. It never occurs to us that a block could also be a hiding spot.
So Mohan went to his garage, a cluttered corner of which doubles as his woodworking shop. It took a few weeks, but he engineered one of the larger blocks with an empty inside, so that it could swallow a smaller piece. To make the ditch easier, he inserted small neodymium supermagnets into both blocks. The magnets ensure that the disappearance happens fast—once the blocks are near their positions, the invisible force takes care of the rest. Mohan smiled as he explained the supermagnets: “The reason for making the carpentry look rough is to get the audience thinking ‘clumsy bits of wood,’ which takes their thoughts away from high-tech rare-earth supermagnets.” Many of us are familiar with the physical misdirection of magic: the flourishes with the wand, the distractions of the cape and hat. But the best magic also uses subliminal misdirection.
After I returned from Toronto, I found a video of Jan Rouven performing the puzzle illusion. It’s an old clip from 2014, taken at a charity benefit for an animal shelter, but it’s the only recording of the original trick. In March 2016, authorities arrested Rouven for possessing child pornography; he’s been in jail ever since. While the incident ended his career, it increased the “prestige” of Rouven’s tricks, since several of them have never aga
in been seen.VIII
In the video, Rouven’s ditch occurs just before the two-minute mark. The ditch is visible once you know what to look for—due to the camera angle, you can see the piece disappear—but that’s the point: nobody knows to look. Such are the lessons of magic: it’s an art that constantly reminds us how little we know, and that we understand even less. Our brains can’t see everything; the world is too big, too full, too strange. So we take shortcuts instead.
Consider a visual illusion known as the Shepard Tables. Look at the picture below and pick the table that is more likely to fit through a narrow doorway:
Nearly everyone picks the table on the left. The answer, however, is that both tables have identical dimensions. (The illusion dupes our perception of depth, which estimates size based on foreshortening.) What makes this illusion so compelling is that even after we know the tables are the same, we still see them as different. As the neuroscientist Gustav Kuhn observes, this tension is what makes the picture interesting, turning a simple line drawing into an epistemic mystery. “Even when you know such illusions are present, the mismatch with reality is still there,” he writes.37
Magic is like that, too. The best tricks can’t be spoiled because, even when the trick is given away, we still can’t understand how it was done. Penn and Teller used to perform a version of Cups and Balls, a classic sleight-of-hand trick supposedly popularized by ancient Egyptian conjurers. In the trick, in a series of “vanishes” and “transpositions,” the balls appear and disappear beneath a series of opaque cups. Teller’s ingenious innovation was to use clear water glasses instead. Although it was now possible to follow the balls as Teller palmed them and moved them from glass to glass, audiences still couldn’t make sense of the performance. “The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them,” Teller says.38
But then the same could be said of the Old Masters, who turned some lenses and mirrors into visual wonders. To be a great artist is to become a magician. It requires that you devote your life to making the inexplicable look easy. It means spending years practicing tricks that only succeed if nobody notices them. Because if the method works, there doesn’t seem to be any method at all. Just a quiet gasp, followed by a lasting sense of mystery.
We crave the gasp. A recent experiment by the magician Joshua Jay and the psychologists Lisa Grimm and Nicholas Spanola showed subjects a series of videos documenting impressive magical feats, such as making a girl levitate. The subjects then had a choice: they could either learn how the trick was done or watch another magic trick. Most people just wanted to see more magic. The experience of mystery was more fun than its solution.
I. One of the most common performance tropes of magic is the so-called inspection. A magician will invite an audience member up to the stage to look at the prop. Such inspections reinforce the bias of functional fixedness, since we see the object performing its typical function (the hat is put on the head, for instance) and feel assured it’s just a standard object.
II. The trick was so mysterious that it soon gained the attention of Houdini. Although Houdini was famous for his death-defying escapes, he’d grown tired of picking locks like a burglar; he wanted to establish himself as a proper magician. Houdini began asking around for tricks he could copy, looking for “an illusion inventor who can keep a secret.” He soon learned about Morritt’s vanishing donkey and decided to buy his trick for cash. Morritt took the money, but urged Houdini to think bigger: “If you really want to make headlines with your magic, you shouldn’t bother with little tricks, rabbits, pigeons. Make an elephant disappear!”11
III. And then there’s the circumstantial evidence. At the time, other artists ridiculed Caravaggio for his reliance on models; they said he couldn’t paint without one. One of Caravaggio’s early patrons was Cardinal Francesco del Monte, a supporter of Galileo and an expert in the latest lens technology. There are also numerous references to Caravaggio’s carrying a “glass.”
IV. I first learned about the story of Bill Tutte from Mohan Srivastava. In his teens, Mo lived down the street from Bill and Dorothea. Mo was Bill’s afternoon chess partner on weekends and suffered the miserable cocoa that Bill made when Dorothea wasn’t around to do it right.
V. Along with three other undergraduates, Tutte solved a long-standing problem called Squaring the Square, which held that it was impossible to divide a square into a series of smaller differently sized squares. Tutte’s solution, which borrowed a principle from electrical-circuit design, showed that it could be done.
VI. Further complicating Tutte’s task was that the Allies had no working example of a Lorenz machine; they didn’t even know what it looked like. (The Enigma machine, in contrast, had been recovered from a crippled German U-boat in 1941, along with the operator’s codebooks.)
VII. The Russians also received raw intelligence from Bletchley Park via John Cairncross, a double agent who worked on the Ultra ciphers.
VIII. A few years ago, the celebrity magician Criss Angel performed a trick for a television special that, by most accounts, was extremely similar to one performed by Jan Rouven years before. This trick, the Bed of Death, is essentially a version of Russian roulette without a loaded pistol, with Rouven instead strapped to a table beneath five razor-sharp swords connected to a series of ropes. One of these swords is poised directly over the magician’s heart. A volunteer from the audience chooses the order of the swords by randomly pulling on various ropes. (The trick is that he or she never chooses the deadly one.) While Rouven’s illusion was widely celebrated, Criss Angel’s television version didn’t go as smoothly. When Angel tried to release the last sword—the one that would have killed him—the sword refused to budge, thus giving away the mechanics of the trick: the rope connected to the dangerous sword is held back by a separate mechanism and thus can’t actually be released by the volunteer.36
CHAPTER 3 THE POWER OF COMIC SANS
It’s not where you take things from. It’s where you take them to.
—KANYE WEST, ON TWITTER
Trust what is difficult.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet
“The Woods Movie”
In the early 1990s, Dan Myrick, a student at the University of Central Florida film school, began complaining to his friends about the sad state of the American horror movie. For Dan, the problem was simple: the movies had stopped being scary. They were bloodier than ever—Freddy’s Dead featured buckets of red corn syrup—but the violence felt frivolous and campy. “The movies had become so predictable,” Dan says. “You could see every move way in advance because you’d seen it a million times before.”1 Krueger had become a cliché.
But Dan wasn’t content to be a critic. Along with fellow film student Eduardo Sánchez, Dan began plotting out a new kind of horror film. “We’d have a few beers, smoke a little, and just talk about the movies we wanted to make,” Dan told me. The students discovered that they both loved the television series In Search of…, a syndicated show from the late 1970s that investigated paranormal mysteries, from Bigfoot to ancient aliens. “What we responded to was that authentic search for answers,” Dan says. “The show treated the mystery seriously, and that made it scarier than most of the horror crap being made.” Dan and Eduardo’s big idea was to make a horror movie modeled on an episode of In Search of…, with their characters attempting to unravel some long-standing enigma. They decided to set their investigation in the woods. (“What’s scarier than getting lost in a big dark forest?” Dan asks.) They started calling their project “The Woods Movie.”
Now the film students needed a plot, a mystery for their characters to investigate in that forbidding forest. The film students began by inventing a sprawling mythology about the curse of Burkittsville, a small town in north-central Maryland. The curse started with the death of a witch—she was exiled during a harsh winter storm—and the disappearance of her accusers. Decades pass; the vanishings continue. Cut to 1994, when three local college students decide to mak
e a documentary about all these missing people. The students walk into the woods and are never seen again. A year later, an anthropologist discovers their duffel bag, containing video tapes, in an abandoned cabin.
Dan and Eduardo’s brilliant conceit was to make a film out of that found footage. “We realized that if you make it feel like a documentary, then all of a sudden there’s no safety net for the audience,” Dan says. “It doesn’t have to have a neat ending. The good guys don’t have to survive. Anything can happen because you’re free from the old ways of telling the story.”
New technology made their new style of storytelling possible. At the time, handheld cameras were becoming commonplace. And it wasn’t just random home videos—the same shaky style was also appearing on television, thanks to cable news and reality shows such as The Real World and Cops. “There was something about the shakiness that just made it feel real,” Dan says. “It was so artless, you’re like, ‘This has to be true.’ ”
But using a jittery camera wasn’t enough. If Dan and Eduardo were going to avoid the predictable tropes of the horror genre—the cheesy soundtrack, the obvious shots, the foreseeable deaths—they would have to pioneer a different kind of moviemaking process. Instead of a conventional script (which would feel too contrived), Dan and Eduardo spent weeks coming up with a thirty-five-page narrative outline, a beat sheet that described every scene in the movie. The actors would improvise the dialogue. “We knew that if for even a second, if you felt like these people were acting, if it felt like a movie at all, we were going to lose the audience,” Eduardo told Vice in 2016. “So it was very important that these actors know how to improv and know how to improv creatively and not overdo it.”2