What Robin Williams Was

With the passing of Robin Williams this week, there has been an outpouring of grief from social media we haven't seen in a while.  Williams' career was big enough that it would make literally anyone on the planet envious.  His passing (and the manner of his passing) is shocking and saddening.

With a career as long and as sucessful as Williams' he ended up meaning a lot of different things to different people.  For those old enough, he was the bafoonish alien Mork.  For most people under 30, he was a world class movie star of family comedies.

I remember seeing Aladdin in theaters when I was six.  For years afterward it was my favorite Disney film as it was for many other young boys of my generation.  Looking back, I suspect that was in no small part because Aladdin was (and still is) one of the only animated Disney films to feature a male protagonist but then and now everyone's favorite character was Robin Williams' Genie.  A character so transcendent that he has become a staple of the Disney brand featuring in many stories, games, attractions, and shows that have no connection to his source material.

Then came Hook and Jumanji and Mrs. Doubtfire.  Robin Williams blew by Tim Allen and Chevy Chase as the definitive schmuck for family comedies in the first half of the 90s.  He moved on from there to adult comedies (The Birdcage is probably my favorite Williams' comedy), more serious work and an Oscar for Good Will Hunting.  It was also during this time that young fans like myself began to grow and explore his earlier classics Good Morning, Vietnam, The Fisher King and Dead Poets Society.

In the 2000s Williams' film work became more sparse and more sporadic in quality.  For every Happy Feet there was an RV.  The most important work of Robin Williams late career was in his return to his beginning.  

Stand up.

His Broadway show in 2002 let Williams unleash his wildly energetic force on a live audience and gave the United States some of its very first 9/11 comedy.  In 2009, he returned on HBO for his raucous "Weapons of Self Destruction."

Robin Williams was one of the first people that made it okay to laugh about terrorism.

When you look at the sort of man Robin Williams was, the sheer manic nature of him, his death is no less tragic but perhaps not quite so shocking.  One that reaches the ceiling in a single leap will always hit the ground twice as hard.  But what he has left behind is a legacy of one man that told many great and varying stories.

Below is a video of a memorable scene from Dead Poets Society in which Williams' character John Keating explains to a class of impressionable young men the value of poetry and art.  In it he quotes Whitman, and inadvertently declares his own very potent self worth.

"O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse."