In the history of cinema and television, it is not a rarity where an actor achieves so much fame and accolades essaying a particular role that her/his entire lifetime is spent in the struggle of trying to come out of that shadow. Sometimes, they embrace that recognition with open arms. At other times, they are disappointed that other more significant or meaningful roles get lost in public memory forever obsessed with their iconic performance. Tapen Chatterjee as Goopy in Goopy Gayen, Bagha Bayen, Kamu Mukherjee as the seasoned and unscrupulous fraudster Mandar Bose in Shonar Kella, Jim Parsons as the nerdy and sometimes intolerable Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise and Amjad Khan as the bandit Gabbar Singh in Sholay are just a few examples. No matter what they had/ have done in their professional life since then, their lives have revolved around being universally recognised and identified as these breakthrough roles. And sometimes, the actor and the character blend into one in public memory to an extent, that we refuse to see the former in the sunshine of the latter. Matthew Perry, who passed away earlier this week, was one such actor whose film and theatre work went somewhat unrecognised, lost in the astronomical success of his Chandler Bing in the sitcom FRIENDS.
FRIENDS ran for ten seasons and was a worldwide phenomenon. Six friends, in their twenties and then thirties, in different stages of their personal and professional life became a household name, even in the Indian subcontinent. But what glued them together was a bond- a bond that was rapidly vanishing in a world of market growth and capitalist boom. In India too, the ripples of the economic liberalisation had now become a wave. Pepsi and Coca Cola had entered the scene, Archies and Hallmark galleries were go to destinations for teens and Sachin Tendulkar and Shah Rukh Khan were the poster boys of Indian Advertisement. It is in this backdrop that FRIENDS entered our lives. And stayed in it forever.
Why were six New Yorkers allowed a space into, not only our drawing room and classroom conversations but rather the lexicon of Popular Culture? Part of its appeal lay in the fact that the goofy/ nerdy/ weird were not denigrated, but accepted and celebrated for their idiosyncrasies. Characters sketched in ways that made them all flesh and blood, with insecurities at work, struggles in their marital and romantic life struck a chord with a generation that was also trying to find a foothold in the big bad world, in India and sometimes in the West. And amongst the six, Chandler Bing was the most sorted, with arguably the wittiest lines in each episode designated to him. It was as if, Matthew Perry wasn’t quite acting or rehearsing his lines. We liked to believe that the lines came naturally and organically to him, that Chandler Bing WAS indeed Matthew Perry. Many years later, it was revealed that the makers of the show allowed only Perry out of the cast members to sit with them while writing the dialogues. Perry had imbibed the aura and energy of Bing, that sarcastic, sardonic man hiding behind jokes to mask his discomfort.
The show was one way of filling up a vacuum. In a world that was not only rapidly changing but also going by at supersonic speed, the show was like a small railways station where trains stop only for a few minutes and one doesn’t even get off lest the train leaves and they are unable to get back up. Chandler and his friends became a model or a standard for the teenaged/ young adult generation where every group had individuals who fashioned themselves on the six of them and sometimes had monikers labelled for them by their peers.
But then we grew up. And moved on. But Chandler and the others remained. Not only was the show being watched as re-runs on different networks, but internet without boundaries and borders meant that every episode was now instantly available at our fingertips for a delightful going back in time. So what basically happened was that for one generation it was taking a trip down memory lane and getting a taste of what they were and what they aspired to be in their formative years and for the next/ current generation, it meant an initiation into FRIENDS, which by then had been one of the most watched sitcoms in Television history.
During it all and the tremendous success that the show garnered, Matthew Perry the man was sinking. Alcoholism, drug abuse and addiction were taking a toll on the physical and mental health, so much so, that his autobiography published a couple of years back, began with the words, ‘I should be dead.’ The irony was only his ardent followers, the ones who saw Perry and not merely Chandler, were abreast with his struggles. In the world and for the world, Perry was still the wise cracking, rapier wit holding model friend and boyfriend, whose closest friends still don’t know what he does for a living and he is totally okay with it. What the show and its reruns did was to enshrine the face of the ever-smiling Chandler Bing in our psyche but prevented us from seeing the person beneath it. In a way, Chandler was the boon and the curse for Matthew, a double-edged sword. His other notable works hardly made it to the public discussions. He carried on being Chandler and one might guess that at some point it may have been a burden for him too. One remembers him saying, ‘But when I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if Friends were listed far behind the things, I did to try to help other people. I know it won't happen but it would be nice.’
But he kept working. He was writing and directing plays, appeared in films occasionally and promoted them too, on David Letterman’s show and a few years back on Graham Norton’s. All the while, battling the demons of substance abuse and alcoholism and spending close to 9M$ on rehab. He had seen from the closest of quarters how addiction can push someone to the brink of despair and he opened up a house in Malibu called the Perry House to offer help to anyone who sought to reach out to him and wanted to beat the disease. In a now famous interview at the launch of his autobiography, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Perry remarked, ‘I would like to be remembered as somebody who lived well, loved well, was a seeker. And his paramount thing is that he wants to help people. That's what I want.’
Every FRIENDS fan, having grown up watching the show, lived with the fear that one day, having opened the morning newspaper or the news portals on our mobile phones, they would be made face to face with the news of the passing of one of the six main leads. And that would lead to the opening of floodgates of memories and reminiscences. They had no idea that the first one to go would be this soon. Matthew Perry passed away at the age of 54 and we hope finally found the kind of peace he was searching for most of his adult life. In one of the episodes of the 236-episode sitcom, Chandler is seen mucking around and then says the line, ‘I guess I’ll be the first one to die.’ That line elicited a lot of laughter back then, but now in retrospect, seems almost prophetic and the most heartbreaking.
The shock is as much in his passing as in the realisation that with him, a huge iceberg of who we are has also left us. That is what happens when our childhood/ young adulthood/ teenage role models or heroes die, they take away that part of our lives that we hold on to despite the times, despite the years. It was a part of our lives that rang with the affirmation that someday we would like to be better versions of ourselves and the wo/man on the screen is the one we would like to emulate. Chandler is the one we all wanted to be. And now although Chandler will always be there, Matthew Perry is not. And neither is that fragment of our lives, the purest, the most innocent, vulnerable but most precious. Chandler held our hands and walked with us. Because that is what friends do –– ‘ when it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.’
Sayan Aich Bhowmik is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Shirakole College, West Bengal. He is the co-editor of Plato’s Caves Online, a semi- academic space on literature, politics and art. He has recently published his debut collection of poems, I Will Come With A Lighthouse.