SITUATION TRAGEDY

By Walter Kirn

For so long the source of American onscreen drama, Los Angeles has lately become the stage for the nation's most gripping real-life dramas as well. The sort of narratives that Hollywood studios, in their quest for blockbuster profits, have almost abandoned--complex moral tales of actual human beings facing the ultimate issues of love and loss, rage and separation--have moved from the sound stages onto the streets. Beginning with the taped beating of Rodney King in 1991 (by far the most important footage to come out of L.A.'s image factory that year) and continuing through the O.J. Simpson trials and all their multifarious spin-offs, the facts of life in Southern California have loomed far larger in the American psyche and stirred more controversy and conversation than any of its technicolor fictions.

Bill Cosby, in his initial public response to the murder of his son, seemed aware of this. The man who single-handedly updated the middle-class patriarch as a TV icon, who made the small screen safe again for displays of frank morality, loving discipline and gruff exasperation, may have sensed straightaway that the death in his family made him a kind of reluctant griever in chief. So instead of asking for sympathy, he offered it--to families who'd experienced similar tragedies. Cosby seemed more concerned about his audience's pain than his own. Considering the permeable borders between art and life these days, he wasn't being just noble but realistic.

The virtual American family has suffered a real death. The feelings will be--and already are--peculiarly complicated. When I first heard the news on CNN, I suffered a momentary mental lag, an instant of ontological puzzlement: Had a human being been slain, or a sitcom character? How was Dr. Huxtable--Bill Cosby, rather--going to handle this one? How would he break such searing news to Phyllicia Rashad, his TV wife, and how could the tragedy ever be resolved in under 30 minutes?

Then, of course, the reality sank in. Bill Cosby, the father who works as an actor whose specialty is playing fathers, had lost a blood, not a visual, relation. And had lost him not to a plot turn but to a bullet. Still, the whole thing didn't quite compute for me. Gunfire was never a part of The Cosby Show. Roadside homicide didn't figure in. According to the same dramatic logic that ruled out rape on Gilligan's Island and domestic violence among the Brady Bunch, murder on Cosby just wasn't possible.

Ennis Cosby's demise is a shocking violation, not only of basic notions of personal safety (changing a tire shouldn't be a death sentence, especially not in palmy suburbia) but of a modern metaphysical barrier as well. Bonds and affections nurtured by a TV show season after season for years should not be vulnerable to sudden disruption from outside the screen. I have plenty of friends who grew up with single parents--or double parents who didn't much like each other--for whom Bill Cosby's intact, warm TV household was a crucial refuge. Now it's gone. And no matter how the current story evolves, those reruns will be difficult to watch, those comforting memories tainted if not spoiled. When Ricky Nelson, America's TV son, died in a mysterious plane crash, rumors swirled that the child actor turned rock star had set the craft ablaze free-basing cocaine. Today's telecitizens like to view tragedies involving high-profile victims as either retributions for evil or sacrifices of perfect innocence, and it will be interesting to see what moral is drawn to deflect and ease the sting of this one.

Bill Cosby not only talked the talk of fatherhood, he walked the walk. Ennis Cosby was not a brat. He was a teacher. Now it's his father who'll have to be one. Bill Cosby has a new role as a model of loss, a paragon of violent bereavement. In Hollywood, privileged, unreal, incredible Hollywood, where imagination transforms reality, reality is taking the upper hand. It's as though the gods of drama have ordained that our entertainers must now act out America's most awful true-life conflicts, no longer just its escapist fantasies.