Over the last decade David Blaine has become a famous magician with a combination of sleek sleight of hand and equally sharp publicity, using television specials, celebrity friends and bizarre tests of endurance to earn millions of dollars, thousands of fans and more than a few detractors.
In May 2002, for example, Blaine climbed a 24m pillar -- in Bryant Park in New York City -- and stood on a platform the size of a large pizza platter for 35 hours before jumping into a pile of boxes. Like his other recent stunts -- including standing for 62 hours in a giant cube of ice in 2000 and a weeklong stay in a coffin buried near New York's Riverside Park in 1999 -- the conclusion of the pillar affair was shown live on ABC.
But now Blaine, 30, says he has become disillusioned, as it were, with the money, the models and the movie-star treatment.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"Everything I've done before is irrelevant," he said in a recent interview, speaking in a nasally mumble that falls somewhere between distraction and shyness. "This one is going to be different."
"This one" is the latest stunt Blaine has devised for himself, an endurance test with as few frills as possible (except of course a small television deal and a documentary to be shot by a friend, the filmmaker Harmony Korine).
Beginning Sept. 5, Blaine says, he will spend 44 days in a Plexiglas box, 2m long by 2m tall by 1m wide, suspended over the Thames River in London. He will have just a set of clothes and a blanket, no food, and will receive only water via a feeding tube. He will have pens and paper to keep a journal (perhaps to be published later) and very little else to keep his mind occupied. His bodily functions will be handled with a small backpack containing diapers and a tube to urinate in.
"I'm not doing this for entertainment, I'm not doing this for the networks," he said, though Sky One and Channel 4 in London will broadcast his entrance and exit as well as a television special shortly after he emerges. "It doesn't have anything to do with anything other than I feel I have to do it. I want to do it."
Alexander E. Kuehl, an expert in emergency medicine and the director of public health in St. Lawrence County, New York, said that 44 days was close to the limit that a human body could last on only water.
"It's sort of an extreme Atkins diet," Kuehl said. "Certainly there are cases of relatively well-nourished people surviving for long periods, up to several months, with just snow or water. Hopefully he needs to lose a little weight."
He added, however, that if the water were loaded with sugar or nutrients, the challenge would be much less impressive. "If it was clear Gatorade, you could probably survive on it forever," Kuehl said.
Blaine insists it will be pure water only, but he does appear to have bulked up in preparation for the stunt. A Brooklyn native, the darkly good-looking Blaine first gained prominence as a street magician in the early 1990s and soon found himself doing magic at swanky bars for the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and his supermodel posse. But that life seems to have lost some of its appeal. He quit drinking last year, he says, and has been concentrating -- perhaps in preparation for his 44 days in a big glass box -- on being alone.
"For me, that's the biggest torture," he said.
He said the idea for the stunt came to him while gazing at a piece of art in his apartment on Fifth Avenue at 11th Street: a butterfly encased in a glass box. The choice of 44 days seems almost random; his birthday is April 4.
The idea also seems to come from a personal obsession with human endurance and the Holocaust. Blaine, who is Jewish, keeps dozens of copies of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz in his apartment, along with books on Einstein, magic and logic puzzles. His walls are filled with pictures of other magicians and celebrities (the Clintons, Orson Welles), and a giant poster of Houdini is affixed to his office ceiling.
"I think a lot of people are unable to accept that they're able to do what they can do," he said. "That we can survive. The human organism is an amazing creation."
Not everybody of course believes that Blaine is able to do what he seems to be able to do. There have been several attempts to debunk his stunts, including a Fox program that offered an elaborate explanation (secret compartment, body double) of how someone might manage an ice stunt like Blaine's.
All of which bothers Blaine more than a little, especially since he says that his fans might be swayed by such programs. During the interview, he showed the Fox program and laughed aloud at its explanation, but then added, "A lot of kids who used to believe now think it was just a trick."
While some other magicians may scoff at Blaine's unapologetic celebrity and success -- despite his current anti-network mood, he has a new deal with ABC for four more specials -- few magicians would question his impact.
"I think the thing about David Blaine is that he was able to take close-up magic and brought it to a whole new, tremendously large audience," said Steve Cuiffo, 25, a performer and magician who has known Blaine for more than 10 years. "And I think these stunts are just a continuation of that."
Still, it is likely that Blaine's latest stunt will receive more than a modicum of ridicule. Last May, during the pillar stand, The Late Show With David Letterman ran a Top 10 list of Least Impressive David Blaine Tricks. ("No. 8: Using fiber-optic cables, can transmit his voice anywhere in the world.")
It was just such a trick that Blaine used on Monday afternoon to expound from London on his next feat. He and Korine, the filmmaker, have been in London for more than a week, shooting segments for Korine's documentary.
Less than three weeks before his highly publicized deprivation begins, Blaine sounded confident, if a little biblical.
"I believe it is completely possible to exist peacefully with absolutely nothing, as it was in the beginning and as it will be in the end," he said. "It will be a public isolation that I will have to endure by adapting and surviving as an animal would. On instinct."
And of course on television.
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