[A Vine Review - Thanks, Amazon!]Nathan Rabin may be a first-time author, but I know him well from reading his A.V. Club articles and the enormous discussion threads they spawn. His discursive, caustic, and quite funny writing style has a gift for transforming a long and pointless afternoon into something longer and just as pointless, only far more entertaining.
As a critic of today, Rabin's the kind of guy who can break anything down into popular entertainment references, so it almost makes sense that when he decided to tell the story of his life, he organized it into chapters referencing famous books, records, and films.
His stay as a boy in a mental institution? He's reminded of the book "Girl, Interrupted" - and careful to point out, not the later film adaptation.
Various relationships with girls are prompted with chapters spotlighting Rabin's takes on Rod Stewart and Jean-Luc Godard. Living in a hippie co-op in Madison, Wisconsin prompts a reference to "Freaks", the Tod Browning cult film. "My fellow co-opers were the stuff of Lou Reed songs," he explains.
Movies became for Rabin a channel of expression and a shelter from the storm: "Movies afforded the rewards of human interaction with none of the terrifying hazards of actual human contact," he writes. Real life has teeth, and Rabin often felt its bite.
I've seen this done before with songs alone, which do lend themselves to this kind of subjective treatment. Movies don't, and Rabin struggles to find the same connecting strands that come more easily from a song like "Maggie May". When Rabin uses "Apocalypse Now" as a basis for comparing a mildly domineering authority figure in Rabin's life to the terrifyingly unhinged Col. Kurtz from the film, it's a sign he's really pushing for significance.
More problematically, not every episode he writes about is as interesting to us as it is to him. There's three chapters alone on Rabin's brief, unsuccessful attempt at being a movie critic on TV, something he writes about with the minute, gory precision of the Starr Report.
When something does click, though, it often clicks hard, like his meeting the woman who gave birth to him, then left him alone for 20 years. When he meets her again, he finds her utterly unconcerned about the emotional damage she has left, and nutty enough for Rabin to realize he's grateful to have escaped her notice.
"Every Mother's Day I'm struck with an urge to send Biological Mother a card but I've yet to find one with a message like 'To a Mother Who's Disappointed Me in Every Conceivable Way.'"
"The Big Rewind" is hardly a disappointment of that order. It's structurally deficient, yes, but otherwise often engaging enough to read through quickly and wonder, if this was another A.V. Club posting, what the discussion thread would look like.
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