Philip Seymour Hoffman

Celebrity looks truly toxic to me, a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Almost by definition you’d end up leading life as some sort of a brand, a host creature filled with the narratives of an unyielding and merciless public. Ultimately more concerned by what stranger’s think than the people who actually knew you, it would, I think, be virtually impossible not to lose your way. Amidst a culture laden with excess and enablers, it must be so hard to turn down the volume and return to an authentic version of yourself– or in failing to do that, to at least stop, if just for a moment, being the myriad incarnations the public demands. The racket in there must be so loud, and when Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose on Sunday, I thought of it as an occupational hazard– sad, even tragic, but a long way from unexpected.

I felt a kind of relief that he’d died of an overdose rather than some more pedestrian, accessible reason, as if that was at least one fate I’d be spared, but even that’s a false security. None of us know when or how we’re going to shuffle off this mortal coil, and I think it’s that anxiety that always draws us to the news of death. We whistle past the graveyard, and the multitudes of people who posted links on their social media feeds were in some way remembering that they were alive as much as they were that Hoffman was gone. It was a little bit weird, but I understood it, I think.

Being a celebrity is to submit to a process of self-annihilation. Symbols upon which all our projections are focused, they become radiant entities, briefly gathering strength from the absorption of our collective energy before inevitably immolating as if in ritual sacrifice.

Hoffman, familiarly imperfect in appearance, seemed more like us than other stars, who with their perfect bodies and dream eyes all seem a different species entirely, and it became easy to appropriate Hoffman in death just as it was in life, allowing him, in spite of our felt kinship with him, to remain an avatar, his end meaning whatever each one of us as needed it to mean.