We're All Charlie Sheen's Enablers

In the past, we wanted our stars and politicians to be larger than life, like American royalty. Now, we want to watch when they spin out of control.

I'll ask the question myself.  Why, when there is revolution in Egypt and Libya, a horrifying tsunami and earthquake in Japan, and a legislative earthquake in Wisconsin, am I writing about Charlie Sheen?

Well, the short answer is the fact that just about every other legitimate news source has been talking about Charlie Sheen. The tacky terrors of his ongoing meltdown have made the front page of almost every major newspaper and online RSS feed, and every "serious" cable news show from FoxNews to MSNBC.  He's getting more attention in his own right now for his bizarre webcasts and Twitter tweets, his child-custody catfights, and his bare-knuckle war with controversial showrunner Chuck Lorre, than he ever did for his "real job" on the wildly popular Two and a Half Men.

I've always been fascinated by the psychology and dynamics of fame.  Lately I’ve found myself wondering about the loss of privacy for public figures, especially in our age of 24 hour television, blogging, and social networking.  Which bring us to Sheen: By actively egging on and intentionally making a show out of his self-destruction, has anyone else deconstructed the expectation of privacy for public figures more than Charlie Sheen?

Except maybe for Mel Gibson and Michael Jackson's final days (and impeachment-era Bill Clinton), I can't think of anyone offhand.  Well -- maybe I can.  Britney, Lindsey, Paris, Snooki, Nicole, Kim Kardashian, etc.  But for them, having one meltdown and tabloid tantrum after another is just another day at the office.  It's almost their stock-in-trade, what a rubber-chicken joke was to a vaudeville comic; it's their shtick, it's what they do.  Do they even have anything else to go on, besides a burning drive to be "stars" for the sake of stardom?

In 2007, while working for the late FilmStew and Yahoo Movies, I wrote a sort-of "obituary" for their patroness saint, Anna-Nicole Smith.  She was one of the first celebrities to realize that stardom in the era of Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, and reality TV, of OJ and JonBenet and the ascendant  internet, could be all but divorced from actual talent.  My last line in the obit was that "she was the addict, and we [the media who enabled her] were the pushers."

Charlie Sheen, however much the party animal he always was and is, is a horse of a different color.  Like Gibson and Jackson, he'd been an established star for over 20 years.  He's carried two TV sitcoms, starred in two back-to-back Oscar-winners for Best Picture in the late '80s, and he comes from a respected theatrical family (father Martin Sheen, brother Emilio Estevez).  He always was a wild one (his now-arch-enemy Lorre specifically created the role of promiscuous, carefree Charlie Harper for him).  But in the past, his over-the-top antics seemed cool, like something we might even want to fantasize about doing, like hearing our jockish older brother bragging in the locker room.  Today, would anybody want to be Charlie Sheen?  Will anybody be able to watch Wall Street or Major League again without thinking of Tiger Blood, goddesses, "winning" or his cult-hypnotized looking visage going on about being "high on a drug called Charlie Sheen"?

What is news-worthily interesting about L'Affaires Sheen and Gibson, besides their obvious traffic-accident or freeway-chase qualities, is what they say about what we want and expect from our favorite celebrities (and politicians) in this day and age. In the past, we wanted both our stage and screen kings and queens (Bette, Joan, Katharine, Gable) and our regal, aristocratic politicians (FDR, JFK, Reagan), to be just that:  American Royalty.  Larger than life.  People we looked up to.  Now, we live to see them taken down a peg or two; we want to watch them when they spin out of control.

In the not-so-long-ago past, studios and networks went out of their way with fixers and payoffs to cover up their biggest stars' indiscretions.  While there were a few gossip rags that hit below the belt (think the ultra-sleazy tabloid chief played by Danny DeVito in the movie of James Ellroy's masterpiece, LA Confidential), the "legitimate" columnists were "like THIS" with the studios and networks themselves.  They largely printed what the publicists and the studios wanted in print.

Today -- ironically in part because of the abuses of the censored past, where homosexuality and terminal illness were "invisible" in Hollywood and Washington -- the very idea of a celebrity or politician having a private life is considered ridiculous, even offensive.  When a politician or celebrity says to a reporter, "I don't want to answer that" about their personal or sex life, no matter how intrusive or inappropriate the question, the ghosts of Rock Hudson, Raymond Burr, Anthony Perkins, and Merv Griffin appear faster than a scene from Macbeth or A Christmas Carol.  Religious Right Republicans wanted to know every detail of Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer's betrayals of "family values", while liberal commentators rejoiced in the hypocrisies of Larry Craig, Bristol Palin, and Mark Foley, and the shocking selfishness and insensitivity of Newt Gingrich.  Andrew Sullivan demanded to know "Is Elena Kagan a Lesbian?" almost as badly as Pat Robertson and James Dobson did.

This goes way beyond just sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  When it gets out that an actress was keeping the details of her "courageous struggle with breast cancer" to herself, or an actor refused to dish the dirt on his "tragic battle with addiction" or his molestation as a child, it's almost as if they were committing psychological theft from us.  Don't we have a RIGHT to "know that we're not alone," so that we too can be "empowered" and draw "inspiration" from their private struggles?  Who do they think they are, keeping all that to themselves, when they could be using their celebrity to "raise awareness" of these key issues?

To many (especially younger) people, a high-profile person who does want to keep their private life private comes across as code-speak for self-hatred, as the essence of disingenuous insincerity.  So if stars can't have any privacy for themselves, then why shouldn't one of them cynically enjoy letting his freak flag fly, being as "outrageous" as he can be for as long as the "high" lasts?  Somebody's going to!

And that's ultimately why the Charlie Sheen sideshow is newsworthy.  Charlie Sheen himself matters because he's a talented, in many ways deservedly famous man whose seemingly-glamorous life and work is by definition interesting to many people.  His meltdown matters because we say it matters -- and because we simply wouldn't have it any other way.   After all, they say the first rule of stardom is to give the people what they want.