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.
Hyper-realism has its place in Hollywood - Jackson's Kong has nose hairs that convincingly ripple in the New York City wind - but the filmmakers who garner the most acclaim for original special effects are those who work within the constraints of reality. Watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), a viewer senses that director Michel Gondry was avoiding the editing room. In one of Jim Carrey's eerie dream sequences, Gondry's camera makes the actor appear to be in two different places at the same time without the use of computer animation or mirrors. Likewise, Gondry's highly watched YouTube video of him solving a Rubik's cube with his feet (search: Gondry+Rubik's) is a demonstration that crude special effects are often the most rewarding with which to grapple. Clearly, the future of special effects lies in both computer processors and human ingenuity.
Contemporary society demands evidence from our scientists and proofs from our politicians. We pay heed to astronomy and chemistry instead of astrology and alchemy. And we call contrived game shows with contestants reciting poorly written scripts, "reality TV." Yet, this is also the age of what Steven Colbert calls, "truthiness." We will accept ruses as long as they appear to be authentic, whether that means the Department of Homeland Security's color-coordinated terror warnings or an outrageous internet video of alleged UFO sightings. Perhaps Captain Disillusion is more than a film editor with too much spare time. Possibly he is addressing a social need for more rigorous skepticism, rescuing a people from their self-inflicted delusions.
Whether we decide to operate as mystics or empiricists, magicians or tricksters, we are increasingly surrounded by moving images that are incredible in the truest sense of the word - against credibility. Maybe with critical eyes we can pick out ambiguities, distortions and paradoxes, finding the distinction between fiction and reality and loving the art all the same.
