We just want to be fooled

All of the discussion about magic and illusion in class today reminded me of the Prestige. The whole movie challenges you to figure out what the trick is as you watch these two guys try to come up with the ultimate illusion. At the end of the movie, Michael Caine says, "Now you're looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled." I think this is a well-placed line, because by the end of the movie, I really don't care to know about what really happens behind the scenes- all of the sneaking around and sabotaging. I don't want to know about the sacrifices the two main characters went through, or the heartache, but I do anyway, because I watched the movie. I saw how their characters transformed with success and obsession, and I didn't like them or their world. I like this quote that Hugh Jackman, one of the magicians says near the end. "You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special... you really don't know?... it was... it was the look on their faces..." What does illusion do for us? What is the point of stories that aren't true? They let us escape for a few seconds? Or do they trap us? I really don't know. Some days, I'd like to live in a dream, because it feels like I have more control over what happens. But then again, I wonder if I really do have as much power as I feel. I didn't play a lot of video games when I was little, but when I was about 11 years old, my best friend got the play station Harvest Moon. Harvest Moon is a game where you become this farmer guy, who has just inherited his grandfather's farm. In order to win the game, you have to re-establish the farm, cultivate so many acres of land, become a part of the town community and get enough money to expand your house and get married. In game time, you have three or four years to accomplish all of this. In real time, Mary and I devoted two years to playing this game. We worked hard to work the land, go mining and date girls. Mary and I had different tastes in women. She thought this one girl was the prettiest of them all, so we had to woo her; and although we did end up marrying her, I still think the inn maid or the librarian would have been fun. We would pull all-nighters at her house, worrying about getting enough produce to the market or saving money to buy hot girl, Karen, a present. I was really good at raising our chickens for chicken fighting contests. Mary was awesome at training our dog for racing. By the time we "won" the game, we had a family- although I don't know when that happened/ we had a 50's two bed system with our wife- good standing in the community and a flourishing farm. But the game didn't really end. There was an anti-climactic celebration and then the game kept going. It was so depressing, we started doing crazy things- totally mid-life crisis. We divorced our wife- didn't know that could happen- accidentally ate our dog, also didn't know that could happen, and just started dating a bunch of women. We wanted to stop, but we invested so much time in that life, that we just couldn't believe it was over or wasn't going anywhere. We spent two more years in it, and in that time, our baby boy didn't grow at all, we were on okay terms with our wife- we had married someone else, got divorced again and remarried our first wife- and life was just the same thing over and over again. It wasn't real, it was like an illusion, and when it was over, it kind of felt like a huge waste of time. Instead of really living, we chose to live a video game. But now that I look back on my life, I seem to always be living some other kind of life in books and movies and daydreams and playing pretend- yeah, I still do that sometimes- I'm my own magician, putting myself in illusions, pulling the wool over my own eyes, because I see and know of the world, but I'd rather live elsewhere every now and then. I guess I'd just rather be fooled.