Recently, the Dylan Farrow letter and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death have underscored for
me a couple of things I’ve come to find very alienating about the internet--or at least my
corner of it, which amounts to a message board and Facebook. I’d rather post these thoughts
here than there; people would take personal issue, and, as I think I’ve said before, I don’t
have the stomach for such arguments anymore.
There’ve been hundreds of ILX posts about Dylan Farrow, and, as with virtually every emo-
tionally charged news story that flares up over there--Trevaughn Martin, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,
Aurora--the thread followed the usual pattern: a few dozen posts, someone says something
in not exactly the way that someone else thinks it should be said, people start sniping at
each other, the word “idiot” makes its first appearance, and before long somebody’s telling
somebody else to go fuck himself. Every time. If you end up on the wrong end of that, you’re
lucky if only one person takes issue with you; usually there’s a pile-on, with one person
surrounded on all sides. I’m very careful about posting on such threads. Most of the time
I avoid them completely (posting, I mean--I read them, or at least as much as I can keep
up with, largely in anticipation of the train wreck), and if I do post, I’ll let at least
three or four days go by and studiously stay clear of saying anything that’s going to cause
me grief. I wanted to go on there and say that I wasn’t sure if Allen was guilty or not;
by way of contrast, I felt a lot more sure that Michael Jackson was guilty. Didn’t dare--
I never would have made it back alive.
Celebrity death. I liked Philip Seymour Hoffman a lot--first noticed him in Boogie Nights
(don’t think I connected him with Twister at the time, which came a year earlier), wrote a
bit about him on this site soon after, saw many of his films over the coming years. I was
glad to see him win an Academy Award for Capote; beyond just his performance, it’s an excel-
lent film that should be seen. If a lot of actors reach us because they’re either glamorous
JFKs or schlubby, everyman Nixons we can more easily relate to, PSH was a consummate Nixon.
And he seemed revered by the people who worked with him.
But, his everyman qualities aside, I didn’t personally know him. I don’t feel gutted or
devastated, and I have a hard time understanding the online chorus of people who say they
do. Maybe that’s a failing on my part, I don’t know. I mean, if anything, a film actor
leaves more of himself behind than any other kind of artist--we can actually watch Hoff-
man’s performances for as long and as often as we want.
I spend a lot of time on ILX, and enough (though less) on Facebook. There’s a lot I get
out of both. But these are two phenomena I find odd and annoying.