Control Nathan Rabin #106 Blind (2017)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor or early aughts animated television program. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen along with an exploration of the cult animated series Batman  Beyond. 

Now I have not reviewed movies professionally for a very long time. It’s been at least four years or so since I was even a freelance stringer for The A.V Club so it did not occur to me until now that, if I remember correctly, I got paid one hundred dollars a movie review at the very end of my time with the website. 

So with Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 I’m basically getting paid as much to write about a movie for you, the patron who makes this beautiful experiment possible, as I would to write about a movie for whoever it is that owns The A.V Club at this point. 

The work is not terribly dissimilar either. The movies that I tended to write about during my eighteen year career as a full-time professional movie reviewer were pop culture detritus that, on a deep, fundamental level did not matter, that were wildly unimportant and doomed to be forgotten, sooner rather than later. 

I’m talking about movies like 2016’s Blind, a hilariously overwrought vanity project that casts an unforgivably hammy Alec Baldwin as a quintessential Great White Male Author Who Articulates Profound Truths About the Human Condition Through His Literary Genius who is part Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman and part Norman Mailer. 

Blind at least comes about its literary hero worship organically. It’s a collaboration between two of Norman Mailer’s children. John Buffalo Mailer wrote the screenplay and co-stars while Michael Mailer directs. 

So perhaps it should not be surprising that the film’s take on its novelist hero is preposterously fawning and deferential. Alec Baldwin’s Bill Oakland is not just a talented author: he’s a God. He’s a guru. He’s a sage. He’s a literary lion whose acolytes sit reverently at his feet, hoping that this wise Zen master of words will bless them with crumbs of his wisdom. He’s a natural-born poet and philosopher whose one novel is quoted with near-religious reverence by cultists awed just to be in his presence. 

Watching Blind I was reminded of one of the only interviews I ever conducted that did not run. It was with James Toback for 2013’s Seduced & Abandoned, another obnoxious Baldwin vanity project, this time a documentary where Baldwin and his friend, collaborator and kindred spirit James Toback tried to get what they clearly thought was a very important, very essential erotic drama in the Last Tango in Paris mold financed, only to discover that the philistines who green light movies prefer superhero movies and action thrillers to IMPORTANT ART created by geniuses like themselves that MUST BE MADE or SOCIETY WILL SUFFER. 

Seduced & Abandoned struck me as narcissistic garbage at the time; the intensely non-shocking revelation that its director was almost assuredly a prolific sex criminal with a decades-long trail of crimes only made it more repellent. 

James Toback and Alec Baldwin not getting to make a contemporary Last Tango in Paris was ultimately no crime. Allowing Toback to make that movie on the other hand, almost assuredly would have been a crime, in the criminal as well as artistic sense.

Blind is every bit as rooted in the Myth of the Great White Male Artist as Seduced & Abandoned and every bit as uninterested in investigating, interrogating or questioning the cultural conditions and prejudices behind it. 

I used to adore Alec Baldwin as an actor. Miami Blues? Fucking amazing. Glengarry Glen Ross? Lives up to the hype. Beetlejuice? Stone cold classic. 30 Rock? Masterful.  

Then Alec Baldwin the obnoxious celebrity made it difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy Alec Baldwin the actor. With Blind Baldwin unfortunately seemed to have reached the point in his career where he didn’t have to act anymore. He didn’t need to work on his craft or disappear into other characters when he could just do his hammy Alec Baldwin shtick. 

Blind exists to serve Baldwin’s actorly ego; everything else is secondary, including the arc of female lead Suzanne Dutchman (Demi Moore), who begins the film leading a life of unexamined privilege as the wife of wealthy businessman Mark Dutchman (Dylan McDermott). 

Dutchman is supposed to be a glamorous business guru with a dark side and a sadistic streak. Instead McDermott gives him the cartoonish villainy of a white collar criminal villain in a direct-to-video Expendables sequel. 

The popularity and ubiquity of cell phones has more or less killed the cliche of establishing a character’s soullessness and ambition by having them bark business jargon into a cell phone but Blind brings it back by introducing Mark shouting things like “I operate on information, not market trends, you know that!” into his iPhone.  

Mark seems like the kind of grade-A sleaze ball who cheats on his wife constantly and engages in insider trading. Yet Suzanne’s quiet, respectable life of enjoying her husband’s money and not asking questions is turned upside down when he’s busted for insider trading and she discovers he’s been unfaithful. 

Since Mark used the family account for some of his financial crimes his wife is sentenced to one hundred hours of community service. In that capacity she’s assigned to read blind professor Bill Oakland (Baldwin) his student’s papers.

Suzanne is the victim of a terrible affliction: she has someone made it into her fifties without developing a discernible personality. She’s a beautiful, empty vacuum of a human being who exists to bask in Bill’s reflected glory, to soak up pearls of his worldly wisdom and then mend his broken heart and make his shattered life completely. 

But first our hero has to test Suzanne by telling her she must have a “tough name to carry around these days” on account of sharing it with “the guy who wanted to lay off 3,000 workers to make a buck that he didn’t need. You must have heard of this sociopath.”

When she replies that she is in fact familiar with this sociopath, on account of being his wife, he really lays into her, taunting, “Even a visually impaired man can see what you’re all about! I know your type: the type who loves her enormous penthouse and her ridiculously oversized diamond ring enough to cast a blind eye to all the heartless acts her husband had to commit in order to get her these things!”

Name a more iconic duo.

Suzanne is so offended by the nerve of Baldwin’s impudent truth teller that she asks for a transfer, only to be sternly informed that she either endures the abuse and harassment of the greatest writer the world has ever been honored to know or does hard time. 

Blind angrily insists that Bill is one of the all-time great writers yet the snippets of writing we hear characters quoting is no better or worse than the snippets of writing from Bill’s students that Suzanne reads to him during their sessions. 

Meanwhile Gavin (Steven Prescod), an earnest young African-American spiritual seeker, finagles his way into his hero and god’s life because he was so blown away by the great white man’s novel that it taught him how to live, how to think, and finally, how to be a man. 

This eager protege will do anything to be a part of Bill’s world so the feisty professor has him do a series of menial chores for no payment beyond the once in a lifetime opportunity to soak in his genius firsthand. 

The two men seem to be cosplaying Finding Forrester: I spent the whole film waiting for the great author to shout, “You’re the man now, dog!” at his disciple in appreciation. Gavin’s role in the movie, and in Bill’s life, is to get him to honor his genius and share his second novel with the world instead of burning it in a painfully cliched ritual of crazed self-negation. 

Blind sees Bill’s second novel as a gift to humanity on par with Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. Bill is a saint and a legend and, honestly, too good for our dumb and degraded world but he’s also a virile older heterosexual man with needs. Sexual needs. 

This silver fox with the silver tongue and silver pen wants to take his beautiful reader to a sacred realm poets and philosophers know as “The Bone Zone”, particularly after he forbids her from turning on the air conditioner during a hot day, forcing her to strip down to the sexy, expensive lingerie she apparently makes a point of wearing to community service and her pheromones drive him into an erotic tizzy. Bill and Suzanne become friends and then something more but their relationship is threatened by Mark Dutchman’s release from jail after a key witness in his case turns up mysteriously dead. 

Blind is one of those gloriously empty-headed bibliophile romances that is hopelessly, desperately in love with the romance and glamour of writing and novels that never seems to have actually read any books itself.

Blind is a very stupid valentine to literary genius. It’s an unhinged melodrama that I would have given the very lowest rating possible if I’d reviewed if for The Dissolve or The A.V Club although it’s so over the top and unhinged in its florid melodrama that there is certainly some fun to be had at its expense. 

I will concede, however, that nothing in this movie from Norman Mailer’s children gave me even a fraction of the joy I received from this moment in their dad’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance that I will cherish and recycle until my dying day on this worthless planet. 

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