Phillip Seymour Hoffman: The Not Lost Tapes

The last work of an actual, genuine, no-bullshit artist.

In recent weeks, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who passed away ten years ago. My new book “Feh” discusses our friendship, how we met while making the pilot for Happyish and our shared feelings of self-loathing, or feh (Yiddish for “disgust”). It was the final work of a genuine master of his craft, and of a man familiar with the fetal position himself, so I thought I’d share some clips of it with you, my fellow Fetals, since he still makes me laugh, all these years later

Phil played the lead character, Thomas Payne, a middle-aged Creative Director at a New York ad agency, who finds himself being replaced by a younger, Twitter-ier pair of talentless Swedish Creative Directors. His larger issue, though, is that while he sells fake happiness for a living, he struggles to find authentic happiness for himself (I realize now that the character was struggling with feelings of feh the same way Phil and I were; the arc of the series would be his attempt to overcome those feelings, with the help of his wife Lee).

Every episode began with a “Fuck you” to someone or something Thom found reflective of a failing world. In the pilot, that was our culture’s obsession with youth and success, as exemplified by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg:

Thom heads to work that morning, having to suffer the conversation of two twenty-something tech bros telling inspiring tales of their Lord and Savior, Steve Jobs:

At work, things only get worse as he must convince a reluctant Louis CK to go through with the Nike commercial they are about to start shooting. You can tell the episode is ten years old here, because nobody today would have any ethical concerns about selling out to Nike (or even know what the term “selling out” means):

Rhys Ifans played Phil’s sociopathic boss, Jonathan, who later that afternoon expresses admiration for Al Qaeda’s “9-11 brand strategy” as he implores Thom to re-brand himself:

In a desperate moment of self-loathing, Thom downs a fat burner drink, which leads him to have a violent/sexual dream about the Keebler elves - his biggest account - whom the Swedes want to get rid of. We often laughed during production that the series had one writer and twenty lawyers. This was why it did:

The episode ends in semi-triumph, when Thom steals the Swedes’ “Welcome” balloon for his son, grabs some Viagra from Jonathan’s desk, and heads home for an evening of “chemical cock” with Lee.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “My way of joking is to tell the truth: It is the funniest joke in the world.” I think that’s why Phil was so good at dark comedy - he wasn’t trying to be funny, he was just telling the truth. I remember thinking, when I saw the final edit of the episode, that I wanted Phil to act in everything I ever wrote, ever. Alas.

Life is often a bittersweet admixture of joy and sorrow, love and loss, laughter and tears. For those of us struggling with feh, the result can sometimes be unbearable, the stony voices of judgement that plague us too loud a damning chorus to ignore. And so one way we cope is this: we lie down on the floor, and we curl up in the fetal position, and though it often feels a Herculean task, we laugh. We laugh and we laugh and we laugh.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

illustrations by orli auslander