IN & OF ITSELF, Post Malone, and the Magic of Magic
“And irony is okay, I suppose, culture is to blame
You try and mask your pain in the most postmodern way
You lack substance when you say
Something like, “Oh, what a shame”
It’s just a self-referential way that stops you having to be human”
I get it, magic sucks, both the performance art and The Gathering. Both are a little too obsessed with cards and attract the biggest nerds known to man. When you tell people you're into magic, both forms trigger the same response Sal's wife has in the one scene in Mad Men where he's explaining Bye Bye Birdie with the same wide-eyed joy of a 5 year old explaining a dream they had. The look of deep despair that this person I love, not only are they not the person I thought they were, but they are so fundamentally different from the person I thought they were to the point where I must question the life I have lived so far that lead me to this moment. Let's just say magic and Magic: The Gathering have had a PR problem. This year, both tried to reinvent their image, to be a newer, cooler magic. And this year I became equally obsessed with both.
To break the fourth wall for just a second, the person editing the essay is who taught me Magic: The Gathering and will probably be laughing at how much of an absolute infant I sound in this essay but who cares! Magic: The Gathering needs no introduction. It's a fantasy card game that every junior high kid’s older brother played and tried to teach you during a sleepover.
I bought my first deck this year and very, very quickly got swept away in the game due to the incredibly popular Commander format. This is a much more casual, slow, and multiplayer format that was the perfect entry point for me to get into the game. And anecdotally, it was for many people this year. Different friend groups from different parts of my life have picked up the game too, to the point where I have three different playgroups now and I have to split my time between them like they're my children from a previous marriage.
Posty posing in front of the Game Knights logo. Check out their channel!
The very popular YouTube series/podcast The Command Zone has a series called Game Knights where the hosts play a game of Commander and have commentary like they're on a reality show - commenting on plays they made, cards in hand, and what their next steps are. Recently, they just had their highest profile guest player ever, rapper Post Malone.
A quick aside, I am a huge fan of Post Malone and his music. "Sunflower" from Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse is one of the most beautiful pop songs of the past 20 years and it should have won the Oscar for Best Original Song, even though it would have taken away Lady Gaga's Oscar unfortunately.
Watching the episode really unlocked a new level of appreciation for both Post Malone and Magic: The Gathering. The way he was having fun the same way me and my friends have fun playing Magic was so refreshing. To see someone covered in tattoos and dabbing not only be accepted by the group but also (spoiler) win the match was a big eye opener for me on how to approach the game. I can rename all of my cards and be silly with the game, and if you find a group of friends to play with they'll be silly with you too.
I'm still afraid of tournaments and will probably never play in one.
DelGuadio adjusting the audience’s perception.
Now let's go from uppercase Magic to lowercase magic. This January, Hulu dropped the magic performance film In & Of Itself, performed by Derek DelGaudio and directed by the legend Frank Oz, to relatively minor fanfare. Stories and reviews were written about it in the usual spots, a couple of podcast mentions here to there, but the second Nanette, this movie was not. (Note: remember how there was a follow-up to Nanette last year called Douglas? Neither do I. Nor Hannah Gadsby herself.) Since its release, comedian Bo Burnham released Inside to widespread critical and cultural success. Every 4th Tik Tok I've seen in the past few weeks uses his song "Jeff Bezos". Even the subreddit r/coachella has a 2022 wishlist post for him.
Burnham is easily more famous than DelGaudio and is working in a completely different medium than him. This is not a piece trying to bring Bo down or say Inside is overrated. Rather, this is a plea to watch In & Of Itself goddamnit! DelGaudio's hybrid magic/one person show earnestly explores identity, masculinity, and authenticity in presenta- no, please come back, it's not as bad as it sounds. It's actually quite euphoric and cathartic. If you look at the current cinema landscape, there's been a real pivot away from true earnestness in presentation. Everything is a metaphor for everything else. Even our biggest franchise, Marvel, has pivoted from "look at the man fly and shoot lasers from his hands" to "Black Widow is actually about the familial trauma and sex trafficking". So when someone describes something as earnest, there's an immediate aversion. How can I, the audience, the tweeter, the Letterboxder, have the take that's like "In & Of Itself is ACTUALLY ABOUT xyz" when 'xyz' isn't subtext, it's text.
Who are you? How do you know?
Part of the magic (shut up) of In & Of Itself is that it uses magic as a medium to tell the truth. The film starts with the audience picking a card from a wall of thousands of cards that are labeled with "I am _____". A teacher, a father, a ninja, etc. The cards are then taken at the entrance to the theater and presented, in a comically large stack, to DelGaudio, who begins the show. The first honest to god magic trick doesn't happen until about 45 minutes into the performance. Up until it, Derek is mostly monologuing very matter of factly about identity, about the fluidity of truth in storytelling, how hiding your authentic self is something that's taught and not learned. Then there's a pivot into what has to be my favorite final act of a film in quite some time. It's best seen not spoiled, but the final two acts are both incredibly elegant, simple, emotionally complex and some of the most technically unreal feats of magic and performance.
This movie came out as I was facing a pretty big identity crisis myself. In December of 2020, I was diagnosed with Bipolar I, and in January I began medical and outpatient treatments to help me get stable again. In the beginning I was so worried about the diagnosis and it dropped me into a frankly dangerous depression where I almost lost all identity. To find out this information about yourself is a lot, spending hours a day thinking about every interaction I've ever had with anyone, reflecting how much of my life I have spent fully not in control of myself, how I spent years and years almost living in third person, watching the movie of Dylan instead of living it. So to see this performance, a bold statement that not only are you who you say you are, but the people who love you see you for who you are and love and respect it, was such an overwhelming concept to take in my brain that was being reformed by a cocktail of antipsychotics. I will forever be in debt to this movie.
Instead of themes to take away, instead of "ACTUALLY" takes, what you're left with is a new perspective on both how you see yourself and how you see the world seeing you. The film doesn't want you to do the work, the work of understanding the themes of the movie is done for you. Now what's left for you is to take those themes and apply them to your life. To quote Angels in America, "The Great Work Begins".