While feeding our kids and getting them off to school, my wife, Elena, and I turned on Good Morning America for coverage of Colin Firth—and all we got was endless “exclusive” hype around the recently fired and self-proclaimed sober Charlie Sheen, looking red-faced and half-dead while spewing insanity about being an old-fashioned guy who believes in honor and chivalry.
“This just isn’t right,” my wife, an admitted reality-TV fan, said, turning off the set. “They’re taking advantage of his addiction.”
I went about my business today, but the words stuck with me. When I went to check out the headlines on the Web, I couldn’t find much of anything about Mark Wahlberg—a recovering addict who helped Christian Bale win an Oscar for his performance in The Fighter as a real-life addict gone straight. What I found was more Charlie Sheen, who apparently did an impromptu interview with TMZ in his backyard this afternoon.
Same with Libya coverage: buried in the papers and online, but there’s Sheen, front and center. Title X legislation and Planned Parenthood’s funding? Sheen. Wisconsin? Sheen.
Up until now, I had really been trying to ignore the whole Sheen debacle as stupid, sad, and irrelevant to my daily life. Why is Charlie Sheen news? Because he blew a $2-million-per-episode deal with CBS for crack and hookers? Because he’s willing to speak as outrageously as Tiger might have if he’d been fed a truth serum?
Or is it because Sheen is the poster boy for a certain type of American manhood? In his overactive id, do we see our own? Do we watch his downward spiral and think, “Hell, I could be that guy—but just for a day”?
Is Charlie Sheen the addict, or are we addicted to Charlie Sheen?
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Don’t get me wrong: I’m a sick bastard, an addict myself, and not beyond being obsessed with the Sheen mystique. For many years my favorite scene in all of cinema featured an underwear-clad Martin Sheen, Charlie’s dad, in Apocalypse Now, cutting himself and crying like a baby in a Saigon hotel. Even better than that was an interview with Martin Sheen in Heart of Darkness, which is about the making of the film. In it, Martin admits to being so drunk that he couldn’t stand up, and that he eventually took so many drugs during shooting that he had a heart attack and had to be medivacked out. The filming of his scenes was put off until he could get better.
To me that was the ultimate in cool. Kind of like the bar stool at NYC’s White Horse Tavern, a favorite spot of John Belushi’s and, even more famously, where poet Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. I drank there, too, just to be part of addict history. Sheen (Martin), Thomas, and Belushi were the kind of men I aspired to become.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t. I helped myself. I got sober (if you really want to know the gory details of all that, you can read it here). I refused to become yet another addict train wreck. My kids, my parents, and my life were too precious. As was my manhood.
So coming at this Charlie Sheen thing from the other side, it upsets me greatly that we as a culture have adopted this guy as our national obsession. It’s a sad story, but one not unlike any number of drunks and cokeheads before him. I have worked with many men who are trying to get and stay sober. The stuff Charlie has done is nothing out of the ordinary. He’s a garden-variety addict with a big-ass wallet, to make matters a lot worse.
All addicts lie. They will sell their mother for a hit. They will do enormously stupid things to cover their lies. And in regard to sex, personal property, and willingness to engage in criminal behavior, whatever morality they might have when sober goes out the window when intoxicated.
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What upsets me so much about waking up to watch Charlie rant and rave? The man is in desperate need of help, and we as a country are getting off on watching him flounder. I have a sneaking suspicion that it has to do with how Charlie fits into the long line of male celebrities and politicians gone bad (Tiger, Spitzer, Edwards … do I need to go on?).
Yes, we love to follow the ins and outs of insane female celebrities as they ruin their lives, too. But it goes from the cover of the tabloids to the (supposedly) serious news networks when a guy screws up. We eat it up.
My question is, why? Do we all want to believe that guys are that bad? Is our view of masculinity so skewed that we would prefer to talk about Charlie Sheen than Colin Firth, Mark Wahlberg, or Christian Bale? Are the good guys “boring” while the bad boys dial up the ratings, feeding the beast of popular culture?
I learned a long time ago that with addiction, the first step is to realize that the urge to do something is not the same as doing it. And so I kindly ask of men and women alike: change the channel. Read a book. Find out about guys volunteering. (Or if nothing else works, read this site.) Not all men are Charlie Sheen, as much as we seem to think they are.
—Photo timesnewsnetwork/Flickr
About Tom Matlack
Vocalyze
What makes Charlie Sheen the train wreck that I cannot look away from?
His outrageous treatment of women — including threatening his wife at knife-point and possessing porn of underage girls. No matter what he does, it doesn’t make a dent in his TV stardom. HIs salary seems to increase with his rap sheet. Baffling.
I know you usually don’t answer comments here, so maybe you’ll track me down and drop some science but….
being a recovering addict/drinker like yourself, I would think you’d be a lot harder on Charlie Sheen for mocking AA, and rejecting the people PAID to help him.
I just ended a relationship with a family member who decided drugs and alcohol were more important than being a daughter, mother, sister, and cousin. I have no sympathy for people who don;t want to help themselves. For me, Charlie Sheen is mindless funny entertainment. Not because of his tv show, I don;t watch it, but because he’s crazy in front of the camera saying F-18s, winning, bi-winning, and other catch phrases. He’s Gary Busey of 15 years ago with a higher sex drive. He has money so he’ll be ok in the long run, or dead. I just pray to the Lord above his kids are not adversely affected.
Dude! his kids WILL be adversely affected! You think this F-ed up shyt doesn’t have an effect on kids? It is deeply disturbing. Not to mention the absence of a father in his right mind.
Of course we are addicted to Charlie Sheen – just as we are addicted to looking at fatal car accidents. But in no time, this wreck will be cleared away and we will wait for the next disaster. After all…we’re Americans!
http://jezebel.com/#!5774374/charlie-sheens-history-of-violence-toward-women
While he may be addicted, he’s not crazy. Though I’d say he’s definitely a victim of his appetites. But above all, I believe Sheen is just a very, very creative guy who is easily labeled a loon because of his wayward appetites. Have you ever tried acting? I have. It’s hard. It takes a different kind of person to give themselves to a character who lives in words on a page and make it come to life. In front of people – or a camera. I’m convinced that actors are some of the most ‘creative’ people on the planet. Next to that, painters, writers and musicians. Creative people in general have to be willing to go outside of the realm of normal to pull things back in so that we can understand them. I am a writer. I know from experience that I don’t fit in with most ‘normal’ people. I don’t like being around them, and at one point they wanted to put me on drugs so I would conform to a reasonable level of normal. So i could ‘fit in.’ I didn’t do it, but have tempered some of my wanderings out on the fringe of what is normal over the years. I was also a full-blown alcoholic, before I was ‘paid’ to be a writer. I was a monster that people (even family) found much easier to put in a box than actually have to deal with.
He might be a lot of things, but Charlie Sheen is not crazy.
The wives and husbands and fathers and mothers and sons and daughters of addicts and alcoholics are not addicted to Charlie Sheen.
They will change the channel or turn off the radio. They don’t click on the link to that story—the story whose ending they already know, too well. The story of unchecked disease. Of permanent organ damage and liver failure and the attendant brain damage caused by ingesting, injecting, drinking and snorting too many toxic substances for too long. Fame and money delay the bottoming out for so many people. That’s not a blessing. That’s a curse. Charlie Sheen is a winner? His wife and family and children and anyone who has ever truly cared for him are the losers.
I never “looked up” this schmuck in any way, shape or form. I have always thought he was lame and a loser. I am enjoying watching his downfall. He deserves this.
What’s this “we” stuff?