The Internet announced it was in
mourning. It was in mourning for a comedian and actor whose work I
honestly didn't appreciate for a long time, until I recently, within
the past couple weeks, really, discovered his early stand-up career,
before he became associated with a long string of what I always
considered to be dreadfully sentimental films.
And I have to wonder why and how the
hive mind mourns. It has always bothered me how people's lives become
metaphor, and in the case of a suicide, the suicide becomes the
central metaphor. If the person has enjoyed some level of fame, the
media coverage of their death turns a complex and remote experience
into something “personal” and “sincere” for the general
public, a tidy little pill we can swallow. Take two after dinner to
feel pathos.
In this case the central metaphor of
his personality-- in public, that of the clown, privately maybe not
so much, as intimated in the now-famous Marc Maron interview-- is
hijacked and transformed into a Pagliaccio figure, the clown carrying
inner pain, which, of all tropes in the media, is one of the laziest
and most played out.
The notion of comedians as being funny
on stage, but also depressed, addicted, or just generally fucked up
should be a notion we're used to by now, 40 plus years after Richard
Pryor and Lenny Bruce made their mark. And it becomes too easy to
construe comedians as inherently fucked up, or conversely, to view
damage and darkness as a natural and necessary conduit for humor.
This is a variation of the old conflation of personal disaster and
creative genius, the fetish of countless teenage boys (self included)
and a plotline that has somehow retained its mystique since Goethe
and Keats introduced it.
Other sectors of the Internet mourning
community have taken the opportunity to claim that depression is a
disease like any other. Now, there is a certain truth to it (yes, it
fits our definition of a disease) and a pragmatism to it (it's good
to demystify mental illness, and to treat it as something that can be
handled clinically). But it becomes too easy to medicalize our
problems, to reduce thorny and difficult problems to something easily
treatable with pharmaceuticals, which in empirical practice seems to
only be sometimes useful, but is deeply in line with the American
desire for quick fixes. And yet this line of thought, which should be
more productive and more empirical, winds up leading to another form
of mystification in the public consciousness. We take something
difficult, and relegate it to the realm of expert knowledge, beyond
comprehension. Which is perhaps, why, in eternally unsmiling and
practically minded Hong Kong, the falling suicide of megastar Leslie
Cheung was reported as “due to chemical imbalance.”
We don't want to confront the fact that
at the end of the day, we are merely speculating, merely projecting
fears and worldviews onto the unknowable and scary when it is
suddenly thrust into the public spotlight. Instead of asking deep,
serious questions, we impose our narrative on the material event, and
damn the places where they don't synchronize.
I know that by writing about it, I am
imposing my own narrative, taking this sort of cagey, oblique,
postmodernist approach, out of my morbid curiosity about everyone
else's morbid curiosity.
Which, like so many meta-approaches,
leaves me with a sense of cold disconnectedness, of being trapped in
an infinite mirror maze of language and sign and discourse. And I'll
leave it there. I could extrapolate that to what the point of writing
is at all, to what the world is, but I know well enough to leave
those issues alone. I simply arrive at this point in said mirror
maze. I feel like I'm somewhere important, but everyone probably does.
