I rewatched Good Will Hunting this week at our little cinema club between me, my sister and our Filipina neighbour, and I remembered I wrote something about Robin Williams on my journal some time ago. Here it is…
I had a crush on him when I was a kid, seeing him in Hook, Jumanji, and as Teddy Roosevelt in Night at the Museum. Well, I don’t remember why. But since I heard that other people loved him I was glad to being liking his stuff.
I think I saw clips of Hook shown at Sunday school and then on TV, and I was invested in his Peter Pan’s story. Jumanji was something I saw in parts, not as a whole, because it was showing on cable TV (we didn’t have cable at home) and I could only watch it when we visited my cousin’s house on Sundays (they had cable). I saw Night at the Museum at a full theatre and it was super memorable. Later on, I think I was 15 or something, my family watched Mrs. Doubtfire on TV either in the Philippines or in Nepal.
Some weeks ago, Reddit had this trend of, “What’s the first movie you think of when you see this actor?” and I decided to try the Robin Williams post on my parents over breakfast. They smiled and said in rapid-fire unison (almost, one of them messed up the title HAHA), “Mrs. Doubtfire!” Sweet.
When the COVID pandemic started, our profs began assigning us films to watch and discuss. It was unspoken, but I think it was a way for the university to comfort us during that time when the whole world was going crazy and even they didn’t know exactly what to do. Anyways, Dead Poets Society was the first films assigned to us. Before that, I had tried to watch it on the airplane from Manila to Yerevan, but my TV glitched and I never got past the first few minutes. So I saw it for the first time because of that class.
I liked how Robin’s character was named after a poet, John Keats, I guess. I wish he was my teacher (although I’ve had the honour of having teachers, profs and mentors who were like him). Just a few weeks before the pandemic started, my American Lit prof, an awesome Bulgarian lady, let us stand on the tables to recite ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe – I didn’t even know about the Dead Poets Society scene before that.
I started writing on the topic of him while doing my ‘Insomnia’ cinematography project. I read an interview of him working on the set, trying to get under Al Pacino’s skin and describing Chris Nolan as an English army officer. The interviewer wrote in the beginning that it was a phone interview, and when Robin heard that he was from Scotland, he did a Mrs. Doubtfire voice for him 😆 It was a delight reading the whole interview – he is just so naturally funny and endearing – so many jokes nestled in his answers, a bit shocked seeing him swear but I’ve seen it before :p
And of course, while I was writing about him, the second most immediate thought I had was about his death.
When I got the news that he killed himself, I was at KISC for some fair or activity, at the basketball court (KISC is an international school in Kathmandu, where my friends went – I was homeschooled). I don’t remember who it was who told me, my mom maybe. I didn’t know how to react – when I’d hear the news about someone dying, I would usually give a smile of disbelief, “No really, are you joking?” as a last attempt to allay the truth – or was it to counteract the shame of death, the shock?
I remember seeing an article about it on Dad’s laptop at home at night and Dad commenting on his death and processing it with me (I was just a 13-year-old then): suicide being a sin and him feeling sad that Robin was depressed (and an alcoholic) and his daughter being devastated. Dad said that life is really like that – people sin, aren’t perfect, they need God, that Robin wasn’t satisfied with his life, the success. Ohhh… but he brought such joy and mirth to us.
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