weird odd lame icon, a sort of tribute

Lots of times, I feel like a weird odd lame queer and I tried various ways to suppress it. And when I’m down and deeply about (which is always), nothing seems to resonate until I try to contemplate on it in cinematic terms. Guess I’m a film nerd after all, and there’s a cinematic answer to any emotional crack…

The late Philip Seymour Hoffman blurted one of the best lines in Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS “we’re uncool” and the ever quotable

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool”

It comes off obviously in his own conception of a character who’s an offspring of the flower revolution finding its ground within rock & roll power play and its impending demise. And of course, his Lester Bangs is a writer.

It’s also an example of how Hoffman stood and moved and uttered as an auteur’s actor, having been in the best of Solondz, Crowe and especially PTA but before you could pigeonhole his work into some cinematic pantheon or dismiss him altogether, I’d say he was an actor who made you feel with him — especially if you hadn’t much relatability with the main characters conceived in the 1990s and 2000s, but with the flickers of the supporting roles that keep the narratives grounded. You could say Hoffman was an auteur in his own right, with a consistent and carefully curated roster of performances under a common thematic.

Hoffman portrayed a handful of weird lame queers (FABULOUS & BOOGIE NIGHTS) who were pushed down to slouching around because they lost the game to insecurity. They seem to grapple with cutthroat attitudes and lifestyles but the environments riddled with crime and capital make cutting throats necessary for moneymaking ventures that are always out to pick on the weakest of the freaks and make them serve the status quo from their own constructed spaces. His characters kept their sting elsewhere, the fighting chances diffused to a small flame enough to just keep warm and kicking.

The camera lingers in the depths where one can easily mistake his characters for an incel or a creep. And with how the younger audiences nowadays police these types, Hoffman gave them some sort of empathy. When he does assert power, such as in THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, THE MASTER or DOUBT, it is always associated with middling suspicion. And yet, like the nurse in MAGNOLIA, they persist (in some capacity) with hidden desires to give pieces of themselves for something or anything that’s good. If one should say he was typecast as a fat creep, then it’s to the characters’ benefit. With Hoffman, there are no easy pieces and he moves and sways with complexity and tinges of sympathy and familiarity, it’s no cardboard creep with an innate kindness, but a kindhearted loser who was painfully made to be the villainous or downtrodden.

Exemplified by his turn in SYNECDOCHE NEW YORK, he usually played laidback men within a certain “crisis” wrought about by flawed systems. They’re languishing with arrested development, or slouchy and rebellious when they manage to build their own away from the corrupt systems. The big picture is what he surrounds himself in, plays with it and bumblingly curses it, punches through the very bitterness of a pathetic modern life. Look what they’ve done and what they still do.

And then, there’s Hoffman in Solondz’s HAPPINESS: the weird slob which is interestingly his most iconic character for indie geeks. So it’s a very bizarre character in a bizarre movie but reading deeply into this embarrassing tale, you can’t deny you have felt a familiar bizarreness in yourself as Solondz was also known to pick on sunny portrayals by keeping his gaze in the shadows. In the animated melodrama MARY & MAX, an image of loneliness is wrapped around Hoffman’s role not in the way of biting into certain aww-shucks stereotypes but in drawing out yet another visage to the feeling of being cast out. You feel him even in animation, because of that voice.

A deep dark lingering painful voice. Hoffman portrayed Truman Capote in the film’s own way of navigating what is a universal truth among the privileged: sucking out the blood of losers — and in CAPOTE, it comes with a sense of inexplicable guilt. A new voice that’s thin, whispy and whisperry to a point of a ghastly mimic, as Capote desiring is also put into question. What a strange circumstance when he begins to fetishize a criminal’s backstory to the point of riddling with romance (a more intriguing affectionate relationship this side of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) only to engage it with a suspicion brimming in himself. The film portrays the writing of “In Cold Blood” as the cause celebre of a prolific career, moreso for queer readers like myself who found Capote confronting his own antics within the writing elite. Hoffman’s oeuvre is in full circle with this Oscar-winning turn, when he portrayed such an upper class party mascot making fun of all the affluent absurdities… but also the absurdities of the working class? CAPOTE bears the irony itself rising in the bigger picture of Hoffman’s own tapestry stabbing the echelons for what they do to the losers and what the losers can do in their most dangerous defenses.

But for me, Lester Bangs will always be central in Hoffman’s work, in the very few touching moments you’d recognize in being with art junkies and loving them. Perhaps Crowe knew how to best showcase what Hoffman brings to the character. He is visually present but most times, he’s on the radio or on the phone providing the wisdom of an “enemy” outsider who built his own sharp perspective on an art form that bleeds twinning joys and heartaches. The main character and the audience learn from his own grounded (albeit world-weary) critique.

There’s an understanding that comes when you’re one who couldn’t make it big and so you make it quite small and gooey. You’d only know those quiet dark spots where a mind can safely unfold with another when you’re brimming with creativity and intelligence while getting beat down all your life. These common traits of the best of his characters (the constant rejection and finding scraps of warm acceptance) makes Philip Seymour Hoffman an icon of his heyday — a chameleon who chose to give face, body and the soothing rasp of a voice to characters still trying it out alive.

This is no call-to-action for the freaks to remain in the darkness of fringes, as Hoffman would soon succumb to a devastating end and take that potential along with him. But perhaps his legacy lives on for us knowing freaks to watch his films and weave this unique tapestry to actually see the parameters of where we were so carefully corralled. To imagine him if he lived, he can rightfully play cerebral Moses breaking free and letting the freaks — in all their awkward cryptics, their cranky hideousness, their monstrosities, their raging dark truths — to rule this town once and for all.

“My advice to you. I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.”