Gene Wilder Was a True Cult Classic and a Dreamer of Dreams

2016 has added yet another beautiful name to its ever-climbing list of celebrity deaths – Gene Wilder is gone. Wilder passed away from complications he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 83, having kept his affliction a secret for the last three years of his life. Wilder’s nephew cited that the actor of screen and stage “simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world.” He leaves behind a family, a legacy, and a filmography chock-full of classics, all of which challenged Hollywood and inspired audiences to explore the inner, infinite bounds of their imagination.

My first exposure to Gene Wilder came when I was 11 years old. I had recently been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and was admitted to a hospital for upwards of three weeks. I spent the first week of my stay in the sterile hallways of Moscow’s European Medical Center hooked up to IVs of saline and insulin, beeping and booping my way through ketoacidosis, unable to stomach solid food. If you can imagine anything more grim and sterile than a hospital, try a Russian hospital: stern, stone-faced nurses would try to lift my spirits as they pricked my fingers, testing my blood sugar as it slowly, sluggishly stabilized.

My father spent the entire three-week stint by my side, working and sleeping in a parallel bed, typing away vigorously at one of those blocky, black IBM ThinkPads that lawyers still use these days. Naturally, after the third day or so, my dad and I started to get stir-crazy. There is, after all, only so much conversation you can make with a sick and grumpy 11-year-old who hasn’t kept a meal down in months. Finally, my dad returned from one of his rare visits home with a haul of movies for us to watch on the hospital’s much-too-bulky TV set.

The first movie he popped into the TV’s relic of a VHS player was Young Frankenstein.

There’s a time-honored tradition of children automatically disliking everything that their parents show them as they’re growing up, only to have the truth dawn on them too late. I felt the same way about Prince a couple years later when my dad pressed play on Purple Rain. How could a lithe black man possibly shred a guitar the way my father said he could? By extension, how could a black-and-white film about Frankenstein possibly lighten me up when I was so heavy with water-weight?

The fact of the matter is that Young Frankenstein could pull laughs from a cadaver, let alone a sick kid and his father. We doubled over laughing at the misadventures of Froderick Fronkensteen, Eyegor and Fraublücher—insert horse whinny here; lines like “Put…ze candle…BACK,” “a roll in ze hay” and “nice hopping” are perennial quotables in my household, as I’m sure they are in countless families around the globe. As soon as the credits rolled on Young Frankenstein, we had two options: we could switch to Blazing Saddles or we would rewind the tape and rewatch Young Frankenstein from the top. Oftentimes, we did both.

Wilder’s career is one of cult classics: Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, while beloved by comedic buffs like my dad, were far from mainstream successes. Ditto goes for Wilder’s debut in Mel Brooks’s The Producers – while Wilder did garner an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor, it was not until his role in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) that he garnered some mainstream recognition. His four films with Richard Pryor—Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Another You—are all legendary and pioneering in their own right, but far from the mainstream comedic canon. After the loss of his beloved wife, Gilda Radnor to cancer, Wilder retreated from the spotlight, focusing instead on directorial efforts and writing novels. He told reporters, “I like show but I don’t like the business.” The fact that Wilder openly derided Tim Burton’s remake of Willy Wonka and refused to see the film speaks volumes of his integrity as an artist who would not stand for shameless cash-ins.

Wilder’s performances were equal parts mad and wet-eyed. He could oscillate between these two states at a manic pace—he brought this bipolar joie de vivre to the role of Willy Wonka. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the first time I ever saw Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. But I do remember the iconic scene that introduced the ever-elusive chocolatier. You know the one:

[Wonka] comes out of the door carrying a cane and then walks toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.

The fact that this entrance was entirely Wilder’s idea says a lot about his commitment and his boundless imagination: when director Mel Stuart asked him to explain his entrance, Wilder quipped, ”Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”

That about sums up the magic of Gene Wilder — his was a talent deeper than the page. It shined in-between lines and still stands as inspiration for today’s music-makers and dreamers of dreams, and we all should thank him for it.