“You fly jets long enough, something like this happens” -Viper, “Top Gun”
Tony Scott, director of more than a few legendary Hollywood blockbusters, died Sunday in what by all accounts was a suicide. According to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, he jumped from a bridge near L.A., leaving several notes behind for his family.
The news has not said much beyond speculation about the reasons why. To a certain extent, it seems like a gross invasion of privacy to delve too deeply into the issue. He reportedly had inoperable brain cancer, but we do not know if that played a role in any way. For whatever reason, he was in pain, and this must have seemed to him to be the best way out.
Over a span of six months in 2011, I lost two friends to suicide. I’ll never know exactly why. I have a sarcastic or snarky responce to nearly everything in life, but this is a subject on which I will never, ever joke. It is something I understand far better than I would like.
Most people would have looked at Tony Scott and seen someone who “had it all,” whatever that might actually mean. He may not have created iconic classics of cinema like his brother, Ridley Scott, but he left behind a memorable body of work. His films included venerable blockbusters like “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop 2,” but also the cult classic “True Romance” and the cerebral blockbuster “Crimson Tide.” His lesser-known 1990 film “Revenge,” starring Kevin Costner and Madeline Stowe, left an impression on me when I saw it in high school. It was, as its title would suggest, a story about a man who cuts a path of destruction to save the woman he loves, but it is not a Hollywood love story. It explored the fine line between love and brutality, something Scott would return to in 2004’s “Man on Fire.”
I guess my point in bringing up his filmography is to say that his career had more depth than he may get credit for, particularly with movies that took a pretty stark look at what people do when they are pushed to an edge, like Costner in “Revenge” and Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire.”
However successful a person may be, that tells you little to nothing about what they are thinking or feeling. Suicide is almost never a rational action (allowing for some extreme examples), usually brought on by a sense of desperation or hopelessness. An excellent talk by JT Eberhard from late last year about his own struggles with depression offers the view of someone who went right up to that brink and came back. He sums it up in the perfect way, a point of view I have heard from friends, and one that I can recognize in my own thoughts at certain points in my life. To roughly paraphrase how he described his thought process leading up to his suicide attempt, he said “I didn’t actually want to die, but I wanted it to stop.”
As trite as it may sound, this too shall pass. Please get some help.
- National Hopeline Network – 1-800-784-2433
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline – 1-800-273-8255, 1-800-799-4889 (TTY – Hearing & Speech Impaired)
- Austin-Travis County Mental Health Hotline – (512) 472-HELP (4357), (512) 703-1395 TTY
- More Texas and national resources
