A Killing For Our Time

Rob Reiner, z"l

Ask people about their favorite movies, and you’ll get a range of different answers. Some will give safe answers, great movies that everybody respects. Others will give more obscure answers that either signal or request membership in an exclusive club of those who know. Some will give answers that tell you a great deal about that person’s taste, others answers that tell you little more than that they have taste—and yet others answers that tell you that this person’s taste is extremely niche. It’s all information and it’s all potentially interesting.

If someone said that their favorite movie was The Princess Bride, or Stand By Me, or When Harry Met Sally, or This is Spinal Tap, I suspect a lot of people would find the answer at least a little bit cringe. These are films that don’t signal much in terms of taste and discernment. They didn’t blaze a new cinematic path or otherwise make history. They don’t say something obviously personal, nor do they reveal a particular obsession, whether with genre or theme, tone or style. They are easy to watch, easy to understand, easy to relate to emotionally, easy to enjoy and appreciate. They’re middlebrow entertainments that everybody likes.

They are also absolutely wonderful films, true classics, films that should be on anybody’s list of favorites. It is extraordinarily difficult to make a story that goes down this easy while still being nourishing, and stuffed with moments so memorable that they have become iconic. These films are middlebrow but they are anything but middling, and they aren’t cringe choices because they show a lack of taste but because they practically define normal taste, because they will touch the heart and tickle the funny bone of just about anybody with a normal cognitive and emotional makeup, and do so in a way that is warm, open and humanistic. They are exemplars of what it means for an art form to be both populist and beautiful, simple and profound.

They’re also the kinds of movies that largely don’t get made anymore. And if one did get made somehow, it almost certainly wouldn’t have the kind of cultural reach that those films did (which is why it probably wouldn’t get made), because almost nothing does any longer. So it couldn’t perform their almost sacramental function of binding people together through a shared experience of something just plain good.

If Rob Reiner, the director of those great films, had died of cancer, or in a car accident, these would have been my elegiac thoughts on the passing of a man and an era. The era passed some time ago, and the man had ceased to produce work of that caliber some time ago as well, but there is a finality to death that prompts this kind of sunset view.

But that’s not how Reiner died. And in light of the work that defined his legacy, it struck me as perversely fitting, horribly apropos for our awful era, that the director of that body of charming, heartwarming work was murdered, along with his wife, apparently by their own son. It’s a crime that is almost unfathomable in its awfulness, to die in such a fashion at the hands of someone about whom you care more than anyone, who you raised and therefore whose actions you cannot help but blame yourself for, and which you know will destroy them as well. It’s just about the worst thing I can imagine happening to anyone. I hope against hope that neither Reiner nor his wife knew what was happening, that neither of them saw their killer; at least then they might have been spared the absolute worst. But with a stabbing death, that’s unlikely.

Then, as if to place a rotten cherry on this bloody sundae, when he learned of Reiner’s death the president of the United States responded by fantasizing that he had been murdered by one of the president’s own supporters. Why? So that he could wag his finger at the dead man, saying that this is what he should have expected would happen for giving voice to his loathing of the president, his country’s mortal god and savior. It would have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, and therefore par for the course, if the president had merely taken the opportunity of Reiner’s death to call him a loser and a has-been. But in this case he dug right through the bottom and kept going, aiming to go right through the earth and come out somewhere in the vicinity of North Korea.

Quite apart from everything else one might say about it, both Reiner’s murder and Trump’s reaction are well-night impossible to imagine from inside the context of Reiner’s greatest films. I said that his end would resonate as the end of an era regardless, but the manner of his end and its reception by our duly-elected president were not just awful, but so emphatically, outrageously outside the realm of normal that they resound like the slamming of some great, heavy door. Yet on this side of that door is where we—all of us—live now, and we are the ones who built and slammed it. Reiner’s great movies were products of the 1980s; so is Donald Trump. Somehow these things are connected, and the connection is us. As my fellow Substacker Damon Linker said, when we gaze on Trump’s vile behavior we’re looking in a mirror, because we, in full knowledge of who he is, gave him the power and position he has. He is our creation as surely as Nick Reiner was the creation of his parents, and our horror at what he does should be not so dissimilar to what theirs must have been in their last moments.

Perhaps it’s absurd for me to be writing about a family tragedy and the loss of an artist when I could be writing about the massacre on Bondi Beach or any number of other recent events that many would argue sound the same drumbeat of doom but louder and more insistently. But for me Reiner’s death, because of the kinds of films he made at his best, tolls most in sync with this dismal moment in time.

Baruch dayat ha-emet is what you say when you hear of someone’s death. “Blessed is the true judge.” God help the rest of us if that is so.