Meet the New Year, Same As the Old Year

A friend posted a version of this meme on Facebook today, and my heart sank.  Something was wrong with it.

So I did a search for the quotation - the alleged quotation, I mean.  The first couple of pages of results came up dry which is to say that there plenty of hits, ascribing the quotation to Williams, but none of them told where or when he'd said it.  That's usually a sign of a bogus quotation.  And then I found a Wikiquote Talk page of unsourced quotes ascribed to Robin Williams, including the specimen my friend had posted.  As I've found before, several of them were lines he'd spoken in this or that movie, and many people figure that everything an actor says in a movie is his or her own creation.  Not this one, though.  In either case, it's probably bogus.

But that, as dispiriting as it is, wasn't why I felt so bad when I saw this meme.  If it expressed a genuine truth, even Robin Willams's truth, I could give it some credit.  But as I thought it over, I realized that I don't think it's true, and if I can't have a valid attribution I at least need some evidence to support it.  From my own milder experience of depression, and from what I know of others' more severe experience, depression just sucks all the life out of a person.  It doesn't drive you to make others happy; it makes any kind of action almost impossible.  In my observation, the saddest people often try to drag everyone else down with them.  Overall, this meme stinks of the Culture of Therapy's false psychology / spirituality, and I say the hell with it.

For all of that, I'm seeing out 2019 in a pretty good mood, although this meme and writing about it were a light kick in the slats.  But on the whole I'm good, and I hope you are too, dear reader.

Taking Life by the Neck; or, Say It Ain't So, Henry!

I've been trying not to write more about Robin Williams's suicide, but then the other day the sf writer John Scalzi denounced Henry Rollins for his piece in the LA Weekly attacking Williams.  Rollins has since apologized; Scalzi approves of the apology, I don't -- but I don't think Rollins had anything to apologize for.

Start with Rollins's attack on Williams.  It's headed "Fuck suicide", typical boy-culture stuff.  (I've been even more annoyed by all the "Fuck the Police" stuff I've been seeing in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown.  It doesn't mean that these fine, radical thinkers love the police and want to give them pleasure, perhaps to teach them that love is better than hate; it means that they think fucking is degrading and debasing to the person who is fucked.  Women, pay attention to what the straight boys you're marching with are saying about you.)

But on to the article itself.  I shared Rollins's alienation from the popular and media reaction to Williams's suicide.  He went on to praise Williams as a performer, and for doing USO shows as Rollins himself does.  And then:

But I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves.
How in the hell could you possibly do that to your children? I don’t care how well adjusted your kid might be — choosing to kill yourself, rather than to be there for that child, is every shade of awful, traumatic and confusing. I think as soon as you have children, you waive your right to take your own life. No matter what mistakes you make in life, it should be your utmost goal not to traumatize your kids. So, you don’t kill yourself.

I think that first quoted sentence says more about the limitations of Rollins's understanding than it says about Robin Williams.  As far as I can tell, Rollins is not himself a parent; nor am I.

I agree that suicide can be an expression of hostility towards others, as witness the childish line "You'll be sorry when I'm dead."  (Even better when it's combined with "... and I'll be laughing." No, they won't.)  But I think Rollins was cheating here a little bit.  Williams's youngest "child," Cody, was born in 1991, which makes him 23 now.  That doesn't mean he's too old to be traumatized by his father's suicide (or death from any cause), but it does mean he's old enough to understand that it wasn't about him, that his father was suffering terribly -- as everyone seems to agree Williams was -- and chose to end it because he didn't want to suffer anymore.  Cody is also old enough that his parents aren't obliged to "be there" for him at every moment anymore: they have feelings and needs and lives of their own, and so does he.  (Many parents have the same difficulty understanding that everything their children do isn't about them.)  Which is not to say that Williams's children aren't or shouldn't be hurt by his loss, only that at a certain point in life the feelings of offspring no longer trump the feelings of the parents.  It might be that Williams hung on for as long as he could -- he was 63, for heaven's sake, and had apparently been miserable for most of his life -- and finally decided enough was enough.

I can't think about this without also thinking of something I touched on in my previous post, the denial of mortality and of death itself.  The last year of Nelson Mandela's life brought this home for me.  For years before that, he had "retired from retirement" because of his failing health.  2013 was a morbid death watch, the way millions of people panicked every time Mandela went into the hospital.  At 95, after a very long life of public service, I'd have thought he had earned the right to rest.  But people still wanted a piece of him, and wanted him to go on living no matter what.  They saw this craving as love, but I think it was something else.  Selfishness is when you let your wishes override the wishes of another person, and I think that selfishness was the dominant emotion in those who wanted Mandela, or anyone else, to be kept alive forever, no matter what.

This kind of selfishness is evident in much of the public mourning for Robin Williams, needless to say, yet hardly anyone seems to have criticized it.

I don't mean that suicide should be committed lightly.  But Rollins, like so many people, seems to take for granted that Williams took his life casually or lightly and certainly for the wrong reason, even when they blame his decision on "depression." (Yeah, Fuck Depression.)  I don't know, and no one probably knows, exactly what chain of feeling and thought led up to Williams's final decision.  For that reason, a becoming humility should be evident in any judgment of that decision, and such humility has been conspicuous by its absence in most of the commentary I've seen.

Nor do I mean that parents and children shouldn't remain close and mutually considerate throughout their lives if they want to.  But once the offspring are adults, the obligations involved change.  It would be nice if a suffering person -- like Williams, say -- could consult with his or her family and reassure them that his or her decision to die was not meant to hurt them.  I don't think this would work in our society as it is, though.  Especially someone like Williams, with a long history of substance abuse and depression, would risk being forcibly committed for treatment if he confessed the wish to end his life.  Which might not be so bad if psychiatrists could accurately distinguish between a passing morbid suicidal impulse and a reasoned decision to die, or if "treatment" would actually help, but there are reasons to be skeptical on both counts.  Williams made sure his family was provided for, leaving generous trust funds to his children (who, being adults, could take care of themselves even if he'd died penniless); he apparently didn't leave a note.  But I see no reason to assume that his suicide was impulsive.

In any case, I don't see that Rollins said anything here that was worse than what many others had said without being attacked for it, except for its bluntness, even though I disagree with him.

I don't feel that way about the rest of the piece, which is kinda embarrassing.

When someone negates their existence, they cancel themselves out in my mind. I have many records, books and films featuring people who have taken their own lives, and I regard them all with a bit of disdain. When someone commits this act, he or she is out of my analog world. I know they existed, yet they have nullified their existence because they willfully removed themselves from life. They were real but now they are not ...

I have life by the neck and drag it along. Rarely does it move fast enough. Raw Power forever.

Reading this made me wonder what Rollins thinks of Ayn Rand.  Apparently he once called her a "cunt," which fits nicely with his use of "fuck."  Gotta keep the bitchez in their place, eh, Henry?  But he's not as far from her as he'd like to think, with that "I have life by the neck and drag it along" line.  Anyone who fancies him or herself to be in total control of his or her life is a self-deluding fool, even though I understand what could motivate someone to delude himself in that way.  Which, just to be clear, is not to endorse a total fatalism either.  It's like the nature/nurture, free will/determinism divide. Yes, we make choices, but the choices start from where we are, what we have.  We don't chose to be born, and we don't choose to be mortal either; you'd think Rollins would be more respectful of people who choose when to die.  They've taken life by the neck too.

Should he have apologized for this diatribe?  I can't see why.  "That I hurt anyone by what I said, and I did hurt many, disgusts me," he wrote.  "It was not at all my intent but it most certainly was the result." C'mon, Henry, you have life by the neck and you drag it along.  What you did was your intent. You can probably see why I don't share Scalzi's approval of the apology: it looks to me like the typical celebrity/public-figure nonapology, which is the same bilge regardless of nation, party, or political stance.  It's all about him: that he hurt anyone "disgusts me."  Who can help but sympathize with his disgust, it must be so painful for him.  I find it hard to believe that someone who's been performing and writing for decades could be unaware of the effect his words would have, especially someone like Rollins whose persona is built on blunt, straight-talking, fuck-this-and-that rhetoric.  His disavowal of responsibility here is at odds with his stated philosophy.

And what about the people who reacted to the original piece?  At least some of them must have been fans to begin with, who read Rollins for his tough, take-no-prisoners style.  (If they persist in reading him just to get the adrenalin rush of offense, they presumably got what they were looking for.)  Were they shocked! shocked! to find that Rollins didn't agree with them in every particular?  Were they fine with fucking capitalism but not a beloved media star?  Well, I don't know what was going on in his readers' minds either.  Maybe he should have apologized, but I don't take his apology seriously.  But maybe that just shows the limits of my understanding.

The Hamster Wheel

Robin Williams is dead, evidently by his own hand.  I was never a big fan, and as time went on I got tired of the types of characters he played and the way he played them.  According to the first reports, Williams had been "battling depression" for a long time, and that may have had something to do with my Robin Williams fatigue: there was too little joy in his persona, too much struggle against the engulfing darkness.  I don't say that to blame him, understand, only to say what I found unappealing in his work.  It is of course terribly sad that he suffered so much for so long.  No one should have to go through that.

Leaving aside Williams as a person, because I know nothing about him as a person, it has been interesting to see what people have been saying about the force that evidently drove him to  take his life.  What I've seen shows how confused a concept "mental illness" is in ordinary discourse.  (And not only there.)  The first commentaries I saw stressed the importance of Getting Help: If you're experiencing depression, people wrote, Get Help!  All I know about Williams is what I read online, but it would be surprising if he never did seek help.  He was married and had a family, as a star he had a professional network of friends and coworkers and agents who would have known about his problem, and he would at least have been under considerable pressure to see a therapist and get medication.  I suspect that people who repeated the Get Help mantra weren't really talking about Williams, or even about people with clinical depression, but just saying what they needed to say, as others would have urged prayer and fasting.

So, for example, someone wrote in a comment thread:

i don't believe he truly intended to commit suicide ... he was in active treatment for severe depression and they were messing with his meds ... and we all know every psycho-med carries the danger of 'suicidal tendencies" during adjustment periods ... personally, i'm happy for him - he's free from all this bullsh*t here which is probably what contributed to his lifelong depression

I don't know how this person knew what treatment Williams was getting for his depression, but suppose it's true.  If so, then all the urging to Get Help seems like dubious advice.  It's known that "every psycho-med carries the danger of 'suicidal tendencies'", and not just during adjustment periods but throughout their use, but also that they are not much (if any) more effective than placebos over the long haul.  Williams did Get Help, but it didn't help him, didn't make the pain go away.

That last sentence is odd, though, isn't it?  If you believe that clinical depression is a medical condition, then it has nothing to do with "all this bulls*t here, which could not have "contributed to his lifelong depression."  His depression, like all clinical depression according to the psychiatric model, was the result of "chemical imbalance" in the brain, not of anything in Williams's life.  If he'd lived in the Garden of Eden before the fall, he'd still have been miserable.

So too, some other people wrote about their feeling that they could have saved Williams if they'd been there, that they would have seen his pain and let him know they loved him.  Perhaps he killed himself because people didn't show him how much they cared?  So, for example, a friend wrote:

There is nothing worse in life than feeling unwanted....... As we all mourn Robin Williams, I wonder if that is one thing in life that drives people over the edge - feeling all alone in the world, with nobody and nothing to live for. Because if there is a bridge, however tiny, to someone who cares or something that has a meaning, can one really make that one final, irreversible step?

Another person wrote:

And it's true. Depression will sneak up on you and when you least expect it, it will get the upper hand. Phone a friend or find someone when it get so hard.

If Robin Williams felt unwanted, it could hardly have been because people around him failed to let him know they cared.  I've known a few people who might have been clinically depressed, but who in any case couldn't or wouldn't believe that others loved them, despite the love and support they received from their friends and their family.  Again, I'm not making a moral judgment here: I've been depressed at times myself, and I know how impermeable those bad feelings are to the real world.  I've felt worthless and hopeless, and all the concern of people who respected and loved me couldn't get through.  In time those feelings passed, and I can't claim that it was because I suddenly realized that I was loved and respected; I don't know why they passed, so I'm not bragging any more than I'm condemning Robin Williams, or the friends I've known who were trapped for whatever reason in the sealed glass jar of depression.  This doesn't mean we needn't love and support others, or that they needn't love and support us; it means that a failure to build bridges was not the cause of Robin Williams's suicide.

The point is that it's worse than useless to blame other people for Williams's suicide if he was, in fact, clinically depressed: it's morally (and medically, for that matter) wrong.  In the first place, everyone has failed someone else at some point in their life.  That includes Robin Williams and the legions of other depressed people.  Demanding that everyone be perfectly, self-denyingly supportive of other people at all times is a hopeless counsel, because it's impossible.  I learned this from Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur, by the way: no one can meet another person's every need and wish.  (Have you never met someone who blamed you for failing to know what they wanted, presumably by reading their mind?  No, I didn't say anything about it, but you should have known!  If you don't know, I'm certainly not going to tell you!)  Dinnerstein was writing about children in relation to their mothers, but I think this generalizes to adults.  Demanding total self-sacrificing service to others a great way to foster guilt, if that's what you want to do, but 1) it's not what I want to do, and 2) it won't work, because the demand is impossible to satisfy.

I've noticed this before, and it's ironic: both the medical model and the touchy-feely Culture of Therapy claim to suspend judgment, but they don't in fact do so.  Especially the Culture of Therapy is built around blaming people, both the victims (who clearly don't love themselves enough) and those around them (who failed to be perfect egoless mommies).  Robin Williams killed himself because he didn't Get Help, or didn't believe in the love of others, or because others didn't love him, and left him to suffer.  That his pain had nothing to do with him as a person, or with the failings of his family and friends, is not really acceptable; it must be someone's fault.  (Not God's, though -- God isn't responsible for anything.)

And let's not forget that in much mourning there is great anger at the deceased for going away.  That anger lurks under the blame in Williams's case, you don't have to dig very far to find it. As in this monumental declaration:

Depression can go fuck itself.

We loved him, but he didn't listen to us!  He didn't Get Help!  Other people didn't love him enough!  He felt unloved, like he was the only person in the world, because other people didn't build bridges to him!  We have to find somebody to blame!  Bad wicked Depression did it!  He went away and left us!  Depression took him away from us!

There's also a denial of death in this, as in so much mourning.  Everyone dies, but most people talk (at least some of the time) as if death is not inevitable.  A suicide like Williams's complicates the matter, because it was not inevitable that he die at that moment; he chose it.  (Couldn't that be seen, contrary to the person I quoted above, as Williams making his own decision to end his suffering?  Who is making these decisions?)  But people react just as unrealistically to 'natural' death.  It might be magnified in the case of a celebrity like Williams, whom millions thought they knew and loved without ever having met him.  I've seen several posts where once again, lines that were written by others for him to speak onscreen are ascribed to him.  Even if by performing he identified himself with his roles, even if he took a kind of responsibility for them in that way, this confusion of the player with the play is troubling.  We love you, Robin! but love based on a projected image isn't really love.  It's about what the other represents for us in our fantasies, regardless of his or her own feelings or needs.

"Come With Me If You Want to Live" - James Cameron

Facebook has not been good for my good nature.  When the above meme, making its slow but inexorable way across the vast fetid surface of Facebook, landed on my wall, I was instantly suspicious.  It wasn't that it didn't sound like Robin Williams -- I didn't know one way or the other -- but for some reason it smelled wrong to me.

I did a search and found the quotation immediately, attributed to "Lance Clayton" on the Internet Movie Database.  Aha, thought I: I could see it coming.  The quotation turned out to be the words of Lance Clayton, the title character of World's Greatest Dad, played by Williams.  If anyone should get credit for the line, it's the movie's writer and director, Bobcat Goldthwait.

But even that might be a mistake.  Goldthwait might well agree with the sentiment in the line; I know I do.  But he wrote them for a character, to be played by an actor in a fiction film.  Writers don't necessarily agree with everything their fictional characters say.  Obvious?  I thought so, but then I remembered how the scholar Leo Bersani ascribed to the playwright Tony Kushner a statement Kushner wrote for a character in Angels in America.

For Kushner, to be gay in the 1980s was to be a metaphor not only for Reagan’s America but for the entire history of America, a country in which there are "no gods…no ghosts and spirits…no angels…no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political."

(Source, and Kushner's response, here.)  It's hard for me to believe that anyone, let alone a literary theorist of renown, could have mistaken the character Bersani was quoting for Kushner's mouthpiece.  But there it is.

I've come to suspect that many people, even people with some education and intelligence, believe that movie actors invent their own lines, right there on the spot in front of the camera, and that they make up -- or better yet, live -- the story as they go, while the camera simply follows them.  The director is there is get them started, by yelling "action!"; as for the writer, who knows?  There must be some cognitive dissonance when a movie is based on an existing source, but then it must be the actors' fault when there are changes in the story.  Some actors do ad-lib, and Williams is famous for it.  But unless the actor is also the director or editor, most of the fine inventions end up on the cutting room floor.

I don't mean to pretend to be superior here.  I didn't think about a lot of these matters until my thirties, when I began to watch movies more seriously.  I'd read a lot of film criticism by people who did know how movies are made, but it didn't sink in for a long time.  Most people don't bother.  We're born believing in magic, and it takes a fair amount of work to stop believing in it.

But maybe one tipping point was something that happened during the making of a movie called Six Degrees of Separation, in 1993.  For one of his first serious movie roles, Will Smith played a young hustler who talks his way into the affections and trust of an affluent New York family.  The young man is not exclusively heterosexual, and the script calls for him to kiss another male character on camera.  Smith knew this going into the job, but balked when the time came to film the scene.  In the end a stunt double was used.  Smith had to explain himself to the press, and explained that Denzel Washington had told him that black folks can't tell the difference between an actor and the character he plays, so "don't go kissing no man."

My immediate reaction when I first read that was that it wasn't only black folks who can't distinguish the actor from the role.  Since then (twenty years!) I've come across many examples of simple, childlike white people who make this basic mistake.  Just this weekend a highly sophisticated friend jokingly congratulated "Gomer" -- Jim Nabors, that is -- for marrying his male partner of 38 years.  I teased her about the naivete of white people confusing actors and their characters (notably, a character the actor hadn't played in over 20 years).  She replied icily that it was a joke.  Well, the Onion made a better joke of it.  (Here's an even bigger joke: Nabors told a reporter that he'd "never made a huge secret" of being gay.  Literally, this may be true: it was only a rather tiny secret.)

I admit that this confusion is on one level what actors aim for: the suspension of disbelief by the audience, getting them to forget for the moment that they are watching a performance.  But as a friend admitted when we were discussing this, it's also expected that that the illusion will be dropped when the performance ends.  The people who are passing this meme around may not know that the line comes from a movie Williams starred in, but I imagine many have seen World's Best Dad and remember the line from it.  But I'm not playing the "things were better in the old days" game; I know this is nothing new.  The friend with whom I was discussing this pointed out that it's like children being shocked when they discover that Teacher has a life outside the classroom, with a spouse and a family.  I agreed, and mentioned that it's also true of parents.  I still remember the day I overheard my mother talking to my grandmother on the phone, and she called her "Mother."  I didn't believe that Mommy had a Mommy.  (I'm tempted to make a joke out of this by saying I was thirty when this happened, but I was really about five.)  Mothers are eternal and existent in themselves, like Aquinas' God.