Thanks for everything, Philip Seymour Hoffman

          

Thanks for everything, Philip  Seymour Hoffman

             I remember sitting in a pub on Tottenham Court Road in 1980 discussing the death of John Lennon.  One of the people I was with was quite upset about the way that people attach more importance to the death of a celebrity than to that of all the people who are starving and otherwise failing in their struggles to live across this wide green Earth.  My friend Bill—who I have unfortunately lost touch with—had more experience of loss than most of us.  An extremely talented anthropology student, I credit him with challenging my thinking about pretty much everything during my first years living away from my family.  Still, I thought he was wrong about this, despite the dissonance I feel whenever one of my favorite celebrities dies  and I’m faced with the realization that, even though I grieve,  these people are not actually close to me in any way.  But they are close to me in some way.  For the guy who exposed me to so many postmodern ideas about culture to insist that my feelings about John Lennon and Philip Seymour Hoffman are phony is, in retrospect, kind of weird. Celebrities are our family members in a sense, in that they connect us to the larger institutions in which we live.  We are no longer in an intimate village or a tribe.  What makes us part of our nation, religion or cultural group?  Surely in part it’s our love affair with our royal families, popes, notorious criminals, athletes, artists, and movie stars.  For the most part, I am extremely suspicious of these love affairs because of the oppressive systems in which so many are inextricably entangled. I’m talking about the unelected rule of kings and princes, the monopolizing of power that celebrity brings artists and business leaders alike, and on the flip side of this, the exploitation of people’s celebrity by the mass media and ultimately by we consumers.  I’m sure that was another part of Bill’s objection to the global grief over John Lennon.  We knew American college students who were unable attend classes due being wracked with sobs after the shooting outside the Dakota.  Which John Lennon were they mourning?  The revolutionary or the merely edgy? 

            I’m going to miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.  A movie can’t fail if he’s on the screen.  I really liked Mission Impossible III—even I often have a hard time being entertained by movies with the number three in the title.  (Spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph.)  His portrayal of the antagonist in this film was so chilling that I was certain that the character had not been killed at the end.  He couldn’t  just die like that…  he must have hung onto the bottom of the truck like Indiana Jones and is currently being rebuilt in a secret bionics lab in China.  Of course, the character might never have made a comeback because Tom Cruise wouldn’t want to be upstaged again, but at least when Hoffman was alive I could live in hope.  Again, in Doubt I was surprised that his role was seen as supporting.  Hoffman consistently played characters that were ambiguous or villainous with total commitment.  

            While the most recent movie I saw him in was Catching Fire, the last time I watched something he was featured in was the documentary Salinger by Shane Salerno.  I was reminded that I had heard somewhere that Marilyn Monroe could walk around New York City and not be recognized because she had a way of presenting herself as so ordinary when she was out on the street.  Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t so much look ordinary as just plain dreadful during his interview in Salerno’s film.  I imagined myself seeing him on the street that day and saying to myself “that poor homeless dude looks kind of like Philip Seymour Hoffman.”  I guess that because I’m not really a celebrity buff I didn’t know that this wasn’t funny at all and that Hoffman was fighting a severe and lethal addiction.  I hadn’t read the news items that he had started “snorting” heroin again and checked himself into rehab.  My guess is that people don’t go to rehab after they’ve been sniffing heroin up their noses.  There’s a much more potent way to get high, and by the sounds of it that’s what killed Hoffman.  Keep an eye on those wasted looking friends of yours, people.  I am certain that Philip Seymour Hoffman was run over by a truck in Shanghai and survived, but no man is stronger than a horse.