A thoughtful pause for those who've lost their way

I still have a list of other entries that I ought to write, and I still have my essay to complete for tomorrow, but during the breaks I take (read: Internet-surfing) I discovered quite by accident that actor Jonathan Brandis died in early November. I was on the Internet Movie Database randomly keying in has-been actors to see if they were still working and as I read Brandis's biography, these words jumped out at me, "He died in November 2003."

He was Bastian in The Neverending Story 2: The Next Chapter, and also acted in Steven Spielberg's SeaQuest DSV, a role that made him a teen idol.

Jonathan was 27 when he died. Reports are showing that he took his own life. It was particularly strange that the media was silent for the most part until two weeks after his death when reports finally trickled out. But still, I hadn't read anything about his death (and I do read several on-line newspapers) until today, and of all places on imdb.com.

I suppose it's always tragic when a young actor dies, and if he has committed suicide. After watching a person on the screen, be it big or small, you garner that strange sensation of almost knowing that person. You know his voice, his face, the color of his eyes. Sure, you've never exchanged words face to face, but that's how celebrity status is, a crowd of people think they know the actor and draw some intangible connection to him, unbeknownst to him. This peculiar intimacy leaves you shocked at an unexpected death and shatters the basest and most naive of assumptions: any actor who's famous, or has been famous, should at least have some security in life, some happiness even. Why would they take their own lives?

I'm thinking now about Leslie Cheung, who jumped to his death earlier this year because of a failed relationship, and of Australian JAG actor Trevor Goddard who played Mic Brumby, the fellow Mac (Catherine Bell) dumped just before they were to wed. He couldn't find better work after he left JAG, and my brother told me he'd seen him on TV commercials promoting vacuum cleaners. Trevor was a former boxer and his main work included Mortal Kombat, JAG and an uncredited role in Gone In Sixty Seconds. He even played a pirate in the more recent Pirates Of The Caribbean. Reports say he had been in the midst of a divorce and that he had two young sons. He was 37 when he took an overdose of prescription drugs.

One other actor's name that I had typed into the search feature at imdb.com was Shane McDermott, the rollerblading guy of Airborne, whom I once liked immensely. I was fifteen years old after all. He's still alive and living in L.A. but doesn't sound like he's very happy. In a magazine article printed in 1995, he confessed that drugs were replacing people in his life - "I just took a load of bad drugs and used them to distort my opinion towards the people that I was actually seeing at the time. And so sex was just a hollow, vacuous thing which was made full and three-dimensional by the fact that I was taking a huge amount of drugs."

"I got sick of my image, that horrible composite monster that was created. I'd read about myself and just cringe. That was part of the reason for the haircut. I thought I'd get people to concentrate on the acting, not the hair."

"I've got everything I need in LA; 50 TV channels, the sun's outside. I hate the sun, but it's nice to know it's there. I rise at 4:30 in the afternoon, in bed by 12, watch films all night. I enjoy it, I absorb culture through my backside."

Not quite what a person would expect after having seen him as the golden California boy on the big screen.

Actors can be just as depressed and lost as us plebians, although perhaps they have a little more spending power than we do. I can't say that the world ought to stop just because another failed, once-famous, actor has passed away, but I must admit that the crumbled image of the golden, beautiful lives of the famous leads us to then think, who does have the perfect life? Who are the happy ones among us, who see the world with rose-tinted glasses and smile in spite of everything that works against them? I confess I used to be one of those; although it happened more often in the past than now, people used to tell me I kept such rose-colored glasses in my pocket. I was happy, hopeful and innocent (more likely naive). I was the Duracell Bunny. I was eager for life.

I grew up, and now I'm a tired grad student, still posessing of a sunny disposition at times, still optimistic, for the most part, about my future, still got those glasses somewhere in a deep pocket, although they're rather useless and used less these days now that I see more clearly, albeit ironically, with my over-stretched eyeballs (literally in the sense of extreme myopia. Without my contacts, I'd be legally blind, I think, which explains the irony). The world isn't an easy place, but I suppose we do our best to live in it and be happy. Some just find it harder to do so.

Posted by Monoceros at December 1, 2003 7:36 PM