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.
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5 responses to “Philip Seymour Hoffman”
Too true friend.
But I do think that Sate and Main was in some ways his best, or at least most natural, movie.
+1 on State and Main!
I barely remember State and Main and will make a point to watch it again, as well as Capote, a movie I have still never seen.
In even his most ebullient performances (The Count, in ‘Pirate Radio’, for example) there was an ineffable, underlying melancholy that seeped through and that, I think, is what made Mr. Hoffman so relatable.
Among those who have suffered the misery that is addiction, withdrawal and life afterward, there is always a tendency to slip into melancholy. Most would not understand why the urge to slip back into a ‘junkie lifestyle’ would be appealing but it is because they have never known the thrill of kissing death on the lips and falling into a euphoria that only your drug of choice can offer.
Every junkie says to themselves that ‘this will be the last shot’ and it is always true. It will be the last shot before they clean up… or it will be the shot that kills them.
I do not know what drove Mr. Hoffman back to drugs, nor will I speculate. I will simply appreciate the gift that he shared with the world for as long as he could continue to do so and pray that his troubled heart, soul, mind and body rest in everlasting peace.
Beautifully put, Jon.