Member Skype #20 Warmup – The Prestige (2006)
This is the Warmup Thread for Member Skype Call #20, which is focused on The Prestige (2006).
David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, technology as ‘magic’. Need I say more?
5 thoughts on “Member Skype #20 Warmup – The Prestige (2006)”
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The scene @ 20.11 When Borden shows the coin to the boy.
“Never show anyone, they’ll beg you and flatter you for the secret, but as soon as you give it up, you’ll be nothing to them. You understand? Nothing. The secret impresses no one, The trick you use it for is everything.”
Ofcourse, there are many scenes to explore. The little boy knows what the magician did and the adults are trying to console him, but the child has eyes to see and cannot be fooled.
ill have to watch it again. but this makes me wonder whether normies know at a visceral level it’s all a farce, but really don’t want to admit seeing what we see.
because they don’t want their magic show to end. life is too scary outside the theater.
and we are that annoying little bugger that is nudging them …saying ‘look..look over there’
not too long ago, a high functioning normie friend laughing in group chats at my hoax hunches in sports (and space) said:
“It’s not that much of a stretch — i think most of tennis and basically almost all second tier sports are rigged to some degree. At the top tier, it’s selected maneuvering via selection of refs and umps and that sort of thing (but players generally not in on it there).
That doesn’t mean I think Serena was born a dude! or thousands of people are in on any space fakery!
Also, generally the fewer # I’d peeps needed to throw a game the easier it is to do it. QB in football, PG in b-ball, etc.
In single-person sports …. boxing, UFC, tennis …. it’s a free-for-all. The outcome is usually negotiated beforehand. In rare circumstances, they let them fight it out. Usually the third part of a trilogy”
as Colombo once said in an episode….’this far…but no farther’ : )
Interesting thoughts on sport and the potential rigging thereof.
My own views on this have slowly but surely swayed back and forth, and not on a linear or 2D spectrum.
If I were to somehow learn for certain that the big fights are 100% prearranged and choreographed, I would not be shocked.
At the same time, if I were to somehow learn that McGregor was genuinely trying to defeat Mayweather last year, again I would not be shocked.
This is not ‘sitting on the fence’. I am openly admitting that I simply do not have any direct evidence one way or the other, leaving me only to draw inferences from the scant information available.
If I were in charge, would I rig the big fights? Only if I felt it would be to my benefit.
Does it benefit TPWRTS to rig these fights? In some cases, to some extend, I would imagine so, but this is only my imagination.
I have in the past demonstrated that promoters like Bob Arum can coordinate these fights such that he wins no matter the outcome.
There is something magical about the indeterminate nature of the ‘future’. Even a certain outcome is not certain until it has happened.
If TPWRTS know as much about ‘magick’ as they seem to, then I am open-minded to the possibility that even when they stack a deck, once the cards are in play, they allow them to fall where they will.
Again, I ask myself what I would do, because that is all I have to go by. I don’t know the people at the top or how they think.
Hopefully one day you and I can watch a fight/game at Madison Square Gardens. We’ll have a few bets between ourselves so that the betting agencies don’t get their 5-10% from us.
‘Loser buys the next round’.
God I love sportsball.
Love that scene. Thanks for reminding me. So, so true. Looking forward to this call.
great scene to highlight, mezzie, and i’m taking your point of focus as a chance to further explicate my take on what “having eyes to see” might more generally mean: perhaps the boy here can see because he has far less conditioning occluding his vision than the adults around him, that baggage we all must unpack if we remain committed to de-programming ourselves. so seeing through the eyes of a child is generally closer to “having eyes to see” because the child’s eyesight is yet to be laden by the various, innumerable lenses we end up accumulating along our way throughout this realm. in other words, “those with eyes to see”, they see plainly and clearly, as free of the distorting lenses of conditioning/projection/trauma/in-dock-tri-nation/etc. as can be.
so it’s interesting that dante’s “high functioning normie friend” can be so dismissive of space fakery while simultaneously allowing for sports fakery – perhaps like many of us his exposure to sport occurred during childhood, giving him a relatively clear lens through which to see sport, at least.
let me ask this ahead of the call: which character in The Prestige has the best “eyes to see”, i.e., sees most plainly/clearly? i also hope there will be discussion of the era in which The Prestige is situated: the 19th Century, Tucson of the History Hoax. can we discern anything at all past the Tucson city limits?
The Prestige would have the audience accept the myth of progress as a given, the realm we presently know as the product of scientism’s pledge of steady progression from industrialization/combustion to electrification to nuclear reaction to quantum entanglement to infinity and beyond. against this backdrop, the film turns into a battle of wills between supremely committed magicians, of whose will to power shall prevail. are audience members with “eyes to see” able to see past effects such as the glamorous insertion of a “historical” figure of Tesla’s stature – played no less by recently-departed, modern-day magus David Bowie – in order to glean a different prestige than audience members with more clouded vision?
having now read the source novel as well, my takeaway certainly leans toward the metaphysical implications, fwiw.