It has been just a few hours since the deaths of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer were announced. I learned about the deaths less than two hours ago. As it stands, the deaths are being called a homicide, which is a tragedy when applied to anyone, as we have learned across multiple mass shootings this week. When applied to someone of Reiner’s fame and stature, however, homicide takes on an added layer of incomprehensibility. How could such a thing happen?
In the time it takes me to write this piece, further details will be released, or more likely, they will find their way to the public. We don’t know much now. Much less do we have enough time, distance, and information to know how to feel. It’s a sad day amid sad times. So, for now, I choose to share a few brief words on the artist and his art.
In a truly great career, a director might have one forever, genre-defining classic. Reiner has five. Five movies across five completely distinct genres, each of which could be included in the dictionary definition of its form.
The year was 1984, and the actor known for playing Meathead on All in the Family made his feature directorial debut with the mockumentary to end all mockumentaries: This Is Spinal Tap. Two years later, he turned a Stephen King novella into the quintessential coming-of-age film: Stand By Me. The next year, The Princess Bride gave a generation its most beloved fantasy romance. Next, along with Nora Ephron, he revived the romantic comedy with perhaps its most cherished film: When Harry Met Sally …. And for good measure, he threw in one of the most popular courtroom dramas ever: A Few Good Men.
I can’t say what my introduction to Reiner was. It could have been any of a few things, and because childhood is a blur of discovery and misattributed memories, it’s impossible to say what came first. My dad loved Stand By Me, so we watched that a lot. I loved it, too, because the main character was a kid who wanted to be a writer, just like I did. A Few Good Men and The American President were in near-constant rotation on TNT and TBS in the ’90s, which accounts for the dozens and dozens of times I’ve seen each.
North, which was famously “hated hated hated hated hated” by Roger Ebert, was beloved by me. A flop of a film about a kid who divorces his parents and goes around the globe auditioning new ones, I wore that VHS out. I revisited it recently, and sure, it’s bad, but nostalgia is a wonderful drug.
Those are the movies Reiner directed that I grew up watching. But when I was 8 or 9, I doubt if I could have named one director (maybe Scorsese or Tarantino). My appreciation for the people behind the camera was a few years off. Where I really would have known Reiner, the performer, the artist, would have been from his brief cameo in Throw Momma from the Train, as the literary manager who dumps Billy Crystal’s writer character with the parting words, “Here, my favorite fuschia. Live and be well.”
Looking back on it now, though, it seems remarkable that one man could have connected so many disparate things that meant so much to me. It’s not a coincidence. That’s the power of a great artist. He pulls you in without you knowing you’re being pulled. Reiner was a great artist and by all accounts a great man who cared deeply about the state of the world and the direction of the nation.
His is a monumental loss that shocks the senses. Tributes will pour in. Memorial retrospectives and revival screenings will be announced. Stories will be shared. We’ll all do our part to make the inexplicable somehow more explainable, the unimaginable more tangible, but such things will remain out of grasp. That is because this moment is, to borrow a word, inconceivable.
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