Franz Schubert wrote that we never know the other. No matter how much we think we know what those closest to us are like and how they feel, we must settle for passing by them and accompanying them for a while, without ever understanding the mystery of them. David Cornwell said something similar in fly in circles, a documentary that has just been released: no matter how much we dig into a person, we must settle for scratching their surface. When we put ourselves in his place, we only project our personality onto his. And if Cornwell—who has spent his life understanding others, first as a spy and then as a novelist under the name John Le Carré—thinks like this, the rest of us must resign ourselves completely. Anyone who thinks they know someone is presumptuous or foolish.
But the deception is so sweet that it is understandable that millions of people—myself included—have received the news of Matthew Perry’s death as if it were that of a friend. We may be pretentious and foolish, but the pain is genuine and even legitimate. We do not understand nor will we be able to understand his tragedy, his disorientation, his successive hells or his loneliness. We can only speculate, projecting our little hells and our particular solitudes onto theirs, and we will surely be monstrously wrong. Me the first.
It is not gratuitous to quote Schubert and Le Carré in this memory of an actor. Schubert is the composer of unfinished works and represents what withers in plenitude, what sprouts but does not flourish. Le Carré is the one who taught us that all life was an act, that no one camouflages better than in broad daylight and that more truths are told with fiction than by writing with your hand on your heart.
Matthew Perry is a bit of both. He was the almost-great actor that he never became, despite being armed with more than enough talent to surpass Chandler Bing. From what we saw, he had as many gifts as Jennifer Aniston to build a dramatic career. Of the entire cast of Friends, were the only actors with that ability. Aniston did it by playing with his own myth, but Perry didn’t know how or didn’t have the strength to do it. Let’s say that Aniston did not kill Rachel Green: he metabolized her, he took her with her everywhere with a naturalness that prevented her character from dominating her. Perry had a more neurotic relationship with Chandler and did not know how to get along with him.
Jokes at a Fordist rhythm
Already in Friends It was difficult for him to carry him. The demand to be funny all the time destroyed him. If he made a joke and no one laughed or they didn’t laugh with enough enthusiasm, Perry would go down, by his own admission, and gorge himself on drugs and alcohol to maintain the Fordist rhythm of joke production. It can be seen in the outtakes from the filming of the series: Matthew Perry is the only actor who continues making jokes when they have yelled cut. He can’t stand silence or routine. He preferred to upset his colleagues and ruin a take by making a poop joke.
Perhaps Chandler’s neurosis and fragility were also in Perry. Who knows if the actor contributed it to the character or if it was the character who infected him with his temper and his way of fleeing forward, resorting to mischief to avoid the devastation of real feelings.
It was beautiful—a narrative success and a rare example of elegance in a television that milks donkeys until they burst—that Friends closed with the characters of Chandler and Monica moving into an adult life that was left out of the frame. There is reason to suspect that the fate of Chandler’s character would have been similar to that of Perry. Chandler survives as long as it consists of laughing and having pet ducks, but that collapses the day he discovers, like the well-worn verses of Gil de Biedma, that life was serious. Chandler exited before the comedy became a tragedy, but, as in classic tragedies, he carried the destiny in the gesture.
And this, of course, is baseless speculation. Who knows what poor Perry suffered and how he allowed himself to be destroyed by hyperbolic fame, but that same hyperbolic fame now produces a hyperbolic feeling of sadness. Half the world (those who were old enough to see Friends, of course, young people don’t care about this) mourns today the death of his friend Chandler. And no matter how hyperbolic the crying is, it is real, just as the laughter at his jokes was real and the affection we had for him was real. Why this happens to us, why we feel this attachment to characters that we know are fictitious played by actors whose lives are completely foreign to us, is another mystery. Some of us live on it. Others, like Perry, also end up dying in it.
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#Chandler #Bing #life #Matthew #Perry