Comic Tragedy

I was going to write about...something else...and then Robin Williams killed himself, and nothing else seemed to matter.

I missed the beginning of the man's career. Mork and Mindy ran from '78 to '82; I was born in '72. (Eva was born just three years earlier than I was, but we have a pop culture age difference of at least a decade: I didn't even really become aware of the world of entertainment until I was in my teens, while it seems as if she absorbed it with her mother's milk.) There's something ironic, though, in a man who first made his Mork as an alien battling and losing to a disease that alienates like no other.

Robin first imprinted on my consciousness in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987). Listening to that soundtrack, you can't help but be aware you're in the presence of a remarkably adept mind.  (In all my life, I've known two people who can make improv funny. Robin Williams was one of them.) From then on, I made a point of watching Williams on screen and on stage. The older I got, the more I recognized the depth of the man. For one thing, his comedy was balls-to-the-wall flat-out: he had an astonishing, nonpareil facility to fully adopt personas and switch between them in the blink of an eye, and he seemed to invest all of himself into every single one of them, even if it lasted for ten seconds.

But it was his dramatic roles that really brought his profundity into focus. From The World According to Garp through to One Hour Photo and beyond, Williams never gave anything less than his all in every role he played. It's hard not to read his mental illness into his unparalleled career trajectory (has any other actor ever veered so wildly between fluff comedies and dark indie dramas, back and forth and back again?) It's as if he was endlessly searching. He covered the whole of the human condition over his acting life, never settling.  Maybe he tried too hard.

For my money, he was at his absolute best in a movie that critically bombed. What Dreams May Come (1998) casts him as a loving husband and father who loses his sons, then loses his wife. He looks down on his surviving wife, who is understandably battling severe depression. He tries so hard to communicate with her, almost succeeding...but she kills herself and descends into a self-created hell, from which he eventually rescues her.  According to Neale Donald Walsch's CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD series, it is one of the most realistic visions we've had as a species about what comes after death.

It was a ten-hankie kind of movie sixteen years ago: I bawled like a baby. I don't believe I could get through it now.

The role I would have most liked to see him tackle was Jack Torrance in THE SHINING (1980). Kubrick wanted him for the part; Stephen King vetoed him. At the time, Williams was comparatively small potatoes, yet Kubrick obviously grasped the man's depth of feeling. I personally believe Williams would have made a much more suitable Torrance than Jack Nicholson did. Nobody can out-crazy Jack Nicholson, but the real horror of THE SHINING lies in watching a loving (though flawed) husband and father go insane by slow degrees. Nicholson was batshit crazy from the first shot. I think Willams would have invested that role--the way he did every other role he played--with humanity.

Williams certainly knew how to lift other people's spirits. When his friend Christopher Reeve suffered that tragic accident that robbed him of his career and mobility, it was Williams who came to make him laugh. He did the same thing for Sharon Osbourne following her cancer diagnosis. While Steven Spielberg was filming Schindler's List, Williams took it upon himself to provide much-needed comic relief.

That was what Williams was, at heart, even in his dramatic roles: a comedian. He could don his hilarious Aspect and raise up his Attribute of Laughter at will. In that respect, he was a fully realized, outer-directed human being.Always there for his friends, to make them laugh, to remind them that life is worth living. Who was there for him?  It would take a perceptive person indeed to peer behind the comedy and glimpse the tragedy that fuelled it. If only he could have found a way to apply some of that infinitude of life-force he so freely gave to his own obviously tormented inner life, the world would still be laughing with him instead of crying over him today.

Tributes are pouring in, from the famous and the not-so-famous alike. One of my friends noted that comedians like Williams see the world too clearly, and there's little doubt that for all their efforts, the world still sucks. He is not the first comic to end his own life and he won't be the last.

Robin, I'm so sorry, but you know, you're right...the world isn't worthy of you. We'll keep trying to redeem it, though, the ones you've left behind. In the meantime, I hope you've broken free of your self-created hell and created a heaven to your liking, full of life and laughter and love...what dreams may come.

ROBIN WILLIAMS 1951-2014 GONE WHERE LAUGHTER GOES


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