And yet he always managed to show up to work and has not hurt the reputation of Two and a Half Men despite the drugs, the whoring, and the mid-life crisis. Compared to Cruise, Sheen has put on a mesmerizing and refreshing display of mid-life crisis honesty—he’s just himself, an addict, take it or leave it (the Empire regime at CBS decided to leave it no matter what the legalities are). On Piers Morgan and 20/20 and the uncut TMZ interview Sheen doesn’t seem like he’s on drugs. Look, you don’t do drugs and then want to give TV interviews. You do drugs and want to bang hookers in Vegas while smoking a carton of Marlboro Lights and downing three bottles of Patron Silver. You don’t do blow and then chat with Andrea Canning on ABC who looks both horrified and also, um, charmed. (Hey? Wanna know a secret, Andrea? Partying is fun. Addiction is hell but partying is a fucking blast.) These interviews don’t seem erratic to me. (He’s taken various drug tests and passed them all.) The TMZ interview is a major post-Empire triumph and I thought he looked great on CNN. Piers Morgan, after an uneven month (try watching the Empire attitude of the Winklevoss twins and not cross your eyes) seemed, finally, happily excited with Sheen’s aggressive transparency. Compare this to how bored Piers was with Janet Jackson’s Empire interview, complete with evasive pauses that lasted so long you could have rolled boulders through them, and Sheen’s honesty made Piers seem almost positively orgasmic. (Imagine Sheen being interviewed by Oprah. Sheen refusing to bow and apologize to the Empress might actually cause her face to melt off and her head to explode.) Sheen seems like a genuinely interesting person now. Maybe a wreck, but REAL. Transparency: that’s where Charlie’s at—sorry, Dr. Drew, it’s just not as logical as you think it is. So Sheen is in the strange new position of defining what that exactly means for a celebrity in post-Empire.
It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Charlie Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw now, and lucid and intense and the most fascinating person wandering through the culture. (No, it’s not Colin Firth or David Fincher or Bruno Mars or super-Empire Tiger Woods, guys.) We’re not used to these kinds of interviews. It’s coming off almost as performance art and we’ve never seen anything like it—because he’s not apologizing for anything. It’s an irresistible spectacle, but it’s also telling because we are watching someone profoundly bored and contemptuous of the media engaging with the media and using the media to admit things about themselves and their desires that seem “shocking” because of society’s old-ass Empire guidelines. No one has ever seen a celebrity more nakedly revealing—even in Sheen’s evasions there’s a truthful playfulness that makes Tiger’s mea culpa press conference look like something manufactured by Nicholas Sparks.
The people unable to process Sheen’s honesty can’t do this because it’s so unlike the pre-fab way celebrity presented itself within the Empire. Anyone who has put up with the fake rigors of celebrity (or has addiction problems) has got to find a kindred spirit here. The new fact is: if you’re punching a paparazzo, you now look like an old-school loser. If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ (and humiliated by Harvey Levin, or Chelsea Handler—princess of post-Empire) walking out of a club on Sunset at 2 in the morning trashed, then you’re basically fucked and you should become a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game now and you’re a fool if you don’t play along with it and are still enacting the role of humble, grateful celebrity instead of embracing your fucked-up-ness. Gaga’s little monsters, anyone? Not showing up to collect your award at the Razzies for that piece of shit you made? So Empire. This is why Charlie seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians. A lot of it is sheer bad-boy bravado—just saying shit to see how people react, which is very post-Empire—but a lot of it is transparent, and on that level, Sheen is, um, winning. And I’m not sure being fired from Two and a Half Men and having to wear those horrible rockabilly bowling shirts for another two years is, um, losing…
What do people want from Charlie Sheen? Knowing more details about the benders and the porn stars and the trumped-up anti-Semitism (well, yeah, maybe, whatever) and being a “womanizer” (what the fuck does that archaic term mean)? What has been labeled “freakery” is really just a bored, pissed-off celebrity whose presence helps make a TV network an insane amount of money and by comparison is paid accordingly. When I tweeted “I love Charlie Sheen” on February 28 after watching him on the Piers Morgan show (and no, I wasn’t being ironic), the number of tweets I received agreeing with me (not ironically) from both men and women was a surprise. (It was the fastest I had been RT’d since something I tossed off about Angry Birds a couple of months ago.) Look, I’m not denying he has drug and alcohol problems, and perhaps even struggles with mental illness, but so do a lot of people in Hollywood who hide it so much better or that the celebrity press just doesn’t care enough about, and I’m not denying that Sheen is exploiting a problematic situation that he has helped create. But you can’t step around the fact that the negativity certain people feel about Sheen has never outweighed our fascination with the hedonism Charlie enjoys and which remains the envy of any man—if only women weren’t around to keep them liars. His supposed propensity for violence against women hasn’t hurt his popularity with female fans either (and if you want to get into what that means then that is a whole other story for another article—or about fifty books. Jezebel.com take note.) And, of course, if Sheen was a rock star (another anachronistic term from the Empire), not many people would be paying attention.
Do they really want manners? Civility? Empire courtesy? No. They want reality, no matter how crazy the celeb who brings it on has become. And this is what enflames CBS and the Empire press (but also gives them boners while they’re wringing their hands): Charlie Sheen doesn’t care what you think of him anymore, and he scoffs at the idea that anyone even thinks there’s such a thing as PR taboo. “Hey suits, I don’t give a shit, you suck,” is what so many of the disenfranchised have responded to. Charlie Sheen blows open the myth that men will outgrow the adolescent pursuit of pleasure, the dream of a life without rules or responsibilities; even if they have children, a flicker of that dream always remains. Charlie Sheen: Truth! Score! We’ve come a long way in the last ten days: Charlie Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the Empire’s dank graveyard. No one knew it in 1986, but Charlie Sheen was actually Ferris Bueller’s dark little brother all along…
Bret Easton Ellis is the author of five previous novels including, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park, and a collection of stories, The Informers. His most recent book, Imperial Bedrooms.
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3/16/2011
Bret Easton Ellis: Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire - The Daily Beast
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