Charlie Sheen: A public fall from grace

By the time you read this, Charlie Sheen may well be dead. The star, volatile at the best of times, has acquired a much more notorious personality as a result of bizarre interviews. Sheen has claimed that he has “tiger blood”, “Adonis DNA”, and (about his drug use) that he “was banging seven gram rocks”. Sheen, who lives with two women, one of whom was a former porn star, has since these interviews been consistently tracked by the media in a way that recalls the hounding of Britney Spears. He has given a successive set of ever more rambling interviews and has been officially fired from his show Two and a Half Men, on which he was one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood. The interviews have gone viral and Sheen is now one of the most widely searched people on Google.

One of his more outlandish phrases: “I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning” has become an internet meme in the phrase ‘winning’. Sheen also set a record for the most amount of Twitter followers accrued within 24 hours; as of writing it stands at 2.8 million and rising. Though this popularity may give him a new lease of life, it is still a sad fall for the rising movie star of the 1980s, whose performances in Platoon and Wall Street showed a real emotional gusto. Even though in the latter Sheen had to play second fiddle to Michael Douglas chewing the scenery, he managed to carry himself at a way that hinted at future stardom. However, drug and alcohol problems and a string of wives and girlfriends over the ‘90s and beyond led to him appearing in such notable films as All Dogs Go To Heaven 2 and Scary Movie 4. It was a far cry from Oliver Stone’s punchy blockbusters.

Sheen was given a new lease of life on the sitcom Two and a Half Men. It’s on more or less every day on VIVA between midnight and 1am and I often catch it before bed. It is a perfectly harmless show, plastic-coated to appeal to a widespread American audience with every joke signposted well in advance – but it worked because Sheen was allowed to play himself. A cynical womaniser, he was by far the most enjoyable character on the show and the show knew this. Whole episodes hinged on his over-the-top reaction to events. Now he has been fired from the show it is hard to see why its production would continue. One and a Half Men doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it and it is unlikely that anyone could fill Sheen’s role. As for future roles for Sheen himself, the man has burnt so many bridges that it seems unlikely that he will be given any major television and film roles, apart from maybe as a sad cameo.

Apart from the colossal waste of talent, one of the more disquieting aspects of this whole scenario has been the media’s role. Sheen may be entertaining but nearly three decades of substance abuse and arrests for domestic battery make him a figure of pity, not ridicule. It is obvious that he needs medical help, and by pandering to him the media merely encourages his increasingly erratic behaviour. Although it is refreshing to see a celebrity who admits that the Hollywood lifestyle is entertaining rather than a burden, and does not see “rehab” as something to be dived in and out of, the pursuit of headlines before a man’s health can only have a bleak conclusion.

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