TEL AVIV, Israel — In 1973, a young man named uri geller appeared on one of the BBC’s most popular television programmes, “The Dimbleby Talk-In”, and announced that the laws of Newtonian physics did not apply to him. Or that, at least, was the implication. A handsome, casually dressed 26-year-old Israeli, Geller performed a series of bewildering feats and said he used nothing more than his mind.
Restarted a stopped clock. She duplicated a drawing that had been sealed in an envelope.
Then he seemed to bend a fork just by looking at it.
“It’s giving way,” Geller said quietly, as a close-up of his right hand showed him gently rubbing the fork between his fingers. “It’s becoming like plastic.”
A few seconds later, the top of the fork came off and hit the ground. By the time the applause from the studio audience died down, the Gellermania had begun. Geller not only became a world celebrity —a media darling who toured the globe and packed auditoriums for dramatic displays of silverware abuse, the humble spoon being his favorite victim— but also in the living embodiment of the hope that there was something more, something that science could not explain. Because at the center of his performance was a bold sustain: that he did not use tricks.
They were demonstrations of psychic powers.
“I’ve never even seen a magic show” Geller, now a lean and tireless 76-year-old, said in an interview in Tel Aviv at the Uri Geller Museum, which opened in 2021. “Except for one: Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas, because I missed a flight.”
Charm and a large dose of grit were essential to his fame, and with fame came a multi-million dollar one-man venture, based on ticket and book sales, and the reality show “The Next Uri Geller,” which aired in Israel, the United States and Europe.
It’s a fortune he might never have earned without his detractors, he said. Geller was long hounded by magicians horrified that what they said were cleverly refined magic tricks were being described as acts of telekinesis. Geller emerged victorious, and proof of his triumph is on display today in the museum: a large-format book titled “Bend It Like Geller,” written by Australian magician Ben Harris.
The book celebrates Geller as a brilliant artist, marking a significant change for Harris, who was once among Geller’s staunchest detractors. Today, Harris and Geller are friends. Harris looks back on his attacking 1985 book, “Gellerism Revealed,” as the work of an angry young man who missed the point.
And the point is that Geller is an artist, someone who discovered that challenging our relationship with the truth and daring us to doubt our eyes can inspire wonder.
“I am the best publicist in the world,” Geller said. “You can promote Coca-Cola, you can promote a car. It doesn’t matter, as long as you use my techniques, which are brilliant.”
Geller’s bent spoons are the analog precursors to deep fakes—reconfigured images, video, and sounds, or “deepfakes”—so that anyone can be made to say or do anything.
“Geller’s spoon-bent demonstrations and deep fakes create this conflict between what we think is possible and what we’re seeing,” said Alice Pailhès, author of The Psychology of Magic. “Both elicit strong emotional responses: confusion, delight, anguish.”
Of course, the stakes are different. Get fooled by a spoon bender and you’ll likely end up with a smile on your face. Fall for a pernicious deepfake and you could end up believing a video posted last year of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky appearing to surrender to Russia.
Today, Geller occasionally speaks before magicians, giving advice and motivational speeches. At a magic convention in Britain in 2020, she poured radish seeds into her hand and asked everyone to chant “Sprout!” As he wiggled the seeds with one finger, a close-up showed a green sprout that seemed to materialize in the middle of his hand.
“Here among magicians, was that a magic trick? Did you put some cress in between your seeds?” asked a bold young man. “Are you serious?” Geller almost yelled, more amused than irritated. “Do you really think that at 73 I am going to say that this was a trick? Please!”.
By: David Segal
BBC-NEWS-SRC: IMPORT DATE: 2023-07-18 20:30:08
