I am not usually a big fan of biographies or memoirs. I will occasionally read life-based nonfiction (I am a pretty big fan of David Sedaris) but I feel like most biographies end up the same. The author talks about what adversity they had to overcome when they were young, and how through sheer wit and skill they overcame insurmountable odds to become a success. OK I may be exaggerating a little bit and allowing the recently read Outliers to taint my ideas, but the subjects of biographies are almost universally not as interesting as the author thinks they are. Thus I probably would have never considered reading The Big Rewind if it weren’t for the name on the cover.
As many of you are probably aware, The AV Club is probably my favorite website, and has been ever since graduating college. I find it to be an endless source of entertainment, both intelligent and humorous, and use it as my go-to source for film and TV reviews and articles. Although their music and book sections tend to be a little lacking, everything else is golden. I especially like that the writers are given clearance to write not only reviews about the new releases, but longer articles about older films that really give the authors a chance to spread their wings.
One of my favorite authors at The AV Club is Nathan Rabin. His film reviews are fine, but the article I really enjoy reading are his features. His best feature, ‘My Year of the Flops’, cleverly discusses films that that were interesting cases of commercial and critical failure, and whether or not these films deserved this reception at the time. He also participates in an AV Club feature that Lindsay is particularly fond of, ‘I Watched This on Purpose’, where the staff members watch shitty movies that have a certain cultural infamy. It’s because of his online film writing that I bought and read Rabin’s book. If anything I didn’t mind financially supporting a writer who has given me hours of free writing and entertainment.
The Big Rewind is mainly about Rabin’s life story, and how certain events or themes of his life relate to popular culture. Each chapter is tied somehow into a piece of pop culture that either is important to Rabin, or relates to something in his life. This ranges from Girl, Interrupted and time spent in a mental institute, to the Nirvana album In Utero where he discusses his time as an angry youth in an orphanage, to possibly his most clever connection where he discusses how a rival critic made him feel Frank Grimes to her Homer Simpson, which is taken from a famous episode of The Simpsons.
The Big Rewind was pretty interesting because Rabin’s life wasn’t very normal. After being middle class at a very young age, he grew up poor and eventually had to spend time in a mental institution due mostly to an error. He then spent much of his child and teenage years at an all boys orphanage and then at a seedy, sinful co-op. The book spends a large amount of space discussing the weird people he met along the way and how they rubbed off on him. The later half of the book mostly chronicles his time on a low-rated, shortly lived movie critic show on AMC and his other professional pursuits. I would have liked a little more information about the formation and development of The AV Club, because he hardly mentions it, but I guess he finds that failures are usually more interesting that successes.
In the introduction Rabin states that the purpose of the book is to relate how his personal pantheon of pop culture relates to his life and how it helped him get through the tough times in his life. It seems that he often chooses pieces of pop culture that obviously relate to his life subject-wise, but I would have liked it if a little more time was spent discussing how the pop culture touched him on a personal level. His observations and discussions about pop culture are very interesting, and his reflections on his life story itself were entertaining and thoughtful, it would have just been nice if everything connected a little better.
I am especially looking forward to his upcoming book based on ‘My Year of the Flops’ because I think Rabin’s forte really lies in discussing ridiculous and culturally infamous movies. Although his life story is different than what you would normally find in biographies, I don’t know if I can really recommend this book unless you are really into biographies or his writing on The AV Club. However if you do enjoy Rabin’s other writing, and want to learn a little more about the neurotic self-deprecating fellow, I would easily recommend The Big Rewind.
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