The actor has come to believe we do not exist. We are all just extras in a shadow play. It was some time after he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and around the time of the disintegration of his third marriage that he realized this. He had long done his best to live with his depression, but now, finally, he was coming through the other side. He stopped Prozac. After all, if there’s no personality to improve by taking the pill every day, why take it. He’s never felt better, he even quit drinking.
His agent calls with a part, and he agrees to read the script, but it’s out of habit. He realizes now that’s all it ever was. He was as much Romeo as he was Tybalt when his high school staged the tragedy his junior year, and he was as much sitting in the audience stoned out of his mind as anything. It was not him in that junior college production of Hamlet which made him decide to become an actor. It was instead a confluence of biology and events: neurotransmitters and chemical reactions, birthdays, holidays, weddings and funerals, coincidences both macro- and microscopic.
Except that there are no coincidences.
For two incidences to co-occur there would have to be time, which there is not. Do you believe in personality? he asked the entertainment reporter who stopped him on the red carpet at the awards show recently. I don’t… none of this actually matters… but there is a wonderful fragrance in the air…
When she pressed him to explain further he did. Why not?
I believe peace lies beyond personality, he told her. Beyond invention of the skies… it’s deeper than that. We’re a cluster of molecules, popping caplets to try and create more pleasant covalent bonds.
The reporter had been speechless.
And the various chemical reactions that combined to form the actor interacted with his experiences, both current and past, and called for a sense of compassion for the reporter, because she truly didn’t understand. Or to put it another way, the perfect chemical storm that was Him, Here, Now, in this ever-present infinite moment, experienced the combination of neurological processes which manifest mentally and correspond textually and vocally to the vibrations of vocal sound that coalesce to create in English that emotion which is denoted as empathy. In other words, he was compelled to try to summarize.
I believe we’re a field of energy dancing for itself, he said. It doesn’t actually matter. Any of it.
Shrugged.
And later, when the video went viral, he shrugged again, though this reaction was not in reality him doing anything. It was just him being himself out of habit. Whoever, whatever that was. They questioned his mental health, said it was known he had struggled with depression for years.
He laughed out loud, though there was no one around. It was just him at home looking at his phone. Or the absence of him, to be accurate. In short, it is endlessly entertaining that this is what passes for news.
