Movie Magic

Last weekend the family went out to see Dr. Strange, the latest Marvel Comics movie. This one is the origin story for Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme and master of the mystic arts. It was entertaining and visually wonderful. It did get me thinking (uh-oh) about how magic is depicted in most modern films — and in a lot of modern fantasy fiction and games. "Cinematic magic" has several recognizable features:

• Spells are cast quickly
• Showy visual effects
• Physical effects are immediate and un-ambiguous
• Effectiveness depends on the skill and personal "power" of the magician
• No spiritual cost

This is the magic of Dr. Strange, of Harry Potter, the film incarnations of Gandalf and the White Witch, the witches of Bewitched, and on back past the Wicked Witch of the West all the way to The Magician by Georges Melies. In games this is how characters do magic in Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy Hero, the World of Darkness, and most other roleplaying systems. And, unsurprisingly, it is how magic works in the hybrid child of tabletop games and cinema, electronic games. You do the spell and stuff happens.

What's interesting about this is how different it is from how magic is described throughout the ages by people who believe it's real. "Real" magic rituals take forever to perform, often involving days of fasting and purification beforehand. They tend to involve a lot of physical apparatus — inscribed charms, ointments, potions, figures, ritual circles and other paraphenalia. In fairness to "real" magicians, they don't have access to post-production visual effects the way moviemakers do, so naturally they need to rely more on stage-dressing and psychological preparation.

While the spell-casting process is a lot more cumbersome and visible than cinematic magic, the effects of "real" magic are often much more subtle. Do this and you will have good fortune, or success in love, or prophetic dreams. Your enemies will get sick or have nightmares. There are exceptions: I've read Greek magical formulas for making corpses talk or to turn yourself invisible. But it's remarkable how few "fireball" spells there are in real books of magic. (This is one distinct difference between the Lord of the Rings films and Tolkein's novel — in the book Gandalf's magic is much more subtle and ambiguous.)

Similarly, while skill and preparation are important in "real" magical operations, there's a lot more randomness and wiggle room. Wizards can always fail, even if they did everything right. (This is a very handy excuse to tell the mark when you're using "real" magic to accomplish the only thing it's really good for: conjuring money from the pockets of gullible people into the hands of magicians.)

One very important element of "real" magic is entirely absent from cinematic sorcery: spirits. Most "real" magic involves summoning spirits, communicating with them, learning from them, and making them do the wizard's bidding. That's how "real" magic generally works: you get a spirit to do something. And by spirits, we mean elemental beings, the souls of dead people, "planetary intelligences," angels . . .

. . . but mostly we mean demons. Which brings me to the final big difference between cinematic sorcery and the stuff real people worried about until they could blame corporations instead: movie magic isn't going to cost your soul. It's morally neutral. Bad people like Voldemort or the Wicked Witch of the West may use spells to cause harm, but it's the causing harm that marks them as evil, not the using spells. Whereas for most of human history, in most cultures, just doing magic is enough to damn you eternally. Even if you might get away with a little harmless "folk magic," the moment you start calling up spirits, you've doomed yourself.

This last points up the common thread of what separates cinematic magic from real magic: it's technological. After all, technological devices tend to work quickly; flip the switch and the light comes on. They have unambiguous effects; pull the trigger and the gun blows a hole in something. They work reliably; click on the Word icon and the application loads (unless you messed up when installing it). And technology (as everyone but a few "Deep Greens" will admit) is morally neutral; the same rocket can launch a weather satellite to save millions of lives from typhoons, or put a warhead on target in an undefended city.

Unsurprisingly, the "technological" style of magic began to appear as the world became more technological. In The Tempest, Shakespeare's Prospero accomplishes all his wonders through the agency of his tame spirit Ariel. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, even the King of the Fairies has to make use of a love potion made from a flower to trick his Queen.

But by the time L. Frank Baum began writing the Oz books, magic had become as mechanistic as a clock or a locomotive. In fact, his amazing final novel, Glinda of Oz, is full of what can only be called magical steampunk technology, with submarines, a domed city that rises and sinks — all of it operated by complex machinery which is powered by magic.

And I think this explains why cinematic magic has completely eclipsed "real" magic, at least in entertainment. The genuine wonders of science and technology left real magic in the dust. Want to fly? You don't have to sign a compact with the Devil and coat yourself in some kind of nasty goop made of nightshade and baby fat; just hop in a plane. Pass the written exam and put in some practice time with an instructor and you can fly it yourself. Looking for buried treasure? You don't have to mess around with stealing corpses and making them tell you where they hid gold, just buy a metal detector (50 bucks at Wal-Mart). Everyone can do magic now.

With technology providing wonders beyond the imaginations of preindustrial wizards, on demand and reasonably-priced, fictional sorcery had to leapfrog ahead, doing things machines can't do (yet), but with the same reliability and moral neutrality people have come to expect. It's notable that "real" magic in the modern world tends to focus on precisely those areas most resistant to technological obsolescence: personal relationships, psychological support, and questions about the soul and the afterlife.

All of which goes to explain why, even though I've written fantasy stories and plan to write more, I call myself a science fiction writer. I know what true magic is: spells that can show me other planets, creatures living inside rocks, and devices to put the power of the Sun at our fingertips. Beat that, Dr. Strange!

Comments

[MadRocketSci]

I wrote this as a comment on another post a while back, but it also seems relevant to this post:

"They also seem to think that technology is indistinguishable from magic."

You know, technology *is* indistinguishable from magic.😛 But magic is a slippery word, and can mean different things depending on who is trying to use it.

Magic can mean something that you don’t understand at all, and because you don’t understand it, you can tell yourself any story you want about it. Used this way, your world is “magical” when anything can happen because you don’t know enough to model it, or what to expect from a situation, which also places it well beyond your control. This is how the Romantics use “magic”. Magic as an unaccountable force that you are helpless against. Technology in particular, is black magic, to them. If you unwind a mystery to the extent that you can make use of it, well then that’s just dull and mundane.

On the other hand you can use magic to refer to something deep and subtle – something that it takes effort and exploration to figure out, which exposes to view a hidden world that you couldn’t see before. Used this way, something is magical because you *do* understand it, or can aspire to understand it, and it is the promise that with enough discipline and learning and effort, you can understand your world and use those hidden subtleties to transcend your circumstances and solve your problems. It suggests that the deeper you go in your understanding of the world, the more interesting things you will find. This is the sort of use of magic that must appeal to science fiction fans, I think.