The Prestige-ous Apple iPad
This weekend, I did two seemingly unrelated things. I watched a DVD called "The Prestige" and I went to the Apple store to buy my mother an iPad. First, if you haven't seen "The Prestige" let me just recommend that you do so as soon as possible. It's rare that I want to watch a movie more than once, but almost unheard of that I need to watch it again as soon as the credits roll on the first viewing. The movie has many themes and archetypes, has a temporally disjointed narrative and requires so much of the viewer. How very apt that the first and last words spoken are the same, "Are you watching?"
Among the themes in the Prestige, you will find obsession and sacrifice framed in a world where equal parts misdirection and science create what we (the audience) call magic. And it is the word "magic" which prompted this post. Because as I walked into the Apple store in downtown Salt Lake, a sign greeted me, declaring the iPad to be a "magical" product. Magical. Misdirection and science in equal parts. Also very apt.
As the indubitable Michael Caine delivers the opening lines of the movie, he could be talking about this device:
"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called 'The Pledge'. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man [or a thin rectangle]. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal [at the Apple Store]. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called 'The Turn'. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary [Where your every touch navigates you in a virtual world]. 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 know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call 'The Prestige'."
As you touch the Safari URL address bar, the virtual keyboard pops up. "Oh, it is just like a touchscreen netbook". What a great trick.
