Magic is a 1978 psychological horror film directed by Richard Attenborough and written by William Goldman, based on his 1976 novel. The film stars Anthony Hopkins, Ann-Margret, and Burgess Meredith, with Ed Lauter, David Ogden Stiers, and EJ André.
Gene Siskel ranked Magic at #9 on his 10 best movies list of 1978, and Roger Ebert praised the performances of Hopkins and Meredith on Sneak Previews, though he was disappointed with the final act. Goldman received a 1979 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. Hopkins received nominations for Golden Globe and BAFTA awards, and Meredith received the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor.
While some critics claimed Magic is rather like the “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” section of Dead of Night (1945), Attenborough vehemently denied any such similarity or plagiarism, as did Goldman. In September, 2025, Sam Raimi and Roy Lee announced their intention to remake Magic, with Raimi confirmed in May 2026 to direct it.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie.
The film begins with a shot in the home of Merlin (André), the sick and aging mentor of aspiring professional magician Charles “Corky” Withers (Hopkins), who has arrived in Merlin’s home to tell him how his first solo attempt at a magic show went. Though Corky, indeed, made no technical mistakes, he tries to make Merlin believe the audience loved him. Merlin can see through Corky’s b.s., and so the latter has to admit that the audience was ignoring his act the whole time…until Corky blew up at them in his sweaty, nervous frustration.
Merlin advises Corky to come up with a gimmick to get the audience’s attention…which he, a year later and after the death of Merlin, does. His gimmick is to combine his magic act, which involves card tricks, with ventriloquism, using a dummy he’s named “Fats.” This change has brought Corky from a zero to a success.
His agent, Ben Greene (Meredith), has Todson (Stiers), a man who works at a TV network, watch Corky perform; Todson is impressed only when Fats appears. It looks as though Corky is going to be a star on TV. After Todson and Greene have visited Corky backstage to congratulate him for a successful show, and he is left alone with Fats, we see the first sign of Corky’s mental instability, for he has a brief but needless exchange of words with the dummy.
Indeed, later on and in New York City, Greene is about to clinch a TV show deal for Corky, who will first need to do a medical exam for the producers. Corky adamantly refuses to do it, insisting that there is nothing wrong with him in the psychiatric sense, when in fact he doesn’t want it to slip out that he has projected part of his personality onto Fats. Greene is equally insistent, however, that Corky do the medical exam, so Corky bails and escapes to the Catskills, where he grew up with his now-dead family, and where an old high-school crush of his, Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), lives.
On his way there in a cab, Corky sees his old house and remembers when he lived there with his family. They then drive by a cemetery, where his family members are buried; Corky remembers his father’s funeral.
In these details about his old family life and his relationship with Merlin, we can gain some insights about his psychiatric condition.
According to psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, his theory of the bipolar self posits that the basis of psychological stability rests on two poles–one of ideals, and the other of grandiosity. With these two intact, one’s narcissism is of a healthy, moderate, restrained, and thus acceptable sort. The poles are the idealized parental imago and the grandiose self.
One sees in one’s mother and/or father a greatness that is reflected back onto oneself, for the parents act as a mirror, in their love of their child, of the grandiosity felt in the child. Over time as the child grows up, these idealizations and grandiosities are let down in tolerable amounts of disappointment, and the child should grow up to be a mature, normal adult. If one pole should fail, on the other hand, compensation must be made by the other pole. If both poles should fail, one suffers psychological fragmentation, a falling apart of the personality and a psychotic break with reality…as happens to Corky by the end of the movie.
Corky’s idealized parental imago would, it seems, have been his father, whom we see in a brief flashback in front of the old house tossing a football to Corky’s older brother; then, as I said above, there’s a flashback of his father’s funeral. With his family “all gone,” there is neither parent for him to have as an idealized parental imago, so in his fragile psychological state, he’d have had to look elsewhere for that.
In Merlin, Corky’s magician mentor, he’d have had a father transference, and therefore a replacement as an idealized parental imago. Indeed, in that opening scene when Corky is telling Merlin how his first solo magic act went, we see Corky feeding Merlin a spoonful of medicine, as a filial son might do for his aging, sick father. But a year later, after Merlin is gone, Corky no longer has anyone to hang his ideals on. His already fragile ego is made all the more fragile.
He now has to compensate with the other pole, his grandiose self. The problem there is that, having always been shy and introverted, Corky has repressed that grandiose self. He as a kid was too shy to tell his high-school crush, Peggy, that he likes her. While in that flashback mentioned above, when his father was tossing the football to his brother, Corky was sitting alone on the porch, carving something out of wood.
It is thus only through Fats that Corky can release and truly experience his grandiose self, for Fats lets out all the extroversion and foul-mouthed sauciness Corky is too shy to express himself. “Fats” is a fitting name for the large-headed dummy, for its persona is that of a fat-headed egotist, the perfect projection of Corky’s grandiose self.
This is why Corky needs Fats so desperately, to let him experience the only pole of his bipolar self that he has left, to help him regain a sense of psychological structure. This is why Corky can’t let Fats be quiet for even a mere five minutes, as Greene will ask him to do, to prove he isn’t mentally ill. Without Fats, Corky has neither pole, and thus he’ll undergo psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break from reality, a defence against which is narcissism, manifested in Corky’s grandiose self…Fats.
A haunting motif heard in Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the film is the use of a harmonica, to remind us of the pathological presence of Fats. Significantly, we don’t usually hear a normal melody of single notes played on it–just an inhaling and exhaling of chords, as when someone who doesn’t really know how to play a harmonica would do.
One breathes in and out of a harmonica, as if to infuse it with (musical) life, like God breathing the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils and making him a living soul (Genesis 2:7); but this inhaling and exhaling with a harmonica hardly gives it any (musical) life. Similarly, throwing one’s voice with a dummy makes for an amusing act, but it doesn’t give any real life to the dummy. The musically naïve might think his breathing into the reeds of the harmonica–its nostrils, so to speak–makes music; psychotic Corky thinks throwing his voice with his dummy, giving it the breath of life, will make it become a living soul.
There is one way, however, that Corky may have someone to be his new transference for idealization: Peggy. His crush on her may have originally been an Oedipal transference; as for now, many years later, whether based on the original Oedipal narcissistic trauma or not, his infatuation with her can still be a new idealization, making it possible for him to reestablish that pole so he needn’t depend on the pole of the grandiose self, making Fats no longer necessary.
This is why Corky is so keen on finding Peggy in the Catskills and resuming a relationship with her, even to the point of seducing her with a card trick and persuading her to get out of her unhappy marriage to Duke (Lauter). Corky knows Fats is bad for him; his narcissism is split and pathological–his grandiose self isn’t integrated with his realistic self (the regular, timid Corky)–but a renewed relationship with her just might bring about that oh, so needed integration. “Fats” won’t have that, though, and so the projected grandiose self will try to sabotage Corky’s relationship with Peggy.
Corky’s discussion with Peggy about Merlin’s “telepathy” with his wife is interesting. Just before his wife died, Merlin claimed he could read her mind. Goldsmith’s eerie, atmosphere music comes in at this point in the scene, suggesting a link between this telepathy idea and Corky’s wavering mental state. He admits he perhaps wants to believe in Merlin’s telepathy, since he imagines this telepathy between husband and wife shows how much they cared about each other.
This scene, of Corky’s discussion with Peggy about Merlin’s telepathy, can be linked to an earlier one of Corky holding a photo of Merlin, in the corner of which is a small photo of a woman, presumably the wife, since she’s neither Peggy nor Corky’s mother. If Merlin was a father transference for Corky, then perhaps the wife was a mother transference, too. A belief in telepathy can mean, for Corky, a way of feeling a stronger bond with those selfobjects (to use another term from Kohut) that he has, with an idealized parental imago, or with his projected grandiose self.
On the one hand, therefore, his use of the card trick on Peggy, to prove he may have a telepathic connection with her, is not just to seduce her, but also to prove he cares for and loves her; it’s also to establish her as a new selfobject for idealization. For on the other hand, Corky’s belief, or wish to believe, in telepathy is also the basis for his delusion that he’s having real conversations and exchanges of ideas with Fats; he knows ‘Fats’s’ thoughts, and so he can communicate with him. Fats, as his projected grandiose self, is another selfobject he needs as a source of narcissistic feeling, of the experience of continuity, coherence, and well-being (or, at least, as he can understand these in his delusional way).
So when he does the card trick with her, and he at first fails to guess the correct card in her hand, he gets rattled; for this failure suggests the unreality of telepathy, which would destroy the edifice of his delusional belief in a living Fats. It would also weaken his hopes of a strong bond with Peggy. Corky’s failure would thus lead to the loss of both selfobjects, leaving him with neither pole functioning, and he would descend into fragmentation and total psychosis.
He succeeds on the second try with the telepathy/card trick, though, and presumably it’s because of some trick, some form of “misdirection,” as Greene calls the basis of any magic trick–a distracting of the audience while the magician creates the illusion of magic. The fact, nonetheless, that Corky gets so emotional about succeeding or failing at “telepathy” shows that he really believes, or at least needs to believe, in it, as the basis of his delusional thinking about selfobjects like Fats.
Corky and Peggy make love, which is the first time she’s ever cheated on Duke, who is away on business. After Greene finds Corky and discovers his delusions about Fats, Corky has to kill him to stop him from seeking psychiatric help for him. Then Duke returns to Peggy, and he immediately has Othello feelings about Corky.
And in the introduction of Duke to the story, we see the further development of the theme of jealousy in Magic. We’ve already seen the jealousy of “Fats” towards Peggy and in Corky’s wish to be with her, him seeing her as his new selfobject of idealization, she who is replacing Merlin and his wife as such selfobjects, who in turn replaced Corky’s parents as such. As for his relationship with his parents-as-selfobjects of idealization, it is the nature of the Oedipus complex for the child to be narcissistically jealous of one parent having the Oedipally-desired other parent, this latter one whom the child wants to hog all to himself.
In Corky’s new parental transference with Peggy, Duke is in the role of father-transference, and Corky must get rid of him, too; for just as Duke is jealous of Corky getting his hands on Peggy (as a threatened father would feel by his son in the Laius complex), Corky is equally jealous of Duke not letting him hog Peggy all to himself.
Now, just as Corky has used the body of Fats to bludgeon Greene, so does he hide behind Fats’s body to stab Duke. He kills Duke not just out of the jealousy I’ve just described, but also because Duke has learned that Greene, whose drowned body he discovered in the lake, was Corky’s agent, after Corky denied knowing who Greene was, and therefore that Corky must have killed him [suspicious of Corky, Duke has rummaged around the room Corky is staying in and has found Greene’s identification hidden in one of Corky’s drawers].
In Corky’s mind, it’s Fats who has committed the murders of Greene and Duke, not himself, for Corky is projecting not only his grandiose self onto Fats (to the point of splitting it off and forming a separate personality), but he’s also projecting his murderous impulses onto the dummy.
Next, Corky must confront Fats in its “jealousy” over Peggy. Corky wants to elope with her, but she feels she owes it to Duke to tell him she’s leaving him first. (She, of course, doesn’t know that Corky has killed him.) Corky just wants to leave with her right away, imagining that his physical distance from the dummy will keep him safe from the split-off personality and its increasing manipulation of him.
Indeed, to get back to Duke when he was alive, it’s ironic that he, upon discovering Greene’s body on the shore of the lake, has tried to give the body the “kiss of life,” as he calls it, to make Greene’s body a living soul, and of course fails; on the other hand, Corky’s throwing of his voice for Fats, that harmonica breathing, if you will, has successfully made the dummy into a living soul (according to Corky’s delusions). Now, it is around the time when Corky’s hopes for eloping with Peggy are at their highest when we finally hear a single-tone melody on the harmonica, breathing the “kiss of life” into it and bringing it to musical life. Corky thinks he can just leave with Peggy and ignore Fats’s threats of confessing the murders.
Of course, dressed almost exactly like Fats now, Corky cannot psychologically separate himself from the dummy. His insistence of running away with Peggy has pushed Fats, in its “jealousy,” to make the split-off personality not only tell Peggy that Corky’s card trick was just to seduce her, upsetting her and making her want to leave him, but also to command Corky to kill her with that knife. It is here where Corky really falls apart.
He cannot get rid of his split-off grandiose self, now a multiple murderer, and he cannot be with his new selfobject of idealization. He’s been reintegrating the grandiose self, as we can see in the near-identical clothes, but it will dominate Corky. The roles are reversed: the dummy is making Corky move, as he imagines. Will it make him stab Peggy?
While in the middle of his psychotic frenzy, he presses his face against a mirror with a wild look on his face; when he collapses on the floor upon, we assume, complying with Fats’s command to kill her, we see the dummy in the reflection, for Corky and Fats are now one. Corky as Fats–doing his voice without the dummy present when he visits Peggy in her house–is clearly him being a dummy in more ways than one, so severe is his delusional state.
As it turns out, though, he doesn’t end up using the knife to carve her, but instead to carve a wooden heart as a gift for her. And as for a stabbing, Corky/Fats sticks the knife in his own gut, for the only way Fats can die is if Corky dies with him. It doesn’t matter how much one tries to project an unwanted part of oneself; that unwanted part will always be within oneself.
Peggy, loving the wooden heart and forgiving Corky, will be heartbroken to discover his suicide.
Infinite Ocean 