moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2020-09-04 07:14 pm
moon_custafer) wrote2020-09-04 07:14 pm
Entry tags:
Twists of Memory
Over on Wonkette, the following story is currently under discussion:
Attorney Lin Wood made his name by representing Richard Jewell in his defamation cases against the media and the US government. If you knew who Wood was before last week, it's either because of that or because he also represented JonBenet Ramsey's parents and brother in their respective defamation cases. ….
Earlier this week, Wood was blocked from attempting to raise money for Rittenhouse's defense on Twitter. Both Facebook and Twitter banned praise of Rittenhouse's actions last week, and Discover has prohibited users from donating to his defense fund.
Today, Wood posted a very weird tweet claiming that in 1996 "Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook declared Richard Jewell to be a mass murderer," and that "efforts to raise money for Jewell's defense & family were banned on social media."
According to the Wonkette article, Wood subsequently claimed his tweet was a satire, or an allegory, or something, but that numerous right-wingers were already denouncing Zuckerberg for his terrible slander of Jewell back in 1996 when Facebook didn’t yet exist and Zuckerberg was in middle-school.
Anyway my reaction was to sigh and shrug, not because of the wrongness or the politics but because false memories and the Mandela Effect and traditions that, having once taken root, get their origin stories backdated several centuries, all seem to be pretty common. Debunking stories is an endless treadmill. Which led me to remember a book about the Indian Rope Trick.
On the chance you’ve somehow never seen **any** kind of Orientalist fantasy, this is the one where the conjurer tosses a rope into the air, and it keeps going up, until his assistant is able to climb it. In movies this often turns into an escape route for the protagonist; sometimes it’s combined with snake charming and the magician causes the robe to rise on its own by playing a flute. In the classic accounts, it’s done in an open field with no tall buildings that might provide hidden suspension for the rope, and the assistant usually gets ten or so feet above the heads of the audience then mysteriously vanishes. In some versions his dismembered limbs subsequently crash back to earth and are reassembled by the magician. Mid-20th-century descriptions of the trick often add the detail that if a tourist tries to photograph the trick, the picture, upon development, shows both the magician and the assistant on the ground with the rope coiled, and imply that the trick is done by somehow mass-hypnotizing all onlookers.
The Wikipedia entry confirmed my memory that the book, Unravelling the Indian Rope Trick (1996) puts forth the theory it was all a 19th-century Western urban legend never actually performed by magicians in India, later retconned into the memories of various English witnesses who claimed, once it entered the popular imagination, to have seen it performed when they were out there. Which was the concept that had always intrigued me, that the real trick was the idea of the trick.
OK. Reading down the article, it appears this theory isn’t totally accepted— some magic historians have more recently suggested it could have been done with classic, low-tech, stage misdirection techniques, but died out as (a) photography became more widespread, and (b) the trick’s fame became widespread and audiences knew to expect the disappearance of the assistant as he shimmies up the rope, and to watch for it.
I admit I kind of want this to be the true explanation, mainly because even the human race contains a large percentage of suckers (see above) I like it when a legend is derived from something more interesting than just “people are superstitious lol.” And because I’m the sort of person who thinks knowing how a magic trick was done makes it cooler. I can point out some illusions that held up for a long time because skeptics were searching for a higher-tech method than that which was actually used (waves to the Cottingley fairies).
Finally, the Wiki entry mentions that Penn and Teller did a tv episode about this trick, that ended with their “recreation” of the illusion, which.... it feels weird to use the term “cheating” about stage magic, which by definition is cheating; but from the Wiki description, they used a streetful of people to convince a couple of passing tourists that they’d just missed seeing the main part of trick, which is very unsatisfying, especially for something where the classic version is supposed to be a couple of jugglers, in an open field, amazing a whole village of onlookers.
Attorney Lin Wood made his name by representing Richard Jewell in his defamation cases against the media and the US government. If you knew who Wood was before last week, it's either because of that or because he also represented JonBenet Ramsey's parents and brother in their respective defamation cases. ….
Earlier this week, Wood was blocked from attempting to raise money for Rittenhouse's defense on Twitter. Both Facebook and Twitter banned praise of Rittenhouse's actions last week, and Discover has prohibited users from donating to his defense fund.
Today, Wood posted a very weird tweet claiming that in 1996 "Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook declared Richard Jewell to be a mass murderer," and that "efforts to raise money for Jewell's defense & family were banned on social media."
According to the Wonkette article, Wood subsequently claimed his tweet was a satire, or an allegory, or something, but that numerous right-wingers were already denouncing Zuckerberg for his terrible slander of Jewell back in 1996 when Facebook didn’t yet exist and Zuckerberg was in middle-school.
Anyway my reaction was to sigh and shrug, not because of the wrongness or the politics but because false memories and the Mandela Effect and traditions that, having once taken root, get their origin stories backdated several centuries, all seem to be pretty common. Debunking stories is an endless treadmill. Which led me to remember a book about the Indian Rope Trick.
On the chance you’ve somehow never seen **any** kind of Orientalist fantasy, this is the one where the conjurer tosses a rope into the air, and it keeps going up, until his assistant is able to climb it. In movies this often turns into an escape route for the protagonist; sometimes it’s combined with snake charming and the magician causes the robe to rise on its own by playing a flute. In the classic accounts, it’s done in an open field with no tall buildings that might provide hidden suspension for the rope, and the assistant usually gets ten or so feet above the heads of the audience then mysteriously vanishes. In some versions his dismembered limbs subsequently crash back to earth and are reassembled by the magician. Mid-20th-century descriptions of the trick often add the detail that if a tourist tries to photograph the trick, the picture, upon development, shows both the magician and the assistant on the ground with the rope coiled, and imply that the trick is done by somehow mass-hypnotizing all onlookers.
The Wikipedia entry confirmed my memory that the book, Unravelling the Indian Rope Trick (1996) puts forth the theory it was all a 19th-century Western urban legend never actually performed by magicians in India, later retconned into the memories of various English witnesses who claimed, once it entered the popular imagination, to have seen it performed when they were out there. Which was the concept that had always intrigued me, that the real trick was the idea of the trick.
OK. Reading down the article, it appears this theory isn’t totally accepted— some magic historians have more recently suggested it could have been done with classic, low-tech, stage misdirection techniques, but died out as (a) photography became more widespread, and (b) the trick’s fame became widespread and audiences knew to expect the disappearance of the assistant as he shimmies up the rope, and to watch for it.
I admit I kind of want this to be the true explanation, mainly because even the human race contains a large percentage of suckers (see above) I like it when a legend is derived from something more interesting than just “people are superstitious lol.” And because I’m the sort of person who thinks knowing how a magic trick was done makes it cooler. I can point out some illusions that held up for a long time because skeptics were searching for a higher-tech method than that which was actually used (waves to the Cottingley fairies).
Finally, the Wiki entry mentions that Penn and Teller did a tv episode about this trick, that ended with their “recreation” of the illusion, which.... it feels weird to use the term “cheating” about stage magic, which by definition is cheating; but from the Wiki description, they used a streetful of people to convince a couple of passing tourists that they’d just missed seeing the main part of trick, which is very unsatisfying, especially for something where the classic version is supposed to be a couple of jugglers, in an open field, amazing a whole village of onlookers.
no subject
Agreed. I would love to know if it's even possible to field-test a reconstruction of this particular trick or if it's still too recognizable by set-up alone.
I can point out some illusions that held up for a long time because skeptics were searching for a higher-tech method than that which was actually used (waves to the Cottingley fairies).
It was an in-camera effect! Those hold up!
no subject