The End of Entertainment?

David Thomson (at TNR) thinks that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, and his legacy of acting, raises some fundamental questions about what we take as entertainment these days:

“No movie actor has risked so much on despondency. This is not to say that every film star has been single-mindedly happy: we know enough to appreciate the uneasiness in Chaplin and Keaton, Tracy and Bogart, ?or Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis, from biographical sketches and from some of their screen work. Yet those fellows also exploded with energy, mirth, and motion. It is an intriguing dilemma, and it gets at the heart of what entertainment is meant to be, especially at the movies. Not everyone can be as blithe, fluid, and enchanting as Fred Astaire. Cary Grant once remarked on how he longed to be that Cary Grant fellow whom strangers enjoyed. But in Philip Seymour Hoffman there is something as bleak as the idea of no more fun. That is as hard to take as the loss of someone still young who seemed born to act. It leaves you feeling that we are in a bad place. Are we beginning to wonder if we no longer deserve entertainment?”