Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Loss of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but Actually on the Sad Nature of Mental Projection.

I find myself reading the Hunger Games Trilogy, specifically Mockingjay, at a particularly unfortunate historical moment. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, finds himself tragically shuffled from this mortal coil during my reading of the book, which at this time is being turned into a movie, two movies if I’m being really accurate, that sit, mid production without one of their most talented cast members. I find myself in the midst of a rather morose confluence of circumstances, where, having seen Catching Fire, after having read it, I had been happily mentally projecting the image of Hoffman onto his literary counterpart, Plutarch Heavensbee (Though not an ounce of my being remains as might be called, “god-fearing,” the dreadful irony is not lost on me that this great man ended his acting career as man named to evoke some celestial insect. Or a cry of disbelief. Heavens be! Heavens be…).

I, mid way through the book, Hoffman possibly midway through his radiant burning-star phase, the movie(s) midway through being made, we all were left to slip into chaos and sadness moving forward. Fuck. Now I am supposed to finish this thing? Thinking of him, this real man, his real death, as he plays a fake man staging a real war after crafting fake games that were deadly real to lose for their fake contestants? Look, it’s shitty of me, it is lowly and self-absorbed to be thinking it, but I felt a kinship with this man. For whatever we didn’t share, I like to think we had both committed ourselves to a craft. I know next to nothing about his life, I don’t draw any sort of connection to it in any way, other than to say that I felt he reached out. I felt his arm extended out to me, as I imagine is the intended effect, so bravo on him. Thus is it really so wrong of me to admit that I very earnestly and continually aspire to do the same? That in part, it is because of the success of people like Hoffman, that I’m inspired to attempt. To reach out my arm in some words and ask, hey, Lades, Fellas, dare I hope, much like Mr. Hoffman, to open your eyes to the real gunk of humanity? To slather yourself in said gunk along with me that we might emerge as new beings, able to maneuver the gunk more effectively? Having maybe grown? It’s a hubris and something blasphemous to even hope, I get that, but I have decided to try and deiced to hope, as I think we all do if we are capable of it. And this man, Phillip, he evoked and invited that from us and I’m left here, with the weight of his legacy sitting in the black lines on the page of a very very mediocre book by my honest opinion. It belittled him to me in those moments, and I felt horrible as an active agent of this man’s belittlement, such a great man does not deserve to be thought of as small in his final moments, not as a junky or mass of flesh suffering, but as a body of art, a living body of work, diminished by a simple association.

But I finished the book. Bad taste of his death in my mental-mouth as I whisked through the pages, his name sputtering each time it came up. Puh. Puh. Puh, Plutarch. President Snow coughing blood. Puh Puh Puh. Plunging. A needle into his arm and my mental construct of him deep into something mushed and soiled. The headlines of his death are like wet newspaper in my mind. All of it sticks together. Hoffman in his many roles, in pictures of his “real life” which is to me as much a construct as any in Them Good Ol Games. Peeta and a fake love to survive. Is that just Hoffman? If I can suitably draw comparisons between this real-as-real-can-get "Out Out Brief Candle"moment and the bordering-on-hackneyed musings of the role of actor vs. person in a YA novel, do they start to become legitimate moments of artistic transcendence? The real question here is, I guess, can the brilliance of a talent like Hoffman’s (and yeah, I know he’s newly dead and I’m rushing to throw laurels on his corpse, but let us be very honest with each other for a moment, and admit, out loud, that his man was unique), can a talent like that elevate the mundane to the sacred?

I can tell you this, my mind tried at all turns. Every bit of Plutarch became something to explore in a retroactive light of comparative stardom, “How now does this now reflect on Hoffman?” The rest of this character, which he will never fully act out. In the days since his death the news has come down that they will be keeping the art of the movie(s) in tact by artificially, via some magic of computers that, again, if we are all honest with ourselves for a moment, approaches that line that Arthur C. Clarke is so often quoted of defining science fiction, “A technology so suffieciently advanced that it borders on magic,” to paraphrase. The very kind we read again and again on the pages of Collin’s book. Magical salves that heal bones, erase burns over night. But nothing to piece together a dead child. In Catching Fire, for a moment, Prim’s death is animated in possibility. I wouldn’t call it foreshadowing, but in the moments of the screams from the Mockingjays, the death is real to Katniss. Not just a simple manipulation on a machine. In the real world, we can also animate the dead with the push of a button, but we cannot resurrect him. I then wonder if the truth is that we are putting ourselves through some kind of new unknown torture.