THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

It is surprising that there are not more celebrity suicides. A celebrity is a human being commoditized, as the Marxists like to say, and thereby robbed of the self that he or she might develop in the course of life normally lived. At the beginning, the celebrity-to-be is probably pitiable because he or she is the victim of his or her agents, managers, publicity spokesmen, and so forth, whose collective design of marketing the person as though he or she were a product entails depriving that person of personhood. At some point, however, when the celebrity-to-be achieves actual celebrity and begins to identify with dehumanized object-of-celebration, he or she becomes culpable in the charade and loses the privilege of being pitied. Commercial culture creates narcissists, many of whom are destructive narcissists, dangerous not only to themselves but to those near to them.

The narcissist is interesting to other people because he or she, showered constantly with orchestrated adulation, appears to the narcissist in everyone to validate narcissism. But the narcissist is a hollow person, a being of demonic emptiness, which cannot exist except by a constant infusion of one-way admiration.

Robin Williams always struck me as the epitome of the mass-entertainment celebrity-narcissist. His early nightclub and late-night television standup routines were addressed to the “hip” audiences, overwhelmingly young, of the 1970s and 80s, whom they impressed as “edgy’ because they were so frantic, incoherent, and seemingly cocaine-driven.  According to the rumors, they often were cocaine-driven.

None of those routines were more than a few minutes in duration. They resembled a lunatic having a breakdown, with symptoms of Tourrette’s syndrome and adolescent schizophrenia thrown in to underscore the effect. It was weird. When Williams moved into prime-time television, it was in the role of the alien “Mork” in the sitcom Mork and Mindy. The “hook” was now the clownishly-dressed “man-boy” persona. It was creepy. It is difficult not to suspect that the faux-schizophrenic standup routines and the repugnant “man-boy” persona were exteriorizations of what there was of any inner being, whose one-note, utterly vain “look-at-me” craving was insatiable.

In film, the pattern continued.  The Dead Poets’ Society has got to be the single most narcissistic story ever put on celluloid – and given Hollywood’s propensity to cash in on narcissism that is saying something. In Mrs. Doubtfire, Williams dressed in drag. It was, of course, “edgy,” and the critics swiftly said so. Gradually the leading roles dwindled down to supporting characters in movies starring younger performers, who were now cashing in on the latest version of “hipness” or the Peter Pan syndrome, whichever one it was that was currently selling the most tickets. The private life was obviously demon-haunted and unlivable, as the parade of wives, mistresses, and children attest.The marriage to the late-in-life trophy wife has every appearance of a desperate attempt to cling to an early-career self-image. It obviously failed. Williams was sixty-three years old, which is still the prime for many men today.

May the man rest in peace. I cannot share, I can hardly understand, the public up-gushing in the aftermath of his passing, which strikes me as of a piece with the weird and creepy career that led up to it.

— Comments —

Perfesser Plum writes:

Professor Bertonneau’s phrase, ‘demonic emptiness’, nails marxo-progmatism in general. Narcissists who can’t change a bike tire but would redesign the world. Who must endlessly and frantically try to fill their emptiness.

I got the feeling that Williams was the same on and off stage. He just could not stop. In contrast to Jonathan Winters, whose stream of consciousness seemed demented, but who to me was clearly not his persona.

Stuart Sachs writes:

I was struck by the casual, careless, and extremely violent use of the word “narcissistic” to describe not Robin Williams’s performance in “Dead Poets Society” but the film itself.

It might be worth discussing that Conservatives seem, increasingly, to toss out the idea of narcissism as a sort of catch-all for things in today’s culture we do not like. Of course, the Left uses the word “fascist” (and other words, too) as both a similar catch-all for things they do not like, AND to tell people, essentially, to shut up.

This comparison came to mind as I found “comments are closed” at the bottom of the post about Williams on your site. Perhaps you can state your comments policy more prominently, as I seem to have missed it. Ideally, the opportunity to comment on something posted in the mid-afternoon would extend beyond a mere few hours. Again, I could be wrong; perhaps it is enough to announce “narcissism,” and then render the idea beyond challenge.

But I think the film Mr. Bertonneau objects to so strenuously says something sociologically significant about what makes (or made) authority legitimate in America, the moral education of elites (or lack of it), and, most devastating of all, the value today of higher education in a broad, cultural sense as opposed to a strictly technocratic one.

Put differently, “Dead Poets Society,” set in 1959, captures on film certain early themes that figure prominently in the 1960s, 70s, and beyond. To me, “narcissism” fails utterly to capture the film’s seriousness.

Alas, however – “comments are closed.”

Laura writes:

The “comments are closed” statement at the bottom of post pages refers to the automatic comments feature that comes with this WordPress blog theme. Once you close that feature as I have done, then the blog programming activates that line. I have not been able to remove it myself. To rectify that, I have noted in three places — on the home page at the bottom of each post, on the bottom of the post page, and in the sidebar of the home page — that comments can be sent to my e-mail. The suggestion that I would close comments because I was afraid of the reaction to the word “narcissism” is extremely far-fetched. Also, your description of the word as “violent” mystifies me. And I think it is a heavily used word today for good reason.

As for the movie, I have not seen it, so I will defer your objections to Dr. Bertonneau.

Dr.Bertonneau writes:

It is, as Mr. Sachs says, 1959.  We are still trapped in the dolorous 1950s, when every adult person at the posh prep-school for boys was arbitrary and mean, including the mean dad, with plenty of influential money, who wouldn’t let his extremely sensitive son join the drama-club.  The only person who is not mean is the Robin Williams character, a newly arrived English master, formerly a pupil at the same school, who is cool, and who can therefore lead his students into the liberated 1960s, which all the mean people are meanly preventing from happening.  Keating, William’s character, is so cool that he manipulates his students into referring to him as “Captain, O my Captain,” a line from Walt Whitman, America’s most narcissistic poet ever (before Alan Ginsburg).  Keating is so cool that he tears out the chapter in the textbook about the “rules” that govern poetry (because, as everyone knows, rules are uncool).  Keating’s students are already so liberated, “hip,” and “1960s” that they imitate him, tearing out the same chapter of “rules” and tossing it in the waste basket.  Later, the mean dad of the extremely sensitive son complains that Keating has encouraged the son to defy his father by joining the drama club.  The mean administrators jerk the extremely sensitive son out of the drama-club, after which, just to prove how mean everyone is, he commits suicide.  And so it goes until, in the final scene, all the cool students in Keating’s class, who have been liberated into their proper individuality, stand on their desks and recite “Captain, O my Captain” in unison, while the mean headmaster informs the cool teacher that he has been fired by the school board and must vacate the premises immediately.  Keating has triumphed by becoming the center of attention.  The mean faculty is humiliated by the cool rebelliousness of the students, who have learned how to think for themselves, by imitating the cool teacher in chorus.

Perhaps “narcissistic” is the wrong word, but only because it is not strong enough.  The Dead Poets’ Society is a Fuhrer-fantasy.

Insofar as Mr. Sachs likes and admires The Dead  Poets’ Society, I can only respond with, “Each to his own taste.”

Beverly Simcic writes:

Thanks again for the excellent article on Robin Williams!! I’ve seen so much demonic emptiness in my lifetime that I am blessed and grateful that it has not entered my life. Over the last ten years or so I have lost lifetime friends who suddenly awake one morning and realize they are childless, empty and alone, then comes alcohol, drugs and depression. Some have not been able to admit to themselves that buying into feminism and the superficial cult mentality of the far left have damaged them forever.

Sometimes I just sit here and contemplate how on earth I was saved from it myself. My background is crazy, but some how in all of it, I managed to maintain faith in God and humanity—-honestly, I really don’t know how I did.

A. B. writes:

I hope you have more mercy shown to you then you have shown.

[Expletive.]

Mary writes:

I saw Dead Poet’s Society when it was released and haven’t seen it since but my irritation at the film is still fresh in my mind – we felt completely manipulated by it’s cliched characterizations. The film spoon-feeds the viewer in the most obvious way, quite like Thomas Bertonneau describes. Narcissistic is an apt description for the preening and fluffing of feathers on view if one is aware of just how much progress has been accomplished by the left, especially in the field of education. The film is also an instruction manual to educate a new generation in the woes of convention, the celebration of individualism and how to view traditional authority.

Alan A. writes:

A commenter over at the Vox Day blog wrote this and it was so profound I thought I’d share:

“For the next 30 days a lot of people will beat their chests, and talk about it, a little less each day though. From 31 days to 364 days from now, hardly anyone will say anything about his life or his work. In year, and for each year for the next 20 or so, there will be some re-runs, some little vignette on the television, maybe a pull out in People magazine.

In 25 years, a generation out, a few people here and there will remember him when going through 40 year old DVDs of Good Will Hunting or another movie. What ever happened to him? Oh yeah, he killed himself.

In 50 years, he’ll be barely mentioned. Everyone who worked with him will be either aged or dead. People who saw him live will be aged or dead. A few wistful 75 years old will remember the time they saw him live doing stand-up, and maybe remember that old show where he played an alien.

And after that, the cycle will close itself. His legacy will be dust, his bones will be dust, his ego will be dust. All the fame, all the mockery of the decent things in the world, all the lust, all the power, all the prestige will not have bought him or his soul one day of peace, nor one day of salvation. And forever more, the nothingness he earned in life will be paid back to him in death.

Pray for his soul to be held over in purgatory and to be cleansed of the stains earned from his time on earth.”

 Laura writes:

Purgatory?

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