How do we mourn those we have never known? How many of us will sit in our living rooms or classrooms or coffee shops, and hear the news that an icon, someone we have admired, someone whose work we know, has passed — and how many of us then will feel the sting of shock, of unanticipated grief? When a familiar and beloved personality dies, especially a screen star, there is a seismic shift in the daily awareness of a whole culture. This person we all knew, in our strangely distanced way, is now gone. There are past performances to reflect on, but no new ones to look forward to. They are suddenly memorialised, but only because we are now painfully aware that they were never as immortal as they once seemed. In their too-brief time on earth, these people come to represent immense, amplified things to us. They are our celluloid surrogates: dastardly villains, swashbuckling heroes, defiant men, righteous women, lovers, mothers, brothers, fathers. Most importantly of all, they are avatars of our own secret, internal heroisms and our great, great capability for goodness and nobility and love. They are actors because we have created a world which needs its performers. When humans long for the beauty of the pretend – which they always do – actors provide access to that escapism, and to the dreamscape of the place where you find what reality lacks. When they are great actors, like Alan Rickman, they spend their lives offering themselves in service of our imagination. And when they die, we reciprocate: we are responsible for the way we shape the legend of the memory that they leave behind.
Losing someone like Alan Rickman isn’t the same for you or me as it is for his family and friends and colleagues. This barely needs to be stated. We won’t comprehend the chasm left behind for them. We won’t know the same grief that they do. We are not his acquaintances. We are his audience; and, at least for the most part, I hope, we are his fans. It isn’t, and can never be, the same as losing a partner, or a loved one, or a friend, or any of those people we have in our individual lives formed messy, beautiful, intense, personal relationships with. That is a unique feeling, that kind of loss. Losing someone we connect with in our everyday life is a grief proportionate to the love we feel. From what I know of it in my young life so far, that grief is terrifying. It is like looking through a window onto a great vista, one that represents the endlessness of the future; and the future is chilled by our loved one’s absence, as though a piece of its potential has been carved away, and there are conversations out there we will never have, and smiles we will never see again.
That we can all empathise with, if we have ever lost someone who is precious to us; we know something of what those who knew him are feeling, because we know what it is to lose a friend, a husband, a colleague — all of those things that Rickman has been in life, besides the sliver of himself that we have been privileged with thanks to his day job mesmerising on our screens. We, the audience, the commentators: we arbitrate the abrasiveness of that immediate shift into the past tense. Out of respect for grammar, we must now begin to characterise him as a phenomenon that happened. But out of respect for his friends, we want to continue to talk about him in the present tense. We want them to still know him, not to be subject to the horrible wrench that is having known him. Words mean so much, and they command us; they tell us where time is going, and when it has stopped.
It is the peculiar privilege of film critics, in fact, that the dead come alive again under their pen; and perhaps it is this, if nothing else, which legitimates the necessity of their work. The spectral presence of Alan Rickman will survive in the text of every essay or article which ever, in the future, analyses Harry Potter or Sense and Sensibility or A Little Chaos. There we will find him in sentences like “Rickman’s gaze in this scene is a powerful thing” or “Is this Rickman’s sharpest ever feat of gorgeous theatricality?”; and in the simplest way, but in the only way the world now has available to it, we will find a part of him which is still alive. Film criticism relies on the vividness of cinema to always be a present thing, and those who partake in its creation purchase their admission fee into the halls of immortality. This, beyond the essay which deconstructs and interprets the cinema and its performances, is the truest and most vital aspect of critical writing, despite how little it is ever remarked upon. It may serve no cultural agenda, it may espouse no ideology, it may be irrelevant to academic or cultural discourse; but it is much more dignified and integral than these things. It is the only real process of immortalisation we have.
For now, however, while the wounds are raw, it will be of little use to those who grieve their lost friend. Today he is gone. Only time will allow him to live on once again, and there is a necessary waiting period. On our own terms, we — his audience — can mourn him only as we’ve found him. We mourn him in respect of those who knew him, but we mourn him uniquely too. We mourn him as a great illusionist of our times.
The sixty-nine-year old actor passed away this morning. His life was so full but too short. His achievements were great but prematurely curtailed. His polymathic abilities were only just beginning to receive the attention they deserved: A Little Chaos, only his second but sublime directorial project since 1997, premiered only last year. His distinctive voice iconically soundtracked the childhood of so many in my generation. His CV is superlative and eclectic: Perfume, Sweeney Todd, Die Hard, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. “I’ll cut your heart out with a spoon!”… “Why a spoon, cuz?” “Because it’s dull, you twit, it’ll hurt more!” An Awfully Big Adventure: the most cataclysmically moving portrayal of traumatised relationships I’ve ever seen. He brought aching emotional nuance to the otherwise frothy lightness of that yearly British institution, Love Actually. He is a national treasure, a member of our prestigious actorly canon, a fine thespian who tread the boards just as well as he lit up the silver screen. He has movies not yet released. Will we see him on our screens again soon, in his latest roles? Alice Through The Looking Glass, The Limehouse Golem. Do they have sufficient footage to make the best of him? To cast the cinematic spells that were cast for Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman when their unfinished projects outlived them? If so then, captured by the lens, he will live on, at least for a little while longer, in the fresh excitements of his as-yet unrevealed illusions; he will extend a little while and a little bittersweetly into the future. And then that future will be the present. His new films will be released, and it will finally all be over. But they have such remarkable potential for wonderful magic within them, these films, because he was so good at what he did; and so the only way we can think of these projects is with hope.
He was, he is, Severus Snape. Now is no time to scoff at the merits of popular culture and children’s literature; now is the time to simply admit that we make our idols out of the things we love collectively. Snape was the vehicle for so many of the best lessons we could learn from the most important series of novels, and then the most definitive cinematic franchise, to happen to the turn of the 21st century. As an actor commits to a role, a part of them is extracted from themselves and buried within it. So a part of Severus Snape will always be Alan Rickman, and so Alan Rickman has for a long time now been that which taught us that not everybody is their surface alone, that true love is altruism, and that bravery does not always come in the guise we expect. He incarnated J.K. Rowling’s most complex character to the extent that, in some senses, he really was Severus Snape; and there is no finer accolade to accord a man than the recognition he shaped the better parts of our younger selves.
Now is the time we realise the importance of hyperbole, because sometimes, dramatic language is the only thing warranted when dealing with the legacy of certain individuals. He was magnificent, magnificent, magnificent. Yes, time will create distance, time will give credence to the sceptics, time will tell me I should have been more objective, that my language here should be more subdued and less full of idolatry; time will tell me I should have simply written a Best Performances list and left it at that. But no. That is all for the future. The retrospectives are coming. He will be talked about first in the past tense, a concession to Death. Death wins this round. Then, when the grief has been accommodated, adjusted to, and diminished in the process — when those who still mourn him are those who knew him best — he will become present tense again. We are human beings, after all. We have cinema, the greatest cheat for Death ever invented. In the meantime, this is the now, and in the now, we feel this loss afresh. Alan Rickman is gone. The variability of his talent has been proven finite only by death, and we miss him already. We want more magic, more showmanship, from him. We are greedy with him. We want what we can no longer have.
I can only offer this as small comfort in this time of darkness, and for now it will be little comfort to those in his life who loved him. But we, his audience, owe them this anyway, for they are the people who made the man who became the men we loved so much. And we owe him this, too; to let him know — wherever his spirit may now be — that his life and his work have been a spectacle of magic, and that we have loved him for it. We have loved him, all of us, so very much.
Remember to turn on the light. There will always be light. He, as a key part of one of the greatest fantasy institutions of our time, has been the mouthpiece for the words which celebrate him most. Perhaps in eras to come, the children of our children will see that we still watch and adore the work of Alan Rickman; and perhaps they will ask in perplexed voices, “after all this time?” To which we will all know our answer already. “Always.”
R.I.P. Alan Rickman, 21.2.46-14.1.16
