Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Distractions
…the illusionist and professional martyr David Blaine rose to the surface on Monday night, ending a week submerged in a water-filled transparent sphere that adorned the plaza at Lincoln Center. After catching his breath, he told us that he loved us.
Like Houdini before him, David Blaine's public events have a morbid fascination. Blaine's exhibitionistic masochism doesn't leave you feeling good about the spectacle, just unsettled.
Speaking of the downer-morbidity-spectacle, I read something recently in which a writer suggested that our current obsession with Six Feet Under-type morbidity shows came from an unlikely source: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — the princess of Death. I once was in an audience when this strange woman gave a talk to an audience of doctors and nurses. With a heavy accent (she was Swiss), Ross presented her ideas with an authority one can only have for a topic in which the subjects cannot represent themselves — the deceased; what really struck me was her grandiosity and the high Germanic-melodrama of her presentation. Her Five Stages of Grief theory seemed to me an unscientific invention, but it has been heavily embraced by the media. In later life Kübler-Ross was involved in a wacky sexual scandal involving a medium and widows. (It's true.) Kübler-Ross instigated the benevolence of the hospice movement and, according to this writer, the grotesquerie of CSI.