Even if celebrity culture really isn’t your thing, you’d have to have some serious problems with your internet connection (and social life) to be oblivious to Charlie Sheen’s recent, rather spectacular, public breakdown. Even if you’ve been cruising the Guardian website for updates on the crisis in Libya rather than pressing the ‘Culture’ link, you can’t have failed to have missed their ‘Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway?’ article. Sheen is everywhere. There’s now even an app you can download to block all mentions of him as you browse the internet.
Charlie Sheen was thoroughly catapulted into our collective consciousness three weeks ago when he was fired from tragically unfunny yet incomprehensibly popular American sitcom ‘Two and Half Men’ after launching into an anti-semitic tirade against series creator Chuck Lorre in a bizarre radio interview. In the same interview Sheen described himself as “having poetry in my fingertips” and claimed to have cured himself of his addictions, “cured it, with my mind”. Clearly, all is not well in the world of Sheen.
Since this now infamous interview, Sheen has embarked on a spectacular voyage of self destruction. From his grandiose declarations that he is “Winning” and has “Tiger blood”, to his announcement that he intends to marry his two girlfriends, Sheen is clearly a train wreck in process; a train wreck the world cannot stop watching. This much is clear with Charlie’s Twitter account; he had 1000 followers before he’d posted a word. Sheen has since set the Guinness World Record for the largest number of followers gained in a day and within hours of introducing a Tiger Blood hashtag, #tigerblood was the No 1 trending subject on the site.
What’s really disturbing, though, is that Sheen is not simply a train wreck we can’t tear ourselves away from, he is a train wreck we can’t stop contributing to. Pictures have recently emerged of Sheen on the roof of Live Nation’s headquarters brandishing a machete, a machete he had been handed by an employee and told to wave around. And then there was the radio station that flew a banner over Sheen’s house and got him to phone in, spewing yet more reams of quotable nonsense into the public sphere. Clearly there’s an unsettling human desire to provide Sheen with extra space to self-combust. It’s all uncomfortably reminiscent of bear-baiting, although in Sheen’s case we are watching an ill man self-destruct in the most public way possible.
The clearest sign that things have gone too far, however, comes from the fact that companies are now attempting to profit out of Sheen’s self-destruction; an American firm has recently launched a limited edition version of one of their energy drinks, naming it ‘Bi-Winning Tiger Blood’ and claiming that “It’s made from 100% passion.”
We can’t stop Sheen from broadcasting his opinions, but surely we shouldn’t be encouraging him and blatantly profiting out of his personal crisis. It’s inhumane, the man is clearly mentally ill. It wasn’t until Britney Spears shaved her head that it became clear that she was in the grips of a serious breakdown and was not a figure to be mocked. What does Charlie Sheen have to do before we reach the same realisation?