Caricature's Lonely Soul with Subtlety

"The material creation is thus an act of necessity, a means for the light-substance to recover what it has lost of itself."--Manichaeism and Its Legacy, Introduction

Celebrity is not a perfect insulator, now that time has softened the blow of Williams' demise. We cannot know if he thought of the very public struggle of Michael J Fox before he hung himself, perhaps not wanting to become another spokesman for Parkinson's as his improvisational genius lost its vigor if not its acuity. Still, Robin Williams wasn't poor, certainly not spiraling into public welfare territory, whatever his problems. In most of his over 40 film work, his nascent childlike innocence wears a bit thin, but had he lived, the embittered widow he plays in Authority is intriguing, a sinister in between figure, with Dick Wolf offering a tacit homage to Terry Gilliam's Orwellian parodies, and Robin reenacting his Manichean figure from One Hour Photo, which amounts to the best acting from a comedian I've ever seen. There are elements of Jackie Gleason's Lonely Soul in these performances, not that dowager knows what was studied.

Being a bird on a wire caught in a dualistic war between opposing forces is not necessarily a way past binary choices, but Robin Williams had that rare ability to express differance in the same way Derrida went in search of it through pushing the boundary of linguistic decorum. Common sense ruralists dismiss Derrida as "word games," and his reputation now suffers in some quarters, or treated as comic relief by archaeologists in inner-disciplinary conferences, and yet he has his defenders, precisely because his textual appropriations offer a tertiary struggle.  In Authority, particularly, Williams moves Meloni's acting up a few notches from sheer A list intimidation, much like my Roman temper despising African obfuscation causes it to tremble autocratic methodology [in translation, white apartment managers would not have attacked me as relentlessly as drafty and vacant niggers like Trudy  and Debra. End clarification, though I am mindful that I want the 2016 Trenton lawyer's assistance, if the firm can take aim at the right cow] , and the conclusion of the 2008 episode of SVU does indeed evade the pat conceits of detective stories. Williams isn't simply entertaining in these examples. He is disturbing, and I wish he had held on, for a little while, but such mania as made his talent has implosive elements.