Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire

„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…”