On July 18th, I interviewed Nathan Rabin, the head writer of The A.V. Club and author of The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture. Earlier today, The Bygone Bureau published a condensed version of our chat. Here, for your reading and listening pleasure, are both the fully transcribed interview and the audio recording of the interview.
Nathan Rabin had a tough childhood. He was placed in a mental hospital after attempting suicide at 14, then spent much of his remaining adolescence in a group home after being kicked out by a foster family. Through it all, he relied on pop culture and his imagination to cope and envision a better life for himself.
At the age of 21, he was hired to write for The A.V. Club, the entertainment and popular culture section of The Onion. Rabin, now 33, has written for them ever since and is their head writer.
His recently released memoir, The Big Rewind, chronicles his life from childhood to his stint as a critic on AMC’s short-lived film review program Movie Club with John Ridley. Each chapter references a piece of popular culture that either resonated with him at the time or serves as a lens through which to view his life.
Here’s the complete, unedited, 40 minute interview. Give it a listen if you’ve got time on your hands.
Tim: The couple interviews I’ve read so far have seemed to focus on how you’re 33 and writing a memoir.
Nathan Rabin: Yes, yes yes. I am deeply apologetic for it.
Was that something you expected?
Yeah. I feel like you have to justify yourself; you have to justify your existence. Also, I am not a famous person. Nobody’s like, “Nathan Rabin, you put out a book!” It’s a matter of feeling like I had a compelling story. I felt like after 12 years [writing for the A.V. Club], I kind of had the tools intellectually and artistically to tell it in a way that would not nauseate people. I feel like I’ve been building toward this my entire life.
I’ve been working on this for two and a half years, so I actually wrote a memoir when I was 31 years old. I’m even more agonizingly narcissistic and self-absorbed than people might imagine.
The book started out focused solely on the Movie Club, right?
It did, it did. It was a subject that fascinated America. They were rapacious; they just couldn’t get enough. But it’s weird, people sometimes say, “Oh, I watched your television show.” I want to say, “You damn liar! Nobody watched my television show.” I barely watched — no, actually I did watch my own television show. I have Shabbas dinner with my dad every Friday night, and the ritual was that we would eat the bread that he got from the soup kitchen — that’s another thing, I think food always tastes better if you’re ripping it out of the mouths of the disadvantaged. If I can steal money from poor people, than more power to me. It tastes more delicious-er. But yeah, we’d eat the challal from the soup kitchen and then we’d drink really nasty wine and watch my television show.
“Oh crap, I’m a half-hour late to one of my best friends’ wedding.”
I would agonize. I had my ‘Nathan Rabin’ cut of every episode — they would introduce the show and then every single shot would be of me. Every once in a while they’d throw in a reaction shot of people beaming ecstatically, basking in my reflected glory, being wowed by whatever trite bit of wisdom or labored one-liner I happened to be dispensing at the moment.
That’s very Larry Sanders-esque.
There’s this madness that everybody who goes to Hollywood has, this sensation where they think, “Oh my god, this is so fucking surreal. I’m running into all of these bizarre characters. I’ve got to write a book or movie about this. I better preserve it for posterity.” And what they don’t realize is that everybody who goes to Hollywood has the exact same experience. That’s why there’s this little watched, little read cornucopia of stuff with the exact same tropes.
And I think Entourage was — I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Entourage. I remember I watched the first season the day of my cubicle-mate Scott Tobias’ wedding. I was watching it and got really really involved in it, to the point where I’m like, “Oh crap, I’m a half-hour late to one of my best friends’ wedding.” And I took a cab and I’m like “[apologetic noise]“.
Entourage parrots all of these clichés and conventions and it’s one innovation is that there’s no moral judgment. It’s not saying these people are sleazy and they’re sordid and they’re just a bunch of callow thrill-seekers and they’re deplorable. These people are shallow and they’re superficial and they have no soul and that’s OK. It’s kind of fun to be like that. It captures what’s great and what’s horrible about Hollywood. The further I get away from my TV experiences and the further I get away from my strange little corner of Hollywood, the less Entourage resonates with me. I didn’t watch much last year and this year I had no real interest.
I realized at a certain point, namely after my agent said everybody had rejected my book, that the world may not be slavering for a 400-page chronicle of a TV show nobody had ever heard of.
Do you feel like you’re recapturing any of that fame now that you’re on tour?
Movie Club never got any press. I think I did three things for it. There was [one thing I did at] Columbia College — but not the good Columbia College — I was on Chicago Tonight, and Bob Sirott, this legendary Chicago newsman, introduced me and said, “He’s a man who’s making a name for himself on the successful television show Movie Club with John Ridley.” What I did not realize at the time — this is so beautifully pure to my whole television experience — is that my show had been cancelled by that point. I didn’t know this and I had been telling people, wait for Movie Club to come back, fifteen new episodes in fall and in the winter, all the way through Oscar season.
What happened was that my producer [the unnamed Head Producer Guy] told me that we had been picked up for thirteen to fifteen episodes. There was part of me that wanted to believe him, that wanted to think, “If you tell me something, that means that it is true.” But my pessimism and my skepticism have seldom steered me wrong, and you always hope that it bites you in the ass and not the opposite. Part of me was like, “I don’t think this is true. I think you said that because you wanted it to be true. I think he said it because it might be true. I think you’re trying to will it into existence and make something happen.”
I mentioned this in the book, but I held onto that answering machine message for like four months, up to the point where he actually called me up and said, “Here’s the thing: we’re actually cancelled.” I could go back and listen to it and he really doesn’t sound very sure of himself. He sounds like somebody who is losing hope.
To be a producer you have to be that, you have to have this passion and drive and I felt that he was carrying she show on his back to a certain extent.
He was not happy with his depiction in the book.
Oh really?
Some of the terms he used were: “hatchet job,” and “stabbed in the back.” He called me scum, and also “the worst kind of Hollywood phony.” I wrestled with a lot of these things, because it’s not just writing about me. If I could have written this book and been the only person in it — it would have been like discovering some insane new form of narcissism — but I think that would have been preferable because I’m writing about people who had no choice in the matter.
At one point in my life I had this very convenient thought, that writers are assassins, and that people who write about their lives and the people they love are people who assassinate the people closest to them. That’s kind of overwrought and melodramatic and giving myself far too much credit — I’m not that malignant of a force or that powerful of a force. But yeah, you’re dealing with people’s lives.
I was worried sick about how my dad would feel about the book because he’s the most important person in my life. I love him dearly. And he’s pretty much the second most important character. I’ve been saying he’s the hero of the book and he really is, but it’s a warts-and-all portrayal.
I haven’t found out how a lot of people who are in it… I’ve been Facebooked by people who are in the book and I’m always torn between saying, “Heeeey, funny story. I wrote a book. You’re in it! It’s available for purchase!”
All the ex-girlfriends…
“Fine. You can have your messiah. You can have pork and shiksas, whatever. Just leave me alone. I’ve had it with you. Chosen my ass.”
Actually, yeah. Last night I was interviewed by my ex-girlfriend’s husband. I’m enormously fond of both of them — I went to their wedding — but she hadn’t read the book yet. I didn’t write that much about her and she’s a fascinating, fascinating person who has this amazing family. One of the reasons I didn’t write about her is that I didn’t want to burn any bridges. I didn’t want to make her life any more difficult.
Part of me is bracing for people like Head Producer Guy who will say that I’m the worst kind of scum. But I think I’m the better kind of scum. I don’t want to give myself too much credit, but my epithet will read, “Nathan Rabin, he was the better kind of scum.”
“Not as bad as he could have been.”
Yes, not the lowest form of scum. That’s a little bit of an exaggeration.
Chris: David Sedaris keeps writing and he has family members saying incriminating things about him and his writings constantly.
It’s funny because I’ve borrowed a bunch of stuff off of my editor’s hard drive and one of them is a David Sedaris CD. I love David Sedaris but I’ve never actually listened to one of his performances. One of them was about his family and how they prefaced everything with, “This is not to be repeated, this is off-the-record.” The way that he manages to live with himself is by pretending that his family wants to be written about. His line was that his brother goes on talk shows to talk about his bowel movements and his sister sends out press release about her love life. I think his great turn-of-phrase was he was just a “friendly transcriber” jotting it all down.
It’s my perspective; it’s very subjective. I tried to tell the truth; I tried to be honest. Another thing that was interesting about Head Producer Guy — why hath thou forsaken me?! — was he never accused me of making anything up. He never said, “That’s not true.” He said, “Why didn’t you write this? I thought we were friends, you betrayed my—” But you know what? I feel bad and I feel that part of that is a bit of an overreaction, but part of it is justified and part of me thinks that I should have told these people I was writing about them then.
When you’re writing a book it’s such an intense thing that you kind of have to be yours, you kind of have to exist in a bubble. Then, once it’s released, it’s weird the way it works on your mind. I held off giving my boss Keith a copy of the book for a while and I held off showing it to anybody because part of me was like, “It’s too personal!” But after July 7th, everybody in the world will be able to read it. It won’t be personal at all. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s my personal pain and it’s going to be public spectacle.
I thought it was interesting how you started the book with a spiritual awakening that was not to be.
The conceit of this book is that I joined together moments of my life with popular culture, and some times it’s a little iffy and sometimes the connection is very abstract. Like the chapter about visiting a brothel and linking that to a Steely Dan song, “My Old School.” The more I knew about the song, I’m like, “Oh god, I am so wrong. I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.” They were writing about something very specifically that happened to them at school, they were not writing about prostitution.
But this was one where there was a very direct link, where I was at an orthodox Jewish summer camp, and we would pray and we would yell, “We want moshiach now, we want moshiach now.” We were really angry, like we were trying to demand things from God. That’s how pushy Jews are, they’re like, “We’re not going to wait for the messiah to happen, we’re going to angrily demand the messiah.” And God’s probably like, “Stop judging me, stop judging me! Fine. You can have your messiah. You can have pork and shiksas, whatever. Just leave me alone. I’ve had it with you. Chosen my ass.”
And then many years later when I heard Matisyahu — and I feel like I must apologize for writing about Matisyahu because he is painfully, painfully unhip. I might as well be writing about the Dave Matthews Band or GrooGrux and the Whiskey King. Whatever. But it was such a direct thing, because when his single came out, the chorus was literally, “I want moshiach now, I want moshiach now.” And I’m like, “Oh my god.” It took me back all those years.
It was so interesting because it was one of the periods of my life where I had the closest elements to a normal childhood. I had a step-mother, I had a father. They both had jobs. They weren’t moonlight or anything. But at the same time it a recurring theme in the book: being a fish out of water, which is finding yourself in situations that you don’t really understand. You find yourself thinking, “Why am I here?”
I think one of the reasons people are really responding to the stuff about my childhood is that children are powerless. They have so little power over their fate that I think there’s a vulnerability people really respond to. Once I become reasonably successful, they’re like “Who the hell cares if your TV show was crazy? Who the hell cares about these things?” But, when you’re a child or a teenager, I think there’s this protective, nurturing element to human nature that causes you to really respond to it.
One of the parts of the book I found most enlightening was the part in “Lukewarm Crawlspace Vermouth” where you discuss The Chronic and talk about growing up in the group home and how you responded to the theatricality of gangster rap.
On one hand, I was cognizant that this is a fantasy that we’re being sold. This is something that’s very empowering but is fundamentally false. There’s almost this cognitive dissonance, where obviously 50 Cent can’t be number one on the Forbes 500 and be selling cocaine and firing machine guns. [50 Cent was number one on Forbes’ 2008 list of richest hip-hop stars.] But it’s such as appealing fantasy, especially when you feel powerless, when you feel like adults and authority figures have this vice-like control over you. To feel like there are people who don’t have to abide by the rules everybody else does — it’s absolutely intoxicating.
You compare yourself to Tarantino in your use of pastiche.
I’m a cultural magpie!
But at the same time, I felt there was also a structural resemblance between your book and his films. It’s ultimately chronological, but it jumps around a lot within the chronology.
I think part of it is that I’m rambling and digressive. The Q and A’s for the signings I’ve been doing have been absolutely marathon affairs. Sometimes I’ll have people ask really, really strange questions. Like the reading last night, a gentleman — a very interesting character — showed me his tattoo of The Onion logo with a knife through it.
I saw that on your Twitter.
He was like, “I’m a chef and I really love The Onion.” And I’m like, “I’m very glad to hear that.”
So it was positive?
It was a positive thing! It was a positive tattoo. He was combining two things that he loved, The Onion and a sharp knife that could be used to stab. It’s funny, it reminded me of GZA. He was being interviewed for something, and said that Wu-Tang inspired a passion and loyalty that G-Unit never could. He’s like, “People have come up to me and they have Wu-Tang tattoos. You ever seen anybody with a G-Unit tattoo?” And that kind of made sense. I think if somebody did get a G-Unit tattoo, they would try — you know how Johnny Depp had that “Winona Forever” tattoo, when he was in love with Winona Ryder. Forever. And then he had it changed to “Wino Forever” after they broke up and he became a horrible alcoholic. He was able to poke fun at it.
Yeah, so, even this answer about how my answers are long and rambling and digressive and make almost no sense is long and rambling and digressive and makes no sense.
He said, “I’ve been seeing this commercial for Hulu and there’s this alien and they rip off their skin and it’s television and they say they’re out to destroy us, but are they out to destroy us? What is going on with this commercial?” I tried to explain, it’s a marketing technique and they’re riffing irreverently on television’s reputation for sucking souls and for being this malignant cultural force.
For turning your brain into mush.
Totally, totally. They’re toying with a negative stereotype and trying to have some fun with it. There’s an old maxim, “Don’t answer the question you’re asked, answer the question you would like to answer.” I don’t know how exactly I spun it, but for twenty minutes I pontificated. The way I write is digressive and sometimes I go too far and need to be reigned in.
Pop culture references can be such a dead end. I think there’s such as thing as the Family Guy effect, where if the reference is random and doesn’t have an emotional center to it, then it becomes very empty. And I think that’s one of the things that separates Family Guy from The Simpsons — especially in the early years when it was the most brilliant show in the history of television — is that you care about these characters. Lisa Simpson is a wonderful, aspirational figure for little girls. There is this warmth, this tenderness to it that I feel Family Guy, while it can be very, very funny, doesn’t have. It’s more random and disconnected.
Zodiac Motherfucker cracks me up. He brings a lot of joy to my life. When I see his all-caps messages on the A.V. Club, a little shiver of joy goes through my body.
One of the things I tried to do in my book was to have lots of pop culture references, but have them mean something and have them relate to something that I believe people are going through. I wanted very, very badly for it to not just be snark, and not be just jokes.
One of the incredibly graitifying things about doing this tour is hearing people say, “Yeah, this really resonates with my own bout of depression.” The secret of the book is that it’s kind of a serious book about depression. I went ridiculous extremes dealing with depression and I feel… I can’t say this without feeling so pretentious and self absorbed — “My book is saving the world!” — but it’s the greatest vindication. Growing up, there were books that meant the world to me and made me feel like people shared my problem. It would make me ecstatic if people felt that way about my book.
Like Catcher in the Rye?
Yeah, totally, or Girl, Interrupted. I’d already been in the mental hospital when I read it and I felt like these were on one hand very different experiences. She was upper class, she was 18 years, she was at one of the finest mental hospitals in the county. I was 14, I was poor, this was a pretty crappy mental hospital. But the emotional core of it, the feeling of emptiness and ennui, the feeling that you’ve just entered this bizarre state of purgatory where nobody gets betters and you’re just kind of suspended, just in this bizarre stasis — that really connected with me.
It’s not the most unusual or the most unexpected or the most clever pop culture touchstone for being in a mental hospital, but it’s something that really rang true.
I felt a little bit self conscious about it because I didn’t want anybody to feel left out. I didn’t want people to say, “Well why did he get picked and not me?” Part of it is that Zodiac Motherfucker cracks me up. He brings a lot of joy to my life. When I see his all-caps messages on the A.V. Club, a little shiver of joy goes through my body. And another one that I thanked, Karatloz, is somebody that responded to pretty much everything I ever wrote. I’m insecure enough that I almost thanked everybody who was ever nice to me. I don’t know if that’s sad or over compensating or something. I felt bad because my ex-girlfriend’s family was really really sweet to me and I thought I had thanked them and I did not. I was like “Noooo!” They were so good to me for so long.
And it’s weird, the first part of any book I ever read is the acknowledgements, and I understand now why the agent and the editor are the first two people thanked in every book, because these books would not exist without them. It’s a little bit like winning the Academy Awards and thanking your agent. It’s like, “Who the hell cares about your agent and your manager?” But you’d just be a horrible, horrible ingrate if you were like, “First and foremost I want to thank my second grade teacher and my tai kwon do instructor.” They’re the ones who got you to the ball so you are contractually obligated to sleep with them on prom night. One of my specialities are really bizarre, really unwieldy, unsavory metaphors. That is one of them, one for the ages.
It’ll live on in internet infamy.
Some day I’ll have a little picture book of unsavory metaphors. For children. Deep Thoughts with Unsavory Metaphors by Nathan Rabin.
It can be the companion piece for My Year of Flops.
I think so. They’re like pop culture references in that they can be abused so much. I think they’re kind of a tool and they can be used for good or they can be used for evil.
Do you think your interactions with commenters on the A.V. Club changed how you wrote the book or went around promoting the book?
I think Roger Ebert is this interesting guy. His as legendary and famous and big a cultural figure as there is in film criticism, and probably criticism as a whole, and one of the many things I love about him is, if you go to rogerebert.com, he’s constantly responding to readers. There’s this sense of being equals and having a conversation that’s really important. I go through different cycles about comments and there are times when I’m feeling really really fragile and somebody’s said something mean about my voice and it will just ruin my day. You have to develop relatively thick skin. If you dish it out, you have to be able to take it.
I wish I had gotten more feedback on my book before it came out. It was so intimate and so personal and part of me thought, “I will be shunned from society. They’re going to put me on an ice floe and send me to the North Pole. It will be the end of my life.” When your a depressive and pessimistic your mind kind of goes to the worst places. But I wish I had gotten more feedback and seen what people responded to, what they didn’t like. I probably would have cut about 10 pages from the Movie Club stuff. I had written an entire book; I transformed 400 pages into 67 pages and I thought, “That’s not that long”” But people don’t know this thing and think it’s a little disconnected from the rest of what I was going through.
One of the reasons I included it, and one of the reasons I think it worked thematically, is I think one of the arcs of the book is that I go from consuming popular culture — from being this sort of passive observer where it’s incredibly important to me, but I’m just sitting in the dark — to the point when I start doing television, where in a very small, very marginal way, I felt like I was creating popular culture to a certain extent. When I was a kid, the idea that I would be on television — it was unbelievable.
I’m the farthest thing from a hipster; I think that’s kind of a mythical creature. I’m not entirely sure the hipster exists. I think it’s like the Snuffleupagus or the Loch Ness Monster.
It was an amazing form of anonymity to be on television on a semi-regular basis and have nobody know who I was. At the screening room in Chicago, where everybody else around me is a film critic, nobody ever once said, “Oh you have a TV show.” People just did not acknowledge it, and for good reason. It would have been different if this was 1987 and there were like 90 television shows, but in 2005 there are like 5,000 TV shows — everyone will have a TV show eventually; you’ll get a TV show before you’re born. With this book, it’s sort of the ultimate culmination of going from being a passive consumer of popular culture to being a creator of popular culture and linking the two together in a way that resonates with people.
God, I’m using “resonate” a lot. I have this thing where I overuse words. I do this with my writing as well. It’s a good thing I’m able to edit my transcriptions from my interviews, because when I’m asking questions, whenever I get anxious, I just use the word interesting over and over. It’s just these weird nervous tics. Thank god for editing.
There was one time when I missed an episode of The Office for my TV Club post and I posted, “I screwed up, I didn’t know it was on. Talk amongst yourselves.” And the comments were as lively and luminous as ever. There were as many comments as if I had been there. I’m like “Why am I even here? You guys just want to talk about this TV show.” In that instance, I’m just part of the conversation; I’m not even the leader of the conversation. I’m just like, “Here’s my opinion.”
When I started writing about 30 Rock, and The Office, too, people were like, “Why are you even writing about this? It sucks. It hasn’t been good for five seasons.” Those people eventually checked out, and I’m kind of glad because if you’re doing TV Club–it gets into kind of tricky territory, too. Scott Tobias was writing about True Blood and he just did not care for it. And people were really angry, because they were like, “Why are you writing about this show if you don’t like it? We do like it and are really passionate about it.” Eventually he just stopped writing about it.
If you don’t have a fundamental passion for something, then there’s something that’s kind of empty about your criticism. I always hate it when people write about hip-hop who don’t like hip-hop and dismiss the entire genre. I feel like that’s incredibly disrespectful. When I started writing about country music for “Nashville or Bust,” I tried to go into it with a generosity of spirit. People were like, “You’re just a hipster who’s trying to make fun of country music.” That’s the stupidest thing in the world. I’m the farthest thing from a hipster; I think that’s kind of a mythical creature. I’m not entirely sure the hipster exists. I think it’s like the Snuffleupagus or the Loch Ness Monster. They probably exist, but since I don’t go to trendy bars or hip concerts and spend most of my time at home with my cats, I do not get exposed to hipsters a lot. If I started a series to make fun of country music — I almost feel bad.
When I started “My Year of Flops“, I had this very noble idea that I was going to reclaim all these great movies and show people that there was this beauty and this truth in things that they had ignored. And I’ve done that. But I’ve also spent a fair amount of time making fun of things. Some times it’s fun to make fun of things.
Some movies are just always going to be failures, not matter how good your intentions are.
Totally. One thing I can understand about it too is that people respond a lot better to making fun of bad movies than saying, “Steven Soderberg’s Solaris was really an intriguing and underrated film.” People like to have their voice be heard on the internet, and I think that’s valid. People everywhere want to have their voice be heard and I think that’s as important as responding to what I’ve written. That’s fair and reasonable. There’s this internet democracy that’s a beautiful and a terrible thing at the same time.
I wanted more Nabokov and less Family Guy.
That’s actually Guns N Rose’s next album. It’s going to be called Internet Democracy and they’re going to take 27 years to record it.
I read that you saw “My Year of Flops” as a place to give movies that had been skipped over a second chance, just like pop culture gave you a second chance.
Very much so. One of the reasons I started it, too, is that I have an innate affection for the underdog and for things that people revile and dismiss. A lot of it is rooted in seeing myself as someone who’s a success and whose psyche is very very fragile, and it doesn’t take much — to put it into context, the book that I spent nine months writing was rejected. It was thoroughly rejected. I felt like such a failure and if I gave these films a second chance, maybe people would give me a second chance. A lot of this is the tortured way that my mind works; I felt like, karmically, it would be a good thing.
It was also intended as an antidote to snark and the idea that everything sucks. You know the idea that, “Let’s just be superior and sarcastic and vicious. Sincerity is for losers.” One of the ironies is that I don’t think I’m immune to snark, it’s something I do on a pretty regular basis. But I feel like there’s this underlying idealism to a lot of what I do. Without it, I think my work would be a lot less interesting and a lot less valuable. I care, man.
I’m curious about the Johnny Rotten quote you closed the book with: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
One of the conceits of the book is that I wanted the pop culture references to start before the actual book and then end after the actual book, and for them to comment obliquely on the book. There’s even pop culture references in the dedications. I have to give some props to Melvin van Peebles. On the one hand, am I just fucking with people’s heads? Like this somehow was a cheat or somehow inauthentic, or something that was insincere; it’s not any of those things. I liked ending with a question mark, on an ambiguous note. And I think the movie endings that I like the best, from the ‘60s and ‘70s are the ones that end with a freeze frame, with a cryptic look on somebody’s face. There was a Beck video that went crazy with that idea, with a freeze frame every five seconds. This was my way of ending with a freeze frame and a question mark.
I also want people to be able to read this more than once, and, if I can be incredibly pretentious, I wanted it to have a Nabokovian denseness in terms of literary allusion. I wanted more Nabokov and less Family Guy. Although there’s something to be said for Family Guy; it’s often a very funny show. But I haven’t watched it many many years.
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A Better Kind of Scum: the full, uncut interview with Nathan Rabin
Photo by Chris Schodt
On July 18th, I interviewed Nathan Rabin, the head writer of The A.V. Club and author of The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture. Earlier today, The Bygone Bureau published a condensed version of our chat. Here, for your reading and listening pleasure, are both the fully transcribed interview and the audio recording of the interview.
Nathan Rabin had a tough childhood. He was placed in a mental hospital after attempting suicide at 14, then spent much of his remaining adolescence in a group home after being kicked out by a foster family. Through it all, he relied on pop culture and his imagination to cope and envision a better life for himself.
At the age of 21, he was hired to write for The A.V. Club, the entertainment and popular culture section of The Onion. Rabin, now 33, has written for them ever since and is their head writer.
His recently released memoir, The Big Rewind, chronicles his life from childhood to his stint as a critic on AMC’s short-lived film review program Movie Club with John Ridley. Each chapter references a piece of popular culture that either resonated with him at the time or serves as a lens through which to view his life.
I spoke with him before his recent reading at Minneapolis’ Magers and Quinn Booksellers.
Here’s the complete, unedited, 40 minute interview. Give it a listen if you’ve got time on your hands.
Tim: The couple interviews I’ve read so far have seemed to focus on how you’re 33 and writing a memoir.
Nathan Rabin: Yes, yes yes. I am deeply apologetic for it.
Was that something you expected?
Yeah. I feel like you have to justify yourself; you have to justify your existence. Also, I am not a famous person. Nobody’s like, “Nathan Rabin, you put out a book!” It’s a matter of feeling like I had a compelling story. I felt like after 12 years [writing for the A.V. Club], I kind of had the tools intellectually and artistically to tell it in a way that would not nauseate people. I feel like I’ve been building toward this my entire life.
I’ve been working on this for two and a half years, so I actually wrote a memoir when I was 31 years old. I’m even more agonizingly narcissistic and self-absorbed than people might imagine.
The book started out focused solely on the Movie Club, right?
It did, it did. It was a subject that fascinated America. They were rapacious; they just couldn’t get enough. But it’s weird, people sometimes say, “Oh, I watched your television show.” I want to say, “You damn liar! Nobody watched my television show.” I barely watched — no, actually I did watch my own television show. I have Shabbas dinner with my dad every Friday night, and the ritual was that we would eat the bread that he got from the soup kitchen — that’s another thing, I think food always tastes better if you’re ripping it out of the mouths of the disadvantaged. If I can steal money from poor people, than more power to me. It tastes more delicious-er. But yeah, we’d eat the challal from the soup kitchen and then we’d drink really nasty wine and watch my television show.
I would agonize. I had my ‘Nathan Rabin’ cut of every episode — they would introduce the show and then every single shot would be of me. Every once in a while they’d throw in a reaction shot of people beaming ecstatically, basking in my reflected glory, being wowed by whatever trite bit of wisdom or labored one-liner I happened to be dispensing at the moment.
That’s very Larry Sanders-esque.
There’s this madness that everybody who goes to Hollywood has, this sensation where they think, “Oh my god, this is so fucking surreal. I’m running into all of these bizarre characters. I’ve got to write a book or movie about this. I better preserve it for posterity.” And what they don’t realize is that everybody who goes to Hollywood has the exact same experience. That’s why there’s this little watched, little read cornucopia of stuff with the exact same tropes.
And I think Entourage was — I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Entourage. I remember I watched the first season the day of my cubicle-mate Scott Tobias’ wedding. I was watching it and got really really involved in it, to the point where I’m like, “Oh crap, I’m a half-hour late to one of my best friends’ wedding.” And I took a cab and I’m like “[apologetic noise]“.
Entourage parrots all of these clichés and conventions and it’s one innovation is that there’s no moral judgment. It’s not saying these people are sleazy and they’re sordid and they’re just a bunch of callow thrill-seekers and they’re deplorable. These people are shallow and they’re superficial and they have no soul and that’s OK. It’s kind of fun to be like that. It captures what’s great and what’s horrible about Hollywood. The further I get away from my TV experiences and the further I get away from my strange little corner of Hollywood, the less Entourage resonates with me. I didn’t watch much last year and this year I had no real interest.
Do you feel like you’re recapturing any of that fame now that you’re on tour?
Movie Club never got any press. I think I did three things for it. There was [one thing I did at] Columbia College — but not the good Columbia College — I was on Chicago Tonight, and Bob Sirott, this legendary Chicago newsman, introduced me and said, “He’s a man who’s making a name for himself on the successful television show Movie Club with John Ridley.” What I did not realize at the time — this is so beautifully pure to my whole television experience — is that my show had been cancelled by that point. I didn’t know this and I had been telling people, wait for Movie Club to come back, fifteen new episodes in fall and in the winter, all the way through Oscar season.
What happened was that my producer [the unnamed Head Producer Guy] told me that we had been picked up for thirteen to fifteen episodes. There was part of me that wanted to believe him, that wanted to think, “If you tell me something, that means that it is true.” But my pessimism and my skepticism have seldom steered me wrong, and you always hope that it bites you in the ass and not the opposite. Part of me was like, “I don’t think this is true. I think you said that because you wanted it to be true. I think he said it because it might be true. I think you’re trying to will it into existence and make something happen.”
I mentioned this in the book, but I held onto that answering machine message for like four months, up to the point where he actually called me up and said, “Here’s the thing: we’re actually cancelled.” I could go back and listen to it and he really doesn’t sound very sure of himself. He sounds like somebody who is losing hope.
To be a producer you have to be that, you have to have this passion and drive and I felt that he was carrying she show on his back to a certain extent.
He was not happy with his depiction in the book.
Oh really?
Some of the terms he used were: “hatchet job,” and “stabbed in the back.” He called me scum, and also “the worst kind of Hollywood phony.” I wrestled with a lot of these things, because it’s not just writing about me. If I could have written this book and been the only person in it — it would have been like discovering some insane new form of narcissism — but I think that would have been preferable because I’m writing about people who had no choice in the matter.
At one point in my life I had this very convenient thought, that writers are assassins, and that people who write about their lives and the people they love are people who assassinate the people closest to them. That’s kind of overwrought and melodramatic and giving myself far too much credit — I’m not that malignant of a force or that powerful of a force. But yeah, you’re dealing with people’s lives.
I was worried sick about how my dad would feel about the book because he’s the most important person in my life. I love him dearly. And he’s pretty much the second most important character. I’ve been saying he’s the hero of the book and he really is, but it’s a warts-and-all portrayal.
I haven’t found out how a lot of people who are in it… I’ve been Facebooked by people who are in the book and I’m always torn between saying, “Heeeey, funny story. I wrote a book. You’re in it! It’s available for purchase!”
All the ex-girlfriends…
Actually, yeah. Last night I was interviewed by my ex-girlfriend’s husband. I’m enormously fond of both of them — I went to their wedding — but she hadn’t read the book yet. I didn’t write that much about her and she’s a fascinating, fascinating person who has this amazing family. One of the reasons I didn’t write about her is that I didn’t want to burn any bridges. I didn’t want to make her life any more difficult.
Part of me is bracing for people like Head Producer Guy who will say that I’m the worst kind of scum. But I think I’m the better kind of scum. I don’t want to give myself too much credit, but my epithet will read, “Nathan Rabin, he was the better kind of scum.”
“Not as bad as he could have been.”
Yes, not the lowest form of scum. That’s a little bit of an exaggeration.
Chris: David Sedaris keeps writing and he has family members saying incriminating things about him and his writings constantly.
It’s funny because I’ve borrowed a bunch of stuff off of my editor’s hard drive and one of them is a David Sedaris CD. I love David Sedaris but I’ve never actually listened to one of his performances. One of them was about his family and how they prefaced everything with, “This is not to be repeated, this is off-the-record.” The way that he manages to live with himself is by pretending that his family wants to be written about. His line was that his brother goes on talk shows to talk about his bowel movements and his sister sends out press release about her love life. I think his great turn-of-phrase was he was just a “friendly transcriber” jotting it all down.
It’s my perspective; it’s very subjective. I tried to tell the truth; I tried to be honest. Another thing that was interesting about Head Producer Guy — why hath thou forsaken me?! — was he never accused me of making anything up. He never said, “That’s not true.” He said, “Why didn’t you write this? I thought we were friends, you betrayed my—” But you know what? I feel bad and I feel that part of that is a bit of an overreaction, but part of it is justified and part of me thinks that I should have told these people I was writing about them then.
When you’re writing a book it’s such an intense thing that you kind of have to be yours, you kind of have to exist in a bubble. Then, once it’s released, it’s weird the way it works on your mind. I held off giving my boss Keith a copy of the book for a while and I held off showing it to anybody because part of me was like, “It’s too personal!” But after July 7th, everybody in the world will be able to read it. It won’t be personal at all. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s my personal pain and it’s going to be public spectacle.
I thought it was interesting how you started the book with a spiritual awakening that was not to be.
The conceit of this book is that I joined together moments of my life with popular culture, and some times it’s a little iffy and sometimes the connection is very abstract. Like the chapter about visiting a brothel and linking that to a Steely Dan song, “My Old School.” The more I knew about the song, I’m like, “Oh god, I am so wrong. I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.” They were writing about something very specifically that happened to them at school, they were not writing about prostitution.
But this was one where there was a very direct link, where I was at an orthodox Jewish summer camp, and we would pray and we would yell, “We want moshiach now, we want moshiach now.” We were really angry, like we were trying to demand things from God. That’s how pushy Jews are, they’re like, “We’re not going to wait for the messiah to happen, we’re going to angrily demand the messiah.” And God’s probably like, “Stop judging me, stop judging me! Fine. You can have your messiah. You can have pork and shiksas, whatever. Just leave me alone. I’ve had it with you. Chosen my ass.”
And then many years later when I heard Matisyahu — and I feel like I must apologize for writing about Matisyahu because he is painfully, painfully unhip. I might as well be writing about the Dave Matthews Band or GrooGrux and the Whiskey King. Whatever. But it was such a direct thing, because when his single came out, the chorus was literally, “I want moshiach now, I want moshiach now.” And I’m like, “Oh my god.” It took me back all those years.
It was so interesting because it was one of the periods of my life where I had the closest elements to a normal childhood. I had a step-mother, I had a father. They both had jobs. They weren’t moonlight or anything. But at the same time it a recurring theme in the book: being a fish out of water, which is finding yourself in situations that you don’t really understand. You find yourself thinking, “Why am I here?”
I think one of the reasons people are really responding to the stuff about my childhood is that children are powerless. They have so little power over their fate that I think there’s a vulnerability people really respond to. Once I become reasonably successful, they’re like “Who the hell cares if your TV show was crazy? Who the hell cares about these things?” But, when you’re a child or a teenager, I think there’s this protective, nurturing element to human nature that causes you to really respond to it.
One of the parts of the book I found most enlightening was the part in “Lukewarm Crawlspace Vermouth” where you discuss The Chronic and talk about growing up in the group home and how you responded to the theatricality of gangster rap.
On one hand, I was cognizant that this is a fantasy that we’re being sold. This is something that’s very empowering but is fundamentally false. There’s almost this cognitive dissonance, where obviously 50 Cent can’t be number one on the Forbes 500 and be selling cocaine and firing machine guns. [50 Cent was number one on Forbes’ 2008 list of richest hip-hop stars.] But it’s such as appealing fantasy, especially when you feel powerless, when you feel like adults and authority figures have this vice-like control over you. To feel like there are people who don’t have to abide by the rules everybody else does — it’s absolutely intoxicating.
You compare yourself to Tarantino in your use of pastiche.
I’m a cultural magpie!
But at the same time, I felt there was also a structural resemblance between your book and his films. It’s ultimately chronological, but it jumps around a lot within the chronology.
I think part of it is that I’m rambling and digressive. The Q and A’s for the signings I’ve been doing have been absolutely marathon affairs. Sometimes I’ll have people ask really, really strange questions. Like the reading last night, a gentleman — a very interesting character — showed me his tattoo of The Onion logo with a knife through it.
I saw that on your Twitter.
He was like, “I’m a chef and I really love The Onion.” And I’m like, “I’m very glad to hear that.”
So it was positive?
It was a positive thing! It was a positive tattoo. He was combining two things that he loved, The Onion and a sharp knife that could be used to stab. It’s funny, it reminded me of GZA. He was being interviewed for something, and said that Wu-Tang inspired a passion and loyalty that G-Unit never could. He’s like, “People have come up to me and they have Wu-Tang tattoos. You ever seen anybody with a G-Unit tattoo?” And that kind of made sense. I think if somebody did get a G-Unit tattoo, they would try — you know how Johnny Depp had that “Winona Forever” tattoo, when he was in love with Winona Ryder. Forever. And then he had it changed to “Wino Forever” after they broke up and he became a horrible alcoholic. He was able to poke fun at it.
Yeah, so, even this answer about how my answers are long and rambling and digressive and make almost no sense is long and rambling and digressive and makes no sense.
He said, “I’ve been seeing this commercial for Hulu and there’s this alien and they rip off their skin and it’s television and they say they’re out to destroy us, but are they out to destroy us? What is going on with this commercial?” I tried to explain, it’s a marketing technique and they’re riffing irreverently on television’s reputation for sucking souls and for being this malignant cultural force.
For turning your brain into mush.
Totally, totally. They’re toying with a negative stereotype and trying to have some fun with it. There’s an old maxim, “Don’t answer the question you’re asked, answer the question you would like to answer.” I don’t know how exactly I spun it, but for twenty minutes I pontificated. The way I write is digressive and sometimes I go too far and need to be reigned in.
Pop culture references can be such a dead end. I think there’s such as thing as the Family Guy effect, where if the reference is random and doesn’t have an emotional center to it, then it becomes very empty. And I think that’s one of the things that separates Family Guy from The Simpsons — especially in the early years when it was the most brilliant show in the history of television — is that you care about these characters. Lisa Simpson is a wonderful, aspirational figure for little girls. There is this warmth, this tenderness to it that I feel Family Guy, while it can be very, very funny, doesn’t have. It’s more random and disconnected.
One of the things I tried to do in my book was to have lots of pop culture references, but have them mean something and have them relate to something that I believe people are going through. I wanted very, very badly for it to not just be snark, and not be just jokes.
One of the incredibly graitifying things about doing this tour is hearing people say, “Yeah, this really resonates with my own bout of depression.” The secret of the book is that it’s kind of a serious book about depression. I went ridiculous extremes dealing with depression and I feel… I can’t say this without feeling so pretentious and self absorbed — “My book is saving the world!” — but it’s the greatest vindication. Growing up, there were books that meant the world to me and made me feel like people shared my problem. It would make me ecstatic if people felt that way about my book.
Like Catcher in the Rye?
Yeah, totally, or Girl, Interrupted. I’d already been in the mental hospital when I read it and I felt like these were on one hand very different experiences. She was upper class, she was 18 years, she was at one of the finest mental hospitals in the county. I was 14, I was poor, this was a pretty crappy mental hospital. But the emotional core of it, the feeling of emptiness and ennui, the feeling that you’ve just entered this bizarre state of purgatory where nobody gets betters and you’re just kind of suspended, just in this bizarre stasis — that really connected with me.
It’s not the most unusual or the most unexpected or the most clever pop culture touchstone for being in a mental hospital, but it’s something that really rang true.
I was glad to see that you acknowledged A.V. Club regulars like Zodiac Motherfucker and Internet Eating Sensation Dave Chang at the end of the book.
I felt a little bit self conscious about it because I didn’t want anybody to feel left out. I didn’t want people to say, “Well why did he get picked and not me?” Part of it is that Zodiac Motherfucker cracks me up. He brings a lot of joy to my life. When I see his all-caps messages on the A.V. Club, a little shiver of joy goes through my body. And another one that I thanked, Karatloz, is somebody that responded to pretty much everything I ever wrote. I’m insecure enough that I almost thanked everybody who was ever nice to me. I don’t know if that’s sad or over compensating or something. I felt bad because my ex-girlfriend’s family was really really sweet to me and I thought I had thanked them and I did not. I was like “Noooo!” They were so good to me for so long.
And it’s weird, the first part of any book I ever read is the acknowledgements, and I understand now why the agent and the editor are the first two people thanked in every book, because these books would not exist without them. It’s a little bit like winning the Academy Awards and thanking your agent. It’s like, “Who the hell cares about your agent and your manager?” But you’d just be a horrible, horrible ingrate if you were like, “First and foremost I want to thank my second grade teacher and my tai kwon do instructor.” They’re the ones who got you to the ball so you are contractually obligated to sleep with them on prom night. One of my specialities are really bizarre, really unwieldy, unsavory metaphors. That is one of them, one for the ages.
It’ll live on in internet infamy.
Some day I’ll have a little picture book of unsavory metaphors. For children. Deep Thoughts with Unsavory Metaphors by Nathan Rabin.
It can be the companion piece for My Year of Flops.
I think so. They’re like pop culture references in that they can be abused so much. I think they’re kind of a tool and they can be used for good or they can be used for evil.
Do you think your interactions with commenters on the A.V. Club changed how you wrote the book or went around promoting the book?
I think Roger Ebert is this interesting guy. His as legendary and famous and big a cultural figure as there is in film criticism, and probably criticism as a whole, and one of the many things I love about him is, if you go to rogerebert.com, he’s constantly responding to readers. There’s this sense of being equals and having a conversation that’s really important. I go through different cycles about comments and there are times when I’m feeling really really fragile and somebody’s said something mean about my voice and it will just ruin my day. You have to develop relatively thick skin. If you dish it out, you have to be able to take it.
I wish I had gotten more feedback on my book before it came out. It was so intimate and so personal and part of me thought, “I will be shunned from society. They’re going to put me on an ice floe and send me to the North Pole. It will be the end of my life.” When your a depressive and pessimistic your mind kind of goes to the worst places. But I wish I had gotten more feedback and seen what people responded to, what they didn’t like. I probably would have cut about 10 pages from the Movie Club stuff. I had written an entire book; I transformed 400 pages into 67 pages and I thought, “That’s not that long”” But people don’t know this thing and think it’s a little disconnected from the rest of what I was going through.
One of the reasons I included it, and one of the reasons I think it worked thematically, is I think one of the arcs of the book is that I go from consuming popular culture — from being this sort of passive observer where it’s incredibly important to me, but I’m just sitting in the dark — to the point when I start doing television, where in a very small, very marginal way, I felt like I was creating popular culture to a certain extent. When I was a kid, the idea that I would be on television — it was unbelievable.
It was an amazing form of anonymity to be on television on a semi-regular basis and have nobody know who I was. At the screening room in Chicago, where everybody else around me is a film critic, nobody ever once said, “Oh you have a TV show.” People just did not acknowledge it, and for good reason. It would have been different if this was 1987 and there were like 90 television shows, but in 2005 there are like 5,000 TV shows — everyone will have a TV show eventually; you’ll get a TV show before you’re born. With this book, it’s sort of the ultimate culmination of going from being a passive consumer of popular culture to being a creator of popular culture and linking the two together in a way that resonates with people.
God, I’m using “resonate” a lot. I have this thing where I overuse words. I do this with my writing as well. It’s a good thing I’m able to edit my transcriptions from my interviews, because when I’m asking questions, whenever I get anxious, I just use the word interesting over and over. It’s just these weird nervous tics. Thank god for editing.
There was one time when I missed an episode of The Office for my TV Club post and I posted, “I screwed up, I didn’t know it was on. Talk amongst yourselves.” And the comments were as lively and luminous as ever. There were as many comments as if I had been there. I’m like “Why am I even here? You guys just want to talk about this TV show.” In that instance, I’m just part of the conversation; I’m not even the leader of the conversation. I’m just like, “Here’s my opinion.”
When I started writing about 30 Rock, and The Office, too, people were like, “Why are you even writing about this? It sucks. It hasn’t been good for five seasons.” Those people eventually checked out, and I’m kind of glad because if you’re doing TV Club–it gets into kind of tricky territory, too. Scott Tobias was writing about True Blood and he just did not care for it. And people were really angry, because they were like, “Why are you writing about this show if you don’t like it? We do like it and are really passionate about it.” Eventually he just stopped writing about it.
If you don’t have a fundamental passion for something, then there’s something that’s kind of empty about your criticism. I always hate it when people write about hip-hop who don’t like hip-hop and dismiss the entire genre. I feel like that’s incredibly disrespectful. When I started writing about country music for “Nashville or Bust,” I tried to go into it with a generosity of spirit. People were like, “You’re just a hipster who’s trying to make fun of country music.” That’s the stupidest thing in the world. I’m the farthest thing from a hipster; I think that’s kind of a mythical creature. I’m not entirely sure the hipster exists. I think it’s like the Snuffleupagus or the Loch Ness Monster. They probably exist, but since I don’t go to trendy bars or hip concerts and spend most of my time at home with my cats, I do not get exposed to hipsters a lot. If I started a series to make fun of country music — I almost feel bad.
When I started “My Year of Flops“, I had this very noble idea that I was going to reclaim all these great movies and show people that there was this beauty and this truth in things that they had ignored. And I’ve done that. But I’ve also spent a fair amount of time making fun of things. Some times it’s fun to make fun of things.
Some movies are just always going to be failures, not matter how good your intentions are.
Totally. One thing I can understand about it too is that people respond a lot better to making fun of bad movies than saying, “Steven Soderberg’s Solaris was really an intriguing and underrated film.” People like to have their voice be heard on the internet, and I think that’s valid. People everywhere want to have their voice be heard and I think that’s as important as responding to what I’ve written. That’s fair and reasonable. There’s this internet democracy that’s a beautiful and a terrible thing at the same time.
That’s actually Guns N Rose’s next album. It’s going to be called Internet Democracy and they’re going to take 27 years to record it.
I read that you saw “My Year of Flops” as a place to give movies that had been skipped over a second chance, just like pop culture gave you a second chance.
Very much so. One of the reasons I started it, too, is that I have an innate affection for the underdog and for things that people revile and dismiss. A lot of it is rooted in seeing myself as someone who’s a success and whose psyche is very very fragile, and it doesn’t take much — to put it into context, the book that I spent nine months writing was rejected. It was thoroughly rejected. I felt like such a failure and if I gave these films a second chance, maybe people would give me a second chance. A lot of this is the tortured way that my mind works; I felt like, karmically, it would be a good thing.
It was also intended as an antidote to snark and the idea that everything sucks. You know the idea that, “Let’s just be superior and sarcastic and vicious. Sincerity is for losers.” One of the ironies is that I don’t think I’m immune to snark, it’s something I do on a pretty regular basis. But I feel like there’s this underlying idealism to a lot of what I do. Without it, I think my work would be a lot less interesting and a lot less valuable. I care, man.
I’m curious about the Johnny Rotten quote you closed the book with: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
One of the conceits of the book is that I wanted the pop culture references to start before the actual book and then end after the actual book, and for them to comment obliquely on the book. There’s even pop culture references in the dedications. I have to give some props to Melvin van Peebles. On the one hand, am I just fucking with people’s heads? Like this somehow was a cheat or somehow inauthentic, or something that was insincere; it’s not any of those things. I liked ending with a question mark, on an ambiguous note. And I think the movie endings that I like the best, from the ‘60s and ‘70s are the ones that end with a freeze frame, with a cryptic look on somebody’s face. There was a Beck video that went crazy with that idea, with a freeze frame every five seconds. This was my way of ending with a freeze frame and a question mark.
I also want people to be able to read this more than once, and, if I can be incredibly pretentious, I wanted it to have a Nabokovian denseness in terms of literary allusion. I wanted more Nabokov and less Family Guy. Although there’s something to be said for Family Guy; it’s often a very funny show. But I haven’t watched it many many years.