The Prestige and Perception

Trompe-l'oeil, a French phrase meaning "deceive the eye," is an art technique which makes a two-dimensional piece appear 3D - it is an optical illusion. Likewise, The Prestige was a trompe-l'oeil which trumped my logic and made me say, 'oi.' Just when I was certain I understood what was happening between the dueling magicians, another complexity would be revealed, and I was left scratching my head. The Prestige in itself is a fulfillment of Mr. Cutter's three necessary stages of a successful magic trick - the pledge, the turn, and the prestige: Angier devotes himself to discovering the secret to Bordon's trick "The Transported Man" and topping it, he discovers a supreme illusion and thinks he's had vengeance, and finally Bordon reveals his true secret.  Though a professional magician, Angier repeatedly falls one step behind Bordon's cunning in a way that echoes the statements made about human perception in René Descartes' Meditations.

During his opening and closing monologue, Mr. Cutter asserts that during an illusion, the audience will think they're mentally searching for the magician's secret, but their unconscious desire to be fooled prohibits them from actually doing so. The repetition of Cutter's philosophy emphasizes its prominence and significance to Angier's desperate and obsessive determination to have vengeance on Bordon, the murderer of his wife. While Angier undeniably desires nothing more than to one-up Bordon, he searches for the secret the wrong way. When Angier and Mr. Cutter begin their attempts to re-create Bordon's "The Transported Man", Angier vehemently protests Mr. Cutter's belief that Bordon uses a double. Mr. Cutter argues that Angier wants the secret to be more complex, but it isn't. His imagination forbids him from accepting Mr. Cutter's (accurate) hypothesis.

Angier's inability to believe that Bordon uses a double affirms Descartes' belief that imagination and sensation can lead accurate perception of reality astray. In Meditations, Descrates describes an encounter with wax - first in its solid form, then as a melted substance. He argues that the human senses will lead him to the false conclusion that these are two different substances, as the melted wax does not feel, look, or smell the way the initial wax did, but that his intuition and mind will lead him to the correct answer. Angier might watch Bordon's trick and think that it's impossible for him to use a double since the man going into the door and coming out of the other door look and sound exactly alike. If Angier were depending on his well-trained magician's mind to determine Bordon's secret, he'd understand as quickly as Mr. Cutter that "The Transported Man" had to rely on a double.

But Angier isn't the only person falling victim to their own, as Descartes would argue, clouded human perception. I fell into the same trap in a very similar way as Angier. I set out to watch The Prestige with my philosophical glasses on: I took notes and concentrated hard. Yet similar to Angier's inability to grasp the secret of "The Transported Man," I found myself over-thinking nearly every move that was made and word that was spoken. I was just as predictable as Mr. Cutter asserted the audience would be - completely unaware of my desire to be fooled. While a few lingering closeups and perplexing flashbacks hinted to Bordon's secret, I didn't realize their significance or meaning until the film was finished. Even Mr. Cutter, who fully understood the folly of human perception, was tripped up once or twice, missing Angier's transformation into Lord Caldlow as well as Bordon's double-life.

The Prestige skillfully intertwines multiple magic tricks into one mind-boggling film - it's like a magical prelude to Inception. When I thought I knew what was going on I really didn't, and when I thought I'd caught up to the plot once again, I discovered I'd been totally oblivious to the complexities of the story. The consolation was that Angier and I went through the same process - both of us searched hard (though not to the same degree - my life's still intact) for what we believed was a hidden truth. Descartes' Meditations gives the two of us the consolation that we're not stupid, we're just falling victim to our sensorial perception of reality: we're trying to understand the wax with our senses rather than with our mind and intuition, which in this event, certainly knows better. Angier seeks tirelessly for the secret to his enemy's great magic trick and just when he believes he's gotten the ultimate revenge and prestige, it's revealed how blind he was. The Prestige questions not how hard, but how closely we'll search for the answers our beings so desperately reach for.