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At the beginning of Mulholland Drive, the late, great David Lynch’s 2001 surreal masterpiece of American ambition and decline, young, naive Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) arrives in Los Angeles from small-town Ontario with dreams of becoming an actress. On her way to L.A., Betty meets a nice older couple, whom she soon says goodbye to at the airport. “It’s time to leave, Betty. It’s been such a pleasure traveling with you,” the older woman says, her eyes kind. “Remember, I’ll be watching your success on the big screen!” “Okay, Irene. Isn’t it a lovely day?” Betty replies, hugging the woman and shaking hands with the man, who sincerely wishes her “all the best.” As Betty climbs into a taxi, the couple also climbs into the car, presumably heading into the city. But as Lynch’s camera locks onto them in the backseat of a car, the happy mood takes a sharp turn. The couple’s smiles, which seemed so warm just moments ago, now look painfully and unsettlingly forced, calling into question their sincerity. With their frozen grimaces and bared teeth, the couple seems to be hiding a darkness we can only guess at.
I kept thinking about that scene while watching “The Baldwins,” the new TLC reality show starring former “30 Rock” star and regular “SNL” host Alec Baldwin, his wife, Hilaria, a yoga teacher twenty-five years his junior, and their seven children, who range in age from two to eleven. While “The Baldwins” isn’t exactly Lynchian, it’s a fairly conventional reality show, hardly sharing the weird dream logic of “Mulholland Drive.” Still, the director’s emphasis on conveying the menace and desperation beneath the forced smiles of a bland, upbeat overall atmosphere—what David Foster Wallace called Lynch’s “strange irony of banality”—reminded me of the Baldwin clan’s show, in which the family members grapple with a protracted crisis.
In 2021, while filming the Western Rust in New Mexico, Alec Baldwin fired a fake gun that he unknowingly found to be loaded with live ammunition. The bullet struck and killed the film’s cameraman, Galina Hutchins, who left behind a husband and young son, and Baldwin was later charged with manslaughter in a chain of events that received widespread media attention. The Baldwins documents the family in the days leading up to Alec’s trial in the summer of 2024, and as the case is dismissed in a Santa Fe courtroom after the prosecution suppressed evidence. However, the show’s focus is not on the legal nuances of the trial or the tragic death of Hutchins, but on the impact these events have on the lives of the Baldwin family, and in particular, the challenges Alec and Hilaria face as they try to successfully raise their many children amidst turmoil. “When something bad happens,” Hilaria tells the camera, “you have to look at your kids and say, 'I'm going to put a smile on my face and we're going to get through this!'”
As a parent, it’s sometimes necessary to put on a cheerful mask to protect your children not only from your own inner angst but also from the harsh reality around them. But the strange, uncomfortable thing about The Baldwins is that the approach Hilaria offers as a parenting tactic also seems to serve as a way for the family to present themselves more broadly on the show, perhaps in an attempt to repair their image after the Rust incident. “I have to fill my kids’ days with positive energy,” Hilaria says. “That doesn’t mean we ignore the bad stuff, but they have to see me smile, see me be weird and silly.” The Baldwins speak to viewers as if they, too, were children. While the show tries to lift the veil and show the real life that goes on beyond scandal and celebrity — to find out, in Hilaria's words, “where the tragedy goes” — it ends up being mostly a frozen smirk, with only snippets of its darker side.
Even before the trial, the Baldwins were no strangers to negative media attention. When Alec met Hilaria, “she had what she had, and she was happy,” he says, referring to his wife’s simpler life before fame. “And then I dragged her into this dirty, nasty world that I’m in.” One of the most public controversies the family faced was the issue of Hilaria’s Spanish heritage, which many believed she flaunted despite being born and raised partly in Boston under the name Hillary; her Spanish accent occasionally comes out on the show. (The Baldwins, or at least the three episodes that have aired so far, only briefly touch on the subject of “Spanishgate”: “We’re a mixture of all these different
Sourse: newyorker.com
