The how and why of "Himmmm"

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.]

A commenter on another entry asks:

"Any thoughts on why Himmmm would give some in-depth details on RDJ in a sympathetic way, then pretend to be him, even though it could get RDJ in trouble?"


Well, the obvious one is that he's a fan and he didn't think that far. I don't think it's especially suspicious that he defended RDJ first. A lot of people have done, over the years, some of the loudest being people who know him personally. Hell, I would, and all I did was watch some movies and spend like three days going through Google. As far as I can tell, some other commenter guessed that was who was behind "Himmmm" sometime last March, and "Himmmm" responded with a lot of comments that played off of Downey's recent success with the Sherlock Holmes films. It was slightly later, when he was really involved in the game, that he "confirmed" that he was really RDJ. If there was any thought at all to the consequences, he probably thought that RDJ is a busy guy these days, and it would be easy enough to prove he wasn't behind it if any legal trouble began brewing.

A slightly more involved answer rests on something I mentioned while tossing in my two cents over on the Gawker network, which was that if the mystery commenter wasn't RDJ, it was someone who identified strongly with his story. Identification, in both authorial and psychological terms, is when you run into someone else, be it a real person or a fictional character, and take note of things you have in common, enabling you to imagine yourself in that other person's place. The more generic a character, usually the more generically good, the easier it is for a very large number of people to put themselves in that character's shoes. A particularly egregious example is Bella from the Twilight books, who is so generically "teenage girl who is as awkward as I feel but considered by other people to be as beautiful and special as I want to be" that eight hundred bajillion women pretended to be her the nanosecond the first book fell off the press and immediately moved to stalk Robert Pattinson, who is probably deeply regretting doing those movies in between calming swims in his gigantic piles of money.

Downey's story is compelling. He was an immensely talented kid who started to hit it big, got swallowed up by the Corrupt Evils of Hollywood, and has slowly and painfully fought his way free over many years, to be welcomed whole-heartedly back by basically everyone. If you made it up, it would make a pretty good roman à clef. "Himmmm" mentions Fentanyl patches (Fentanyl, if you don't happen to know what that is, is a highly potent and dangerous painkiller that is generally only used when a patient has intractable pain and has developed a high tolerance for just about everything else on the list. Probably its most common use is for returning some quality of life to terminal cancer patients), which certainly tallies on the drug count. And he's probably hoping to be seen as someone who can turn in phenomenal work while lit up like a damn Christmas tree, which, regardless of his behavior off the set, RDJ did indeed manage to do.

There may be some subtleties he's missing. People generally give you second chances because it makes them feel like they're being kind. Sometimes you get third chances that way, too. But Downey has gotten literally as many chances as he needed to get it together -- you earn that kind of tolerance from others. Only recently has he had the kind of obscene wealth and clout he would have needed to buy his way clear, he was already in too much trouble for someone to ride his coattails to the A-list, and not even in Hollywood are that many people that deeply codependent. I would put the odds on simply that RDJ must be a damned decent guy even when he's whatever is the exact polar opposite of sober. I've so far not seen anything to contradict this, and I'm pretty sure that someone would have spoken up by now if he'd made a habit of being a complete tool.

Having read the other blog, this [someone]/"Himmmm" person mostly sounds to me like he's replaced a few too many brain cells with loose Vicodin tablets, but that's unfairly discounting the possibility that he was kind of crazeballs to begin with. There is... a lot of ranting, when he is not constrained by Enty's posted topic du jour. But he was trying to consistently out what he thought of as "bad people" by dishing in the comments to the blind items. He may have simply been trying to earn his loads of tolerance.

In order to know more, I'd have to know more about [someone]'s life and thought patterns. To be honest, he kind of makes my head hurt. My specialization in this whole profiling gig is usually spotting the weird genius gifted kids from like five miles off. Technically, I could do the weird ranty conspiracy theory guys, but then I'd have to think like a weird ranty conspiracy theory guy, which takes some effort. As opposed to thinking like a weird genius gifted kid, which I actually am.