Over the last few years when I have had occasion to watch some tidbit with Robin Williams in it, I was always struck by something I couldn't quite put my finger on. In his early days, when he 'turned on' that manic, free flowing word association of comedy, he was young and it all seemed like a grand ride he was taking us on. He was like watching an adorable Tasmanian Devil, the kind from cartoons.
Then like many great comedians, he was able to tap into something else and gave us heartbreaking and sometimes painful characters that seemed to ache inside for things intangible. While not considered his best films I think his performance in One Hour Photo and Final Cut showed us perhaps some of the demons Mr. Williams may have been dealing with. These two characters are extremely troubled, isolated, and down right depressed. Characters which I thought more interesting to watch than those purporting genuine happiness or which used his trademark mania. Williams' characters were not just depressed, they were disturbed. Many of his roles he played were people that should we have a relative as such, we might define as, "My crazy uncle". In The World According to Garp, we saw Robin in a world we may have half imagined he came from. But I know, for myself, when I saw him depicting Oliver Sacks in Awakenings, I was a bit unnerved. That is the person that I felt was closer to Mr. Williams than any of that manic comic stuff. Knowing a bit more about Oliver Sachs than Mr. Williams (and I know nothing of Mr. WIlliams), I'd imagine suffering from prosopagnosia has its benefits. While both men where famous one is not under the scrutiny of the press to be 'on' and with prosopagnosia I'd imagine that to a certain extent each day is a new day. You don't have an immediate tie-in to what hurts so bad.
I think too about the language that is used to describe mental illness (crazy) and the same language we use to describe someone who makes us laugh with their endless, funny escapades (crazy).
But as of late, the last ten years, he seemed to be grimacing and forcing himself to be funny. It was like he was holding himself up as a ventriloquist dummy, presenting the puppet for laughs, his own arm up his own backside, while he disappeared into sadness. If I had to read body language I would say he looked afraid and overwhelmingly bruised and hurt, like a child praying not to be hit again. Sometimes, while listening to his interviews, it seems almost as though he stops breathing. I personally found it painful to watch Robin Williams be serious because it seemed behind that comedy was someone broken and in tears. I can't look at pain and not respond. Can you? I have to change the channel. Anything else and I'm just a fan to be steered clear of.
In one of the multitude of tributes and articles trying to make sense of Mr. Williams recent suicide I was struck by one interview which he gave were he denied being clinically depressed. People who commit suicide are clinically depressed. Was he in denial or was he, like me, left undiagnosed as such for so many years that he came to believe it. Not really believing it, but not being told otherwise and therefore inadvertently believing he could, or should, snap out of it. There are many reasons he may have been failed by his clinicians. Can you imagine being a doctor and Robin Williams comes into your office and out of genuine insecurity he gives you 20 minutes of a personal stand up routine? Do you laugh or do you remain sober and stay focused on your patient? I can tell you, the minute you laugh is the minute your patient knows you are responding to the celebrity and not to you, the patient. Anyone with a gigantic personality, myself included, knows how to entertain, and much of the time we are entertaining, we are doing so to keep you the fuck as far away as possible. We can watch you closely when you are mesmerized. People who are mesmerized don't see where the rabbit came from. We are like magicians in this way, and our sleight of hand is done to see if you have what it takes to stand by the fire.
The desperate though, sometimes rely on the unqualified. There are doctors that only work with celebrities. This in itself sounds good but what if they do so because it allows them to be famous too? Who do you think will get the short end of that stick? In New York City there are AA meetings (I'm sure all over), where one can 'get sober with celebrities'. All kinds of people miss the point; doctors and clinicians are not exempt from seeking fame or of being awe struck. In another interview Mr. Williams revealed that he had to learn to stop doing comedy routines in group therapy because it interfered with the group process. This is what he imagined might be expected of him. Who wants to see Robin Williams as Sad Sack McGee? Maybe a few people but no one will pay to see it.
We must not forget the issue that men with mental illness face. They can often be far more reluctant to acknowledge this frailty and are often disinclined to take medication because some medications can interfere with virility which for some men is a crucial defining factor in their existence. Men often see the need for help as a weakness. Women are allowed to be weak, men are not. All the more kudos given, as I discuss later, for Joe Pantoliano's organization.
In the course of writing this piece I've had to ask: Is there something about comedy that people exit from and never go back to because it's not so funny? Tom Hanks didn't go back, Eddie Murphy hasn't come back. Chris Rock is strengthening his serious side, Woody Allen never went back. Gene Wilder seems to have a broken heart, Steve Martin boned up on being an intellectual with seemingly nary a funny bone to be found. And then people like Belushi, Lenny Bruce, Chris Farley, they never even made it fully out. We can take this far back in time to Buster Keaton who learned to be comically stoic when his parents tossed him into walls for comedic effect. Let's not forget Dan Aykroyd who now portrays wonderful characters who are often under appreciated. Or Bill Murray: Able to tap into some very tragic, lonely people. John Candy could break your heart. In Trains, Planes and Automobiles, touted as a comedy, I cried from start to finish. And then there is Joan Rivers who seems to be the angriest, meanest person on the planet. I have heard it said that anger is hurt directed outwards, whereas tears is anger directed inwards. When Bill Cosby isn't doing his schtick he seems to be kind of angry too. I don't know any of these people personally, so I can't say anything with certainty, but I find some of this curious. Something about this profession draws in the fragile. Out of the holocaust comes funny shit.
There is a very sharp blade to fame. Very few people know how to be near it who aren't involved with fame themselves. And being near it is no guarantee that you know how to handle it. I don't think there will ever be a doubt that Mr. Williams will always be thought of as a genius. What many of us don't truly understand is that genius is all too often connected to mental illness. Creative geniuses often suffer from the most debilitating forms of depression. We have to acknowledge this. While we may never be friends with the likes of a Robin Williams we are friends with people who suffer in the exact same way. Robin Williams gets a mass of condolences while your friend gets dismissed. That is the price of fame. Phillip Seymour Hoffman becomes a tragic loss while your friend becomes good riddance to an annoying junkie. Everyone is valuable and Mr. Hoffman was a loss no different than your annoying junkie friend, but Hoffman was bigger than life and therefore not entitled to foibles or shortcomings.
I suspected I was bi-polar when I was in my late teens. In my early 20's I searched the Internet for information about the way I was feeling and I found nothing. (These were the days when you needed a floppy disc to boot and use a computer). In my 30's I looked again and the examples that were given to define someone with bi-polarity did not fit me. Since my 20's I have been involved with talk therapy with licensed clinicians who never once suggested that I go see a psychiatrist for possible medication. What illusion do you suppose that created in me? It created the sense that if I just talked enough, tried harder and came to sessions more frequently, I would get through this engulfing depression. Bi-polarity is a chemical imbalance and all the talking in the world is not going to correct that. And all the medication in the world will not take depression away.
It was not until I was in my forties that I finally got a therapist, who suggested that I get evaluated by a psychiatrist for medication. It took another ten years to finally get a bi-polarity diagnosis. Today, when I scroll the Internet for what ails me, they have included the symptoms that I manifest. My only regret in this life is that I wasn't diagnosed when I was 15. I would have had another life. Clinical depression is not like normal blues. It's like you swallowed the anchor for the QE ll and have to act normal and get up and walk around. Absolutely impossible. And looking at my own example of seeking treatment I marvel I bothered to stay put too. It is a long road to stay put when all you want to do is get the fuck out. You stay around because people swear it will get better and for short periods of time it does. Then it goes back to unbearable. Then at times doctors tell you its a matter of trial and error finding the correct combination of medication and that you just have to wait it out. If you change doctors, for whatever reason, it is almost impossible to get a doctor to be happy with the meds you are currently on, as they all imagine themselves Freud himself and think they can do better. If it works and you are doing better, tell your new doctor to go fuck himself. Only you know when that dread is at bay. And then, as the years go by, you realize that the way you feel now, is as good as it gets. You will never be chipper, You will never choke on cheer. And as with some mental illnesses, the older you get, the worse it will get, and that is when you realize that suicide is a viable option. It is the option one takes to find relief.
I recently was watching a film with the dynamic actor Joe Pantoliano, and I wondered aloud where he had been so I hit the Internet to see. There he was under his organization No Kidding? Me Too! which is an organization which he began in hopes of demystifying the stigma and perceived notions of depression and mental illness in general, something of which Mr. Pantoliano suffers from. I wrote him a quick Facebook note to say hang in there and he wrote back to say thank you. And then within days of having done so Phillip Seymour Hoffman died and I realized how precarious we all are. And how even more fragile people who are famous, are. Are their hurts bigger? Absolutely not, but I strongly feel that by the very nature of their chosen professions, they are by default. sometimes surrounded by people who really don't give a rat's ass about them as people but rather see the money to be made. Everyone seems bitten by the fame bug and I think The Kardashian family is a case in point; even your own mother can pimp you out if it means a bit of fame. Because money is involved and fame, child abuse never enters the equation.
Suddenly I felt somewhat scared for Mr. Pantoliano because Hoffman is his peer, and when your peers are giving up and in, the precipice gets closer. Fragile people don't need an extra excuse; they have their own laundry list. I wanted, and did, reach out again to Mr. Pantoliano, but this is the problem with fame. I am not famous and I am therefore suspect. I'm just a rabid fan who's in love with a celebrity. I'm not, but he'll never know that. I was simply responding to his struggle with depression from one person to another. I honestly care that he wins the battle. I don't want him jumping ship when people he knows and cares for are doing so. Sometimes all these suicides are just riptides for the rest of us. We can get pulled in with the undertow. (You know, someone I love and admire did it, why not me?) I care because it seems good therapeutic help is not necessarily had by people in his industry and that concerns me. I care because though I can't identify with him as an actor I do identify with him as a person that states out loud: sometimes this shit is too difficult. His catch phrase, No Kidding? Me Too! I thought wonderful because it is what we say when we share ourselves and discover that the 'other' listener feels the same way too. It concerns me because artists are crucial to the well being of the rest of us. Without painters, authors, actors, sculptors and the like, we are living in a flavourless, fucked world.
Craft, all craft is an interpretation of something and the interpretation is the sole responsibility of the artist. That performance you didn't like, that piece of art you think is shit, it doesn't matter if you like it or not: The artist put his/her balls into it. They lost something because you didn't get it. They loose the feedback that what they are doing, what their vision is, is not shared by another. The audience that 'gets it' is the collaboration; the marriage. What do you do if all you know how to do is create art and no one gets it? Do you think people like that simply jump on the I'll be a bus driver instead, path? I used to think an actor's job was to memorize lines or a sculptor's job was to keep a mass of clay straight on a pottery wheel and a musicians job was to play. They are no more important than nurses, bricklayers, house cleaners and the like but they are doing something that can not be expressed with words. And like the music of Bach it is taking us to a higher place. All these other professions in a way are simply meant to sustain what we already have; what is necessary to survive. Art and artists give us what we don't have but all too often ache for.
Years ago I worked for Bert Padell in New York City and on a daily basis I was surrounded by every imaginable celebrity one can think of. When I first came on board I was as star struck as anyone else but staring at people in your place of work is frowned upon. After three months of working there I began to pay attention to something else. All the musicians seemed to walk around happy to talk and hang out with all of us employees but all the actors seemed painfully shy. The actors seemed like they were protecting something. The musicians sat down next to you to shoot the breeze while they waited. All the actors were shorter than I expected or had imagined. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that musicians can kind of look any way they came into the world looking but actors are forced to maintain an appearance that borders on the insane. I only mention this last observation because I think that is the problem with fame. These actors are on screen larger than life, and they are encased in makeup, wardrobes, and lighting that makes them look, often, quite unlike themselves. Then the media invades their lives, cramming what should be private down our throats, and suddenly they aren't human; they are people who we have access to anytime we want. They are not allowed down time or to be seem as frail or ordinary. And if they are found being ordinary they are raked over the coals in a way I don't think I could survive. On the other hand one goes to a music concert and the musician is a speck on the stage unless screens are installed giving the nose bleed section a closer look. Perhaps I am wrong but actors seems to encounter far more stalkers and weirdos than musicians. I think this is because of how the media hounds them. I don't do well around famous people unless I can talk to them. If all I can do is stand around and stare I am just as moronic as the next person. I can think of nothing sane to say.
I also began to think about what it takes to be an actor and I began to see something potentially not so great. Where do you have to go inside yourself to become Travis Bickle? Most of the roles that Robin Wright seems to take on reek of melancholia: House of Cards, Sorry, Haters, Forrest Gump, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee? Come on, she goes to dark places. Places where women go and suffer in silence. Where do you have to go to create these characters and make it believable? One can claim it is type casting or just acting but that attribute of hers I would be very surprised to learn was nothing like her natural personality.What are you tapping into? My guess is it is a place that on some levels is a place of mental illness and sadness. If you met these characters in real life they would be candidates for psychiatric care. Actors have to go someplace that some of us are stuck in all the time. Some actors aren't going far. Some tap into something they can't get out of, and some seem to sashay in and out of roles like its all a breeze. I also wonder if some roles taken on are really a voice to the pain they had no words for. This craft, I no longer watch in the same way. I now watch film wondering what it took for a given actor to do that searing performance, to win that award. I don't envy that calling. I know I couldn't do it. I couldn't take the psychological stamina necessary to pull off some of these roles. Some of it looks too painful. Claire Danes' portrayal in the TV series, Homeland, of a woman sliding into a manic and finally depressive bi-polar cycle was so powerful that I had to take that episode in pieces; it was so strong that I felt I could be sucked in to my own cyclic hell. Brando claimed he was just good at acting, like it was akin to brushing his hair, but though we will never know what happened, something happened to Brando and food and isolation made more sense to him than anything else. The people called to this profession too often have a core spot that is as delicate as saffron threads. And saffron is too easily broken.
I know that some of the funniest 'on' people I know come from some of the saddest of places imaginable. I think the genius of Woody Allen is that in each film he plays himself. He never digs deep. He's perpetually 12 years old. I imagine him to be one of the most psychologically shallow people alive. And I don't say that to be harsh. Each one of his films is an homage, in a way, to his own neurosis. He couldn't play a cowboy to save his life. He is never acting. Everyone around him is acting but he isn't. Which may explain how he got to be a man in his 70's with never an episode of being seen drunk or looking for drugs in sordid places. He's really only 12 and not old enough to get into trouble. I think his genius is as writer and director. While Allen is funny himself onscreen I don't think he sees himself as funny. He's just being himself. He's a once trick pony, but his films are often all over the place and quite different. No matter where he lands in a film he is wearing the exact same outfit as the last film. He knows that the way he looks is part of the joke. Interestingly enough most of his films are about people with a range of behaviours and emotions (that he wrote as a script) that I think act out behaviours Allen is incapable of being. His films are his therapy. They are the venue which keeps him sane. His films are dress up for his ordinariness.
I think of my friend Simon G, self taught painter, self taught chef, read the entire OED dictionary and at the same time I think of one of the most miserable people ever to walk this earth. I am not sure how he died but one of the components of his death was suicide. He longed to be dead and never missed the opportunity to say so. In between all that he catered parties and made people happy. All the many things we do before we die.
Many of the comments, even from celebrities, make note that had Robin Williams received the right help he wouldn't have committed suicide. This is a fallacy. Chemical psychiatry only goes so far. No treatment is perfect and some people don't respond to treatment at all, and that is the truth. What should be done with people who don't respond to treatment? Keep them alive in their misery? You wouldn't do that for Fido, why for Robin Williams? Or anyone else eaten alive by misery. And from the looks of things Mr. Williams tried for at least a good solid 20 years, if not longer, to feel better. People are drunks because they are trying to feel better. People shoot heroin because they want to feel better. Yes they are addicts but they were looking for something to make themselves feel better in the beginning. Sobriety programs promise that if you just get sober all your problems will go away and this is not always so. Sometimes you are sober and miserable as all fuck without a bottle. Reality is was too real for some of us. Please forgive us. Suicide is sometimes the very best and most accurate way to end unending pain. Pain that is relentless, immobilizing and all consuming. Because sometimes that pain and depression is so, so much, that there is no one on this planet, wife, child, best friend that can keep you here, because deep down you know they will never feel what you are feeling and therefore will never connect with you in the way you need to feel connected, because if they did they would join you in your death. To call suicides cowards is something only the deliriously happy can mutter. People who sit in places where pointing at others is easy.
We don't want to go on without Robin because he made us laugh, and we want someone like that around as long as possible to be the parenthetical enclosure to our life, but Robin doesn't have to spend another moment wishing he were dead. Because he is. And in some ways we should be happy for him. Because, yes, I do think it was that bad.
Then like many great comedians, he was able to tap into something else and gave us heartbreaking and sometimes painful characters that seemed to ache inside for things intangible. While not considered his best films I think his performance in One Hour Photo and Final Cut showed us perhaps some of the demons Mr. Williams may have been dealing with. These two characters are extremely troubled, isolated, and down right depressed. Characters which I thought more interesting to watch than those purporting genuine happiness or which used his trademark mania. Williams' characters were not just depressed, they were disturbed. Many of his roles he played were people that should we have a relative as such, we might define as, "My crazy uncle". In The World According to Garp, we saw Robin in a world we may have half imagined he came from. But I know, for myself, when I saw him depicting Oliver Sacks in Awakenings, I was a bit unnerved. That is the person that I felt was closer to Mr. Williams than any of that manic comic stuff. Knowing a bit more about Oliver Sachs than Mr. Williams (and I know nothing of Mr. WIlliams), I'd imagine suffering from prosopagnosia has its benefits. While both men where famous one is not under the scrutiny of the press to be 'on' and with prosopagnosia I'd imagine that to a certain extent each day is a new day. You don't have an immediate tie-in to what hurts so bad.
I think too about the language that is used to describe mental illness (crazy) and the same language we use to describe someone who makes us laugh with their endless, funny escapades (crazy).
But as of late, the last ten years, he seemed to be grimacing and forcing himself to be funny. It was like he was holding himself up as a ventriloquist dummy, presenting the puppet for laughs, his own arm up his own backside, while he disappeared into sadness. If I had to read body language I would say he looked afraid and overwhelmingly bruised and hurt, like a child praying not to be hit again. Sometimes, while listening to his interviews, it seems almost as though he stops breathing. I personally found it painful to watch Robin Williams be serious because it seemed behind that comedy was someone broken and in tears. I can't look at pain and not respond. Can you? I have to change the channel. Anything else and I'm just a fan to be steered clear of.
In one of the multitude of tributes and articles trying to make sense of Mr. Williams recent suicide I was struck by one interview which he gave were he denied being clinically depressed. People who commit suicide are clinically depressed. Was he in denial or was he, like me, left undiagnosed as such for so many years that he came to believe it. Not really believing it, but not being told otherwise and therefore inadvertently believing he could, or should, snap out of it. There are many reasons he may have been failed by his clinicians. Can you imagine being a doctor and Robin Williams comes into your office and out of genuine insecurity he gives you 20 minutes of a personal stand up routine? Do you laugh or do you remain sober and stay focused on your patient? I can tell you, the minute you laugh is the minute your patient knows you are responding to the celebrity and not to you, the patient. Anyone with a gigantic personality, myself included, knows how to entertain, and much of the time we are entertaining, we are doing so to keep you the fuck as far away as possible. We can watch you closely when you are mesmerized. People who are mesmerized don't see where the rabbit came from. We are like magicians in this way, and our sleight of hand is done to see if you have what it takes to stand by the fire.
The desperate though, sometimes rely on the unqualified. There are doctors that only work with celebrities. This in itself sounds good but what if they do so because it allows them to be famous too? Who do you think will get the short end of that stick? In New York City there are AA meetings (I'm sure all over), where one can 'get sober with celebrities'. All kinds of people miss the point; doctors and clinicians are not exempt from seeking fame or of being awe struck. In another interview Mr. Williams revealed that he had to learn to stop doing comedy routines in group therapy because it interfered with the group process. This is what he imagined might be expected of him. Who wants to see Robin Williams as Sad Sack McGee? Maybe a few people but no one will pay to see it.
We must not forget the issue that men with mental illness face. They can often be far more reluctant to acknowledge this frailty and are often disinclined to take medication because some medications can interfere with virility which for some men is a crucial defining factor in their existence. Men often see the need for help as a weakness. Women are allowed to be weak, men are not. All the more kudos given, as I discuss later, for Joe Pantoliano's organization.
In the course of writing this piece I've had to ask: Is there something about comedy that people exit from and never go back to because it's not so funny? Tom Hanks didn't go back, Eddie Murphy hasn't come back. Chris Rock is strengthening his serious side, Woody Allen never went back. Gene Wilder seems to have a broken heart, Steve Martin boned up on being an intellectual with seemingly nary a funny bone to be found. And then people like Belushi, Lenny Bruce, Chris Farley, they never even made it fully out. We can take this far back in time to Buster Keaton who learned to be comically stoic when his parents tossed him into walls for comedic effect. Let's not forget Dan Aykroyd who now portrays wonderful characters who are often under appreciated. Or Bill Murray: Able to tap into some very tragic, lonely people. John Candy could break your heart. In Trains, Planes and Automobiles, touted as a comedy, I cried from start to finish. And then there is Joan Rivers who seems to be the angriest, meanest person on the planet. I have heard it said that anger is hurt directed outwards, whereas tears is anger directed inwards. When Bill Cosby isn't doing his schtick he seems to be kind of angry too. I don't know any of these people personally, so I can't say anything with certainty, but I find some of this curious. Something about this profession draws in the fragile. Out of the holocaust comes funny shit.
There is a very sharp blade to fame. Very few people know how to be near it who aren't involved with fame themselves. And being near it is no guarantee that you know how to handle it. I don't think there will ever be a doubt that Mr. Williams will always be thought of as a genius. What many of us don't truly understand is that genius is all too often connected to mental illness. Creative geniuses often suffer from the most debilitating forms of depression. We have to acknowledge this. While we may never be friends with the likes of a Robin Williams we are friends with people who suffer in the exact same way. Robin Williams gets a mass of condolences while your friend gets dismissed. That is the price of fame. Phillip Seymour Hoffman becomes a tragic loss while your friend becomes good riddance to an annoying junkie. Everyone is valuable and Mr. Hoffman was a loss no different than your annoying junkie friend, but Hoffman was bigger than life and therefore not entitled to foibles or shortcomings.
I suspected I was bi-polar when I was in my late teens. In my early 20's I searched the Internet for information about the way I was feeling and I found nothing. (These were the days when you needed a floppy disc to boot and use a computer). In my 30's I looked again and the examples that were given to define someone with bi-polarity did not fit me. Since my 20's I have been involved with talk therapy with licensed clinicians who never once suggested that I go see a psychiatrist for possible medication. What illusion do you suppose that created in me? It created the sense that if I just talked enough, tried harder and came to sessions more frequently, I would get through this engulfing depression. Bi-polarity is a chemical imbalance and all the talking in the world is not going to correct that. And all the medication in the world will not take depression away.
It was not until I was in my forties that I finally got a therapist, who suggested that I get evaluated by a psychiatrist for medication. It took another ten years to finally get a bi-polarity diagnosis. Today, when I scroll the Internet for what ails me, they have included the symptoms that I manifest. My only regret in this life is that I wasn't diagnosed when I was 15. I would have had another life. Clinical depression is not like normal blues. It's like you swallowed the anchor for the QE ll and have to act normal and get up and walk around. Absolutely impossible. And looking at my own example of seeking treatment I marvel I bothered to stay put too. It is a long road to stay put when all you want to do is get the fuck out. You stay around because people swear it will get better and for short periods of time it does. Then it goes back to unbearable. Then at times doctors tell you its a matter of trial and error finding the correct combination of medication and that you just have to wait it out. If you change doctors, for whatever reason, it is almost impossible to get a doctor to be happy with the meds you are currently on, as they all imagine themselves Freud himself and think they can do better. If it works and you are doing better, tell your new doctor to go fuck himself. Only you know when that dread is at bay. And then, as the years go by, you realize that the way you feel now, is as good as it gets. You will never be chipper, You will never choke on cheer. And as with some mental illnesses, the older you get, the worse it will get, and that is when you realize that suicide is a viable option. It is the option one takes to find relief.
I recently was watching a film with the dynamic actor Joe Pantoliano, and I wondered aloud where he had been so I hit the Internet to see. There he was under his organization No Kidding? Me Too! which is an organization which he began in hopes of demystifying the stigma and perceived notions of depression and mental illness in general, something of which Mr. Pantoliano suffers from. I wrote him a quick Facebook note to say hang in there and he wrote back to say thank you. And then within days of having done so Phillip Seymour Hoffman died and I realized how precarious we all are. And how even more fragile people who are famous, are. Are their hurts bigger? Absolutely not, but I strongly feel that by the very nature of their chosen professions, they are by default. sometimes surrounded by people who really don't give a rat's ass about them as people but rather see the money to be made. Everyone seems bitten by the fame bug and I think The Kardashian family is a case in point; even your own mother can pimp you out if it means a bit of fame. Because money is involved and fame, child abuse never enters the equation.
Suddenly I felt somewhat scared for Mr. Pantoliano because Hoffman is his peer, and when your peers are giving up and in, the precipice gets closer. Fragile people don't need an extra excuse; they have their own laundry list. I wanted, and did, reach out again to Mr. Pantoliano, but this is the problem with fame. I am not famous and I am therefore suspect. I'm just a rabid fan who's in love with a celebrity. I'm not, but he'll never know that. I was simply responding to his struggle with depression from one person to another. I honestly care that he wins the battle. I don't want him jumping ship when people he knows and cares for are doing so. Sometimes all these suicides are just riptides for the rest of us. We can get pulled in with the undertow. (You know, someone I love and admire did it, why not me?) I care because it seems good therapeutic help is not necessarily had by people in his industry and that concerns me. I care because though I can't identify with him as an actor I do identify with him as a person that states out loud: sometimes this shit is too difficult. His catch phrase, No Kidding? Me Too! I thought wonderful because it is what we say when we share ourselves and discover that the 'other' listener feels the same way too. It concerns me because artists are crucial to the well being of the rest of us. Without painters, authors, actors, sculptors and the like, we are living in a flavourless, fucked world.
Craft, all craft is an interpretation of something and the interpretation is the sole responsibility of the artist. That performance you didn't like, that piece of art you think is shit, it doesn't matter if you like it or not: The artist put his/her balls into it. They lost something because you didn't get it. They loose the feedback that what they are doing, what their vision is, is not shared by another. The audience that 'gets it' is the collaboration; the marriage. What do you do if all you know how to do is create art and no one gets it? Do you think people like that simply jump on the I'll be a bus driver instead, path? I used to think an actor's job was to memorize lines or a sculptor's job was to keep a mass of clay straight on a pottery wheel and a musicians job was to play. They are no more important than nurses, bricklayers, house cleaners and the like but they are doing something that can not be expressed with words. And like the music of Bach it is taking us to a higher place. All these other professions in a way are simply meant to sustain what we already have; what is necessary to survive. Art and artists give us what we don't have but all too often ache for.
Years ago I worked for Bert Padell in New York City and on a daily basis I was surrounded by every imaginable celebrity one can think of. When I first came on board I was as star struck as anyone else but staring at people in your place of work is frowned upon. After three months of working there I began to pay attention to something else. All the musicians seemed to walk around happy to talk and hang out with all of us employees but all the actors seemed painfully shy. The actors seemed like they were protecting something. The musicians sat down next to you to shoot the breeze while they waited. All the actors were shorter than I expected or had imagined. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that musicians can kind of look any way they came into the world looking but actors are forced to maintain an appearance that borders on the insane. I only mention this last observation because I think that is the problem with fame. These actors are on screen larger than life, and they are encased in makeup, wardrobes, and lighting that makes them look, often, quite unlike themselves. Then the media invades their lives, cramming what should be private down our throats, and suddenly they aren't human; they are people who we have access to anytime we want. They are not allowed down time or to be seem as frail or ordinary. And if they are found being ordinary they are raked over the coals in a way I don't think I could survive. On the other hand one goes to a music concert and the musician is a speck on the stage unless screens are installed giving the nose bleed section a closer look. Perhaps I am wrong but actors seems to encounter far more stalkers and weirdos than musicians. I think this is because of how the media hounds them. I don't do well around famous people unless I can talk to them. If all I can do is stand around and stare I am just as moronic as the next person. I can think of nothing sane to say.
I also began to think about what it takes to be an actor and I began to see something potentially not so great. Where do you have to go inside yourself to become Travis Bickle? Most of the roles that Robin Wright seems to take on reek of melancholia: House of Cards, Sorry, Haters, Forrest Gump, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee? Come on, she goes to dark places. Places where women go and suffer in silence. Where do you have to go to create these characters and make it believable? One can claim it is type casting or just acting but that attribute of hers I would be very surprised to learn was nothing like her natural personality.What are you tapping into? My guess is it is a place that on some levels is a place of mental illness and sadness. If you met these characters in real life they would be candidates for psychiatric care. Actors have to go someplace that some of us are stuck in all the time. Some actors aren't going far. Some tap into something they can't get out of, and some seem to sashay in and out of roles like its all a breeze. I also wonder if some roles taken on are really a voice to the pain they had no words for. This craft, I no longer watch in the same way. I now watch film wondering what it took for a given actor to do that searing performance, to win that award. I don't envy that calling. I know I couldn't do it. I couldn't take the psychological stamina necessary to pull off some of these roles. Some of it looks too painful. Claire Danes' portrayal in the TV series, Homeland, of a woman sliding into a manic and finally depressive bi-polar cycle was so powerful that I had to take that episode in pieces; it was so strong that I felt I could be sucked in to my own cyclic hell. Brando claimed he was just good at acting, like it was akin to brushing his hair, but though we will never know what happened, something happened to Brando and food and isolation made more sense to him than anything else. The people called to this profession too often have a core spot that is as delicate as saffron threads. And saffron is too easily broken.
I know that some of the funniest 'on' people I know come from some of the saddest of places imaginable. I think the genius of Woody Allen is that in each film he plays himself. He never digs deep. He's perpetually 12 years old. I imagine him to be one of the most psychologically shallow people alive. And I don't say that to be harsh. Each one of his films is an homage, in a way, to his own neurosis. He couldn't play a cowboy to save his life. He is never acting. Everyone around him is acting but he isn't. Which may explain how he got to be a man in his 70's with never an episode of being seen drunk or looking for drugs in sordid places. He's really only 12 and not old enough to get into trouble. I think his genius is as writer and director. While Allen is funny himself onscreen I don't think he sees himself as funny. He's just being himself. He's a once trick pony, but his films are often all over the place and quite different. No matter where he lands in a film he is wearing the exact same outfit as the last film. He knows that the way he looks is part of the joke. Interestingly enough most of his films are about people with a range of behaviours and emotions (that he wrote as a script) that I think act out behaviours Allen is incapable of being. His films are his therapy. They are the venue which keeps him sane. His films are dress up for his ordinariness.
I think of my friend Simon G, self taught painter, self taught chef, read the entire OED dictionary and at the same time I think of one of the most miserable people ever to walk this earth. I am not sure how he died but one of the components of his death was suicide. He longed to be dead and never missed the opportunity to say so. In between all that he catered parties and made people happy. All the many things we do before we die.
Many of the comments, even from celebrities, make note that had Robin Williams received the right help he wouldn't have committed suicide. This is a fallacy. Chemical psychiatry only goes so far. No treatment is perfect and some people don't respond to treatment at all, and that is the truth. What should be done with people who don't respond to treatment? Keep them alive in their misery? You wouldn't do that for Fido, why for Robin Williams? Or anyone else eaten alive by misery. And from the looks of things Mr. Williams tried for at least a good solid 20 years, if not longer, to feel better. People are drunks because they are trying to feel better. People shoot heroin because they want to feel better. Yes they are addicts but they were looking for something to make themselves feel better in the beginning. Sobriety programs promise that if you just get sober all your problems will go away and this is not always so. Sometimes you are sober and miserable as all fuck without a bottle. Reality is was too real for some of us. Please forgive us. Suicide is sometimes the very best and most accurate way to end unending pain. Pain that is relentless, immobilizing and all consuming. Because sometimes that pain and depression is so, so much, that there is no one on this planet, wife, child, best friend that can keep you here, because deep down you know they will never feel what you are feeling and therefore will never connect with you in the way you need to feel connected, because if they did they would join you in your death. To call suicides cowards is something only the deliriously happy can mutter. People who sit in places where pointing at others is easy.
We don't want to go on without Robin because he made us laugh, and we want someone like that around as long as possible to be the parenthetical enclosure to our life, but Robin doesn't have to spend another moment wishing he were dead. Because he is. And in some ways we should be happy for him. Because, yes, I do think it was that bad.
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