An Acquired Taste

Poor Matthew Perry. What went wrong for him? There are no clues in his formative years. No tyrannical father. No childhood trauma. No diagnosed mental health problems. Yet you know exactly what drove him to excess. Perry’s parents lived thousands of miles apart and he remembered flying alone from Ottawa as a child to see his dad. He would not feel safe until he could see the lights of Los Angeles rising to meet him. ‘But soon I would see the lights of the city and have a parent once more.’

Perry describes a lifelong sense of incompleteness and dislocation. He felt that there was a void inside him – one he had to fill with success, and applause, and with booze and opiates. This sense of incompleteness may stem from all those hours of lonely flights over the continental States. But that feeling of dislocation is basic human condition stuff. We all feel that we are lacking, illegitimate, or in Perry’s words ‘not enough’. (Don’t we?) If only in all those years of rehab and therapy someone had told him – or maybe they did and it didn’t sink in. For me, anyway, it’s something instantly identifiable. A therapist told Perry once that reality is an acquired taste. I knew what Perry meant as soon I read that line, and I also knew that the acquisition of such taste can be the work of a lifetime.

Every autobiography is a success story, Martin Amis said. Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is not a success story. The poor man is like something out of F Scott Fitzgerald, or Bojack Horseman. Perry often breaks off the narrative to say something like: ‘During that time, I met at least five women that I could have married, had children with. Had I done so just once, I would not now be sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with, save a sober companion, a nurse, and a gardener twice a week – a gardener I would often run outside and give a hundred dollars to so he’d turn his fucking leaf blower off. (We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t invent a silent one of these things?)’ And, later: ‘Instead, I’m some schmuck who’s alone in his house at fifty-three, looking down at an unquiet ocean…’

Self pity is hard to take, particularly from the wealthy, but there’s no point in Perry’s memoir where you feel he’s asking you to feel sorry for him. The style is too self aware and funny and candid for that. Even the really terrible lines (‘My colon exploded’, ‘I’m a drug addict, I did some drugs, that’s what we do!’) you will hear them in the voice of Chandler Bing, and Perry of course knows this. He fell in love with his character and indeed reading this book I realised for the first time the weight the right actor can bring to a character. The tragedy of Perry’s life, as he says, is that the character had surpassed him: ‘It was not lost on me that Chandler had grown up way faster than I had.’

Anyway, how has Friends aged? There’s a fascinating discussion, one that social media has yet to address. I tried to watch the series through last year and stalled at season five. I never thought it was the same since Chandler and Monica got together – not because the characters lost their spark but because the whole show felt too polished and professional. People say Friends was too white, but that’s true of most TV in the nineties. At its worst Friends was a despotism of social norms – the main group are these shiny happy people and the humour came from their interactions with various wacky people outside their group.

The Atlantic’s Megan Garber said:

I don’t love that they tend to make the people outside the universe the butt of the jokes. You’ve got the core people. And then you have the side characters and dating interests who cycle through their lives. And typically, it’s those outsiders who get the brunt of the jokes. They’re expendable and therefore the most mockable, which is not a great dynamic.

Having said that, at least Friends was good at eccentrics and grotesques: Patrick Kerr’s wonderful turn as the creepy restauranteur, Chandler’s disturbed housemate Eddie, Phoebe’s brother Frank, Mr Heckles and Janice and even Jack Geller. (‘A woman who works in my office is a lesbian. I’m just saying!’) The early seasons are the best because they’re hanging out in their apartments together and having a laugh (Monica’s apartment is unrealistically large – has anyone mentioned that?) and it makes you think of when you were in your early twenties and spent lazy afternoons watching the show with your friends, because all of you had nothing but time on your hands. It was such a chilled, witty vibe and we had the drama of Ross and Rachel’s on-off relationship. As the Twitter account ‘what a weird week’ said, their love story was completely misaligned. ‘Everything is ALWAYS fraught. Fighting, jealousy, possessiveness, drama. Their relationship looks EXHAUSTING.’ Chandler and Monica were the more natural couple, but Ross and Rachel – whether in each other’s arms, or at each other’s throats – captivated us more.

So I feel bad for Matthew Perry, sad that he died alone, probably in that same big empty house by an unquiet ocean. I never shared Perry’s faith in God or the higher power but I do hope that if there is a place that we walk after we die, that that walkway has a star with his name on, and that there are city lights rising to meet him. For men of a certain age, Perry’s premature death could not, uh, be more poignant. 

(Image: Wiki)