10 Years On: Long live the Master
Entering the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles is like stepping back in time- into ancient Egypt, the Hollywood of a 100 years ago, and maybe wherever the film you’re going to see is set. Movies at their best allow for this time traveling phenomenon, sublimely transporting you to a space outside of reality’s constraints. This feeling happens less and less to me now and in that scarcity only makes me crave it more. But whatever the ultimate effect ends up being, you can always peel back the surface of the filmstrip and look at the actors and all the pieces assembled by the directors to fit their moving pictures and see the unique chronicle of a time and place and people that existed only once.
When I went to the Egyptian on a recent Saturday evening to see The Master in 70 MM, I felt these different temporal constructs converge, filtered as they were through the prism of the man still in the middle of it all, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and refracted back through my consciousness and out now into this article. I thought about his life as much as if not more than his death 10 years ago, a moving collage in my mind of many of his performances through the years, and memories of seeing the man live in Death of a Salesman. I wanted to not care about the anniversary, but it was hard to ignore, not nearly as intense as when he passed, but akin to a faded scar I had forgotten about, and now remembered, almost like recalling an old friend you haven’t talked with for a while.
When Hoffman passed I went down a filmic rabbit hole and watched or rewatched all of his movies. I wrote about all the performances with the plan of compiling the pieces into a book. But it was hard to write full pieces about the acting in all of them, and the acting of someone who was only briefly in the film in some cases. And some pieces were just plain bad. The worst thing though, and maybe this was also a symptom of living on my own, not going out much, and having a three hour work commute, was that it was a project that left me feeling drained rather than elevated, the opposite of what seeing a soaring PSH performance felt like (“MY LOYALTY?!” “SHUT! SHUT! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” “Mmmm. The minty flavor”). Writing what became the eventual book was better, but I was still left with a gnawing sense of mystery over who he really was. We spend our lives watching our favorite actors perform and give interviews, read articles about them, hear little stories about who they were, but we don’t really know them. How could we really? And would we really want to if we could?
I forgot how alive PSH’s performance is in The Master- how playful, jovial, strange, funny, sad, and angry it is, among other descriptors. Like a great movie you can go back and rewatch his performances and see something new every time, maybe it’s just minuscule and your subconscious is picking it up in a way you can’t fathom in the moment. And it makes me wonder whether I do this when I go through my daily routine, see people I know, and retread old paths that look the same but are never quite thus. And as the years go by I see things differently too, so the Hoffman I once knew is illuminated anew.
Listening to a Bill Simmons Show interview between Paul Thomas Anderson, Simmons, and Sean Fennessey from 2021, I wondered whether Anderson would mention his old muse at all in the context of directing PSH’s son, Cooper Hoffman, for Licorice Pizza. He didn’t. And he didn’t need to, because in Cooper he was already there, a person who still carries the light of his father, albeit in a different yet no less captivating way. The light of a man, an actor’s actor, a father, and an enduring inspiration…ten years on and forevermore, hiding in the light of the projector and maybe even more visible in those unseen spaces.
