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This Issue 04/17/2008

Also in this issue

• I Am Your Father.
• Word on the Street
• Ego of the Week
• Shoutgun Sounds

Captain Disillusion stares at the camera and utters, "Love with your heart, use your head for everything else." This post-enlightenment superhero, whose face is partially coated in metallic silver paint, is at once seriously goofy and playfully skeptical. If viewers can disregard the aesthetics of his costume - and judging by hit-counts, not many have - they will walk away from each of his short videos with greater awareness of the special effects that permeate YouTube culture. Captain Disillusion calls people's attention to the lack of authenticity in the construction of popular videos like those of penguins bitch-slapping each other, lens flares that appear to be ghosts and people catching glasses on the bridges of their noses. These occurrences never happened, and the Captain wants you to know it.

Movie magic is not a term people frequently use these days. Special effects, an average filmgoer might claim, are guaranteed in this highly digitized, latex-mask-wearing era of Spielberg, Lucas and Cameron. On a basic level, people understand that what they see on the screen probably never actually occurred in front of a camera. Whether a team of computer animators constructed the entire scene from scratch, or a basic editing cut made someone disappear, audiences realize that the cinematic medium carries its own rules of reality. The ways in which frames create movement, shots compose scenes and sequences depict narratives all add up to a cinematic language. Indeed, filmgoers have developed their film grammar considerably since the first screening of a moving picture in 1895 Paris by the LumiŠre brothers. As that famous clip of a train coming toward the camera played to a packed theater, audience members shrieked and ran out of their seats in fear of an impending crash.

In 1895, people probably considered the LumiŠre brothers technological magicians. Filmmakers, like magicians, use sleight of hand - or camera - to present a series of images that are manipulative, misleading and illusory to the untrained eye. The writer Adam Gopnik, in a recent essay on illusionists, notes that modern-day magic is no longer about convincing viewers that the laws of space and time have been broken. Rather, magicians engage in a duel of reasoning and perception with their audiences, trying to outwit the rational actors in a game of wit and skill. Accordingly, no one believes that Peter Jackson filmed an actual gigantic gorilla battling real dinosaurs during the production of King Kong (2005). Instead, everyone believes that he and his visual effects team did a magical job making the creatures look real.