Keanu Reeves has played some pretty powerful entities in film: The messianic Neo, the extraterrestrial Klaatu, a pre-enlightened Buddha, and a time-traveling teen whose garage band founded a utopia. And if those sad images of his lonely meals are to be believed, all that fictional-world saving would appear to have taken its toll on the actor. But the presumed immortal Reeves, who’s beaten Death (onscreen), has mostly shrugged off those cataclysmic events and rescues, opting to focus on the good things in life, like sandwiches. Even after he was saddled with the “Sad Keanu” moniker, Reeves responded by telling the pitiful mortals who’d chuckled at his grim chewing that “it can always be worse,” compiling the memes into book form.
Now the noted marksman has announced that the follow-up to 2011’s Ode To Happiness will be a “book about shadows” titled, appropriately enough, Shadows. Reeves has teamed up with his Ode To Happiness co-author, L.A. artist Alexandra Grant, to put depressing captions on pictures of silhouettes, to remind us of how Death stalks everyone but him.
Reeves’ publisher Steidl (German, naturally) expounded upon the actor’s book in a statement that’s really all queries.
“What exactly is a shadow? Is it light tracing an object or the shape a body throws when it comes between a light source and a surface? Is it a metaphor for the intimate, darker side of a person’s nature, the unconscious side of one’s self, where daemons and secrets are kept hidden or repressed? Is it an allegorical place or state of being, somewhere between darkness and light, living and dying?”
Unfortunately, despite literally being a book of shadows, the work is bereft of Wiccan rituals, so ponying up the $55 for it won’t nab you Reeves’ immortality spell. Instead, you can look forward to reading nihilist epigrams, e.g.., “Me and my shadow and it still doesn’t help.” We assume that the tears wept over this revelation are actually what keeps Reeves ageless and flying around, but we wonder what his partner gets out of it.