Is David Copperfield gaslighting me?

March 10, 2017 9:14 AM

For years, the Niagara Falls stunt that David Copperfield performed on a tv special (YT link within) has bothered me. It seems like some things went wrong here but that the audience was supposed to think it was a success. And I haven't found any sources that discuss it as a failure either. More inside.

Here is the video of his Niagara Falls performance.

You'll note that at the beginning, he takes viewers through what they can expect to see and assures them that the camera will not cut away. At 6:20, the raft goes over the falls and disappears into the water's spray. Then the camera pans way out, and we don't see DC again until a helicopter (from which he dangles by a rope) comes into sight at 6:57. That strikes me as an awfully long time for the camera to "not cut away." What happened in those 37 seconds? Has anyone read or heard anything about what happened during the time we don't see him? Also, they make a big deal out of the role of the jet ski, but we never see him on it.


It's also puzzling that in the setup to the trick, he doesn't mention the helicopter at all. I know from this interview that the helicopter part was practiced, but I don't know if it was practiced as a backup safety plan or as the scheduled finish to the act. Yes, he acts triumphant, but I can't imagine he would act like he failed, no matter what wrong.


What's most maddening to me about this, I think, is that it looks like some sort of magic fail occurred. But in the reading I've done so far, nobody else seems to think there was a fail. Nobody brings up the camera cutting away for so long. Nobody mentions the lack of jet ski or the sudden presence of the helicopter. All the reading I've found on this stunt ranks it as one of his biggest successes. Can anyone find more in-depth reading on this? Or does anyone know things through other channels about what happened behind the scenes here?

posted by mermaidcafe to Media & Arts (11 answers total)

Best answer: He never went over the falls.

It's all camera work and fake limbs. Watch it again and notice what the camera doesn't follow. When they secure his feet, the camera pans away and his feet go below the plank and they replace with fake feet. (I think they're motorized, because they appear to flex.) When they put the top over the plank, there's a guy who is "securing" things but blocks the view so they can replace the hands with fake ones. Later on, a woman "secures" his hands, mostly to cover them so viewers could not see they were fake. At that point, the camera focuses on the top of the elevated platform. DC scoots out the bottom and runs to a waiting helicopter that then drops to the falls so he could rise triumphantly, dry-shirted and with his enormous magical eyebrows fluffy and un-doused as ever.

And it's all part of the trick -- he was never supposed to use that jetski.
posted by mochapickle at 9:45 AM on March 10, 2017 [9 favorites]

Best answer: I agree with mochapickle. If you check out the spots in the video referenced here, you can catch his head lifting as the put the cover on him, suggesting he was scooting out the trapdoor as they secured it.

I agree that he never planned to use the jet ski, but rather wanted the moment of suspense when the contraption went over the falls. Consider how tightly the jet ski is bound to the raft; it doesn't fly off when the raft goes over the edge. I'm not sure how he would have had time to untie it and start it and get away in addition to freeing himself.
posted by cabingirl at 9:56 AM on March 10, 2017 [4 favorites]

I also agree that he was never going to use the jet ski. It was there to create suspense. The setup makes it sound like he's supposed to escape the contraption *before* going over the falls, and then ride the jet ski back up the river against the current and away from the falls. When it goes over the falls with him presumably still in the contraption and the jet ski still attached, you're supposed think "holy cow he just went over the falls!". You're supposed to think the trick has failed and he's going to die, but then he rises triumphantly hanging from the helicopter.

What happened during those 37 seconds is that the helicopter (carrying David Copperfield, as mochapickle described) maneuvered down near the bottom of the falls (near where the Maid of the Mist goes, if you're familiar with the area) and lowered him on the rope. The camera has to move back over the lip of the falls because if you saw over the falls, you'd see him descending out of the helicopter. They made such a big deal out of the "no cutaway" thing that they couldn't cut, but what they could do is point the camera away from where the behind-the-scenese action is happening.

This seems like the kind of thing that would be best experienced on live TV. Watching on YouTube, you know he makes it - he's still alive in 2017. But the drama of the trick depends on the viewer thinking he goes over the falls, presumably to his death. The idea is that you're so shocked by that in the moment that you don't ask too many questions about how it was done. Once you know he survives, though, you start asking those questions.
posted by kevinbelt at 10:14 AM on March 10, 2017 [8 favorites]

Yeah, the whole stretch from about 3:20 to 4:00 has one of this assistants blocking the view to various important things, like extending the fake hands into view, allowing DC to slide out headfirst (note the leg positions of the assistant on the front right-- he blocks everything to the right of the big yellow cover).

The chains are a big clue that what looks secure either doesn't matter or isn't really secure. Magicians love chains-- they are strong when pulled against their own length, but they have no strength in any other direction, and they make a lot of noise and allow for a lot of distracting motion while twist them, drag them, you lock them in place, etc. They look good and offer a lot of weaknesses to be exploited. When captor and captive are conspiring against a witness, chains around the wrist aren't worth a damn.
posted by Sunburnt at 11:06 AM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

In the interview you link to, he says "Then at the end, I would be on a rope dangling from a helicopter. We had a stuntman there ready to rehearse for me, and it was so dangerous, he even refused to do it.". So there's quite a lot of things you can work out from that:

1. Dangling from the helicopter was planned.
2. Surely if the helicopter was going to pick him out of the water, he'd have said so explicitly
3. What was so dangerous that the stuntman refused to do? To go into the water on the raft, surely. Which is what we were led to believe Copperfield did, but he doesn't explicitly say he did in any part of the interview.

Which is to say, Copperfield is misusing your assumptions to make you believe things without overt lying - he's gaslighting you, but that's his job. Part of the fun of magicians is that they make us explore our cognitive dissonance when what we think just saw doesn't match up with what we know to be true.
posted by ambrosen at 11:15 AM on March 10, 2017 [4 favorites]

Best answer: So David Copperfield is well-known for doing a very specific kind of double-magic trick, especially in his large televised stunts. He sets it up as one trick (in this case, escape the table in 10 seconds and ride away on the jet ski), appears to fail in a dramatic and life-threatening manner, only to re-emerge triumphant.

If you look at some of his other big tricks on youtube, many of them have the same structure. For example, the Bermuda Triangle illusion is also set up to look like the act has taken a wrong turn. His escape from the Hotel Charlotte is another of his big acts that appears to be a failed escape act until the very end (I remember quite vividly watching this act on TV as a little girl).
posted by muddgirl at 11:44 AM on March 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

And on a smaller scale, his Table of Death act has the same setup and payoff.
posted by muddgirl at 11:54 AM on March 10, 2017

Let me just add I wouldn't call any of this gaslighting, popular though the term has become lately. Gaslighting is about someone trying to make you think you can't trust your own senses, and therefore that you're either hallucinating and crazy, or nothing you know is real. Gaslighting is, above all, a mean-spirited act of misdirection. It's malevolent abuse, one crime used to distract you from another crime.

We're talking about deception and misdirection to create an illusion that you already know you're going to get because you don't watch David Copperfield make dinner, you watch him make illusions. This is entertainment by mutual consent-- you agreed to be fooled (which, to be fair, you do every time you turn on the TV). At no time is he harming you by misdirection, nor is he making you look in another direction while he ransacks your wallet.

Let's not taint David Copperfield with the spectre of Jack Manningham.
posted by Sunburnt at 12:30 PM on March 10, 2017 [37 favorites]

I should have added, without getting into a whole History of Magic treatise that I am certainly not qualified to give, that while David Copperfield is not an escape artist he is definitely a student of the history of magic, including escapology, and uses the audiences familiarity with and expectations of escape acts as part of his own illusion. In the Table of Death, Escape from Hotel Charlotte, and Niagra falls trick, he is subverting the Escape or Die scenario which was invented by Harry Houdini.
posted by muddgirl at 1:09 PM on March 10, 2017

I think that, in general, TV magic makes use of an false assumption by the audience. The viewer tends to believe that the magician's view of fair play is that what fools the TV viewer would also fool a live viewer standing with the camera's point of view. Not true at all. Often a live viewer, with wider field of view, a sense of direction, a sense of smell, decent hearing, a bit of freedom of motion, etc would not be fooled at all.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:06 PM on March 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

At about 3:14 there's a camera cut. After the cut what we see is an entire fake body, sans head, with DC's real head on the far side of the body, talking to us. After that, while the assistants are securing the fake body, including covering the space where the head would be, DC is escaping to somewhere downward and toward the right.
posted by JimN2TAW at 10:27 AM on March 14, 2017