Carpe Diem. Seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary,” Prof John Keating told his stiff-necked students to awaken their limitless possibilities in Dead Poets Society. Yet one of the greatest humorists of our time, Robin Williams, chose to have a rather ordinary end, that of suicide by asphyxiation.
Perhaps, as he said in one of his interviews, comedy was a therapy of life but one that his bipolar self couldn’t allow into the sub-conscious. His was a mind that was incurable, and one he was self-deprecatory about (“Being a functioning alcoholic is kind of like being a paraplegic lap dancer...”) knowing it would lead him to the ultimate self-destruction — suicide. Or may be he was mocking at life itself.
Yet Robin Williams will live on as one of Shakespeare’s fools, witty, pleasant, wise, commentative, stand-alone and positive. For all the nervous energy and livewire bumbling of words, there was subtle satire and critique too but not without leaving a thread of hope, a lifeline of being rescued. One that Williams could not latch on to in his real life but conveyed successfully through his reel life monikers. It would be ironic to think of Williams in terms of afterlife as he portrayed in What Dreams May Come but that was perhaps the closest solace he yearned for. As its protagonist Chris Nielsen, he asks his dog, “A place where we all go can’t be bad, can it girlIJ” He tells his wife, “Annie I’m here, I still exist.” And then you can almost hear Williams now when you recount Nielsen’s other thoughts: “What’s true in our minds is true, whether some people know it or not. What some folks call impossible, is just stuff they haven’t seen before. Good people end up in Hell because they can’t forgive themselves. I know I can’t. Sometimes, when you lose, you win. A whole human life is just a heartbeat here in Heaven. Then we’ll all be together forever.”
And so in life Williams was a humanist, contributing greatly to charity and making us laugh our guts out. He was innocent and child-like, gaming with children or cycling in the woods which he likened to mobile meditation. He set hope afloat through each of his appearances and changed the contours of cinematic convention. As the Bicentennial Man, Williams changed the way Hollywood did and continues to look at robots, unfeeling, aneroid machines avenging humans with their artificial intelligence. Instead, Williams’ robot chose to be human, ticking off ephemerality over permanence. As a shrink in Good Will Hunting, he grows with and learns from his student. He was a master of disguises, popping up through a plethora of overdone, eccentric characters, perhaps to gloss over the floundering realism of our flat lives, where most of us are responsible for our own misfortunes and choose not to improve or learn from them.
little wonder then that he will be remembered by many Indians for the pathos and laughter of Mrs Doubtfire and Patch Adams. The former inspired an icon like Kamal Haasan to attempt Chachi 420, the transformation from a slacker husband to a caring, asexual grandmother traversing the whole gamut of human relationships. Unlike Tootsie, Williams’ Doubtfire was a genuine Hollywood attempt at understanding the core of a woman devoid of all the trappings that make her attractive to men. Patch Adams inspired the famous Munnabhai MBBS, where laughter is the best medicine in a hopeless, dreamless world. Clearly he was not comfortable in that parable world as he let the realist in him surface. As the villain in Insomnia, he showed he could effortlessly turn black in the light of day. And that evil could hide in the everydayness of innocuous moments and be more ruthless and insidious. The stalker in One-Hour Photo makes you suspicious of having your pictures taken, so creepy and unsettling is he.
That versatility came from Williams’ consummate ease as an actor and his early childhood habit of play-acting others, perhaps his way of interpreting the world as he saw it. Born in Chicago in 1951, Williams would remember himself as a shy kid who got some early laughs from his mother because he mimicked his grandmother. He opened up more in high school when he joined the drama club and was accepted into the prestigious Juilliard Academy, known for demanding standards. He and Christopher Reeve were the only students and John Houseman was the teacher.
Though trained in classical traditions, he was encouraged by Houseman to pursue comedy. There Williams identified with the wildest and angriest of performers: Jonathan Winters, lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin. Their acts were not warm and lovable. They were just being themselves. “You look at the world and see how scary it can be sometimes and still try to deal with the fear,” he said in 1989. “Comedy can deal with the fear and still not paralyse you or tell you that it’s going away. You say, OK, you got certain choices here, you can laugh at them and then once you’ve laughed at them and you have expunged the demon, now you can deal with them. That’s what I do when I do my act.” There were very few simple things that Williams wanted in life. Unfortunately, they are rare in our times. “Family and friends. And a good pet. For pure loyalty there is nothing like a pug,” he told Reddit in a chat.
Following his success in films, Williams often returned to television — appearances on Saturday Night live, for Friends, for comedy specials, for American Idol, where in 2008 he pretended to be a Russian idol who belts out a tuneless, indecipherable My Way.
Williams could handle a script, when he felt like it, and also think on his feet. He ad-libbed in many of his films and was just as quick in person. During a media tour for Awakenings, when director Penny Marshall mistakenly described the film as being set in a “menstrual hospital,” instead of “mental hospital,” Williams quickly stepped in and joked, “It’s a period piece.” For all his other successes, he held the Oliver Sacks-inspired character in Awakenings dear because he could explore the human brain from the inside out.
Winner of a Grammy in 2003 for best spoken comedy album, Robin Williams-live 2002, he once likened his act to the daily jogs he took across the Golden Gate Bridge. There were times he would look over the edge, one side of him pulling back in fear, the other insisting he could fly. Williams, unlike Patch Adams, perhaps didn’t find the butterfly as he stood on the precipice of death. Dr Adams, mourning the loss of his love, remembered she always wanted to fly. The butterfly lands on his bag and afterwards on his shirt. He believes it to be her reincarnation and goes about his work. Mr Williams will forever keep us waiting.
(inputs AP)