Disappearing in Plain Sight: The Magic Trick and the Missed Event (original) (raw)

During a magic show, an audience misses the production of the trick while it occurs in plain sight. Onstage, the magician accomplishes the trick by using sleight-of-hand. Onscreen, the cut produces the illusion. Both use invisibility to achieve their effects. Using a psychoanalytic lens, this study contends the magic trick stages a fantasy of disappearance and return that mirrors Freud's concept of fort/da and Peggy Phelan's concept of performance. Cinematic representations of the trick use the stage as a metaphor for being both “gone” and “there.” Analyzing examples of the magic trick in Christopher Nolan’s [The Prestige] (2006) and Georges Méliès’s trick film [The Vanishing Lady] (1896), this essay argues the magic trick mirrors the traumatic aspect of performance—both onstage and onscreen—which always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event.