The Winter of Alec Baldwin's Discontent

And Hilaria's paparazzi obsession makes me fear for the future of their children and humanity in general

I’ve been thinking of John Steinbeck today. Mostly, I’ve been thinking about his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent. The title is so evocative and the book and its story have been called to my mind because of the recent developments in the saga of the Rust shooting, with Alec Baldwin once again being indicted for involuntary manslaughter. I’ve written about Alec Baldwin and his wife Hillary / Hilaria here twice before and I never planned on focusing on Baldwin and his world. It has become something that I cannot look away from.

This era of Baldwin’s life is truly the winter of his discontent. Baldwin has been brought low by his fortune being squandered foolishly. In the novel, as the title suggests, the protagonist Ethan Hawley of New Baytown, Long Island, is forced to work as a lowly clerk in a store his family once owned. Hawley smolders about the humiliation of his reduced circumstances and plots how he can recapture the status and wealth that was once associated with his family name.

This plot outline might already ring some bells, but to square the circle, in Baldwin’s current drama, Alec of Massapequa, Long Island is being forced to work as an actor in Geezer Teaser trash and at Comic cons selling photo ops and signatures. It must be Alec’s worst nightmare to be debased forever online in scenes as weird as this one with a fat, sloppy rube in a Who Ate All the Pussy t-shirt.

The greatest photograph ever captured in any medium

Steinbeck’s character Ethan Hawley, like Alec, has a deep love for his family. That may be Alec and Ethan’s one redeeming quality. The plot of The Winter of Our Discontent is about Ethan’s increasingly desperate and ruthless attempts to recapture his family’s former glory. We watch as Ethan throws old friends under the bus and ignores the cries for attention from his children. Ethan Hawley becomes so obsessed with his goal, he jeopardizes everything to provide material wealth for his family. If you have seen the jobs that Alec is taking these days, that parallel, too, is uncanny.

As entertaining as this whole Baldwin meltdown saga has been, I am truly alarmed at what I see unfolding before me. As Alec is forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel to make his monthly nut to pay for his seven children under 11 years old and his multiple homes and legal bills and god knows what else, his wife Hilaria is busy burning up the streets of New York City on pap walks. I wasn’t aware how the whole paparazzi ecosystem worked before I started reading up on the Baldwins, but from what I understand, Hilaria is hiring the “paparazzi” or at least coordinating with them to stage photo ops hoping to place the photos in gossip magazines or on social media.

If you’re unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of how the paps work in LA, I recently happened upon a great clip from a podcast where former TMZ talking head Van Lathan breaks down both how TMZ comes up with the most optimized clickbait headlines, and also how the ecosystem of celebrities and paparazzi and media works in the LA bubble. As Lathan explains, everything you see on TMZ, and other tabloid-type media, is almost without exception done in collaboration with the celebrities that appear in the stories.

As far as I have been able to figure, the thinking behind Hilaria staging these photo ops serves a few purposes. One, it allows her to stage manage what images appear in the media. She wants to be shown in the most fashionable clothes and in situations that reflect well on her. The disconnect happens when a celeb thinks they are a savvy PR professional when they are not, and they generate media placements that do not paint them in a positive light. I think we can assume that Hilaria has gone rogue because exactly zero qualified PR professionals would advise you to have impromptu roadside press conferences in the aftermath of a fatal shooting incident where you and your husband look like crazy people. 

Since the announcement of the renewed indictment of Alec in the last few days, Hilaria has gone on an absolute tear setting up photo ops. This might not even be all of them, but the following are the main ones that are being discussed online:

Walking from an SUV with her oldest daughter, ten-year-old Carmen. Carmen is on her phone and looking sort of like a twin of her mother. Commenters on the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit, in one of many threads on the bumper crop of pap walks, have mostly expressed a sense of sorrow that Carmen is being raised by two crazy people. User intestinal_turmoil posted a representative comment:

And there it is, the saddest thing I’ve seen all day.

This is abuse. This child will need years of therapy.

Other posters are discussing how Carmen is dressing like she’s a lot older than ten years old and I agree that this is worrying given how volatile and self-absorbed her parents appear to be. User mojorisiin added: 

I just wanna remind everyone Carmen is 10 not 17. Yuck

Then we get another pap shot of Hilaria and Carmen on the streets of NYC, this time carrying a giant tray of coffees. Can you imagine how bizarre the Baldwin kids’ lives must be and what sort of stories they will have when they become adults? What is the over / under for tell alls that will be written by the 7 Baldwinitos? I can only imagine that we will be treated to horror stories of Growing up Baldwin for decades and eventually people will experience them as something like a Holodeck virtual reality program or whatever the media format of choice will be in 2050. 

Then we get pap walk number three, where the public was treated to a scene worthy of a Renaissance fresco of Hilaria and a nanny ferrying a small horde of Baldwin children across a busy street in New York. This photo op is shamelessly calculated to appear as if Hilaria is a supermom. Again, because Hilaria has no ability to judge how she is coming off to the average person, the nanny parade photo op becomes yet another backfire. The choreography of the photo is so shambolically assembled, with the group lumbering into New York City traffic with the grace of a pack of water buffaloes, this becomes another debacle. The telltale expression of exasperation on the face of the put-upon nanny says it all in this strange tableau.

Finally, we have the pièce de résistance from this afternoon: Hilaria in her best Pretty Woman / Not Like Other Girls / Middle Aged Manic Pixie Dream Girl attire. In this latest photo spread, we find the ersatz Spaniard wearing fishnets, stiletto high heels and a shiny silver jacket. Hilaria’s get up looks unhinged enough on its own, but then you read the comments in the Reddit thread about how it was raining and super cold in New York City yesterday and it somehow comes off as even nuttier.

Hilaria obviously has a histrionic personality disorder of some kind and is crazier than a shit house rat. This isn’t helped by the fact that she is married to the one person on the Eastern Seaboard who might be even more buttfucked in the head than her. In the end, my thoughts return to the future generation. Let us take a moment here to say a prayer for the children, those dear old Baldwinito children, and hope that the sins of the father (and mother) won’t be visited upon them.

The Winter of Our Discontent ends on a note of redemption. Ethan Hawley ends up finding his moral compass before he ultimately loses himself. This is the way of a good novel, but it’s not like this in real life. In real life, Halyna Hutchins is dead, and her son and husband will suffer greatly as a result of the cruel indifference of Alec Baldwin. In New Mexico, on a movie set of a film that Alec was producing, he didn’t concern himself with anything other than himself. This is how Alec has operated for every moment of his 65 years on this earth. Chaos was unfolding all around Alec Baldwin as there were misfired rounds on the set and crew members walking off for safety concerns and a general sense of anxiety and unease among the shoestring crew who were trying to scratch out a living in October 2021 as the pandemic was swallowing up their livelihood. All of this was an opportunity for Alec and some of his moneyed pals to film a Western on the cheap, a passion project not only for the money guys but for Alec as well. Alec grew up watching Westerns with his father and Alec’s father’s favorite film was How Green Was My Valley, a John Ford film about coal miners. I’m sure this all says something very deep about Alec Baldwin’s self-image and his psychology. Somewhere in these layers of insanity, something has to give. I only hope that the winter of his children’s discontent is not as grim.