MATT'S EDITORIAL 13/8/2014 - The funny man and the femme fatale
This editorial comes at a time of deep mourning and loss in American cinema. Yesterday it was Robin Williams and today it was Lauren Bacall. Two greatly influential icons of cinema in their own right, icons of different times whose deaths conceal deeper meanings about different Hollywood realities.
When Hollywood as we know it was born, or if you like, invented, it was a geographic spot where big American film studios settled. Now, more than that, Hollywood has become an abstract concept, a word with which we re-group mainstream, commercial and often expensive cinema. It has become a concept of nostalgia, a term form the distance between the audience and the world of red carpets, Oscars and big premieres. Often, this is a dangerous distance and as we have seen it hides vulnerabilities and loneliness.
This is a lonely world we live in. A world where one of the funniest men in show business cracks jokes at lightning speed, relentlessly and frantically as if he knew that if he stopped he might give way to the voices in his head and cause a darker side and old demons to surface. Robin Williams was not a comedian, he was a talented actor and one of the most loved American actors of all time. His presence in some family film classics from Aladdin to Mrs. Doubtfire ensured a generation of film audiences and children born at a time of VHS tapes to watch his eccentric antics over and over again.
The times he slowed down, we got to take a peek at a deeper and vulnerable side. This perpetual happiness he seemed to portray added unparallelled depth to his performances and his films - often films that could never have been half as memorable without him. We recall his performance in Dead Poets Society, where he stands unchallenged as the figure of the teacher we'd all have loved to have. But what happens in the end? The students turn their backs on him. He leaves the room, smiling because the students give him a memorable send off. Nevertheless, the damage has been done, it is far too late and we never know what professor John Keating might have felt alone in his room after the black screen falls upon us to reassure us - the viewers - with a highly unlikely happy ending. More dramatically, we recall a fragile and restrained performance by Williams in the underrated 2009 black comedy The World's Greatest Dad, where he utters in half hearted drama the lines 'suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem'.
His death should wake the world. This facebook generation is very deceitful. Everyone pretends to live the perfect life while in reality there are more depths each of our individualities than even we ourselves like to think. His death shows us that even the happiest of men can be the saddest of men.
The next day, 89 year old actress Lauren Bacall died having lived an accomplished happy life. An icon of the golden age of Hollywood, leaves us with a remarkable body of work both on the big screen and on the stage. I myself consider her the greatest of femme fatales, perhaps because she seemed to me the only one truly capable of loving someone and being completely loyal. To Have and Have Not was a film I watched when I was thirteen, and perhaps had I not watched it I would never have become so obsessed with this wonderful art form.
Her death definitely closes the chapter of the time when Hollywood existed. When people were still seeing gigantic representations of themselves on the big screen as myths or marble statues. When even the dialogue seemed different, followed a different beat, when escapism truly was an artform. Throughout her life she refused to be defined a legend, because it was a word that had far too much to do with the past and not enough to do with the future. But Lauren, that is what you guys were. You, Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and so on for a while focused on establishing pure cinematic character blueprints and people that might never have existed had cinema not been invented. That to me is the true definition of a legend.