Krull
Few stars embodied as many contradictions as Kris Kristofferson did.
On the surface, he was all hyper-masculinity—a Golden Gloves champion boxer, helicopter pilot, star football player, U.S. Army veteran, a goodlooking man whose jawline and upper body looked like they had been carved out of stone.
Beneath that veneer, though, was a roiling mass of fear, need and insecurity. His best songs ached with a yearning that approached desperation, his best performances as an actor explorations of a man battling to hold himself together.
The first song of his to which I ever listened closely was “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” I heard one of the zillions of cover versions that sprang forth in the early 1970s, titillated in my adolescence at first by the lyrics’ allusions to sex and, I thought at the time, passion.
Then I encountered a version by a singer—for the life of me, I cannot remember which one—who grasped what the song really was about.
Too many vocalists delivered the song then and now as a come-on for a night of empty bliss. It isn’t that.
What the song traces is loneliness. It sketches out a portrait of a man or woman who cannot stand to be alone with his or her own company and thoughts during those hours when darkness claims the earth and can descend upon the soul.
The song’s narrator needs a distraction, not a lover. A way to escape his or her own torment, not an evening of romance.
Help me make it through the night, indeed.
After really, truly hearing that song for the first time, I understood something about people who approached the dance of courtship with hunger, not joy, that I hadn’t before. I never looked at the fumbling attempts at meaningless seduction that take place every day the same way again.
Art led to empathy, as true art so often does.
Many of Kristofferson’s songs explore the vulnerability that is a condition of being human, the regrets that accumulate during even the happiest of lives, the hurts that hide themselves in our private selves. So many of them are meditations on Thoreau’s observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Kristofferson’s work as an actor was similarly layered.
When he first began appearing on screen in the 1970s, casting directors, beguiled by his rugged handsomeness, tried to make him a leading man. He starred in big-budget productions opposite Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda and alongside Burt Reynolds.
But he never seemed comfortable playing a man whose problems would be solved and his demons put to rest through the love of a good woman and by the end of the third act. Happy endings, he knew and he conveyed, weren’t that simple to find or easy to come by.
Instead, he found a niche, not surprisingly, playing characters of moral complexity, even ambiguity. He was willing to delve into the corrosive but too-often bewitching charms of malevolence, the awful allure of evil.
My favorite screen performance of his came in a now almost forgotten masterpiece from filmmaker John Sayles, 1996’s “Lone Star.” Kristofferson plays a violent, racist, corrupt-to-his-core Texas sheriff, a mean man without any redeeming virtues whom the actor nevertheless somehow makes relatable.
To play characters such as that sheriff, Kristofferson had to delve into places in his soul most people prefer to pretend do not exist. He understood that to be human means one is as susceptible to vice as to virtue.
It was this spiritual fearlessness that made the best of his songwriting and his acting so compelling.
By acknowledging—no, displaying—his own doubts and torments, he made clear to the members of his audience that they weren’t alone in their quiet desperation. If someone as handsome, talented and brilliant as him could be haunted by demons, anyone could.
Kris Kristofferson died the other day.
He was 88.
Normally, I’d say that he leaves this world a lonelier place.
But I learned from listening to him that loneliness is something we have to learn to live with, a condition of being human.
And that happiness and satisfaction in life come not from denying our ghosts but confronting and making peace with them.
Kris Kristofferson is gone.
May he rest in peace.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Comments may be sent to [email protected].
