Another Hollywood Ending
I knew nothing about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s personal life until he passed. Was I surprised to discover that he had died from a drug overdose? Not really. That he had died at all? Certainly. So young. But the cause of death shouldn’t surprise anyone. Heath Ledger was another actor whose career seemed to be peaking when his habit of choice killed him. Again, the death itself was the only surprise.
By all accounts, Hoffman was an actor’s actor, not a celebrity. He took the craft very seriously; the limelight, less so. Did that duality help feed his addiction? Were the drugs the means by which he was able to bracket the trappings of Hollywood, enabling him to embody whatever character or role he played? Or maybe that process became too difficult for him to sustain anymore, and he wanted out?
God will have to sort that out, I suppose.
A liberal acquaintance of mine once caught me reading a novel by Edward Abbey, the hard-drinking “environmentalist” (he hated that word) writer who arguably hadn’t lived a full life, at least in terms of years. Abbey had just died, and this guy suggested that Abbey’s contributions would have been much greater if he hadn’t been so self-abusive. In quantity? Perhaps. Quality? Not so sure. Who’s to say what or how much of Abbey’s lived life generated the creative flow that produced the likes of The Monkey Wrench Gang? How do you parse that sort of inspiration out? I don’t think you can.
Would Hoffman have been a better actor without the drugs? Would he have been an actor at all? Or might the culture of celebrity have just swallowed him whole?
One reaction to Hoffman’s death was printed in the “Voice of the People” section of The Chicago Tribune, Feb. 7th, under the heading, “An Actor’s Death.”
“So much has been written and televised about the ‘tragedy’ of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s early demise. My idea of tragedy is when a tsunami wipes out thousands of people in a remote village, or when a police officer is killed in the line of duty, or an innocent young person is shot to death simply because he or she happened to live in the wrong neighborhood.
“A man who has been blessed with the good luck of fame, fortune, offspring and the adulation of millions of people and has chosen the route of infusing chemicals into his body rather than deal with life on its own terms is not a tragedian. In my opinion he is an ingrate.
“I realize that addictions can and do take over people’s lives, and that mastering one’s fate under such circumstances is difficult.
“However, Hoffman was a man with the intelligence and resources to deal with the monkeys he had on his back. More important, he left behind three young children who will be scarred for life by someone, so blessed, who would choose heroin over loved ones.”
— Mel Novit, Morton Grove, IL
