Psychics - even fake ones - can see money

In Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter," Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a lonely San Francisco psychic who considers his ability to commune with the dead a curse. He used to do it for money, but no longer. Now he avoids shaking hands with people or touching them, lest he find out a bit too much about them.

The reluctant spiritualist is an endearing and enduring figure: His reluctance is what makes us believe in him. In the late 1700s, the famous lover Giacomo Casanova (yes, he actually existed) played the part in order to swindle the Marquise Jeanne d'Urfé out of a fortune; he detailed the whole charade in his autobiography. The Scottish psychic Daniel Dunglas Home became a Victorian-era celebrity partly by never directly asking for money. (He lived quite comfortably, however, on gifts from wealthy patrons.)

In movies, too, "real" psychics eschew payment and avoid fame. In "The Dead Zone," the 1983 adaptation of Steven King's novel, Christopher Walken tried to avoid desperate supplicants searching for missing loved ones. In last year's "Paranormal Activity," a ghost-buster visited a haunted house but found the bad vibes too powerful; he fled. And of course there was no doubting the child-psychics in "The Shining" and "The Sixth Sense" - what kid would make up such terrifying visions?

It's possible that the reluctant psychic is being replaced by the fake one. The USA comedy-crime series "Psych," and CBS' "The Mentalist" both feature protagonists who merely pretend to have supernatural powers. Oddly enough, this only makes them more lovable. Now, that's a real gift.