A Prestigious Trap

Well played, JC and Sherry...well played, indeed. You both convinced me that you enjoyed The Prestige, and I fell headlong into your trap.

The high esteem I hold you both in precludes the possibility that you actually enjoyed such a silly, contrived mess of a plot. A plot where the great illusion, central to the movie, is first achieved by having a secret twin brother who fucks your wife every other night (while you occasionally fuck his mistress), and is then duplicated by a machine that is actually capable of cloning people (in the late 19th century, no less).

Perhaps you enjoyed the unwitting comedy, as I did, of one performer intentionally deceiving his rival by choosing a random 5-letter word ('Tesla') as his cipher, which actually leads him to the man who invents the cloning machine. (The clones, of course, are drowned after every performance with the help of blind stagehands.)

Or perhaps you just fell asleep, as I nearly did, bored to death with the flat, stale characters and their completely unmoving obsession with each other. Perhaps your eyes rolled back into your heads when one rival (un?)intentionally kills the other's wife by tying a double windsor knot instead of a slipknot (even though he never actually remembers tying a double windsor knot), and then they both stand around, helpless, as the oldest and weakest man in the room swings an axe 314 times against the glass before it breaks (instead of using the quick-release lock to open the box.)

But surely you didn't actually enjoy this joke of a film. I know it sounds self-absorbed to imagine that you'd pen a blog entry solely to trick me, but I can't envision any other reason you recommended it.

After days of ruminating over possibilities - turning the trap back on you two, or simply pretending I never saw the movie - I decided to instead go public and give credit where it's due. You laid the trap perfectly, and I stepped right into it. Well played. The fact that Deppen got caught in the collateral damage is surely just a bonus.