National Post (National Edition)
The delightfully dorky things Blaine can do
Still like a kid telling you to pick a card
“No. No. What the f--k just happened? What the f--k! WHAT? Yo. YO! Wait. Hold on hold on hold on hold on. What? No! Yooooooo!”
David Blaine has just made a stranger’s iPhone vanish from his hands and reappear in her purse, and the stranger — his patron? his victim? — isn’t having it. They saw the phone disappear! No way could it have leapt into that bag unnoticed! The magician isn’t even wearing sleeves! So they react how strangers always do when David Blaine beguiles them. They hop up and down, lurch and droop, fan themselves wildly. They bury their faces in their hands and moan. They shriek. Such shrieking! “No. No! WHAT!? YOOOOOOOOO!” This is just what David Blaine does to people.
That’s vintage Blaine: mystifying randoms in public, unmoved as they jounce and scream around him. It’s one of the few acts of classic street-magic performed in his new hour-long ABC special, Beyond Magic; these days Blaine prefers more illustrious company, staging wow-worthy parlour tricks for Jennifer Lawrence and John Travolta like a sort of court jester for A-list celebs.
Not that it matters so much. Blaine’s shtick works just as well on billionaires as it does on the proletariat: rich or poor, everyone freaks out. Drake seems on the verge of having Blaine ejected from his home. Jennifer Lawrence insists he’s a witch. David Beckham just looks upset — he’s seen the laws of the universe defied, and he isn’t pleased. This is what Blaine does to everyone.
Is David Blaine lame? Oh, almost certainly: He’s a celebrity magician, first of all, which puts him somewhere between reality-TV star and eating-contest champion on the scale of enviable fame. Besides which his more extravagant stuntwork as “endurance artist” has the look-ma-no-hands quality of someone a little too desperate for acclaim. (Holding your breath for 20 minutes may be a remarkable feat but it will always sound like the kind of thing your childhood friend claimed his older cousin could do.) Blaine tries hard and takes himself very seriously — a kiss of death combination for anyone in the public eye. You know the appellations emblazoned on the screen at the beginning of his last special, Real or Magic? “Warlock,” “Dragon,” “Troublemaker,” “Guru,” “Maniac.” That’s how he imagines himself.
What he doesn’t realize is that he’s a bit of a dork. But a delightful dork! The good kind of lame! In fact I’m beginning to understand that David Blaine’s resounding lack of cool is precisely his appeal. It’s because he so obviously tries hard and so unabashedly takes himself seriously — because he not only does amazing and dangerous things but can’t help but point out how amazing and dangerous these things are, always cutting to awed onlookers and physicians exaggeratedly concerned for his well-being — that watching him work and lionize himself offers a base-level thrill. Few TV personalities are so earnest or endearing. It doesn’t matter how elaborate or spectacular the undertakings get, he’s still your kid brother telling you to pick a card, any card; still the class nerd at the talent show pulling a rabbit out of his hat.
It’s how he responds to all the bouncing and shrieking that does it for me, because he doesn’t respond at all. So reliable is his total lack of affect in the face of a stranger’s meltdown that it quickly became the hallmark of magic à la David Blaine: he’ll reveal the missing nine of hearts, or direct someone to find a dollar bill in their shoe, or guess a number someone was thinking of that he couldn’t possibly have known, and the strangers will just go utterly berserk, just completely lose it, yelling and yawping and staggering away in raptures. And Blaine won’t react at all. He never laughs, never smirks, never winks or blurts out “Aha!” He just does the magic and moves on.
He’s the perfect straight man, in other words — and part of what’s so endlessly enjoyable about the routine is that contrast between Blaine’s unruffled poise and the manic gesticulations of his marks. (And the more over the top the reaction, needless to say, the more amusing the result.) There’s something of the Pagliacci in this whole bit, the entertainer who enchants the masses but never smiles. Not that David Blaine seems sad, exactly. I suspect it has more to do with how seriously — far too seriously, I should think — the man takes his craft. He’s able to drive Sir Patrick Stewart to a fit of cursing and laughter, and he’s able to keep a straight face. Marvellous.
This is what David Blaine does to people. This is the delightfully dorky thing David Blaine does.