LONDON — “All human life is here”, Dr. Johnson remarked of London in the middle of the eighteenth century. Confronted by the sprawling, polyglot, multicultural London of 2003, the great British sage would doubtless see little cause to revise his verdict. Least of all would he be surprised by the extent to which the British capital remains a magnet for attention-seekers and exhibitionists, for over-the-top behavior of every description.
Last week, a 37-year-old artist pushed a peanut along the ground with his nose for seven miles, all the way from his home in the south London suburb of Lewisham to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. By the time he reached the end of his grueling seven-mile trek, he was suffering from a grazed and throbbing nose, back pain and an aching head.
To be fair, this seemingly madcap caper at least had a constructive purpose: The artist was seeking to draw public attention to the crippling debts which many British students are these days forced to incur in order to sustain themselves through university. What purpose on the other hand is being served by the antics with which the American magician David Blaine is currently diverting the London public is rather less clear. Incarcerated in a glass chamber suspended high above the ground close to Tower Bridge, Blaine has embarked on a 44-day fast in full public view, with only water (plus the lucrative sponsorship of BSkyB and Channel 4 television) to sustain him.
If Blaine’s objective was merely to generate publicity and cause a stir, his stunt can certainly be accounted a huge success. Legions of Londoners are showing up to gape at the spectacle he is making of himself as he undergoes what is trumpeted as his “toughest endurance test yet” — though few appear to regard the whole business as anything other than an excuse to behave badly. Since he began his self-imposed ordeal, the great illusionist has been subjected to all manner of only too real indignities. Amid much noisy, typically British, speculation about how he performs his bodily functions with no lavatory at his disposal, jeering onlookers have been pelting his makeshift home with bottles, bananas and eggs, while girls have flaunted their breasts at him and men bared their behinds.
Then there were the imaginative pranksters who bore down on Tower Bridge with their golf clubs and began smashing golf balls in the magician’s direction. Nor does Blaine get any peace at night. A Bhangra rock percussionist traveled across London with the deliberate aim of banging his drum after dark and making it impossible for the magician to sleep.
The other day, Blaine’s girlfriend, the statuesque model, Manon von Gerkan, was hoisted up on a crane to wipe away the egg yolk smearing his diaphanous cell. Outraged by the less than respectful British reception of her boyfriend’s stunt, she described the crowd’s conduct as “bizarre”. “We never had anything like this in New York”, she exclaimed. How Blaine himself, sealed off from the world around him, is responding to it all is a matter for conjecture. But the magician — who has named London as his favorite city — must be a little surprised that he is eliciting reactions so far removed from those he has known on the other side of the Atlantic. When, for the benefit of the US public, he encased himself in a block of ice — from which, following the example of the legendary escapologist, Houdini, he finally and dramatically broke out — Americans were duly amazed, greeting him with fervent applause and acclaiming him as a national hero. Being treated as a poseur and a freak, as a butt of public ridicule and abuse, is outside the magician’s experience. It was surely not what he was expecting at the hands of the British, a people about whom he may never feel quite the same again.
It is the gulf between British and US perceptions of David Blaine that have been exercising British commentators, with a number of newspaper pundits maintaining that the episode demonstrates what a difference there still is, despite much talk of the Americanization of Britain, between Britons and Americans. The former editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, was delighted to note how a pointless American stunt was being laughed to scorn by “cynical hard-to-impress Brits”.
In the Guardian, Catherine Bennett — a London journalist who seldom finds anything complimentary to say about her compatriots — developed the same theme with relish. To anyone who has been dismayed by credulous public displays of celebrity worship, wrote Bennett, the mass derision to which Blaine was being subjected, was a “reassuring, if not inspiring, sight”: Here, among the irreverent but genial London crowd composed of all classes and ethnicities, was evidence of “residual British good sense”, of an enduring indigenous capacity to distinguish between a huckster and a true hero.
There may be something in this — even if Bennett’s verdict smacks somewhat of chauvinistic self-flattery, of a faintly desperate attempt on the part of a disaffected native, to latch onto some redeeming British quality. For if Blaine’s spectators have been showing an admirable refusal to be easily impressed, they have also been disporting themselves much like those 18th century Londoners whose idea of an entertaining excursion was to visit the asylum known as Bedlam and point mocking fingers at the mad and deformed. In other words, David Blaine could be said to have provided the bored, the boorish and the unruly of latter-day London with a license to indulge in regressive behavior.
Certainly, Dr. Johnson would find the zoological goings-on at Tower Bridge all too familiar, and so too would his contemporary, the great British artist William Hogarth, who, in painting after satirical painting, immortalized the brutalized behavior of the Londoners of his day. Ubiquitous mobile phones notwithstanding, the uproarious mob gathered at Tower Bridge presents an unmistakably Hogarthian scene.
Not that David Blaine is wholly without British admirers. By the end of last week, letter-writers to the Guardian, angered by Catherine Bennett’s sour outburst, were rallying to his defense. One, a local resident, claimed that Blaine had brought a sorely needed sense of community to the area. Another insisted that, by hanging “empty and alone” in the middle of one of the most “overhyped, overindulged and overpriced” cities in the world, the magician is in fact making a significant statement about the soulless place the British metropolis has become.
If people are showing contempt for him, she interestingly suggested, it is because they are profoundly disturbed by the sight of a man existing “simply as himself, consuming only himself”.
What is not in doubt is that this publicity-addicted American showman has provoked an extraordinary range of reactions. Plausibly enough, some even believe that his stunt furnishes an uncannily apt image of the predicament of Tony Blair’s beleaguered government, now facing endless interrogation over its declared reasons for attacking Iraq.
It is true that Blaine and Britain’s increasingly isolated prime minister, each experiencing ordeals of his own making, each suffering interminable exposure to hostile public scrutiny, have more than a little in common. There is, though, this important difference between them: In contrast to the illusionist in Downing Street, David Blaine cannot be accused of harming anybody but himself.
- Arab News Opinion 16 September 2003
