I was lucky enough to get to talk a little with Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski at Ebertfest. At one point while we were chatting, the subject of magicians came up and Scott said he was a fan of magic. I didn’t make much of it. Then a day later, the festival screened Man on the Moon, about the life of Andy Kaufman. 

If you asked most people who Andy Kaufman was, they’d say he was a comedian. But in Man on the Moon, Andy hates being called a comedian. When he’s referred to that way, he bristles. He calls himself a “song and dance man.” Really, though, he’s a magician. He tricks people. He uses bombing the way an illusionist uses sleight of hand.

So Man on the Moon is sort of like that Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed show, where you saw how the magician did his tricks. In the film, this theme reaches its crescendo when a deathly ill Andy goes to a faraway country for a miracle cure and he sees the doctor and how he is “fixing” people using sleight of hand. And then Andy chuckles. One dissolve later, Andy is dead. 

A couple scenes earlier, Jim Carrey’s Andy Kaufman says “life is an illusion.”  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But Andy certainly was.