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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Ah, shit...
Posted by Jill | 8:30 PM
Twelve days ago I saw the news about Christopher Bowman's death on the news crawl on Morning Joe. Today I heard the news about the death of Heath Ledger on Newsradio 880, and my reaction was identical: "Oh, shit...."

One thing that happens when you get to be fifty is that you start recognizing the names of famous people who die, as the actors and celebrities you watched when you were a kid start to drop off one by one. Of course we had our share of young wasted lives too, during those few years when Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison all decided that twenty-seven years was long enough to hang around. But when you hit middle age, and your own time gets shorter, the news that someone young and attractive and talented is gone amidst speculation of whether the death is due to suicide (which seems at this moment to be probably not the case), an accidental overdose (possible) a continuing substance abuse problem, or due to a bout with pneumonia that apparently he'd been fighting (revealed by TMZ's Harvey Levin on Countdown this evening just makes you angry.

I'm not sure why these deaths affect us the way they do. Even now, two weeks after Bowman's death, most of the traffic coming here from Google is from searches for information on this male figure skater whose career ended fifteen years ago, and of whom you'd think most people had never heard. Perhaps it's because we think we know them because we see them on a screen; or perhaps it's that we think that they are somehow happier than we are because they live lives we can't even imagine -- and then it's a shock to find out that they have problems with depression and mental illness (Bowman was, it turns out, bipolar, which explains a great deal about his conduct during his skating career). Perhaps the deaths of people like Bowman and Heath Ledger and the similarly untimely death last week of the young and troubled actor Brad Renfro helps us to appreciate our own lives.

The Usual Suspects of tabloid media are going to be all over this story, with speculation. You know where to find them, so I'm not going to quote from or link to them here. I may have more to say on these as the toxicology reports come back and we know what the causes of death are. Until then, to speculate only causes more pain to the very real people in their lives.

Ledger was an actor the quality of whose work seemed to be a function of his director. For every Monster's Ball, there was A Knight's Tale. For every Brokeback Mountain:




...there was a Casanova. Ledger had always seemed to me to be a pretty but unimpressive actor until Brokeback -- with a deep voice that seemed incongrous with his Guess model features. I never could have imagined that this particular actor could have been the one to breathe life into the deeply closeted and tormented Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, but his work in that film can still take your breath away. I defy anyone to watch this final scene without tearing up -- and the loss of someone so talented at such a young age just makes it worse.



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2 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Ah, shit...
1/23/08, 6:33 AM  
Blogger K said...
That last scene had me in tears.
1/23/08, 10:03 AM  
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