Just to give everybody a sense of closure: Since I posted when he was in, I should probably post now that he's out. Yeah, David Blaine stepped out of the box, finally. There was no "illusion," no surprise, "poof, I'm gone, now I'm behind this tree!" dramatic ending. He just stepped out.

This is what I enjoy about Blaine. Rather than, say, walking through the great wall of China, Blaine is doing stuff that almost seems remotely plausible. People could almost buy that he was just standing in a block of ice for three days. People are buying now that this is some kind of starvation stunt. By taking the "razzle dazzle" out of magic, he's reintroducing some of the plausibility and wonder and discussion that makes magic interesting.

When David Copperfield shoves a girl in an alien space box and makes her vanish, the audience shrugs and says, "Gee, there must be something about that alien space box I didn't understand." When Blaine acts, it's with ordinary props, ordinary situations that people feel they understand and are familiar with. Sort of like "psychics" who bend spoons and fix broken watches. We understand spoons and broken watches, and so its easier to believe.

And, because we understand them, it's more fun to speculate on how it's done. Alien Space boxes force us to concede that there are mirrors or trapdoors or something. Props we understand force us to get creative with solutions, and thinking of creative solutions is part of the fun of watching magic.

The last thing he's doing, and doing well, is creating images, lasting images, for the public consciousness. The image of the man buried alive, or frozen in ice, or standing atop the pole, or trapped in a box--these are going to stick with us, whether we enjoy Blaine or not. That's the point that guys like Roeper miss when they call him "boring." He's not about dancing and scantily clad women. He's giving you an image, one that's going to make you remember him. (Not that Roeper doesn't generally manage to miss the point.)

He's being billed as the Anti-Houdini, and in a lot of ways that's true. Houdini represented that inherently American desire to break out and be free. Blaine is going against that and staying in the box. It jars at all of our psyches, because on some level we want him out of there, we feel it's wrong for him to be in there. That conflict creates an impression on our mind. Whatever feeling that is--or whether he's managed to create that feeling at all--tells you how well his art has affected you.

The eleven year old boy quoted in the article sums up the attitude of a lot of us, whether we like it or not. He felt Blaine was, "stupid," but was still going to keep the bin-bag Blaine tossed to the crowd as "a souvenir."