I do card tricks. It's something I do, something I've been interested in for just over three years now. When I say I "do" them
I do card tricks. It's something I do, something I've been interested in for just over three years now. When I say I "do" them, I don't mean I perform them. I do them the way people sew, or read, or masturbate — I do the vast bulk of them in private for my own amusement, just because it's a skill whose history, mechanics, and aesthetics interest me.
There's a certain phenomenon. On the few occasions that I have performed tricks for living people, I don't think this has ever not happened. I'll finish the trick, and then someone in the group will say, "I know a card trick," and he'll take the deck and do a card trick parody back at me. And sometimes it can be very funny, if the person is a funny person, but it happens all the time. Thinking back to before I started studying cards, I know I did it a few times myself.
Now, of course, there's the explanation you'd expect. Someone feels his ego has been jabbed, but he can't punch you in the face because it's a card trick. So he's jabbing you back, or belittling the jab. That's happening, no question about it. There's nothing more emasculating than being made a fool in a socially acceptable way, and far be it from me to deny him an outlet to vent his anger. Especially if it's done as a face-punching alternative.
Beyond that, though, there's something deeper in the way people react to card tricks. It has something to do with the movie Good Will Hunting, and something else to do with freshman Literary Criticism seminars, and a wee bit to do with the state of modern criticism (and nothing at all to do with any of the essays in the periodical you now hold in your hands, least of all this one). So, Good Will Hunting.
Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting was a fucking genius. Not a genius, but a fucking genius. That is, you never see him studying or doing research, or receding into isolation to focus on his field, or burning the midnight oil amid dusty book stacks. Actually, I'm not sure if you see him crack one book throughout the length of the film. In short, he does none of the intensely hard, dedicated work that makes geniuses (on the whole) look more like Richard Feynman than Matt Damon. Yet he's a fucking genius. He just is.
Now I know Gus Van Sant's gotta sell popcorn, and a movie whose Act II midpoint was Matt Damon working out the dryer details of string theory would let that corn grow cold, but the point of this is that the "fucking genius" character is what's being presented, and people loved it. We all loved it. It felt good to see this uneducated (but naturally bright) kid effortlessly spin off academic minutia. It felt good because it hits right at the heart of what so many of us have been raised to believe: We're all fucking geniuses. Having something interesting or enlightening to say about a topic is not contingent on having put any effort into knowing anything about it.
Reading the back cover of a book entitles us to join an intelligent conversation about it. We saw 8 1/2 in a film class six years ago and we're making broad statements about Fellini. We catch a few nightly news segments on Palestine and we've got an opinion about the Middle East, should anybody ask. We breeze through a introductory text on the physical processes of consciousness, and feel qualified to write an article about it in a certain quarterly publication. Then there's the one subject which perhaps boasts the widest gap between hardened opinions and actual research (on both sides of the fence): religion. Many (not all) believers are running off either dogma or feel-good gloss, and many (not all) non-believers are running off impressions gleaned from Sunday school and pop culture. But both parties are just as likely to address the subject with that unique brand of glib authority usually reserved for tenured college professors. We're all of us fucking geniuses.
We live in a culture where you don't have to have an argument, just an opinion. We don't want to sit through the equation, just give us the number (and the number doesn't have to necessarily be the RIGHT number, so long as you passionately believe it's the right number, and read that article about numbers in last month's New Yorker.) What are the criteria to write a review of a concert for a popular magazine? A knowledge of music theory? A history of the band members' origins? A versing in the genre of music they play? A familiarity with their influences? Without these you don't have a review, you have an opinion. Yet how much of modern criticism is unabashedly that?
Thirty-eight years after Richard Hofstadter published his grand treatise on the phenomenon, anti-intellectualism is still alive and well. This trend which I'm describing is not anti-intellectualism, but it has accomplished the same goals with greater efficiency. Far from strangling the learned by choking them off into a socially stigmatized corner of society, it takes a brilliant "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em till they're dead" strategy.
The never-ending din of opinions masquerading as commentary effectively buries the pockets of true expertise in a field of white noise. When a gaggle of celebrities debates stem-cell research with comic Bill Maher on Politically Incorrect, the most amazing thing is the thinness of the show's obligatory sense of irony. Watch enough of it, and it becomes apparent that the main conceit isn't "ha ha, what do these celebrities know about stem cells?" but "ooooh, what do these celebrities think about stem cells?" They're performing their opinions with the phonetic ring of knowledgeable discourse. Just like ... well, hey, just like someone who grabs a pack of cards from a would-be magician and does a card trick parody.
There's a deeper, more hidden but obviously present aspect to all of their performances, though, in that on some bedrock level they both expect to be taken seriously. This is the unconscious hope of the card trick joker when he does the "pick a card put it back shuffle it up is this your card ha ha ha" thing. In the instant that he holds that card up in the air, just as the crowd's eyes light on it but before their reaction registers, in that moment there is a flickering, irrational, childish, but fundamental, hope in the back of his mind that it will somehow actually work. The opinion will be valid, the review will be piercing, the article will be enlightening, the deck will turn up aces. Not because we sat in front of a mirror three hours a day, five days a week practicing the mundane details of a specific handling, but just because we'd like to be the type of person who can do it.
(Rian Johnson has not read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism In America, but he did skim a few intelligent-sounding reader reviews on Amazon.com)
