gattino
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2003
- Messages
- 2,523
This is just another one of my rambling observationals on a phenomenon which is reported both in (purported) fact and fiction often enough that it's clearly a distinct thing...yet not enough for anyone to have collected such incidents together and give them a name. At least not as far as I know.
I was reading the plot summary of a 1934 Claude Rains movie, based on a novel, called The Clairvoyant ("The Evil Mind" in the US). I know I've seen it years ago on TV. But in essence it's about a stage magician with a mind reading act who one night tells an audience member the contents of a sealed envelope without any of the usual assistance from his wife, an impossible feat which he initially dismisses..and then goes on to find himself reading minds and making genuine predictions of news events etc.
This is the trope I've seen or read many times over the years.
I recall a 1970s Superman comic in which a story is being told about some (fake) magician on Krypton who one day,unwittingly, performs one of hs miracles without his assistant being in place to make it happen...and that this frightens him. This being shaken and spooked by the turn of events is the part of interest.
In one of the two major films about Houdini - I suspect the Paul Michael Glaser one - I again only vaguely recall the details but I remember a scene in which some other escapologist's decision to giv up is explained by him having escaped some death trap, such as the water tank, when he shouldn't have been able to. He didn't know how and this had shaken him to the core. I'm going from the vaguest of memory so maybe it just meant his brush with death, but I know at the time I understood it to be a reference to him being spooked and mentally shaken by his own apparent display of genuine "magic".
Perhaps someone who's seen the film more recently than I can confirm that scene.
Here's the most contentious one..For years I was absolutely certain there is a passage on this same theme in one of the gospels that really intrigued me and caught my imagination. I use the past tense as I simply cannot find it. But I'm so sure it was there. In my memory Jesus heals someone, perhaps on demand, and it says something along the lines of "Jesus was amazed (afraid?) for the man had no faith" and then/so withdrew from the place.
Googling the phrase reveals a very similar reference to him being amazed because a gentile had so much more faith than the others, but I don't believe I can be getting mixed up with that..because the version I recall left a very distinct impression on me. That Christ himself had been startled and scared by his own success at healing someone when the person in question didn't display the magic placebo like ingredient of faith...which suggests Jesus himself was the source to his own apparent surprise. Does such a passage exist? If not where on earth did I get it from?
On more certain ground in the book Telephone Calls From The Dead (Callum E Cooper, Tricorn books) the author quotes at great length a previously published account by one Harry Walters about being witness to an incident involving a stage mentalist who incorporated a "spirit telephone"in his act, in which the punters would believe they were talking to the dead over the phone but it was in fact the magician - someone called Marvell - 's wife in the next room with a script. You can guess the rest....
Finally, intriguingly, here's Orson Welles discussing his own experience as a fake clairvoyant and the art of cold reading...he describes the act of ending up believing your own gift as a well established occupational hazard of the scam, and rationalises his own apparent success at revealing something he couldn't know, and which made him immediatly stop doing readings, as him unconsciously picking up cues...but interestingly he appears merely to be assuming so as a preferred and less disturbing interpretation.....
Can anyone confirm or clarify the ones I'm vague about or point to other examples?
I was reading the plot summary of a 1934 Claude Rains movie, based on a novel, called The Clairvoyant ("The Evil Mind" in the US). I know I've seen it years ago on TV. But in essence it's about a stage magician with a mind reading act who one night tells an audience member the contents of a sealed envelope without any of the usual assistance from his wife, an impossible feat which he initially dismisses..and then goes on to find himself reading minds and making genuine predictions of news events etc.
This is the trope I've seen or read many times over the years.
I recall a 1970s Superman comic in which a story is being told about some (fake) magician on Krypton who one day,unwittingly, performs one of hs miracles without his assistant being in place to make it happen...and that this frightens him. This being shaken and spooked by the turn of events is the part of interest.
In one of the two major films about Houdini - I suspect the Paul Michael Glaser one - I again only vaguely recall the details but I remember a scene in which some other escapologist's decision to giv up is explained by him having escaped some death trap, such as the water tank, when he shouldn't have been able to. He didn't know how and this had shaken him to the core. I'm going from the vaguest of memory so maybe it just meant his brush with death, but I know at the time I understood it to be a reference to him being spooked and mentally shaken by his own apparent display of genuine "magic".
Perhaps someone who's seen the film more recently than I can confirm that scene.
Here's the most contentious one..For years I was absolutely certain there is a passage on this same theme in one of the gospels that really intrigued me and caught my imagination. I use the past tense as I simply cannot find it. But I'm so sure it was there. In my memory Jesus heals someone, perhaps on demand, and it says something along the lines of "Jesus was amazed (afraid?) for the man had no faith" and then/so withdrew from the place.
Googling the phrase reveals a very similar reference to him being amazed because a gentile had so much more faith than the others, but I don't believe I can be getting mixed up with that..because the version I recall left a very distinct impression on me. That Christ himself had been startled and scared by his own success at healing someone when the person in question didn't display the magic placebo like ingredient of faith...which suggests Jesus himself was the source to his own apparent surprise. Does such a passage exist? If not where on earth did I get it from?
On more certain ground in the book Telephone Calls From The Dead (Callum E Cooper, Tricorn books) the author quotes at great length a previously published account by one Harry Walters about being witness to an incident involving a stage mentalist who incorporated a "spirit telephone"in his act, in which the punters would believe they were talking to the dead over the phone but it was in fact the magician - someone called Marvell - 's wife in the next room with a script. You can guess the rest....
Finally, intriguingly, here's Orson Welles discussing his own experience as a fake clairvoyant and the art of cold reading...he describes the act of ending up believing your own gift as a well established occupational hazard of the scam, and rationalises his own apparent success at revealing something he couldn't know, and which made him immediatly stop doing readings, as him unconsciously picking up cues...but interestingly he appears merely to be assuming so as a preferred and less disturbing interpretation.....
Can anyone confirm or clarify the ones I'm vague about or point to other examples?
