Robin Williams and the Problem of Suicide

Are there any good options for a biopic? Probably not.

Like many people this week, I was instantly charmed by this viral clip of actor Jamie Costa in a dry-run teaser for a (currently) hypothetical Robin Williams biopic. I’ve always been a sucker for good impressions, and Costa’s Williams is quite uncannily good. More impressively, the clip shows he can act in his own right, as he plays a haunting moment of reaction to the news of John Belushi’s death.

Williams fans everywhere are now demanding that Costa be given a chance to prove his chops at feature length. At first, swept up in the general enthusiasm, I felt the same way. But a little more reflection, and this excellent thread by friend and fellow film critic Hannah Long, caused me to change my mind. The reason is simple: We, as a culture, don’t know how to talk about suicide.

As Hannah astutely pointed out, there is a real risk that a full biopic would eventually devolve into the film version of the Academy’s Twitter reaction to his death: Aladdin hugging the genie, with caption “Genie, you’re free.” This, unfortunately, was not atypical. Fan reactions were much the same.

But they were, perhaps, psychologically understandable. Williams was the quintessential “sad clown,” a vulnerable performer whose emotional pain was apparent even behind happy roles. Suicide was a predictable, if brutal end to decades of depression, substance abuse, and previous suicidal ideations. More recently, it came to light that Williams was suffering from a rare form of progressive dementia, which could have been confusing his ability to process what he did in the moment. But the extent of the mitigation isn’t clear. It seems plausible that he still had enough self-possession to know what he was doing and what result it would have. By then, the physical symptoms of his illness were only adding to his anguish.

I’ve sometimes heard suicide compared to the experience of a man on the ledge of a burning building, with no safety net below. There is no way forward…and no way back. So he jumps. It’s a powerful, if flawed image. It hits particularly hard in cases where physical and mental pain are compounding each other. The flaw, of course, is that the man on the ledge doesn’t want to die. If angels were to bear him away as he fell, he would gladly accept the miracle.

Fundamentally, what the analogy captures is that people can’t bear to blame the suicidal man for trying and succeeding. It seems cruel, unfeeling. It seems there is nothing to say. All they can think of are platitudes and memes, like a child’s Band-Aid over a full-body sore.

But for a loss as fresh as the loss of Williams, it likewise feels tin-eared for a biopic to run the other direction, bleak and grim. Honest as bleak and grim might be, that biopic feels like it would need at least another decade of space in between to not be simply tasteless.

All of which raises a simple question: Does a Robin Williams biopic even need to exist? Or might this not be an opportunity to pause and question the roots of biopic addiction itself? An opportunity to ask why we need to recreate lost things as soon as possible after they are lost? We already have Williams forever in what he left behind. Can we not be content with this? What more is it that we crave?

I say “we,” because I ask this of myself as much as anyone else. Although for Williams, in my case I never had the accumulated attachment of fans who grew up on his work. I played catch-up only after his death. But perhaps I came to his work at the right moment, able as I was then to sift out what had aged well from what had long since melted away in a puddle of sentimentality. And sad as it was, it was an invaluable exercise. It taught me things I never forgot about the fragility of genius, about the larger interplay of comedy and tragedy in art, in life, in the art of life. One story has always stuck with me, from the making of Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. Williams had to shoot an intense scene where his character runs down the street on the edge of a psychotic break. He kept insisting on retakes, wanting to give the scene more, wanting to wring just a few more drops of pain out of it, until finally Gilliam remembers corralling him in a hug and saying “Robin, Robin stop. We got it. We got it.”

The Fisher King featured heavily in a short creative project that would take shape out of my sifting. At the time, I was a college student between semesters, prone to fritter away my free time but also prone to intense bursts of creative energy that sometimes bore satisfying fruit. As I binged my way through Williams’s catalogue for the first time, I thought about the sort of tribute I would prefer to see, something that would balance light with dark in a way that was tasteful without seeming desperate to avoid the dark. So, over two weeks at the end of that summer, I worked it out. I also worked it out in writing, but in hindsight, I don’t know that what I wrote aged as well as what I made. I’ve written at more length for paying subscribers here about how I’ve thought about suicide over the years, how I look back at old thoughts and think “I didn’t write anything false, but gosh I was young.”

I still am, of course. But I am, at least, older. Older me, in hindsight, looks back on what I made in Windows Movie Maker and calls it good. So here it is, ending on a closing line snipped from the prophecy of Zechariah in Luke’s gospel—a reference that seems odd, but didn’t strike my college Anglican self as odd at the time. Perhaps, in the end, it is the only thing left to say: “The Dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.”