Michael J. Fox, the ’80s hero who defied Hollywood and then Parkinson’s

Schopenhauer said that pleasure leaves neither a trace nor a memory. After a pleasurable feeling, all that remains is either the anxiety of getting more of the same or the boredom of not having it. However, pain is something else. Pain accompanies desire and failure, For the absence and immediacy of mourning after love or after the greatest glory. Pain ends up becoming the skin of life. The pain persists. There is always pain. There is no record that Michael J. Fox may have read some of the most outspoken pessimists ever, but few are as careful digests of their cult following as this 61-year-old actor. throughout the duration of the film Still: A Michael J. fox movie (The title is translated with dull and very inappropriate Life of Michael J. Fox), Michael talks about everything except fine pain. He recalls his restless childhood as the youngest in class (“I didn’t know what it was to be still. I never knew,” he says), recalls his troubled start in an industry, in which he had a hard time recognizing the proof of his genius. ,“We’ll never see his face in a lunch box”, NBC president almighty Brandon Tartikoff said of him), he introduced us to his family (with his wife Tracy Pollan as lifeguard and guide) and even reconstructed the day in detail did when he first awoke from a drunken stupor he could not control. Signs of Parkinson’s on the little finger (“I was convinced it was a hangover from a day before with Woody Harrelson”). He barely (only at the end) mentions pain. And yet it always happens.

“I remember”, says the director of the documentary Davis Guggenheim Through Zoom, “that after hours and hours of interviewing, I suddenly realized that Fox didn’t talk about her suffering at all. We see her falling again and again; we see her fight against the physiotherapist we listen to him recall each of the darkest phases of his life and we listen to his reflections on what it meant for him to give up everything when he had absolutely everything… and, Despite this, not one regret. So, despite the fact that he had already given up because the recording session was over, I caught a plane, stood in front of him at his house and asked him about the pain. He told me Told that during the whole year he had spent more time in the emergency room than at home; that it was terrible, because due to the vibration it was impossible to heal his fracture… And then he said: “But never feel sorry for yourself. Pity is a form of abuse.”

The documentary that Apple TV just released adds strictly nothing to each of the actor’s memoirs, which embodied all time Marty McFly And he, by the wildest and most blatant rebuttals of every muscular star of the moment, ended up defining the true hero of the ’80s like no other. His story is known and remembered a thousand times over as the clearest example of an impossible dream ever praised. Determined to become an actor against parental opinion and everyone’s advice, the restless (perhaps hyperactive) Fox bets everything on number one. beardless, electric and somewhat puny It would be said that their suicides were quite similar. After failing in all possible ways and finding the diet more toxic than it should be for less and less, one fine day they got a phone call that would change everything. First it was one of the legends family relations And soon after that it was a whole series. His face went on wallpaper covers and, actually… lunch boxes too. He said at the time, “I had no phone, no money, not even a sofa. I was so devastated that I would have accepted anything.” What followed was three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and one why, Eternity.

“He changed the concept of everything,” says Guggenheim. And he continues: “For the first time, audiences who were tired of seeing people like Schwarzenegger, Stallone or Bruce Willis on screen as unreal, capable of anything, recognized someone with whom to be identified as really vulnerable, normal, close. … He looked like an elf! He was a superhero, but the opposite. Besides, he was the only really funny person out of all of them The next thing was to alternate the character of the good reactionary Alex P. Keaton prototype of a Reaganon on the rise with the protagonists of return to the future, And it’s not even time to catch your breath going from one set to the next at a devilish pace 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He replaced the hard-hitting Eric Stoltz. Robert Zemeckis, the DeLorean, the Doctor and the Flux Capacitor will do the rest.

Even then. Michael J. Fox’s life is very different from your typical heroic celebrity documentary. The director says, “The idea is to have a similar rhythm and feel to an 80s film.” And, indeed, the documentary entertains itself at times in reconstructing, as if it were a fiction, a good chunk of life on the spur of the moment. As he plays, Fox himself speaks directly to the camera, allowing the stumbling blocks and insecurities of the disease to pause before the audience’s eyes, perfect in each of their imperfections. And so on until 1991. they filmed doctor hollywood, “I woke up to see a message in my left hand. It vibrated. It wasn’t a fax or a telegram. No, I didn’t have anything in my hand. The vibration was the message,” he says. He was 29 years old. Now, 60 years old, he lives with his wife and their four children. At first they hid that vibration for years and in every possible way. Those were the dark years of alcohol, dopamine and many other drugs (“I Became a True Connoisseur of Drug Addiction”, and so on until the third season Spin City: Crazy City Hall in which he made public an increasingly apparent illness. And so, for years afterward, he laughed at himself and his pain on the first Larry David Show. good wife Later “Disabled people can be stupid too,” he said through revelation in the most Foxian of his statements. and so on Even then. The Life of Michael J. Fox.

“He doesn’t want Parkinson’s to define him. He doesn’t want Parkinson’s to crush him. He wants to laugh with his family. He insists that he’s like a cockroach that always resists, able to survive everything,” recalls Guggenheim. Will reaches 80 and as long as he talks, something about pain Does not know. No one except him. Pain becomes the skin of life. Pain remains. Pain is always there.