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Health & Fitness

Anita Finlay's Cruel Attack on Tom Junod's Tribute to Philip Seymour Hoffman (Or, Aristotle to the Rescue)

Tom Junod’s piece about Philip Seymour Hoffman was simply beautiful as a piece of prose. When I read a stylist like this, I think, “I want to be him (or her) when I grow up.” With one exception, no one I know who liked, shared or commented about this piece on Facebook imputed anything but noble motives to Junod, a great fan of Hoffman’s art.

But Anita Finlay seems outraged by several of Junod’s points, which she not only thinks are wrong but actually “cruel.” Cruelty implies intent. If Finlay had adduced other examples of Junod’s writing, she might have been able to make a case, even a bad case, for Junod’s cruelty. 

But she’s an actress, political writer, and radio personality, not a lawyer or a literary critic trained to make persuasive arguments based on the textual and real-life evidence before her. This of course doesn’t prevent her from taking the moral high ground with an ugliness I found far more objectionable than anything Junod wrote in good faith.

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Finlay objects to Junod’s distinction between Hoffman on the one hand, and George Clooney and Matt Damon, on the other. I’m not convinced she even understands his point: roughly, that neither one of these stars (as opposed to pure character actors) would allow such an undignified end because they have “too much to lose.”

It's not Junod's best, much less his main, point, nor am I sure he's right.  Neither Clooney nor Damon is an addict, and even if they were in this sense character actors rather than traditional "movie stars," who consistently took on such emotionally risky roles, their lives would not therefore end in so heartbreaking a way. 

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But I can at least see how a person looking to misconstrue Junod might to herself (read: in private) look at Hoffman’s de facto widow and three now-fatherless children, and wonder why his family wouldn’t count in the calculus of what he had to lose. But in the larger context of Junod’s attempt to understand the death of this great talent with such humanity in his every glance, breath, and word, only someone actively trying to get it wrong would interpret Junod as Finlay does.

However, Finlay’s objection to Junod’s admission that he was wrong–”I’d always confused Hoffman’s mastery with detachment, and assumed that he had lived by Flaubert’s charge to live an orderly life so that he could be violent and original in his work”–is completely baffling. I knew nothing about Hoffman’s personal life except that he lived in the city, graduated from NYU, had three kids with the same woman, and was a private man who neither sought nor attracted the odious spotlight of paparazzi and tabloids.

So Junod’s assumption makes perfect sense to me (and would make sense even if I’d known about his trouble some twenty years ago with heroin). That some character actors dwell oncreen and off in the darkness they portray, while other actors live relatively stable lives which anchor the risks they take in their art, is hardly controversial but worth mentioning.

Finlay seems to have some reading comprehension issue because she rails at Junod for what she believes is his too facile and naïve equation of Hoffman’s life and work. Telling us that she has been in the acting business for 30 years, Finlay adopts the role of aging schoolmistress (or old nun with a ruler) and explains in the most patronizing tone that plenty of actors are happy and stable: ”That’s why they call it acting.”

Finlay is equally incensed by Junod’s claim that “we pay to see them who look like us only when they convince us that they live in psychic spaces we could never endure.” If Finlay ever studied tragedy at Hunter College or any of her other schools, surely she’s heard of catharsis, even if her knowledge is not comparable to that of a classics scholar like Martha Nussbaum, or a philosopher like Swarthmore’s Richard Eldridge (who sat on my Orals committee and wrote compellingly on the subject in Persistence of Romanticism: Essays on Philosophy and Literature).

You need not be an academic to know that the sixth chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics identifies “pity” and “fear” as the emotions aroused by tragedy. If a tragedy does its job, the audience will experience a catharsis (or purgation) of these painful emotions. We have often been taught that the hero of a Greek tragedy suffers from a tragic flaw, hubris, which precipitates his downfall. But modern scholars focus more onhamartia than hubrisHamartia is an error of judgment in one who must be morally upright enough for us to care, but not godlike or even substantially better than we are.

Of course, we–those who produce and watch films–have long since abandoned Aristotle’s rigid standards about what sort of person counts as a hero. In so doing, we have broadened the definition of tragedy far beyond anything the Poetics at once described and prescribed.

A tragedy isn’t merely something exceedingly horrible or desperately sad, but that’s how the word has come to be used in an era marked by rampant disregard for language. Still, one could argue that some roles tackled by this (or last) generation’s consummate character actors should be considered tragic, even if they do not meet Aristotle’s criteria.

Scholars may disagree about the exact nature of hamartia (as they do about most concepts in the seminal text), but it’s fairly unambiguous that Aristotle believes we derive “tragic pleasure” from the hero’s fall, and that witnessing the consequences of his errors in judgment serves a moral function.

If tragedy didn’t serve this function and provide a unique pleasure, we might watch comedy most (or all) of the time. Aeschylus’ tragedies and Aristophanes’ comedies both fulfill the requirements for art Horace sets forth in Ars Poetica –”to delight and instruct”–but tragedy provides for a distinct sort of instruction—and pleasure.

Finally, in case Finlay hadn’t noticed–a distinct possibility because she’s a poor reader both of prose and human nature (which might be why she’s blogging and writing about politics instead of acting for a living)–Junod is on her general side of the matter. He is not one of the people calling the “thunderous and magnificent actor" (that's Aaron Sorkin) “selfish” or “weak.”

Junod didn't play it safe: he wrote a think piece which considered Hoffman’s death in relation to his art. Obviously, Hoffman was in the first instance killed by his addiction, not his art. Is it so terrible, though, to raise the possibility that “going for broke” carries real risks? Jim Carrey wrote one of the best Tweets on Hoffman, one in the spirit of Junod’s tribute: “Dear Philip, a beautiful beautiful soul. For the most sensitive among us, the noise can be too much.”

At no point did Junod present his speculations as definitive or exhaustive. Nor did he take on the larger topic of addiction. Many other artists who are also addicts, including Russell Brand, have done the admirable and (incomprehensibly) necessary work of explaining to a somewhat ignorant populace that addiction is, in fact, a disease.

I don’t doubt that Junod understands this, but Finlay was right about one thing, and one thing only: Junod did tread in “treacherous waters.” And why are those waters so treacherous? Because of people like Anita Finlay, who cannot allow anyone to express an alternate perspective. Not to mention one that is infinitely more elegant and sophisticated in its expression, and grasp of Hoffman’s art, as the 15,000 Facebook shares attest.


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