Category: In Memoriam

R.I.P. Treat Williams

The fine character actor Treat Williams died in a motorcycle accident earlier this week. I say “character actor” because, despite his charm, intelligence, and vaguely Scottish good-looks, Williams never quite achieved leading-man status in Hollywood. His best movie, imho, was Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, a wrenching drama about the corrupting influence of drug money on police officers. Everyone should check it out.

I don’t know why Williams didn’t get the lead in more films. Perhaps it had something to do with his physiognomy (he resembled Colin Farrell, another actor who never really clicked in Hollywood). Whatever the reason, Williams had a long, brilliant career in films, TV, and on-stage. 

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I saw him in a lot of stuff, and he was always great. His perseverance should inspire future generations of actors and artists who don’t quite fit the standard commercial mold but have talent out the yin-yang. Success is the best revenge.

Godspeed, Mr. Williams…

R.I.P. Martin Amis

Of all the novels I have read in my life, only two ever disturbed me on a deep, lasting level. One was The Constant Gardener by John le Carré. The other was Money by Martin Amis.

Money is, by any reasonable definition, a brilliant novel. Full of symbolism and thematic complexity, Money is a phantasmagoric mediation on the evils of modern capitalism, whose only purpose is to make every living human being into a customer. And the very best customers, Amis reminds us, are addicts. They simply can’t stop.

The novel’s protagonist, a low-budget film director named John Self (ahem), certainly can’t stop. Addicted to sex, booze, fast-food, and pornography, he spends his days and night rambling around 1980s London, ostensibly in preparing to shoot a low-budget film with an egomaniac has-been movie star and a young, nymphomaniac actress, amongst other tragic-comic types. The movie is being funded by a shady character named Fielding Goodney, who might just be the devil himself. 

Money is a triumph of style and imagery (although—be warned—much of that imagery is very, very gross). Self is a kind of stand-in for the entirety of modern Western civilization, and the novel might have been irredeemably bleak if not for Amis’s ferocious sense of humor, which he surely inherited from his equally brilliant father, the novelist Kingley Amis. 

Martin Amis was a very fine writer, and the world will be a lot less interesting without him.