Franz Schubert wrote that we never know the other person. No matter how much we think we know what the people who are not closest to us are like and how they feel, we must be content to stay by their side and accompany them for a while, without ever revealing their secret understand. David Cornwell said something similar in “Flying in Circles,” a documentary that was just released: No matter how deeply we engage with a person, we must be content to scratch their surface. When we put ourselves in their shoes, we are only projecting our personality onto theirs. And if Cornwell – who has spent his life trying to understand others, first as a spy and then as a novelist under the name John Le Carré – thinks so, we must all be completely resigned. Anyone who thinks they know someone is arrogant or stupid.
But the deception is so sweet that it’s understandable that millions of people – myself included – took the news of Matthew Perry’s death like that of a friend. We may be arrogant and stupid, but the pain is real and even legitimate. We cannot and will not understand their tragedy, their disorientation, their successive hells or their loneliness. We can only speculate and project our little hells and our particular loneliness onto theirs, and we will surely be sorely wrong. I’m the first.
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It is not in vain to quote Schubert and Le Carré in this memory of an actor. Schubert is the composer of unfinished works and represents what withers in abundance, what sprouts but does not flourish. Le Carré is the one who taught us that all life is an act, that no one disguises themselves better than in broad daylight, and that more truths are told in fiction than by writing with hand over heart.
From left to right: Jennifer Aniston, David Schummer, Courteney Cox, Matt Leblanc, Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry, stars of “Friends”.cordonpress
Matthew Perry is a little bit of both. He was the almost great actor he never became, despite having more than enough talent to surpass Chandler Bing. From what we’ve seen, she had just as much talent as Jennifer Aniston to build a dramatic career. Out of the entire cast of Friends, they were the only actors with this ability. Aniston managed it by playing on her own myth, but Perry didn’t know how or didn’t have the strength to do it. Let’s assume that Aniston didn’t kill Rachel Green: she metabolized her, she took her everywhere with her, with a naturalness that prevented the character from dominating her. Perry had a rather neurotic relationship with Chandler and didn’t know how to get along with him.
Jokes in a Fordist rhythm
Even in Friends he found it difficult to wear it. The demand to always be funny destroyed him. If he made a joke and no one laughed or they didn’t laugh with enough enthusiasm, Perry, by his own admission, would collapse and binge on drugs and alcohol to maintain the Fordist rhythm of joke production. In the outtakes from filming the series, Matthew Perry is the only actor who continues to make jokes after yelling “cut.” He cannot stand silence and routine. He preferred to throw his colleagues off balance and ruin a take by making a poop joke.
Perhaps Chandler’s neurosis and fragility were present in Perry as well. Who knows whether the actor transferred it to the character or whether it was the character who infected him with his temper and his way of fleeing forward and getting into mischief to avoid the destruction of real feelings.
Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Courteney Cox and Matt LeBlanc in “Friends.”
It was beautiful — a narrative success and a rare example of elegance in television that milks its asses until they burst — that “Friends” ended with the characters Chandler and Monica moving on to adult lives, but outside the frame stayed. There is reason to believe that Chandler’s character’s fate would have been similar to Perry’s. Chandler survives as long as it’s all laughter and caresses, but he collapses the day he discovers, like the hackneyed verses of Gil de Biedma, that life was serious. Chandler left before comedy became tragedy, but as in classic tragedies, his gesture expressed fate.
And of course that is unfounded speculation. Who knows what poor Perry suffered and how he allowed excessive fame to destroy him, but that same excessive fame now creates an exaggerated feeling of sadness. Half the world (those who were old enough to watch Friends don’t care, of course) are mourning the loss of their friend Chandler today. And no matter how exaggerated the crying is, it is real, just like 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 we know are fictional and played by actors whose lives are completely alien to us, is another mystery. Some of us make a living from it. Others, like Perry, also die in it.
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