(I hope you read this, Goddess Trix, my hypnodomme, as you recently posted a short about striking a difficult balance between exploiting the tropes of hypnotism--as magic or as control--and wanting to dispel them.)
"There is no such thing as magic...There is no other explanation." --The Haydn Dilemma Whit Haydn, one of the great Magic Castle performers and magic theorists posits the false syllogism above as the basis of any good magical effect: the feeling of shock at feeling the impossible. He claims that both sides of the dilemma must be clear to achieve the desired result, that the experience is a trick, an illusion, not real (on the one hand) and that all evidence and logic dictates otherwise. His example is the difference between classic theater and a magic show. We would find it bizarre at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, if the performers tried to prove that the guillotine was real and blade was sharp by chopping a melon first, yet this evidence would be conventional in a magic show. Similarly, in a performance of Peter Pan, we would not be bothered too much if we saw the wires--no ring is passed over the floating characters to prove there are no wires; however, in his flying illusion, David Copperfield has audience members on stage to inspect the glass box and carries one with him in flight as a convincer. This feeling of impossibility is the key to magic, according to Haydn, and I suspect is the basis of other experiences like "kayfabe" in the athletic theater of "pro wrestling" or ghost tours, where the disclaimers are weak or non-existent. Approaches to the cognitive dissonance vary: some American mentalists prefer to present their mind reading acts as supernatural while I'm told that many British performers treat the mentalism as a magic show. Darren Brown opens his Trick of the Mind television show and some live performances saying he uses a mixture of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship." [edit: Perhaps the cultural or personal differences in weak vs. strong disclaimers lies in the celebration of magick/mysticism vs. the debunking of magick/mysticism.] According to Whit Haydn, if either side of the dilemma is too weak, the experience of the impossible is turned into fantasy or theater (without evidence and convincers) or on the other side of the balance turned into the work of a charlatan or "closed eye" spiritualist. Haydn says that both the frame of magic performance (implicit disclaimer) and convincers (implicit evidence) create an elegant synergy. Too much disclaiming inside the experience or too much evidence out in the frame can upset the delicate balance. He promotes use of the false syllogism "it can't be real...it must be real" to create the ideal experience.
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