I’ve never written about a celebrity before, never having
been moved, except perhaps with the detached professional guise of a film and
media scholar, by the relatively crass marketing of a famous person as a human
image or the banal, interchangeable films they tend to inhabit. Certainly there
are favourite actors and performing artists who have made particular influences
on my life. Some of them I even had the luck and pleasure to meet and work
with. But celebrity culture is an inward-facing mirror which doesn’t really
appeal to me in or of itself. I don’t consider it evil or a waste of time for
those who enjoy the soap opera lives of the tabloid famous, but on a personal
level I do find most of it exceptionally boring. Not the desires which lead
people to obsess over celebrities, the desires which lead to lines of fans
waiting outside of film shoots or premieres, or to express their desire creatively
through jpegs and fan fiction. That’s not boring at all. That stuff is
legitimately interesting, mostly because as a representation of the flows of
capital more generally celebrity culture is the leading edge of a particular revolutionary politics which renders (or reflects) most of civilisation as a
docile and manageable collective. What I’m bored by is all the talk following
talk following what is, essentially, nothing.
Everyone keeps reminding us how fame is so often ephemeral
and insubstantial. How it does little to appease the demons of those who have
been made famous. We watch in necrophiliac fascination as celebrities turn
against themselves and increase their fame by self-destructing live over
realtime media. Drug and sex scandals which disrupt or emphasize our love of
the self projected onto an object-person for our consumption. Palliatives for
our own troubled lives, certainly, or perhaps a dose of intrigue for the absurd
tedium of the contemporary leisure society in the early twenty-first century. How could they possibly throw everything
they have away just to pursue temporary vices? we ask ourselves and sit
happy in our self-satisfaction.
And then the suicide of Robin Williams lit up my digital
feeds with one, overwhelming network of affect. A shared emotion distributed
widely over small data packets. A person often described as the funniest person
on earth was so tortured by what was not public, by what could not be made
public, that he took his own life. An actor who was forced into the childhood psyche
of a generation of North American youth born between the mid-1970s and the
1990s by means of Hollywood’s globe-leading position at the forefront of the complex
of technological and financial interests which comprise modern (and postmodern)
life. A comedian known for insanely energetic physical antics and a
lightning-fast wit who became the voice of a modern middle-class who wanted
to watch life on television. Someone who has brought so much joy to so many
people that it is incomprehensible to many that he took his own life.
And so the story continues, and that is why I felt the need
to write about his death. Robin Williams was an example and a possibility for
the weird and disruptive hyper kids who had to navigate life in the age before
pharmaceuticals and the stranger-danger,
penal-colony policies of parents picking up their children from school turned
everyone grey and docile and paranoid and corporate, looking for answers in
simple questions with readymade solutions. I was introduced to Williams when my
mom watched Mork & Mindy on
television and she let me stay up late, and then again at the age of ten or so
when I discovered the scatological excesses of Williams’s HBO stand-up tapes on
Beta. Live, Williams seemed to be in full control of his lack of control, and
his manic, adult-onset Tourette’s was a revelation to a pre-adolescent living in
Mulroney’s vision for a clean and sober Canada focused on the numbers game. Robin
Williams acted exactly as we were told not to act. Manic, hyperbolic,
enthusiastic, continually in search of play. These are not the virtues of the successful office bureaucrat or
entrepreneur, whose pageantry makes the world go round despite the lack of
resources to see the spinning continue for much longer. Robin Williams was the turning
point between kids who were policed by teachers and kept acting up and kids who
were policed by society with insurance-covered drugs in convenient child-proof
packages.
Comedy is an interesting thing. Often springing from tragic
individual lives, comedy emerges to placate the wounds of the social, often by
shocking the wounded and the non-wounded alike into a new kind of self-recognition. It is among the most
dangerous of our political pleasures, and we often see it among the first
victims of undemocratic or totalitarian censorship. Comedy is disruptive
because it takes an ontological pleasure in this tragedy, of seeing suffering through
to transcendence. It is often a defence against the self-hatred which plagues
many creative and intelligent people who by their natures are wracked and
sometimes hobbled by self-loathing and doubt. Most importantly, it is and must
be a social phenomenon. Comedy does not isolate, except perhaps those who don’t
get the joke or don’t wish to try. It is a bridge for the perils of
contemporary habitation within the various and often conflicting flows of
desire produced by a multitude of individuals. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, as the holy fool,
the trickster, and the clown permeate much of the world tradition for myth and
storytelling. These figures often serve to redeem their societies through the revolutionary
subversion of pleasure. Of course, the Dostoevsky of The Brothers Karamazov only partially anticipated the dynamics of
modern capital and the society it created.
The celebrity life of Robin Williams
serves witness to this capacity of contemporary life to make martyrs of us all,
to celebrate the dissolution of our own revolutionary self-interests into the
Q1-Q4 marketing strategies of the massive industrial conglomerates in control
of so much of our technological media. Hollywood tamed Williams not simply
through formulaic scripts and hackneyed characterisations, but through sheer success.
The You’ve Made It! feeling which
permeates the everyday among the mansions, cafes, and nightclubs of Hollywood
and soothes – even if only temporarily – the unpleasured suffering of the
not-famous. Money rolls in, everyone talks about you, and you’re in every big
movie with your face splashed across the ad campaign. And then the act loses
its edge as focus groups and mid-level executives weigh in on where everything
all fits together in the contemporary marketplace. The authentic becomes the
marketed, not inauthentic but differently authentic, an authenticity of
massification, of mass duplication. But isn’t this what we’re all looking for
as we troll our jobs and our friendships and the media we choose to play with looking
for a moment of temporary relief from ourselves, from this process of looking? An incessant search, and one which always finds the same emptiness leading
forward into more searching. Frankly, I do not wonder why many of those
creative people who have found commercial success tend toward self-destruction.
Self-improvement and self-loathing are mutually-contingent phenomena.
The conversation about Robin Williams and suicide is rapidly
passing, and as expected we’re watching nostalgic clips on television instead
of working to understand mental health issues with any degree of enthusiasm or
sensitivity. We need to accept that some of our most interesting people are
doomed to self-destruction, but this does not mean that we need to accept death.
Self-destruction can manifest as a living force, and one with an austere and
significant revolutionary potential. This dynamic is scattered across the
history of revolutionary activities, whose gestures have so often been co-opted
into the power structures which excluded them. I cannot help but view Hollywood
as the benchmark for such progress in capital – the avantgarde is made safely
digestible for mass consumption. This is both its terror and its revolutionary impulse, in one simultaneous gesture of productive consumption. No wonder that Hollywood film making is one of the most capital-intensive industries currently in operation. As the whole industry is fuelled by desire, the whole industry can manifest and vaporize like changes in the weather. This is why the large conglomerates play everything safe, and why comedy in particular is rendered docile, a domesticated leisure item which sits well with the livingroom furniture. And yet other potential dynamics remain in play: the Janus/Dionysian duality of Comedy centres it at the vanguard of the
possibilities for the revolutionary disruption of normalcy by means of an avantgarde
which breathes life into the corpses made by capital.
