The death of Chandler Bing

The death of Friends star Matthew Perry still resonates even after the celebrity news cycle has moved on. Comedy writer James Cary contemplates how endings are written.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Actor Matthew Perry looks formally away, with a US flag in the background

A 2012 portrait of Matthew Perry at the launch of a drug control initiative.

Office of National Drug Control Policy, via Wikimedia Commons.

How do you end a sitcom?

That’s not a joke. For those of us who write sitcoms, it’s a practical question. Every episode needs an ending. These days, every season needs an ending. And then the whole thing needs some kind of grand finale as the characters ride off into the sunset.

A sitcom ending should be both surprising but also retrospectively inevitable. That’s what I tell aspiring sitcom writers. The ending of a sitcom shouldn’t be a nasty shock. Nor is it just the moment where the episode runs out of time or story.

Casablanca is one of the all-time great endings. Rick tells Isla to get on that plane, and there’s the business with Lazlo, Strasser and ‘the usual suspects’. I’ve read that the writing of the ending came fairly late in the day. The Motion Picture Production Code forbade showing a woman leaving her husband for another man. This seems restrictive but in our hearts we want to believe that Rick would do the decent thing.

From the very first scene of the very first episode, it was clear that the planets had aligned for this actor, this show and the viewing public. Everybody loved Chandler.

When it comes down to it, our hearts yearn for a happy ending. And if not happy, bittersweet. But mostly sweet.

The ending of Matthew Perry, star of one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, is both surprising and inevitable. No one expected him to die at the age of 54. But given his problems with addiction, it is not as shocking as it might be.

Perry confessed one of his greatest addictions, along with painkillers and alcohol, was to be the funniest. He needed to hear those laughs. In the HBO Max Friends reunion special, he said “To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn't laugh,” he said. All comedians feel this but it seems that Perry felt it especially acutely. When co-star Matt LeBlanc recalled tripping over his mark and everyone on set laughed, Perry had to jump in. “Because I was like, ‘Somebody's getting a laugh, I can't handle it — I need to get a laugh, too.’”

No wonder Matthew Perry was so funny as Chandler Bing. He was so determined to be the funniest. And he was. From the very first scene of the very first episode, it was clear that the planets had aligned for this actor, this show and the viewing public. Everybody loved Chandler.

For most people, the death of Matthew Perry was the death of Chandler Bing. And we just weren’t prepared for that.

It was a dream character to play: a young man in his twenties who is funny because, well, he is really funny. Being funny is his thing. It’s to cover his cowardice, but he is the funny guy. Ross is the nerd. Joey is the ladies' man. Rachel is the princess. Phoebe is cooky. Monica is uptight. And Chander is the comedian whose lines were being written, rewritten and perfected by a battery of writers who are among the funniest people in the English-speaking world.

But Perry still had to deliver those lines, on cue in the right order, no matter what else was going on in his life. And a lot was going on. But he coped. He was just so funny. The only evidence of his personal demons on screen was his weight loss and weight gain. He was a consistently excellent performer. In an earlier era, when more mainstream romantic comedy movies were made, Perry might have given Cary Grant a run for his money. And then maybe Alfred Hitchcock may have given him a new lease of life.

But I don’t think Perry has been so mourned because of his talent, and that he was taken from us before his time. He wasn’t a River Phoenix or a Heath Ledger whose death meant we have been denied some truly great films they would surely have made. (Personally I feel that way about Victoria Wood who died aged 62 and had at least two more truly great works in her).

For most people, the death of Matthew Perry was the death of Chandler Bing. And we just weren’t prepared for that.

Life isn’t scripted. At least not by us. Sitcoms resemble real life. But our lives are messier, and more complicated. Our jokes aren’t as funny. And sometimes it’s just tragic.

Matthew Perry simply was Chandler from Friends. “I’ve said this for a long time: When I die, I don’t want ‘Friends’ to be the first thing that’s mentioned,” he said. It’s not hard to imagine Chandler making a joke out of that. One can also imagine Perry’s character saying, “I always figured I’d die alone. In a hot tub. Whoa, did I just say that out loud?’ And the audience would laugh because in the Friends-world, those writers have handed Chandler a happy ending: a life with Monica and their children, away from Manhattan, but forever connected to their lifelong friends, Ross, Joey, Phoebe and Rachel.

Life isn’t scripted. At least not by us. Sitcoms resemble real life. But our lives are messier, and more complicated. Our jokes aren’t as funny. And sometimes it’s just tragic. The Chandler Bings don’t get the Monicas and the happily ever afters. Sometimes the Chandler Bings die young and alone. And no-one laughs.

But the real human Perry did what one senses the fictional Chandler Bing would not or could not do: turn to God for help. A year before his death, he wrote in his memoir that at his lowest ebb, he experienced God’s presence and love, saying that “for the first time in my life, I felt OK. I felt safe, taken care of. Decades of struggling with God, and wrestling with life, and sadness, all was being washed away, like a river of pain gone into oblivion.”

Maybe it sounds cliched. But for those of us with a Christian faith, what he experienced is not a surprise but a wonderful reality.

Review

Art

Culture

26 April 2024

5 min read

Blake, imagination and the insight of God

A new exhibition focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

William Blake's illustration of God squatting down to create with his hair and beard blown to one side

Blake's Ancient of Days.

The Fitzwilliam Museum.

The exhibition William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, enables visitors to discover a constellation of European Romantic artists who sought spirituality in their lives and art in response to war, revolution and political turbulence.

The exhibition brings together the largest-ever display of works by the radical British artist, printmaker and poet from the Fitzwilliam Museum's collection, alongside artworks by Blake's European contemporaries such as the German romantic painters Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich – many of which have never been displayed publicly in the UK until now. Though they never met or connected in their lifetimes, Blake, Runge and Friedrich shared an unwavering belief in the power of art to redeem a society in crisis.

Blake believed it ‘is only the imagination’, the faculty we have neglected, which can lead us out of our self-imposed prison.

The exhibition also places Blake within his artistic network in Britain, drawing parallels with the work of his peers, mentors and followers including Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, and Samuel Palmer. In the exhibition catalogue Esther Chadwick draws attention to a little-known series of paintings in which ‘Blake is shown partaking in an immense community of like-minded intellectuals of the European Romantic generation.’ These include writers and poets associated with Runge, as well as artists and poets such as Flaxman, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Flaxman introduced Charles Augustus Tulk, a well-known Swedenborgian, to Blake, to whom Tulk later introduced Coleridge saying ‘Blake and Coleridge, when in company seemed like congenial beings from another sphere breathing for a while on our earth’.

Exhibition curators David Bindman and Chadwick have said: “This is the first exhibition to show William Blake not as an isolated figure but as part of European-wide attempts to find a new spirituality in face of the revolutions and wars of his time. We are excited to be able to shed new light on Blake by placing his works in dialogue with wider trends and themes in European art of the Romantic period, including transformations of classical tradition, fascination with Christian mysticism, belief in the coming apocalypse, spiritual regeneration and national revival.”

Independently of each other, Blake and Runge were inspired by the writings of German mystic Jacob Böhme, who, as Bindman and Chadwick explain, ‘believed that all being arises from the dynamic interplay of opposites: between darkness and light, life and death, hot and cold, male and female’. As a result, he viewed our spiritual quest as ‘the reconciliation of differences to produce spiritual and philosophical regeneration’. Bryan Aubrey has also shown that Böhme believed human beings can share in the divine imagination, through which we act ‘with, and on behalf of, the creator’. Böhme ‘equated the strong imagination with the faith that moves mountains’ while Blake believed it ‘is only the imagination’, the faculty we have neglected, which can lead us out of our self-imposed prison. Blake was, as a result, indebted to Böhme for his concept of the imagination and his doctrine of contraries.

This exhibition demonstrates that many of great Romantic philosophers and writers were seeking just such a spiritual regeneration and national revival.

Melanie Öhlenbach has argued that ‘Runge's life, his theory and works bear testimony to Böhme's importance’. For Runge, art ‘is considered as the revelation of God and the artist as its tool, while the artist's imagination creates the insight of God’. He believed it is ‘the artists' duty to re-create the diverging harmony of man and cosmos in the sense of an artistic-spiritual revolution’. She writes that due to his early death, ‘Runge managed only partly to put his ambitions into practice’, notably in his Times of Day series which represent not only the changing times of day, but the seasons, the ages of humanity and historical epochs. Similarly, Friedrich’s seven sepia drawings The Ages of Man are thought to be inspired by Runge’s interest in visual representations of time, meaning that this exquisitely delicate series is associated with the themes of change in nature, the cyclical representation of time and the temporality of human life.

The significance of these artists is, in part, as prophets within the Christian tradition. Lucy Winkett has noted that ‘Blake’s faith was in the Jesus whom he believed the Church had abandoned’. As a result, ‘he was — and still is — an internal rather than external critic of the way in which the Christian faith is practised by its adherents; and so, for those who have ears to hear, his is a prophetic rather than destructive force within the Christian tradition’. Richard A. Rosengarten states that ‘Blake wanted to stir things up because he thought the Christian revelation was meant to stir things up’. He argues that, for Blake, the ‘first step in doing so (after reading the Bible from stem to stern) was to liberate Imagination from the shackles of Reason’. This is what ‘could make us fully human again, and thus much more approximately the creatures of God that we truly are’.

Malcolm Guite suggests that both Blake and Coleridge: ‘recognised Jesus as the Divine Imagination and Love bodied forth for us and kindling afresh in us the love and imagination which is God’s lost image deep in our souls. Both men were calling for England (‘Albion’ in Blakes terms) to awaken from the sleep of materialism, greed and conquest, and to be renewed in Christ through an awakening of the spiritual imagination.’

This exhibition demonstrates that many of great Romantic philosophers and writers were seeking just such a spiritual regeneration and national revival. In our own time of war, revolution and political turbulence, it may be that this is a prescient exhibition bringing us artists who, as Winkett said of Blake, have ‘a distinctively Christian voice for our time’.

In Jerusalem, one of Blake’s illuminated books from which many plates are shown in this exhibition, Blake writes: ‘I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination – Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.’

William Blake’s Universe, 23 February 2024 - 19 May 2024, Fitzwilliam Museum.