My Feelings on Bronson Pinchot as Mr. Toomy from “The Langoliers”- formerly posted on Bronson Pinchot’s facebook page
OK, I don't know if Bronson will see this, but I just wanted to say that I discovered your role in “The Langoliers” thanks to the popular youtube persona Nostalgia Critic (who delivers a hilarious little review btw). Prior to watching this I had no knowledge of any of your acting work. After a couple of repeated watches of Doug Walker’s famous riffing on B-movie schlock, I realized that despite the histrionics and  hokey, meme-worthy performance… Toomy, legend that he is,… really…. spoke to me. I mean A LOT. As a person who has, at times in her life, suffered from pretty severe and debilitating anxiety, coupled with some measure of OCD, and who has experienced the pressure to be perfect and the resulting emotional insecurity which this can engender, I strongly relate to the manic unease which is Toomy incarnate.
Watching the film, I observed a degree of Toomy’s manic depressiveness in myself (at this point I ought to point out that I am just self-diagnosing, in all honesty). His outbursts, but more importantly, his silences, which, while clearly emblematic of some kind of emotional instability, and, which, at face value seem like a regurgitation of some neurotic trope, actually struck me as much deeper than that. What, in the film, was probably intended as a tropey flashback struck me as the sort of inner reflection that many of us do when trying to keep up the appearance of strength, despite our manifold insecurities and fears. Toomy’s brooding moroseness and his repeated attempts to project self-control and purpose, despite inner turmoil, mirrored my, and I’m sure many other people’s attempts, to appear confident and strong-willed, even when feeling very scared and very alone (something the little, blind girl clearly identified). More importantly, perhaps, to me, was Toomy’s method of shaping reality to fit his mental definitions (literal monsters aside) by appearing laissez-faire in the face of disaster (as in the opening) and choosing to mask his own self-loathing with camp vitriol, something which I found bitterly poignant.
However, it was the character's pontificating on time and the importance of not wasting time which struck me as incredibly jarring because I remember hearing similar things said to me as a young child (i.e. “Time is of the essence” and such). The terrible march of time and its embodiment as a “mystical life-giving essence” to those wise enough to somehow assimilate and make use of it made no small impact on my young psyche. Like Toomy, I also know what it’s like to be pressured to follow paths which don’t resonate with me.
I am curious as to whether anyone has ever reached out to you to tell you that the Toomy character was meaningful to them and if, when portraying him, you chose to tap into the mindset, not so much of a delusional, deranged person (although such a characterization is clearly at play) but of a person potentially suffering from mental illness (the ripping of the paper seemed like a quite obvious tic, for example). In saying this, I don’t mean to make unfounded claims regarding the character’s mental state (I never read the original Stephen King story, so he may have expounded upon Toomy’s character there) but I think that mental illness, which is such a polarizing topic, and which is being increasingly talked about, should never be taken out of the equation. I’m completely unaware if others have analyzed Toomy’s character before, but in my mind, there is a serious pathos to this guy, immaterial of the film’s silly and irreverent trappings, which puts him on par with Macbeth or a character out of a Euripidean tragedy. And if you’re reading this, Bronson, I think you really contributed to making that happen, whatever your approach to this role was, through your performance. Now, I may just be overanalyzing a made-for-TV sci-fi flick, but as the purpose of acting is partly to crystallize emotions and mindsets, I think Toomy’s mindset, while it can be easily dismissed as a disturbing mechanism for furthering the plot, can in fact be viewed as something infinitely greater than the sum of a handful of eye rolls and some hammy acting. I think what the performance in fact displays is the mindset of an individual, which far from alienating the audience with its weirdness, in fact distresses the audience, because they see Toomy, his flaws and anxieties, his fear of being lost in the wilderness of banality, in themselves.
areudirty
theartofmadeline
