What can postmodernism do for, or to, educational research? The article discusses its potential for resisting closure and simplification. Developing a "preposterous", anachronistic postmodern method that is caught up with surrealism and the baroque, the article plays with "trompel'oeil" paintings and outmoded popular entertainments such as magic lanterns, peep shows and clockwork automata as figures for critique and analysis. It argues for defamiliarisation, fascination, recalcitrance and frivolity as methodic practices for research in the compromised conditions of postmodernity, and as forms of ethical resistance to the risk-averse literalism that pervades contemporary education policy.