Can you imagine it?
The professor has just left the classroom. He put his few belongings in the cardboard box that in America symbolizes the end of a job. He gathers a couple of photographs: some unrealized project and a lot of films that have enchanted young and old alike. Even the statue of an Oscar, but placed sideways because it was used as a paperweight when there was a nice air circulation in the room that he used as an office whenever he opened the window.
The students have all been watching, sitting mostly in silence. They do not like the fact that the system put aside a talent so prodigious. With his lectures, the professor taught a lot to everyone, making people laugh. Because things seen from the “other side” of laughter, of irreverent mockery, make us more aware of our finiteness and smallness. But these guys in the model Hollywood class, do not rebel to the misfortune of his dismissal. They have a talent in front of them and they quite agree to put it aside to make room for more profitable trends. In their midst, there are no writers who will think of a part written especially for him, to strike his comic, yet always so clearly serious, chords. The roles that have been offered him in more than the last decade are like those books of poetry for which the value of a text is measured by a chart: they should all have at least the introduction ripped off and thrown into the trash can. It was roles far below the talent of who had to interpret them. But this is known: it’s how the system works, neither good nor bad. Just a little too insensitive, in the same oiled assembly line pace into which Chaplin himself fell while tightening its bolts. And it is a system that does not speak too much in comedy and laughs, that are deemed to be trivial things lasting the space of a round of applause.
The professor has done everything under the watchful eye of the headmaster, while outside the beautiful day runs indifferent. The sky is clear, the birds are chirping, the drama of who is sidelined fades a little in the everyday life, which is always the same and numbs us always, even if we barely notice.
Then the professor walks through the room with the sad smile of those to whom not even the luxury of a farewell is granted, as it should be. With looks that say a lot of things and words that stay mute, frozen in place behind the teeth, and a knot lodged in the throat.
The farewell was already in the scene of his most famous film and for those who grew up with images of Dead Poets Society in the eyes, Robin Williams’ career has always seemed to outlive a goodbye that was already written in the cards. Regardless, there had been, in the midst, sublime examples of acting as in Good Morning Vietnam, The Fisher King, Insomnia, Mrs Doubtfire or Awakenings, or even, as we begin to slip into the bad, which however he miraculously made sense of, The Bicentennial Man.
Finally, the professor walks out the door, gentle, quiet, almost apologizing for an intrusion that lasted the space of a semester. The suicide of his pupil is the cross that he put on his shoulders, and we should learn to do the same with that of the man Robin Williams. Provided that his was a suicide, but we leave speculations to the more pathological side of those of us who have been left behind.
And it is here that, finally, a guy stands up, gets on a bench and shouts: “Captain, oh my Captain!”, Immediately followed by another and another while the music of the full orchestra fills our heart and ears in the consolation of easy certainties.
And then …
Can you imagine it? Can you imagine one of these guys who, young and full of promise, as he pulls himself on one of these benches, stumbles and falls? Can you imagine the laughter? Can you imagine the world seen not from the higher perspective of poetry, but from the magnificently destabilizing ground level of the comedian?
Can you imagine it?
This indeed, of all the ways to remember him, would be the most beautiful.
From. Close-up (italian version)