Not sure how much I can add to our national day of mourning over Robin Williams. I never got to meet him; I knew him only as most everyone else did, through his four-decade body of work. And Im loath to draw any conclusions from his death; we always want there to be a lesson, so that we can feel like the celebrity didnt die in vain, but in this case, Im afraid the only lesson is that its very hard to keep a suicidally depressed person from attempting or committing suicide, and that not even knowing that youre universally loved and admired is a deterrent. Theres also the impulse to get angry. Think of the needless pain he caused his loved ones. And think of all the Williams performances well never get to see. How dare he deprive us all of his presence for another 10 or 20 or 30 years? But of course, its not about us. Its just about him. We think we have a right to understand what he was thinking in those final moments, or to have him perform for us for as long as his health would have held out, or to draw a cautionary tale from his demise, but we dont. Of course, all thats happening today is about us, not just because we loved him and how he made us laugh and cry, but because we miss who we were when he blessed us with all those moving performances. Its not speaking ill of the dead to acknowledge that he did little over the past 15 years or so that moved mass audiences the way his earlier work did. He was as talented and brilliant as ever, but hed become so familiar that we started to take him for granted. We didnt expect much from him, maybe because we always expected that, if this movie or TV show amounted to little, there would always be another dazzling film or talk-show appearance around the corner. At the same time, we lost much of our capacity to be amused by his stock-in-trade shtick, his snarky celebrity impressions, his drug jokes, his dick jokes, as they had become commonplace and no longer daring. He didnt change; we did. Looking back at his work, its easy today to see a streak of bleakness in even his lightest material. His most celebrated movies (Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, Mrs. Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting, et al) are haunted by divorce, death, dementia, depression, and other dark topics. So are his less celebrated movies (Garp, The Survivors, Toys, Patch Adams, Insomnia, One Hour Photo, The Final Cut, The Night Listener, Worlds Greatest Dad). Was he drawn to such dark material, or did he just naturally imbue it with melancholy? Who knows, but a better question might be: Why did we respond to it so strongly? Why did we find such resonance in it? Did he get closer than wed like to admit to making us acknowledge that laughter and tears are never far apart when were responding to both lifes joys and its often cruel absurdities? I think the best tribute to Williams that Ive seen so far is the bench in the Boston Public Garden where he sat in Good Will Hunting, playing the shrink who tries to help Matt Damon by unburdening his own history of joy and pain. Today, the pavement surrounding the bench is covered with chalk-written lines of dialogue from the movie. Williams didnt write those lines, of course, but he delivered them with such conviction that he won his only Oscar. Today, those lines resonate, in that place, because Williams effort to heal others made that performance a permanent part of our landscape, literally in this case. Its horrible to think that, even if he knew how much people valued his work, it wouldnt have been enough to keep him from taking his own life, but at least we still have that bench to remind us of how he tried to make us better people -- and who we were, and have become, in the years since he tried.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:02:17 +0000