At the end of January, Charlie Sheen checked himself into rehab shortly after receiving emergency treatment at LA Hospital for “severe abdominal pains”. Sources state that Sheen’s rehab (apparently, rehabilitation is tax-deductible. Who knew?) would last approximately three months, a fact important only because it will cost TV studio executives millions due to the inevitable production delays of the hit sitcom “Two and a Half Men”. A basic Google search reveals Sheen to be a highly unstable man with a checkered history, someone who also possesses this particular panache of staying a half-step ahead of total self-destruction.
Personally, Charlie Sheen never particularly struck me as a noteworthy actor. He’s not A-list material, nor is he open to ridicule or parody. I recently reviewed “Platoon”, “Wall Street”, as well as a few episodes of “Two and a Half Men”. He plays all the roles with equal intensity; a man whose fragmenting idealism is being slowly replaced with this all-consuming toxic cynicism, guiding his subsequent actions in-between the realms of malaise and of misanthropy. I’m mildly interested in his characters, but only so due to the fact that he’s part of a story or condition that’s far more compelling.
The reason why I’m writing about him now is because of his sudden explosion into our collective social consciousness. I doubt that anyone really gave a shit about Charlie Sheen until his quotes started emerging through ALL social channels. His quotes are so popular that he broke the Guinness record for acquiring the most Twitter followers in a short span of time (over a million new subscribers within a 25-hour period). Most of his quotes were generated from the interviews and talk-shows he appeared on after he had checked himself into rehab in order to address his current mental state and plans for the near future.
Websites like livethesheendream.com deliver Sheen’s one-liners in a unique way. Imagine a Tickle-Me-Elmo with Sheen’s head sewn on, with his default facial expression being WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT? Every tickle of the ribs (or click of his head) will make him vomit verbally abusive phrases that elicit emotions such as confusion, awe, and fear ALL AT ONCE. Obviously, this is highly amusing if his words are taken with little or no context. Sheen’s quotes on this website are actually cannibalized from larger quotes, so viewers new to the concept of Charlie Sheen begin to think that he talks like Duke Nukem. Of course, there are also all the YouTube videos, tweets, micro blog posts, and assorted clips that do the same exact thing.
We’re no strangers to using seemingly arbitrary celebrities and warping them to our amusement. Chuck Norris is a born-again Christian who used to drink himself towards the point of shitting himself in his alcohol-induced comas. After making a bunch of cheese ball action movies in the late 70s and 80s, he faded into Hollywood obscurity and rematerialized in late-night TV commercials promoting Bow-Flexes and Total Gyms. After somebody made a website with the sole purpose of assigning him powers of a God, he exploded into this sort of fame that he could only DREAM of. Everybody became familiar with his jokes, and over the span of the following months, they were used and abused, and finally retired. Kind of like Borat catch phrases.
Charlie Sheen is riding his 15 minutes of fame (which he probably didn’t want in the first place). However, unlike Chuck Norris, where most of the content was largely open-source and user-generated, Charlie Sheen is NOT a quote-producing machine. People will not be able to readily contribute to his verbal diarrhea and keep this trend alive for much longer. Additionally, due to the advent of microblogging, twitter-sized news bytes, and the basic fact that news moves A LOT MORE QUICKLY than it used to, Charlie Sheen’s current claim to fame will have a shorter half-life than of Chuck Norris’ (whose popularity preceded heavy social media usage). But unlike Chuck Norris, who appears to have adjusted to a relatively stable life free of excessive public scrutiny, Charlie Sheen will probably go down in flames. However, our public conscious doesn’t have the attention span like it used to, so I predict that his inevitable downward spiral will go by largely unnoticed. Whether this is due to our culture becoming increasingly accustomed to celebrity meltdowns (Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, and Britney Spears just to name a few) or due to the fact that most fame (or cultural memes) are increasingly taken out of context or appear completely fucking random is open to debate.
I suppose it’s hard to get invested in understanding the context or full story behind every bite-sized news article, tweet, and blurb out there. News and Journalism isn’t what it used to be – it’s a commodity that we’re supposed to filter through, favoring a few choices things that gets our mental pleasure centers most excited. In other words, it’s easy to disregard what used to be IMPORTANT while becoming that 8-millionth viewer of some YouTube video of someone dressing up in drag and telling you to “Leave Britney Alone!” I would probably get into how it’s the responsibility for new-age journalists to report the truth as accurately as they can, without lying by omission or leaving context and follow up to news consumers, but that will probably lead into a moot point. So I won’t. All I’ll say is that if I involved myself in that racket, I’d probably do more harm than good.
So Charlie Sheen may slip into the cultural ether, perhaps briefly reminisced many years from now in a VH1 cultural nostalgia marathon, but his legacy as a person may be ultimately reduced to a few choice words he said right before his fall. I guess that’s why I feel sorry for the guy.
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oh yeah. 5 miles yesterday.
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