What’s In J.J. Abrams’s Mystery Box?

Spoiler alert: Hey J. J., if you’re checking this out — or if your minions at the Alliance of Twelve/SD-6 or the Impossible Missions Force or even Starfleet Command are intercepting communications for you — just pull down the curtains now, click off to somewhere else. Unless you want to find out what’s in that 39-year-old mystery box of yours.

If you read Frank Bruni’s profile of J. J. Abrams in Sunday’s magazine, you know that the filmmaker regards his work as the creation of mystery boxes. He laid out his thinking at a TED conference several years ago: “What are stories, but mystery boxes? . . . What’s a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You go to the theater, you’re just so excited to see anything — the moment the lights go down is often the best part.”

What Abrams was talking about specifically was something he got at Tannen’s Magic, in Midtown Manhattan, more than three decades ago — a real box with a question mark on the outside and unidentified objects shuffling around inside. By the time of the TED conference four years ago, Abrams had gone 35 years without opening his box. Kept closed, “it represents infinite possibility,” he told his audience. “It represents hope. It represents potential.” And who would want to give up those things?

Well, this blog is no mystery box, not this post, anyway, so I went by Tannen’s at lunch the other day, forked over $25 to buy one, tore it open on the spot and found . . . Schrodinger’s cat! (No wonder Abrams never opened the box. Three-plus decades is a long time to leave a cat mewling in quantum indeterminacy, but it beats being definitively dead.)

Actually, that didn’t happen. But I did go to Tannen’s. After waiting for a clerk to explain to the only other customer there, a woman giving off a pronounced oddball vibe, that magicians no longer kill birds for tricks — probably she was disturbed by Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Prestige,” in which the Christian Bale character does just that — I asked about Abrams’s mystery box. He knew all about it, said they still sold the exact same thing.

I have to say it’s a little underwhelming. That picture above is not some prop we threw together — it’s the real mystery box. This has been J. J. Abrams’s grand inspiration? Given his typical production values, you’d expect his McGuffin to be a little showier or more evocative. What’s more, as I already knew from Tannen’s Web site, the mystery box is in truth a “magic mystery box.” As the rather prosaic promo copy puts it: “Here is your chance to get at least $50.00 worth of magic at half price. That’s right, $50.00 of good solid magic for only $25.00 All of these are NEW effects, complete with instructions. Some are overstocked items, other are never released samples.” It’s a sign of Abrams’s storytelling instincts that he doesn’t quite emphasize this aspect of his mystery box.

But I bought one all the same. (I can expense this, right, Boss?) I gave some thought to holding on to it for 35 years; maybe I would get to enjoy some of Abrams’s infinite possibilities, or at least his hope. But I’m not so confident I’ll be around that long (now there’s a mystery box for you — your unknown lifespan). Besides, what Pandora’s business tells us is that you have to open the box to let the hope out.

So I gave it to my kids instead. I told them about Abrams’s own box and how they might want to leave theirs unopened, the way he did. That worked out pretty well for him. They deliberated for about 10 seconds before opening it. Oh, well. I suppose that means they won’t be making movies and supporting me in my old age with their box-office grosses. Still, they were pretty excited by what they found inside (see below). And I have to admit I kind of am, too. Who couldn’t do with some more illusions? I’m especially looking forward to the moment when one of them pulls the “Synonymental” card trick — or, kids being the ultimate mystery boxes, some other bit of magic — on me.