On The Death of Robin Williams (1951-2014)

When the death of Robin Williams was announced last month, it came not just as a shock—which it certainly was—but something that had the force of a blow. Not only was the suddenness of it all so devastating, but the manner, a suicide by hanging, was almost impossible to accept.

Somewhere in the late John Horne Burns’ novel, The Gallery (1947), set in Italy during the Second World War, one of the characters asks: which is truer, a face that smiles or a face that cries? The question was put as a rhetorical exercise, for the “tragic sense of life,” (pacé Miguel de Unamuno) eventually outlasts the less profound and lighter moments, even though the two-faced icon, or masks, often displayed in theaters, gives equal billing to both the smiles and the tears. But incomparable comic that he was, Williams, even when his face expressed the insanity and the absurdity of the comic, underneath the wild and rollicking comedy, lurked a hint of something deeper.

Underneath the laughing, joking appearance was the reality of black despair, which testifies to his power not only as a comic, but as a consummate actor. In him we had the iconic Pagliaci—the clown who made us all laugh even as his own heart was breaking. There was always the hint of something deeper at work when he participated as an invited guest on late night TV talk shows—the hyper-activity, the clowning, the gags—perhaps meant to hide something more troubling.

Sam Bluefarb is Prof. Emeritus, Los Angeles Harbor College.

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