Russell Brand: Robin Williams’ divine madness will no longer disrupt the sadness of the world
The
manic energy of Williams could turn to destruction as easily as
creativity. Is it melancholy to think that a world that he can’t live in
must be broken?
‘I was aware that this burbling and manic
man-child that I watched on the box on my Nan’s front room floor with a
Mork action figure struggled with mental illness and addiction.’
Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex
I’d been thinking about Robin Williams a bit recently. His manager
Larry Bresner told me that when Robin was asked by a German journalist
on a press junket why the Germans had a reputation for humourlessness
that Williams replied, “Because you killed all the funny people.”
Robin
Williams was exciting to me because he seemed to be sat upon a geyser
of comedy. Like he didn’t manufacture it laboriously within but had only
to open a valve and it would come bursting through in effervescent
jets. He was plugged into the mains of comedy.
I was aware too
that this burbling and manic man-child that I watched on the box on my
Nan’s front room floor with a Mork action figure (I wish I still had
that, he came in a plastic egg) struggled with mental illness and
addiction. The chaotic clarity that lashed like an electric cable, that
razzed and sparked with amoral, puckish wonder was in fact harvested
madness. A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to
destruction as creativity.
He spoke candidly about his mental illness and addiction,
how he felt often on a precipice of self-destruction, whether through
substance misuse or some act of more certain finality. I thought that
this articulate acknowledgement amounted to a kind of vaccine against
the return of such diseased thinking, which has proven to be hopelessly
naive.
When someone gets to 63 I imagined, hoped, I suppose, that
maturity would grant an immunity to adolescent notions of suicide but
today I read that suicide isn’t exclusively a young man’s game. Robin
Williams at 63 still hadn’t come to terms with being Robin Williams.
Now
I am incapable of looking back at my fleeting meeting with him with any
kind of objectivity, I am bound to apply, with hindsight, some special
significance to his fragility, meekness and humility. Hidden behind his
beard and kindness and compliments was a kind of awkwardness, like he
was in the wrong context or element, a fallen bird on a hard floor. Robin Williams in 2011. Photograph: Walter McBride/Corbis
It seems that Robin Williams could not find a context. Is that what
drug use is? An attempt to anaesthetise against a reality that
constantly knocks against your nerves, like tinfoil on an old school
filling, the pang an urgent message to a dormant, truer you.
Is it
melancholy to think that a world that Robin Williams can’t live in must
be broken? To tie this sad event to the overarching misery of our
times? No academic would co-sign a theory in which the tumult of our
fractured and unhappy planet is causing the inherently hilarious to end
their lives, though I did read that suicide among the middle-aged
increased inexplicably in 1999 and has been rising ever since. Is it a
condition of our era?
Poor Robin Williams, briefly enduring that
lonely moment of morbid certainty where it didn’t matter how funny he
was or who loved him or how many lachrymose obituaries would be written.
I feel bad now that I was unduly and unbefittingly snooty about that
handful of his films that were adjudged unsophisticated and sentimental.
He obviously dealt with a pain that was impossible to render and
ultimately insurmountable, the sentimentality perhaps an accompaniment
to his childlike brilliance.
We sort of accept that the price for
that free-flowing, fast-paced, inexplicable comic genius is a
counterweight of solitary misery. That there is an invisible inner
economy that demands a high price for breathtaking talent. For me genius
is defined by that irrationality; how can he talk like that? Play like
that? Kick a ball like that? A talent that was not sculpted and
schooled, educated and polished but bursts through the portal, raw and
vulgar. Always mischievous, always on the brink of going wrong,
dangerous and fun, like drugs.
Robin Williams could have tapped
anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down
and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they
loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids
loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of
strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger
that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing
sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative
that we used to turn to him to disrupt.
What platitudes then can
we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness
that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was?
That fame and accolades are no defence against mental illness and
addiction? That we live in a world that has become so negligent of human
values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves? That we
must be more vigilant, more aware, more grateful, more mindful? That we
can’t tarnish this tiny slice of awareness that we share on this sphere
amidst the infinite blackness with conflict and hate?
That we must
reach inward and outward to the light that is inside all of us? That
all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than
the one Robin Williams wore? Do you have time to tune in to Fox News, to
cement your angry views to calcify the certain misery?
What I
might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will
Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all
are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that
seems like it will never expire.
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