Disappearing in Plain Sight: The Magic Trick and the Missed Event Rachel Joseph During a magic show, an audience misses the production of the trick while it occurs in plain sight. Onstage, the magician accomplishes the trick by using sleight-of-hand. Onscreen, the cut produces the illusion. Both use invisibility to achieve their effects. Using a psychoanalytic lens, this study contends the magic trick stages a fantasy of disappearance and return that mirrors Freud’s concept of fort/da and Peggy Phelan’s concept of performance. Cinematic representations of the trick use the stage as a metaphor for being both “gone” and “there.” Analyzing examples of the magic trick in Christopher Nolan’s [The Prestige] (2006) and Georges Méliès’s trick film [The Vanishing Lady] (1896), this essay argues the magic trick mirrors the traumatic aspect of performance—both onstage and onscreen—which always entails both an unbearable excess and a missed event. Invisibility cloaks that which is there and not at the same time. It hovers at the edge of sight, palpably present but still unknown, a trick of vision. One particularly poignant example of this phenomenon occurs in Christopher Nolan’s film, The Prestige (2006). Illusion designer Harry Cutter performs a magic trick for a child. He makes a bird disappear and then reappear. The underside of the trick involves literally killing the bird by smashing it in a collapsible cage and then replacing it with a double. In order to execute the trick, sleight-of-hand requires the violence of repressing the method of production in such a way that the audience misses its essential nature. 1 1 The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan (2006: Burbank CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD.