Some Losses — Touched with Fire Media

1. Grief as Paranoia

I flew down to Bend for my cousin’s wedding over the weekend. Flying to Bend is always a bit of an odd experience — the flight, which only covers 120 miles or so, usually takes about 25 minutes, so that getting to and from the airport is a bigger ordeal than being in the air. When I got down there, nobody was there to pick me up. Not a big deal — the Redmond-Bend airport is not much more than a glorified bus station, so there’s nothing arduous about getting in and out — but I wondered, sort of, if I’d been forgotten, so I called my mom to see if someone was on the way. She said my dad was, but he was running a little late.

Then a weird thing happened. A couple of minutes later, I was still waiting, and she called me back. When I saw her name on the caller ID, I became convinced that she was calling to tell me that my dad had been in a wreck on the way to pick me up, and was dead. This is a completely ridiculous, irrational fear, but it was so strong that I almost didn’t answer the phone. When I did, she just wanted to say that she’d talked to him and he would be there any minute. Even as she did, I spotted his car pulling up to the curb. Everything was fine. Nobody had died. Of course nobody had died.

When I was a kid, my dad hated answering the phone, and the explanation given was always that he associated unexpected phone calls with answering the call that informed him that my half-sister, his oldest child, had been killed in a car wreck. I sort of pretended to understand that — it made sense in an abstract way — but I never really did. It wasn’t until I got a similar call a couple of years ago that I started to understand. Now — now, my grief over that event has largely subsided to a background noise, something that’s always there but rarely all-consuming. It has, however, manifested as this very specific form of paranoia. If there’s a way for my brain to line up events in such a way that someone has died, it’ll do it. And though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t help it. Every phone call is a disaster in the making.

2. Grief as Public Rite

When David Bowie died, I was as surprised as anybody, I suppose. But what really surprised me, far more than the actual fact of his death, was the response to it. My Facebook feed erupted in a collective cri de coeur, one which roared for a full day but still hasn’t really petered out. Links to his videos, teary-sounding tributes, lots of agreeing, head shaking, and digital hugging went around. The rending of garments was elaborate.

This surprised me because David Bowie meant exactly nothing to me. I don’t begrudge anybody else their fandom or their grief — God knows, most of them will all be mystified when a small minority of us are totally crushed by the inevitable death of, say, Stephen Fry — I just don’t understand it. I always found Bowie’s music to be a little bland; it always seemed to me that the theatrical aspect of his art rendered the music qua music not very interesting, much of the time. My favorite Bowie record is probably an Iggy Pop record. (The Idiot, btw.) My favorite Bowie song is probably a Queen song. (“Under Pressure”.) The only time I ever saw Bowie live, it was because he was touring with Nine Inch Nails, and I spent most of his set (he was in Thin White Duke mode that night) idly wondering when Trent Reznor was going to come out.

And it’s funny, because in many ways Bowie seems to have stood foursquare against a lot of the things I despise: rote fetishization of the authentic; reflexive privileging of emotion over intellect; the idea of perfection in art. Bowie was weird and daring and sometimes sloppy. He took risks that didn’t always pay off. This is the kind of artist I usually love; it’s the kind I try to be. He stands with Neal Stephenson and Richard Linklater and Margaret Atwood in this way. And yet, somehow, I just never locked in with him. My failure to lock in caused me to have a blind spot as to his massive cultural significance.

It’s weird to be reminded so viscerally of the ways in which you’re out-of-step with the zeitgeist. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had died and this been the response, I would have been as all in as everybody else. But the death of David Bowie, even at the relatively young age of 69, did not rock my world. I kind of wish now that it had. I’m obviously missing out on something.

The night Bowie died, I was walking up Clinton Street in the dark, and I saw a big crowd gathered around a firetruck and an ambulance. My first instinct was to take out my radio gear and see what was going on. But as I approached, I heard a boombox playing “Under Pressure”, and then “Rebel Rebel”, and I realized something public, important, but not necessarily newsworthy was going on here. It had something to do with David Bowie, though I couldn’t tell what. I never did figure out what the firetruck and ambulance were there for — nobody was hurt — and eventually I moved on. Really, I probably should have taken out my gear anyway and started asking around. I’m sure there was a story there. Maybe, though, I was not the person to tell it.

3. Grief as Public Rite 2: The Re-griefening

But then Alan Rickman died. Rickman and Bowie were both English, both 69 years old, both died of cancer. I was actually shocked to find that Rickman was the same age as Bowie — his rise to fame came 15 years later, with his iconic performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I think I would have pegged him at about 55, if you’d asked, though I don’t know why you’d ask me how old Alan Rickman was when you could just Google the guy. But it gave me a window into what other people were feeling about Bowie. A reminder, really; I’ve been getting bummed out by celebrity deaths since the suicide of Kurt Cobain at least. I don’t know that I’m gutted, the way some people seemed to be by Bowie’s death. But I’m not happy about it. It scares me — not least because Rickman was younger than my father and not much older than my mother. And it feels completely not real. Like, how is it possible that Alan Fucking Rickman is dead? Hans Gruber sure isn’t dead, even if he is. Severus Snape isn’t dead, even if he is. (Spoiler alert, Potter newbies.) How can the man who brought them to life be dead?

A few years ago, I was poking through some website looking for an Adventure Time t-shirt, when I ran across something far better: a baseball undershirt with blue sleeves and, positioned smack in the middle, an airbrushed glamour shot of a young Alan Rickman, sandy-haired and, in his weird, beaky way, very handsome. I knew immediately that I had just found the greatest item of clothing ever made. I will admit that some of that was the seriously WTF nature of the person on its front — Rickman was famous (very, after his turn as Snape), and seriously talented, but he wasn’t a celebrity in the way that the people who get their faces on t-shirts usually are. His dalliances didn’t make the pages of People magazine. I have no idea where he lived. I’m actually not entirely sure whether he was straight or gay. Until he took the role of Snape, he had been a slightly-more-handsome-than-average character actor. Even after he took the role of Snape, he was still a character actor — it was just that he was probably the single most famous character actor in the world. Why was he on this shirt?

But there was more to it for me. Rickman had always been one of those guys that I felt a little bit of ownership of. One of the things I used to do, back when I had a membership to a fabulous brick-and-mortar PDX movie rental shop called Movie Madness, was fall in love with an actor or actress and make a project of plowing through every movie on their IMDB page. The whims that took me could be capricious, weird — I watched every terrible movie that the terrible actress Jennifer Morrison (of the terrible TV show House) made, for instance. But one of the more rewarding ones of these projects was Rickman. I never finished — he’d been in over 40 movies and TV shows by the time I took it up, some of them quite hard to lay hands on (I never managed to find a copy of a BBC miniseries called The Barchester Chronicles, in which Rickman plays a reportedly very minor role, for instance). But you’d find Rickman doing solid work in the weirdest corners of cinema and television — as the title character in an HBO movie called Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, for instance; or as the nasty Outback imperlalist Elliot Marston in the dopey Quigley Down Under. Though he was often typecast as the heavy, he could do just about anything, as attested by his comic turn as The Metatron in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or his unexpectedly heart-throbbing Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. When finally he was tapped to play the role that would make him a worldwide icon — Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise — it felt like there was no other actor on Earth who could breathe life into JK Rowling’s most complex, dangerous, and magnetic character.

He was probably too old to play Snape, really; the Severus of the books is still a relatively young man (some rudimentary math would suggest that he’s in his early 30s by the time Harry and the gang show up at Hogwarts), but Rickman was 55 — old enough to be the father of the character he was playing, if you think about it. But still he seemed perfect. Rickman’s specialty was the character who was supercilious, hyper-intelligent, malevolent. Snape was all of those things. He was scary and mean and cruel. The thing is, a lot of people could do that. But the part called for someone who could play all of those things, and then make it convincing when he finally displayed something many never expected him to have — vulnerability. When the moment came, Rickman was more than up to the task. By that point, seven-and-a-half movies in, the Harry Potter franchise was not really featuring the acting skills of its players very much; the books were far too long and complex to be adapted into movies, especially when the movies made the mistake of concentrating on the action at the expense of the things that truly made the books special — the characters and the humor. Rickman was just about the only adult with a big moment to play in either of the final two films. Many other very fine actors — Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, etc — were reduced to little more than cackling villains or noble godheads by that point. But Rickman nailed it. Inasmuch as the bloated, overstuffed behemoths that were the last few Harry Potter movies had a heart, Rickman’s Snape was it. He pumped hot blood through a cold franchise almost single-handed.

I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone. I no longer follow movies as avidly as once I did, but the idea that the upcoming flicks Eye in the Sky (a star-studded techno-thriller in which Rickman stars opposite Helen Mirren) and the certain-to-be-dreadful Alice in Wonderland sequel, in which he’ll voice the Catarpillar, will be his last? That just seems wrong. I re-watched Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, and every time he was on the screen, I tried to convince myself that he was really dead. I never got there. Somehow it just doesn’t make sense.