Last Sunday, Kajsa and I had come back from a nice afternoon
at the Yale Art Gallery and were killing time before she had to get her train
back to NYC. As one will, I got on facebook and there saw in my feed reactions
to the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Shocked to find out he was dead, I was
even more shocked to find out it was a death related to heroin. As a “glamor
drug,” I’ve always associated it with the lifestyle of musicians, not actors.
Of course, one could come up with someone from back in the day, like John
Belushi, but he was someone who lived the rock star lifestyle, getting drugs
from a woman who used to get them for Keith Richards and Ron Wood. But Hoffman?
The blow of his death was doubled by the fact that friends
of mine who live in the Village send their son to the school some of Hoffman’s
kids attend. My friends would get a bit buzzed by seeing Hoffman walking his
kids to school like any other parent. It was dismaying to think he was carrying
on that “normal” lifestyle while also shooting up heroin. It seemed so
incongruous. My first reaction was that it was wildly irresponsible.
In reading some of the many treatments of Hoffman that have
appeared in the press since his death, I was struck by the idea of how hard it
would be to resist acquiring such drugs if you had once used them. The bigger
you get, the easier it is to get whatever you want. I tend to think that
professional and personal obligations would make such things harder, but
apparently not. The use of hard drugs tends to make one the center of the world
anyway, and if one is a celebrity, that tendency is already present. I’m still
of the opinion that, when you have three kids, using hard drugs is indulgent
and selfish to the extreme, but in Hoffman’s case, the first use predates his family
life. So, the double life, then death.
Today’s song is a response to all that from way back in
1972, Neil Young's hugely popular album Harvest (you reap what you sow?). The rock star lifestyle had famously claimed the lives of Jimi Hendrix,
Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison by then. Neil Young’s song is a response to
deaths from heroin in his circle—bandmates and, eventually, a roadie named
Bruce Berry whose death inspired the song “Tonight’s the Night,” recorded in
1973. We can say that in the early Seventies was already established the
baleful tale of the junkie death.
“The Needle and the Damage Done” is fairly simple. I first
heard it as the B side of “Old Man” and both songs show Neil Young to be a
serious young man trying to cope with his sudden fortune and fame and well
aware that fortune and fame often lead to drug abuse, as he watches “the needle
take another man.” Words which immediately come to mind in Hoffman’s death. The
video shows Young performing the song on The
Johnny Cash Show, and catches the intensity of Neil Young in performance as
well as the bitterness behind this song. The high life of stardom, Young has
realized, can be a lethal trap.
 |
| Hoffman in The Savages |
About Hoffman, I’ll just say I’ve always admired his work,
since first seeing him, probably, as an over-eager cop hassling Paul Newman in Nobody’s Fool (1994) then particularly
captivated by his roles in Boogie Nights
(1997), Magnolia (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Happiness (1998), Capote (2005), The Savages
(2007), and The Master (2012). He was
a very talented actor, full of an average-person soulfulness as well as the ability to be very subtle in his use of humor and pathos. He made emotional suffering fascinating. And it was possible until last Sunday to believe that his
best work might be still to come (even if his current projects were The Hunger Games).
Young’s song is definite in its position: “I sing the song
because I love the man”—a line which steps away from the kind of moral censure
and judgments that weigh the drug user and find him wanting (much as I did in
the first few seconds after learning the cause of Hoffman’s death). Even more than an
accident or an illness, no matter how behaviorally based death by either might
be, substance abuse deaths seem to be somehow “alterable.” All of which illustrates well-enough Young’s
statement: “I sing the needle and the damage done / A little part of it in
everyone / But every junkie’s like a setting sun.” The latter line may seem a bit sentimental,
the image of the setting sun perhaps bathing the junkie’s death in a certain
warm glow. But I don’t think Young intends that. He means the setting sun in a
somewhat more literal way: as the status of a life dedicated to junk can only
be in decline, setting—“going down.” And
“a little part of it in everyone” serves to remind that we all, mostly, have
one kind of addiction or another, some habit or tendency that can be seen as
running our life, making some of our decisions for us, and endangering us in some
way—if not putting our health at risk, then risking in some way our
relationships with others or to our work, or even to our environment. I could
go on about “the reality principle” vs. “the pleasure principle,” but I’ll stop
here.
R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Gone, gone, the damage done.
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