RIP, William Hurt (and some thoughts on The Big Chill)

Watched The Big Chill again last night, to mark William Hurt's passing - an easy win for my favourite Hurt performance, with only his turn as Eddie Jessup in Altered States vying against it. 

I was fascinated by The Big Chill as a kid - moreso than I think you'd expect a 15 year old, born in 1968, to be, so much so that I actually made clothing choices based on the way one character in the film dressed (pretty much the only time in my life I did that). 

It's not entirely inexplicable. Growing up in the 1980's meant that 60's culture was everywhere, especially on the radio. At the time I thought it meant that there was truly something special about the popular culture of the 1960's, absent from the music people were making at the time; later, in the 2000s, I see the same thing happening with 80's culture, with the same bands I'd dismissed as pop fluff in 1985 being aggressively and obnoxiously recycled by the media - I even think I heard Flock of Seagulls on the radio the other day - and have figured out that it's MOSTLY just a market phenomenon, then as now, with radio stations recycling the music made by and for youth 20-30 years previous to capitalize on the tastes of the demographic with purchasing power (in fact the same youth, but now older and wealthier and much more satisfied with themselves). 

Still, it seemed to me necessary as a teenager to understand and come to terms with the 1960's, and I spent a lot of time on 60's and early 70's music, flipping through books by Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, and Abbie Hoffman, watching movies like Woodstock, trying to puzzle out what had happened to the culture - how the people dancing in the mud and screaming out the Fish cheer had kind of disappeared into the straight world, and how what seemed like a burgeoning revolutionary social movement had dissolved completely, its members dropping off their Phil Ochs records at a thrift store on their way to their newfound careers as... whatever. 

The Big Chill was a great film for contemplating all that. It's somewhat oblique about what it does -  subtly judging some of its characters for having sold out any ideals they once held - especially the ones played by JoBeth Williams and Tom Berenger. The characters it has the most sympathy for are the angriest and saddest of them, from Nick the drug dealer (played by Hurt) to Alex, the suicide (Kevin Costner, whose scenes were cut from the film)... or the people who find ways to reassert their ideals in a changed landscape (Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place). There is a climactic sex scene with two couples (in different locales) that seems to condemn one pair and elevate the other - but the film is very quiet - gentle, subtle in how it articulates this, so much so that it would be possible to miss that it is passing judgement altogether. It also has some brilliant moments where complex and rich character development is attained without dialogue at all (for instance, when Glenn Close's character decides that she's going to ask her husband to sleep with her best friend, who wants to get pregnant; if you're invested in the characters, if you've been paying enough attention, you can see what she's thinking without it needing to be articulated, with only a bit of camera motion, zooming in on her face, to give it away). Meg Tilly - who as far as I know still lives in my old hometown - is great in the movie, too - playing a naive young woman who is far smarter than most of the other characters give her credit for being; there's a scene where she laughs at a joke made by Nick ("What's for dessert?") that has some of the most authentic, unforced laughter I've seen an actor produce, ever. I watched the film 20 or more times as a teenager, from a first-run theatrical screening at the long-gone Starlight Cinemas in Maple Ridge to dozens of viewings on home video; I was taken enough with the character of Nick that I actually bought a corduroy jacket in emulation of him, which I wore daily to junior high school for a couple of years. 

The film holds up. There's a LITTLE boomer self-celebration that you have to rise above - fun "musical montages" that are invitations to dance along with the characters, that can maybe encourage viewers to watch the film in a shallow, self-congratulatory way, which boomers (a shallow and self-congratulatory demographic, for the most part) would probably try to do regardless - they're the Walt Whitman generation, if you will, turning anything into an excuse to celebrate themselves. But it's good music, and without allowing for a bit of pleasure, the film would probably not have been a hit (maybe only in Europe).  

Anyhow, I was saddened to hear that William Hurt died the other day (prostate cancer, if you missed it - my recent experiences have me a bit attuned to death by cancer, with a lot of what I'm taking in culturally - Warren Zevon and Frank Zappa records, for instance, or the Bowie Ball - having some connection to the disease). 

Hurt's career seemed to go downhill after the 1980's, which saw him getting fewer lead roles and appearing in films I was generally less interested in seeing (though I did like him in Cronenberg's A History of Violence). 71 is still far too young to go, and thanks to The Big Chill and Altered States, especially, I'll always have some feeling of connection to the man. 

(Note - since I wrote this, I've been educated a bit in just how abusive Hurt apparently was to the women in his life, which I had not realized on writing this. I had remembered a high-profile trial, maybe a divorce, where some ugly stuff got said and Hurt came off poorly - and always assumed that he helped torpedo his own career thus, because he went from an A-lister starring in big films to a B-list actor either with the lead role in little films or little roles in big films... the article I linked suggests his career was "unscathed" by all this, but I don't think it was. I did enjoy those roles of his, early on. But maybe I'll remove the words "rest in peace" here - if you're like that to people in your life, peace may not be what you've earned).