What Will Suffice

I should say, at the outset, I am not a huge comic book fan. Well, rather, I should say, I am not any kind of comic book fan. There is something forbiddingly male about them, to me, and moreover, something alienating about their conviction that the world is easily divisible into the good guys and bad and that life is as simple as choosing sides. I was born with the wrong intellectual wiring to find that view engaging.

What I am a fan of, or was a fan of, I suppose, is Heath Ledger. Oh, I know. I know he was not whatever person I have imagined him to be through whatever I have seen in the media and gleaned from his small set of performances. I have known enough actors to be skeptical of their types, and in particular of the talented ones, because they always seem to have an irritating self-awareness of how very good they are, and they can smell your hunger for a good performance from miles away.

But when I saw Brokeback Mountain, I was shocked. That performance is the least judgmental, and also the least sentimental, depiction of a rural-dwelling, inarticulate person I think I will ever see. And you know, I did not think that the movie was perfect. I did not think it was well-directed, though I suppose it could have been worse. I saw at a screening at Lincoln Center, one I will always remember because Larry McMurtry revealed, there, that before Ang Lee was contracted to do the film, Joel Schumacher had been on board. A butterfly flaps its wings, and the whole world changes.

The day Heath Ledger died – and he died, by the way, just blocks from where I live – I was also taking the day off but then because a play I had directed was in its final dress rehearsal. I left my apartment about the same time he was discovered. We found out during the rehearsal when someone checked their email and saw the news.

When I came home that evening, at one in the morning, the neighbourhood was actually, and I know this sounds silly but it’s true, saturated with apprehension. Walking by a bar nearby, I heard someone, presumably a reporter, ask a patron, “So did you ever meet him?” (I had heard he had been there, though he was one of the few neighbourhood celebrities I never saw in person.) And even without the name the context was immediately apparent. I thought to myself, I guess we don’t get a lot of moments like this, where you don’t have to explain yourself fully to be understood.

All of this to say that when I saw The Dark Knight I went by myself, albeit somewhat unwillingly. I emailed a few friends asking if they wanted to come and made some kind of joke about how I was afraid I would cry if I saw it on my own. These friends are not actors, or even particularly interested in pop culture, and in retrospect I’m not even sure why I asked them. One was hard-pressed to identify Beyoncé when he saw her in person, though he could no doubt give a twenty-minute speech on the 1944 Blitz of London on a moment’s notice. When they all declined there was a part of me that was relieved.

I haven’t so much to say about the movie or even about his performance as I do about the way you could, audibly, hear the audience exhale their collectively held breath at the end of the scenes in which he appeared. There was a real comfort in that sound to me. I am not the only one who cares about this. I am not the only one who gets involved. I am not the only one who finds it strange to see his face all twisted up with decay and pain.

And, you know, I care about a great many things. I care about feminism a lot. I care about my cat, cliché that I am. I care about New York, and I care about universal health care, and I also care about being the kind of person my friends can call in the middle of the night without second thoughts. My caring about Heath Ledger and the fact that he died, maybe out of his own stupidity and waste and lack of self-care, but nevertheless way sooner than people, let alone talented people, should have to, is not to the exclusion of any of these things.

But this caring, of course, is uncool, uncool, it garners me only intellectual demerit points, because Hollywood, it is artistically bankrupt, didn’t you know? The Oscars are a scam and Death Cab sold out ages ago and the world is going to hell in a handbasket because the automatons of the world are watching way too many America’s Next Top Model marathons on VH1. And here I am thinking about some dude, some celebrity, who never built a single school in Africa his whole life, who didn’t even adopt a cute orphan from an impoverished nation to show that he felt some connection to the things larger in life than the movies. Couldn’t he at least have done something like that?

And if he had, I suppose, it would be turned into another reason to dismiss any sense that here lies a human being and he once occupied a noticeable amount of space in the world. It would make it easier to cut out some noise he generated that keeps echoing on, to relegate it to the back of our heads like some occasionally annoying but mostly faint drone of elevator music, and isn’t it nice to get some peace and quiet now and again?

The best response I have to that is that I would rather be deaf in a cacophony of sound than in silence. I would rather know the world is there than be unable to tell. And so, if walking out of that movie theatre in a funk because it was the last full manifestation I’d get of a person who once did something true and admirable, I guess I’ll take the label “uncool.” I guess I will.