15

Movie Magic

YOU’LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY! Remember that one? You would if you were around in 1978 when Christopher Reeve burst onto the scene as the Man of Steel. Prior to that Richard Donner film, flying men—and women, of course—looked pretty darned hokey. Those of us who remembered the Guy with the Spit-Curl and Cape from television went into the movie with visions of George Reeves (with an s and no relation) obviously suspended on wires with rear projection scenery flitting past. Which was okay when you were nine, but this was way cooler. This Superman looked as if he really were flying.

Filmmakers had been trying, of course, to achieve the illusion of flight ever since they began burning images into celluloid at eighteen frames a second. And of getting trampled by horses, falling from buildings, walking through walls, pretty much anything you couldn’t achieve in real life (and survive) or onstage. They didn’t get around to fighting with lightsabers until George Lucas brought them to the screen in 1977 in the original Star Wars (I refuse to submit to the renaming regime for the series; there is only one Star Wars; accept no substitute), but some sort of magic was always on hand. As near as I can tell, no trick in the history of film fired the preteen imagination quite like the lightsaber—this stick that emitted a beam of light that could be contained, controlled, and used with lethal efficiency. Okay, maybe the Winchester 73 and the Colt .45, but go with it here. The lightsaber’s effect was achieved by means of rotoscoping—hand-drawing lines around the object (in this case, model lightsabers) on every frame in which the weapon appears, to create a matte, then fill in the matte and add a glow. You could fend off projectiles and bursts of murderous light, parry the best efforts of an assassin, cut a man in half, probably carve your Thanksgiving bird. I’m not sure there is a house in America that contained a boy between 1977 and, say, 1992 that did not possess, or maybe even still does, a plastic imitation. It helped if the Force was strong in you. Which was part of the magic. Lightsabers were only one element in a complete universe of enchantment, filled with exotic creatures, magnificent evil, really cool devices, mystical powers, and excellent gadgets. If you’d like, I believe I can show you every one of them in my basement. There is a (deliberately) cheesy diner in Kent, Ohio, that has a replica (suitably cheesy) of an X-Wing fighter outside the entrance; virtually no male patron of the appropriate generation can resist having his picture taken beside it as he leaves. You want to talk about the Force? There it is.

This is not, however, a chapter about special effects. It’s about movie magic, which is different. Special effects are part of that magic, of course, but only part. And not necessarily the most important part.

So what do we mean by “movie magic”? Just this: that a film employs devices and techniques to draw us into the world that the film is creating. Those devices and techniques can be as simple or as complex as you want; what matters is that they convince us of the reality the film presents. Here’s simple: you can have a group of travelers talk about the danger from an Apache attack all you want, but the moment we really buy it is when that first arrow lodges in the wall of the stagecoach. Now we understand the hazard. We can be fairly certain that, actors being somewhat expensive and a nuisance to replace even in the studio era, no one actually shot an arrow into the wall of the stagecoach, and yet it appears with all the emotional force of one that has come direct from an Apache bow. And complex: take us into a world where ten-foot-tall blue beings generated by motion capture and CGI move through a world that is computer generated and the whole thing not only looks real but does so in three dimensions. And in between? Well, there’s a sea of possibilities in terms of both chronology and technology. And the thing about movie magic, broadly constituted, is that it is designed not to trick the eye—although that happens—but to use the eye (and the ear, of course) to convince the brain. Because the brain knows two things: first, that none of this is “real,” and second, that it wants it all to feel real. Our thinking selves are always willing to be seduced by a movie’s reality. And we will be, if the movie gives us a juicy slice of invention.

Before going on, let’s stipulate that, yes, all moviemaking is magic, that we are watching stories that never happened (or never happened like that) to people who aren’t real or, if real, not the actual persons. In other words, there is a great deal of magic in actors convincing us of the reality of unreal stories. A great subject, but not our concern at present. We are concerned, rather, with the panoply of techniques by which video information can be manipulated to trick, astonish, terrify, amuse, befuddle, enlighten, or otherwise enthrall us. Whether that video information is analog or digital, black and white or color, achieved with razor blades or computers, is immaterial. The point is that someone—cinematographer, director, editor, their designees, or a combination thereof—has fiddled with the information on or in the medium of the movie to achieve an effect, and that the effect, when successful, is indeed special.

The beauty of movies is that they can do things no other medium can manage. You can have effects that are impossible in the theater, that we can only imagine in books or on radio. Some of them are fairly simple parlor tricks. How about a bulleted list?

•   If, for example, someone shoots a gun in a room and it bounces off any number of objects before coming to rest in the wall or the villain’s thigh (it’s a comedy), it’s a straightforward procedure to show a series of extremely quick shots of those objects in the room deflecting the bullet before it thumps into the drywall or makes the bad guy yelp. Try that one onstage.

•   You want Superman to stop a bullet with his chest or catch it in his hand? No problem. That’s easy enough onstage (although a big yawn in a comic book), but at the Cineplex we can actually see the bullet being caught.

•   In The Matrix, we see Neo bend out of the path of an oncoming bullet—or several thousand of them. We see him, see the path of the bullet, see the hair’s-breadth escape in vivid terms. In fact, the moment succeeds only because super-duper-extreme slo-mo, or the effects that create the illusion, allow us to “see” all that happening. Which is pretty cool.

•   In Stagecoach, John Ford’s motto was no bullet left behind. Every time John Wayne’s Ringo Kid fired his Winchester, an Apache fell. Actually, his horse fell. It’s a record that still stands. About what was done to the horses to achieve that effect, the less said, the better.

The history of movie effects, “special” or otherwise, is a long story of invention and innovation. What often drives innovation is vision. A director wants to tell a certain story in a certain way and can’t do so with currently existing means. The result is that he or she then searches for some new means or some new combination of existing techniques to achieve this vision. Let’s say that he wants to re-create a stunt no actor can possibly accomplish, the shooting of which would prove fatal in the physical world, between two structures that don’t exist but whose appearance is universally known. And make it look absolutely real. Put like that, the effort sounds slightly demented, doesn’t it? To be fair, so was the original effort. On August 7, 1974, young Frenchman Philippe Petit walked across a two-hundred-foot high wire eight times and became the talk of the world. What made the feat newsworthy wasn’t the length of the stroll or stunts like lying down on the wire mid-transit but the fact that the wire was suspended between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a dizzying 1,350 feet in the air. There hasn’t been an actor since Charlie Chaplin who could begin to replicate that performance, and there’s no production company willing to risk its star and no insurer that would underwrite such a venture. Even if there were, other images of the Twin Towers have supplanted those of Petit traversing the gap between them. So how to film? For Robert Zemeckis, director of The Walk (2015), it’s a combination of the highest of high-tech, old-fashioned set building, and athletic training by his star. To begin with, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Petit, underwent intensive training with the man he portrays, until he was able to take his own walks on an admittedly lower wire. In filming, Zemeckis re-created the top two floors of the towers on a soundstage and strung the cable twelve feet off the floor. Even that is daunting, as Gordon-Levitt told USA Today: “It’s not so high compared with what a high-wire walker would do, but you’d be surprised how scary it is twelve feet in the air,” which is twice the height at which he trained. Even the safety harness provided only limited comfort: “Your body still tenses all the way up. The only thing that allowed me to get past that terror was just the time spent with Philippe.”

Figure 9. Stop bullets? No problem for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.
Licensed By: Warner Bros. Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.

That’s the human element. The tech portion kicks in with green-screen shooting and CGI re-creation of the towers and their surroundings. Green-screen shooting is just what it sounds like: the scene is shot in front of a green screen, which is replaced with chosen images in postproduction. Anything else you want to vanish is also green—which is why TV meteorologists never wear green: the weather maps and related imagery appear compliments of green-screening, and no meteorologist cares to appear as a disembodied head. In the case of our movie, at times the “wire” is actually a green platform, with the wire inserted later; you can hardly expect your lead actor to stand around for hours on a strand of woven steel. Shooting on such a stage also got rid of an inevitable problem of shooting at heights: in a real setting, the star would be blown off the wire by the prop wash created by the helicopter holding the camera. This technique is hardly new; since the beginning of film, scenes of great heights have routinely been shot either on soundstage re-creations of outdoor settings or, less commonly, in the actual settings but with some sort of net just below the line of sight. When Harold Lloyd performed his very funny business with a clock in Safety Last! (1923), he was truly high in the air, although not on an actual skyscraper façade. Rather, he climbed on a wall constructed on top of a skyscraper and located near enough to the edge that, when shot from above, it hid the building on which it stood and gave the illusion of a truly dizzying altitude. The difference between his performance and Gordon-Levitt’s is chiefly a matter of scale, of whether we believe the character is ten stories off the ground or one hundred and ten. And with how the trick is achieved. Lloyd achieves his effect with careful camera placement. Had he lived in 2015, he might, like Zemeckis, have used computer-generated imagery, or CGI.

The CGI element for The Walk was created by scanning thousands of images of the World Trade Center and surrounding lower Manhattan, along with the Manhattan skyline. The place has to look like 1974 New York, after all, and not 2015 New York with two anachronistic towers. And the pictures of the WTC include both the interior as well as the more familiar exterior. The lobby and even stairwells also ceased to exist in 2001, so the filmmakers had to depict them as well. (Anytime you’re tempted to daydream about how glamorous it would be to work in the movies, consider those poor blighters sifting through hundreds of thousands of photographs, many of them with no real visual interest at all, for the mere tens of thousands needed to fill the computer with images so that shots can be generated later on. Honestly, stairwells.) The sky is still the sky, of course, but it, too, is inserted digitally. This is all a tremendous amount of work, naturally, and of a very different sort from the traditional cinematic practices of set building and rear projection. The results are spectacular. The stock promotional shot that appears alongside virtually every article and review of the movie shows Gordon-Levitt as Petit lying on the wire, shot from above, with the towers receding down toward the ground and a very detailed image of the old WTC plaza simultaneously very far away and very clear. Add to this technology the use of 3-D projection and you have a stomach-churning experience of vertigo, especially to those of us with acrophobic tendencies. Critics were split on numerous aspects of The Walk, but there was near-universal agreement regarding the technical achievement of its centerpiece.

And the payoff? Even knowing absolutely everything about how the images were generated and the effects accomplished, I found the results terrifying.

At the far end of the effects spectrum, some of the best magic is only possible with lower technology. Angels, for instance, work best in black and white. At least one does. In The Bishop’s Wife (1947), Cary Grant’s angel, Dudley (sure, strange name for an angel, but work with me here), has a couple of enchanting parlor tricks. He has come to Earth in answer to a prayer by Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven in a rare hyperserious role) asking for guidance. Henry thinks he’s asking to win approval and money to build a cathedral, but what he really needs is help getting his values straight and getting over a bad habit of ignoring his wife, Julia (Loretta Young). It’s okay about the wife; he’s Episcopalian. Just not ignoring her. That he’s capable of taking Loretta Young for granted is evidence of the depth of his need for divine assistance. In order to free up his afternoon, Dudley manages to complete his fling in a matter of moments, tossing the cards toward their destination and, with a wiggle or two of the fingers, directing them in several streams into the appropriate boxes. He reprises this trick with the decorations on a rather forlorn Christmas tree, although it takes him two attempts to make it magnificent. Watching him remove the lights and tinsel is almost as much fun as watching him put them on. Now, we all know that these feats are managed by some creative editing (in this case, by shooting the destruction—blowing the cards out of the box or knocking the ornaments off the tree, then running the film in reverse to get the desired effect), but we just don’t care. What matters is that we see the results of his work and ignore the intense labor of cameramen and tinsel wranglers and editors. That business of ignoring is somewhat easier in monochrome analog cinema than it might be in super-duper-high-def digital, 3-D fabulousness. In some ways, it is more charming precisely because of the distance created by the older technology. And maybe because of the charm of its star: it would be hard to name a movie in which the hero moves with as much grace and coolness as does Cary Grant.

Having said that, the most magical moment in the movie requires nothing special at all, merely a bit of sleight of hand. An angry Henry summons Dudley into his office to have it out with him. To make sure they are not disturbed, he locks the door. When the interview is over, Dudley simply opens the “locked” door and exits with a devastating smile, leaving Henry flabbergasted. When building a set, it is the simplest thing in the world to construct a door with a keyhole but no actual lock, but that doesn’t matter. The movie has spent an hour establishing Dudley’s bona fides as a miraculous being, so when he opens the locked door, we believe that he has done the magical. Well, someone has, but maybe not the angel.

It’s because of these stagy miracles that we believe Dudley when he pulls off his real stunt: putting the bloom back in Julia’s cheeks (not easy in black and white) and the twinkle in her eyes (achieved by having Loretta Young stand a little straighter, walk with a little more bounce, and smile more), while making Henry sufficiently jealous to remember his love for his wife. That’s what brought us to the movie in the first place, even if we thought we wanted the parlor tricks. The human element is nearly always the driving aspect of film. Hey, we’re human and, as such, interested in how and why people like us move through the world, even when the world is made-up.

How to Not Burn Books

Occasionally even less is needed to trick the eye and brain. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Steven Spielberg includes a scene of a Nazi book-burning reminiscent of the notorious real-life 1933 Berlin burning of “un-German” books. By all accounts, the idea for the scene was Spielberg’s, along with the insistence that no actual books could be burned. The problem? Nothing but a book burns quite like a book. The solution? A couple of guys with paint rollers and a huge stack of phone directories. A few buckets of several colors, a few hours, and, voilà: a cultural atrocity minus the destruction of any intellectual heritage.

The master of getting the most from the lowest tech is, as with so many things, Alfred Hitchcock. His most important technological tool is the single-edge razor blade. Attached to an excellent film-editorial hand, of course. In his most notorious scene, which we’ve discussed already, we see many things: dress, wig, shower curtain, showerhead, naked body (or sufficiently suggestive parts thereof), knife, blood. The rapidity of the sequence of shots tricks our minds into believing—into remembering—that our eyes have seen a murder. If you slow down the montage to a frame-by-frame experience, you quickly realize that we have seen no such thing. But that’s exactly why the trick is so good: we don’t watch movies frame by frame. We see them at twenty-four frames per second, so a half-dozen frames comprising a mere quarter of a second will register with us without actually showing anything clearly. Psycho doesn’t have to supply the connective tissue of the scene, since our minds are more than happy to undertake the task. Considered separately, the images don’t make sense; collectively, we get the whole awful message. No novel could ever convey that message with such terrible economy.

Here’s another thing books can’t do. Woody Allen has always investigated the difficulties of communication between men and women, nowhere better than in Annie Hall (1977). His character, Alvy Singer, is—surprise!—a neurotic, Jewish comedian who has just broken up with the eponymous Annie, a specimen of that alien species, Gentile woman. One of their big issues has been communication, and as a block on that particular road, the ethno-religious matter is a pebble compared to the male-female boulder. One of the great techniques of the movie is the breaking of the “fourth wall,” that invisible barrier that keeps characters in their proper place and speaking to one another rather than to us. He trots out a wonderful example early on: while waiting for a movie, Alvy and Annie are subjected to a monologue by the man standing behind them in line (“on line” for the native Brooklynite) on Fellini, film generally, the pernicious influence of television, and the theories of Marshall McLuhan. Finally, Alvy, who has been kvetching the entire time, can take no more and steps out of line to address us about his annoyance. The annoying neighbor then asserts his right to pontificate in a free country, to which Alvy responds that the dope knows nothing about McLuhan’s theories. That claim draws a comeback that said dope teaches a course on media at Columbia, at which Alvy produces the real McLuhan from behind a sign to say that the man, indeed, doesn’t understand his theories at all. A normal director might be satisfied with this sight joke as is, but Allen has Alvy break through the proscenium again to say, “Boy, if life were only like this.” He has already done groundwork for this scene in his reminiscence of his early education when the adult Alvy appears in his elementary school classroom to defend his younger self’s transgression (he kissed a little girl) by saying he “never had a latency period.”

The stage is set, then, for what may be the pièce de résistance: subtitles. After their initial meeting at a tennis club, Annie invites Alvy up to her apartment for a glass of wine. They’re both extremely nervous and clumsy—and self-aware. As they sip wine out on her balcony, they attempt to make light conversation, but what they say is not what they think. How do we know? Allen provides subtitles. When Annie says that she dabbles in photography, the subtitle reads, “I dabble? Listen to me. What a jerk.” Moments later, while Alvy is saying that photography has yet to develop a full set of aesthetic criteria, he’s thinking (as we see), “I wonder what she looks like naked.” This exchange is one of the funniest in the movie precisely because we know that it’s true. The language of meeting and courtship is fraught with subtexts, but in real life we can never see them. In film, at least in this film, we can. And their subtexts are chiefly ours: insecurity, interest, doubts, and, mostly, awkwardness. Indeed, if there is one moment in the movie that encapsulates the whole, it’s this one. The anxieties and uncertainties of the relationship that the film explores may here be writ small, but written they are.

The beauty of these inventions is that they require almost nothing in the way of technical expertise. Imagine, a human being popping up in an unexpected place! How hard is that? And yet, they get at the heart of what makes the movies magical. Take the McLuhan example: you simply cannot do that in a painting or a novel. Even in a play, it can’t be the same. We need the real McLuhan, who by definition is limited in time and space. So even if you could have persuaded him to appear in, say, the original Broadway production, he wouldn’t be available for the road company, much less for all those revivals and high school performances. In film, though, if you can get him once, you have him forever. The subtitles, similarly, can function in only one medium. Onstage, we would have to either have the characters hold up essentially unreadable signs or else flash the subtitles up on a marquee or rear-projection screen, either of which would outstrip the characters in size and, therefore, relative importance. Only the movie screen can provide that curious mixture of intimacy, simultaneity, and scale that allows the joke to work.

I don’t mean to suggest that anything books can do, film can do better. Anyone who has seen one of the meager attempts at filming stream-of-consciousness novels knows that’s not true. On the other hand, it can find its own way of projecting consciousness, as two more recent films demonstrate. In both Birdman (2014) and Woman in Gold (2015), we see the main characters experiencing their pasts. In the former, Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson is a washed-up actor who once starred in a series of superhero movies as the title character. Now, as he tries to mount a play, he is haunted, literally, by his earlier character: we see and hear the derision that Birdman directs at Riggan. In the latter film, Helen Mirren’s Maria Altmann periodically sees her Viennese past before her eyes—and so do we. In each case, no special techniques are required. Characters are inserted into scenes (in the first) or entire scenes are filmed (in the second). Yet the results are genuinely magical. Whatever novels may have over film in the specifics of stream of consciousness, they can never do this with the same ease. To achieve the same level of immediacy—that is to say, by jumping directly to a character or scene that wasn’t there a second before—the novelist will leave at least some readers confused. If she provides a transition—that is to say, if she mediates the shift—by definition the immediacy is lost. If, on the other hand, we suddenly see the fantasy sequences begin in Birdman or Woman in Gold, or indeed in Black Swan (2010), our minds can accept and process that shift. We can tell there has been a shift, but our eyes and brains have been trained to accept that.

Sometimes the best movie magic requires no camera tricks at all—just brilliant planning and incredible courage. For the most famous moment in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Buster Keaton reprised and improved a stunt he had first used in One Week (1920)—the falling wall trick. In this case, as a cyclone hits town, the infirmary in which young Bill is a patient loses its roof, then his hospital bed is blown hither and yon, including through a horse barn, finally landing him in front of a building whose front falls down around him, the star providentially saved by standing where an open window will land. Being wrong by mere inches would prove fatal. When the critical moment in filming came, even the cameraman, as he later confessed, had to look away from the possible disaster. As the finished film shows, Keaton emerges unscathed (not always true of his stunts) and, looking around at the destruction, abandons his customary stillness for a quick exit from danger.

So that’s the low-definition end of the scale. At the other extreme, film has probably advanced more in terms of special effect techniques in the last twenty years than in the previous hundred. We can make this sound like a thriller and call it the Rise of the Machines, although the Rise of the Processors is probably more accurate. The work at studios like George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, Disney, and Pixar had been advancing the world of special effects for years, but it took one man’s frustration to really push things forward. James Cameron, fresh from the massive success of Titanic in 1997, had a vision for a film that he could not realize with current technology. This one would be a sort of King Solomon’s Mines for the digital age, assuming the digital age would get its act together. It took the better part of a decade for CGI and 3-D and motion-capture technologies to advance to the point that he could make the version of Avatar that he saw in his head. The result was eye-popping: whatever critics and viewers may have thought about the tale and its telling—although most responses were positive—the visuals completely blew people away. Turning human actors into ten-foot-tall blue Na’vi humanoids is an achievement in itself; having them ride on mountain banshees (something between a dragon and a horse with elements of a butterfly) through completely imagined spaces is one for the ages. The seamless mix of traditional and computer-generated cinematic elements caught everyone’s attention. One of the great challenges of the digital age of filmmaking to that point was the sometimes glaring boundary between the computerized elements and those shot with standard technology.

Of course, progress had been coming throughout the decade. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy had demonstrated that CGI could turn ordinary humans into dwarves, giants, Hobbits, and at least one Gollum. Indeed, actor Andy Serkis’s motion-capture performance as the Ring-obsessed blue maniac was the real star turn of the films. And the several Harry Potter films made great use of CGI in a host of ways. In fact, Alfonso Cuarón, director of installment three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), had wanted to use puppetry rather than CGI for the Dementors, but expense and technical difficulty ultimately led him to abandon the switch. He also made use of “bullet time,” the slowing or virtual stopping of some elements—in his case, the Muggle world outside the Knight Bus that takes Harry to the Leaky Cauldron.

Finally, we should note that films can do magic because they are magic. Let’s go to the limit on this one: no CGI, no special effects, not even any falling walls or subtitles. Just regular—if there be such things—movie shots. How, we might ask, can a man time-travel? How can he leave his own historical moment and, for however long an interval, travel back, oh, eighty years? I suppose that if we worked at it long enough, we could come up with a fictive time machine or time tunnel or Chinese box or something (and those have all been employed), but we’d be better off with the simplest of devices. How about if he just gets into a car?

In Midnight in Paris (2011), that’s how Woody Allen launches Gil Pender, successful screenwriter and balked novelist, hapless future husband and hopeless, or perhaps hopeful, romantic, back into his idealized twenties, when the City of Light was full of artistic exiles. The device is simplicity itself: on the stroke of midnight, a 1920s Peugeot Type 176 full of partygoers in strange dress drives up the hill and stops. Shades of Rip Van Winkle! Gil then finds himself deposited among the beautiful and desperate of twenties Paris, meeting Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí, among a host of others. At his first stop Cole Porter is playing “Let’s Do It.” And not as in “Cole Porter is playing on the phonograph.” No, no, no. Cole Porter (actually, Yves Heck as Cole Porter, the original being somewhat unavailable in 2011) is playing the piano while singing his latest witty creation. One of the beauties of the setup is that chronology need not be strictly observed. The song, like the Peugeot, is from 1928, while Hemingway has only one book (and is still on good terms with Gertrude Stein), putting the year at either 1925 or 1926, since his second, The Sun Also Rises, would appear in October 1926. Evidently, being magical makes an era somewhat unstable. Oh, and Gil also finds a fictive romantic interest (what would a Woody Allen film be without one?) played with incandescent appeal by Marion Cotillard. Whenever the car delivers him, Gil arrives in his cherished era. When he tries to hoof it, no soap. At one point, he is sitting in a bar with Hemingway but needs to go home and retrieve his novel manuscript so Hem can take it to Gertrude Stein. He starts down the street, then does an about-face and attempts to go back, only to find the bar has become a modern Laundromat. See? Simple.

When Gil tries to get his fiancée, Inez, to travel with him to the past, she grows impatient and leaves just minutes before midnight. On the stroke of twelve, the magic auto again drives up the incline and whisks him off to further adventures. No special techniques are required of the filmmakers, and the only requirement for us is the willing suspension of disbelief (more in a moment), that time-out we take from our knowledge that, for instance, the past cannot be accessed by means of an antique Peugeot. This is a movie; of course it can be. We have only to allow it to take us along.

Figure 10. Why not? Gil (Owen Wilson) with Hemingway (Cory Stoll) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). ©Gravier Productions, 2011. All Rights Reserved.

This story leads us to a basic truth: here’s the real magic of movies: they make us see things that never were. They show us stories full of death in which no person died. Only characters did. And yet we respond as if they had. When Butch and Sundance ran through that door for the first time into a sepia freeze frame and a hail of sonic bullets—the first time for me, that is—I felt many things—panic, grief, despair—at their loss. The one thing I didn’t feel in the moment was “It doesn’t matter; they’re not real.” I knew that, of course. How could I not, sitting in a car at a drive-in theater a good hundred and twenty yards from the screen? You can’t get much more divorced from the action than that. Yet what we know and what we feel are entirely separate things. The film had made me—made us—care about those characters within the context of the story as if they were real, which brings us to the curious paradox of watching real persons play unreal ones. Here are some basic facts:

•   Sylvester Stallone is not Rocky. Nor Rambo.

•   Neither Greta Garbo nor Keira Knightley is Anna Karenina.

•   Humphrey Bogart is not Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, or Rick Blaine.

•   Nor is Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry Callahan or John Wayne the Ringo Kid.

•   Et cetera.

•   Not one of the preceding facts matters when we watch their films. Only the imaginative and emotional truths of the movies themselves matter.

This is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who missed the movie age by most of a century, meant when he said that we willingly suspend our disbelief at the door of the literary work. We know better, of course, than to believe that an actor is really a made-up character, that a man can fly, that Hobbits and wizards exist. We have it within our power, however, to choose to accept that reality. We don’t really have to believe in the reality (this sometimes causes difficulties for the excessively literal-minded, folks like totalitarian rulers); we have only to suspend our otherwise quite reasonable disbelief in it. The process works out to a sort of compact between artist and audience. If the makers keep faith with us by providing what the late novelist John Gardner calls “the vivid and continuous dream,” if they don’t let us down through faulty technique or failures of the imagination (bad dialogue, clumsy action, or Ed Wood–style, Plan 9 from Outer Space ham-handedness), we will keep faith with them by believing, for the time we are their audience, in their reality. We won’t needlessly bring in our knowledge of the larger reality, our pedantry, our boundless rationalism. It’s a square deal. Paul Newman didn’t die. Robert Redford didn’t die. They went on to make many wonderful and a few sketchy movies. But Butch and Sundance died. And in that moment, our minds are with them, not the actors who make us believe in them. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.