True pity

It really is a sad day that Hollywood-based director Tony Scott felt the need to take his own life yesterday, jumping off the bridge connecting Los Angeles to Long Island.  One commenter was upset that his death meant that there would be no more Tony Scott movies and that is a depressing matter but all the films he had left in him would not be worth his life being brought to an abrupt end.  Many will cite Top Gun as his signature work and that may well be the case but, for me, his name was truly elevated by True Romance.

His brother, Sir Ridley Scott, in the aftermath of shooting Kingdom of Heaven, said it was a disgrace that the medieval church and society ostracised suicide cases and refused to give them a decent burial.  Maybe he was aware of the dark hues and self-destructive urges inherent  within his brother as could be discerned in two of his early films, The Hunger and Revenge.  Both made without Jerry Bruckheimer, who reined in such mainstream off-putting slants when working as producer to Tony Scott’s director.

Maybe it is a Hollywood thing – in the land of eternal summer one can become so soft as to lose one’s mind.  Contrasts disappear and nothing seems worthwhile even if you have it all because you can have it all.  Ten years ago, Mel Gibson confessed he almost walked out of a window high up a building so disillusioned had he become with the superficiality of it all.  In Ivan’s XTC, no-one in the Hollywood elite can believe the agent has died of cancer, concluding it must be either suicide (or AIDS).  Typical of the attitude is that Scott drove to his final destination in a black Toyota Prius.  Fashion-conscious to the end but to what purpose and keen to save the world but unable to save themselves, it is an indictment of how one can be swallowed up in a sea of syrup until one drowns.