Last night David Blaine completed his Dive Of Death stunt – which, as it turns out, contained quite a lot less diving and/or death than we expected.
That’s nothing surprising, really – had he wanted the stunt to have more accurate name David Blaine would have titled it The Brief Upside Down Swing Of Uncomfortable Urination or, better, The Mostly Standing Up Of Non-Death – but it’s finished now, so we may as well humour David a bit.
The Dive Of Death part came right at the end of David Blaine’s stunt where, after 60 hours of hanging upside down, Blaine was sort of gently lowered down to the ground on a harness and then pulled up again until he vanished. Nobody really knows why this happened, but they’re generally agreed that it was better than watching him cry like a big girl as soon as it finished, which tends to be his traditional show-stopper.
It’s always a little bit disappointing when David Blaine survives his stunts, isn’t it? We’re not saying that because we dislike David Blaine – although, you know – but because everyone spends so long beforehand detailing all the gory ways that David Blaine could end his life that we can’t help feeling a little short-changed when he doesn’t.
Take the Dive Of Death which ended last night, for example. Some doctors said that at the very least David Blaine could go blind from all the blood sloshing around behind his eyeballs, and there was even the promise of an exploded head or two as well if we stuck around for long enough.
Did any of that happen? No. Was there any real danger that anything even approaching that would happen? Thanks to the way that David Blaine took one in every three minutes off to stand up and have a wee, no. So what was the Dive Of Death’s big finale? E! Online reports:
When it came time to “dive,” he sort of fluttered down to Earth before the hoister of his harness whisked him away. Mystifyingly into the ether, he’d have us believe.
You see the implication in that? David Blaine doesn’t belong among us. He belongs in space with the stars, because the stars don’t laugh at David Blaine for complaining that it hurts when he pees.
Actually, in all the controversy about David’s standing-up breaks, we think the magnitude of what he achieved with the Dive Of Death stunt has been lost a little.
Yes, David Blaine may have stood up every now and again, but that was only to stop him dying. In the end, you can’t take the accomplishment away from David Blaine – even with the breaks, he still hung upside down without food or sleep for 40 hours. For no reason whatsoever. Even though nobody asked him to. He wasn’t even doing it for charity or anything. No, you can’t take that away from him.
Anyway, as it happens we actually enjoyed the ending to David Blaine’s upside down stunt. Would you rather see a man anticlimactically vanish into thin air, or would you rather see a weeping bloke get helped into an ambulance, because that’s how all his previous stunts have ended.
The ‘vanish into space’ thing is much more dignified – at least unless you stuck around for long enough afterwards to watch David Blaine get lowered down normally and helped into an ambulance while he sobbed, that is. Which we assume is what happened. Why break the habit of a lifetime?
magnetite says
I didn’t want to see him ‘mystifying into the ether’. I wanted to see him micturating into his nostrils – then developing a kind of unstoppable precessive twirl due to the snorting and sneezing – so that in the end he’d be bouncing off trees and passing buses in the kind of foolhardy and inevitably fatal stunt I made my Action Man figures perform as a boy. Ah, I was a terrible General. I think I killed more of ‘Our Boys’ than Kitchener.
…and it’s aether, E! Online – the stuff you’re talking about is a fall-back substance to abuse when there’s no gin left in the fridge. No, don’t thank me, E! Online – thank my two GCEs and 1 CSE (grade 3, and that was woodwork)
jan says
at the very least whoever wrote this should hang upside down and go blind. You are what is wrong with the world, forget your job in writing just go drop dead.