The Charlie Sheen Effect

Today's Topic: Two Epic Meltdowns

I remember when I watched a shaggy, out of work, bearded fellow on David Letterman a few years back who appeared to have completely lost his mind. The entire gullible audience bought it. Joaquin Phoenix had slipped into insanity. What was this all about? It couldn't be a prank, could it? He played it so well, it seemed so real. No one thought that it could be possible, to act this strange out of no where. It's what he wanted you to think. Somewhere under that beard and those dark shades, Joaquin was smiling a "gotcha" grin. He Charlie Sheened the audience.

Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck simply did it for kicks to make a mockumentary movie about the whole celebrity meltdown phenonmenon. There is a speech in the movie unoffcially titled the Mountain Top Water Speech which Affleck wrote and Edward James Olmos performed. Below is the excerpt of the speech:

"That's you, drops of water and you're on top of the mountain of success. But one day you start sliding down the mountain and you think wait a minute; I'm a mountain top water drop. I don't belong in this valley, this river, this low dark ocean with all these drops of water. And you're confused. Then one day, it gets hot and you slowly evaporate into air, way up, higher than any mountain top, all the way to the heavens. Then you understand that it was at your lowest that you were closest to God. Life's a journey that goes round and round and the end is closest to the beginning. So if it's change you need, relish the journey."

Fancy metaphors really draw this picture of a sort of inmortality, as if celebrities are a different kind of lifeform in general or a seperate identity from people in groups. I have been able to draw many similarities in this speech to what Charlie Sheen is putting us through right now. He's a celebrity who rose to fame and became the highest paid per show actor in television history. And now he has arguably become the most highly paid actor turned lunatic in history.

Clearly like the mountain top water drop metaphor says, Sheen needs a change and he is in fact relishing the journey he is on. In present day, we now gaze at the former star of two and half men and listen to his rants on YouTube entitled "Sheen's Korner." It's this sort of drug we have become addicted to. A case of the Sheens if you will. The recent rantings about winning and tiger blood are arguably part of a larger issue on the table. But is it insanity? Or is it genius? I'd like to think that the years of substance abuse have finally caught up with the star and like all stars, something goes of in their head where they just snap. And luckily (or unluckily) for the TMZ society we live in today, everyone is there to capture the latest breaking updates.

As for Sheen? Call it a project if you will. Capture an audience by sitting down with 60 minutes, calling in to Howard Stern, making videos on YouTube that seem to exceed high intellect levels, proposing that the audience must first believe that everyone else on this earth is the enemy. Then comes the merchandise. The coffee mugs people take into work, the t-shirts that you wear on the streets, showing off your Sheen pride, the facebook updates, the profile picture changes, the twitter updates...it takes the world by storm. When he finally tipped over the boiling pot, Sheen ripped through social networks like an F5 tornado ripping through a path to ultimate destruction. The fact that you can completely lose your mind, do drugs, party like a rockstar, make ridiculous videos, and then go on a world tour and sell tickets to a show where people can witness your meltdown live...it absolutely blows me away. Bravo Mr. Sheen. Bravo indeed. You did what few celebrities dare to ever do; have a public meltdown and get rich off it. I have to hand it to the man; he knows what people want and what they want to hear.

As some point, I think we need to ask ourselves if we can be held partly responsible for the ripple effects of this meltdown. If we had responded to Sheen with tired yawns, would he have pursued the tour? Did his manager realize that what he was doing seemed like a stroke of genius because we are all just a bunch of numbskulls? Whether it's real or not is still debatable. I'm sure cameras are rolling somewhere, capturing all the Sheen antics that have come thus far. A "Winning" movie is likely in the works and tigers will soon become an endangerged species because of the demand for their blood. Until then, I continue to applaud a celebrity like Sheen who defies the critics, rises above the banter and haters, and gains momementum in an otherwise need-to-know society hanging on to his every word. Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way and maybe he has us all fooled like Joaquin did. Until I hear the word gotcha come out of his mouth, I'm classifying this case under the sheer brilliance file and part of me is sort of jealous.