Ronnie Rondell Jr died this week, at the age of 88. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone: working as a stuntman generally doesn’t make one famous, so you probably didn’t notice him in Lethal Weapon, Star Trek, Thelma and Louise, Batman and Robin, Charlie’s angels and other productions. You definitely will have noticed him as the burning man on the cover of Pink Floyd’s album Wish you were here.
Their 1975 album is about absence – absence of human connection in general and absence of Syd Barrett in particular. Storm Thorgerson, who designed most of Pink Floyd’s album covers, said this about it: “People often conceal their true feelings, for fear of being burned. Thus the man shaking hands while actually on fire seemed to symbolise this situation”.
But concealing your feelings only leads to repression, repression leads to isolation, isolation leads to getting burned. Often we don’t realise we’re on fire. We shake hands, pretend everything is fine, but meanwhile.. we’re burning. Thorgerson again: “It was also just an amazing thought: a man on fire shaking the hand of another man, not being perturbed that he was on fire. So therefore, the fire must be metaphorical. However, the fire wasn’t metaphorical—it was real. So there was always an inner contradiction to this picture.”
Rondell’s job was to risk fire for art. The rest of us do it every day, without noticing.