I don't even know where to begin here.
Ordinarily, I don't usually feel compelled to write things about celebrity deaths, unless I'm taking reality-show culture to task for behavior that is tantamount to murder. But this is different. In the two hours after I heard the news about Heath Ledger's death yesterday evening, I read through an e-mail chain, countless message board posts, and took two separate phone calls about it. The reaction was unanimous: surprise at not only his death but at how much we were affected by it. Why is the death of an actor, whose work I admired but wasn't otherwise emotionally attached to, affecting me as if I had heard that someone I haven't seen since high school was killed in a car crash?
For starters, because he was old enough - or rather, young enough - to be one of my high school friends. I'm racking my brains right now to remember any rising stars that were around my age when they died. I can't think of one. Young Hollywood has been pretty lucky since River Phoenix's death (which I don't think my mother has quite gotten over yet) almost 15 years ago. There have been a few actors here and there: Jonathan Brandis, Justin Pierce (whose only claim to fame was Larry Clark's Kids), and even Brad Renfro from just last week. But none of them were on the rise. Heath Ledger, and I've said this for years, was one of those guys who just needed the right outlet to show the world what he can do. He's had a couple in his time - Brokeback Mountain being the best example to date - but unfortunately, I think he was just getting warmed up.
So why, aside from age and talent, is this affecting me so much? Well, isn't that enough? There is more, some of it trivial and almost offensive to even suggest. For example, the upcoming Batman movie in which he was possibly going to make us forget Jack Nicholson's Joker by bringing us a harder-edged one that has so far been teased in the trailers. Time will tell but I think Ledger has the unfair advantage of his turn as the Joker possibly being his swan song. I say "possibly" because he was currently filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, directed by my idol and cinematic Greek tragedy Terry Gilliam; Gilliam's shit luck with making films means that this is probably not only the last footage ever shot of Ledger but the last that 67-year-old Gilliam will ever have an opportunity (or desire) to shoot.
But there's also the fact that he was never prime tabloid fare. No hotel rooms on fire, no DUIs, no coke busts, no deviant or otherwise unusual behavior with which he has become synonymous. He seemed like someone with his head screwed on straight, a rarity in Hollywood. And maybe he was. The problem with this is that the only reason we all think he was a decent guy is because we were never told otherwise. The tabloid culture that we're engrossed in gives us so much information about celebrities (very often more than we ever care to know) that we would imagine that, if Heath Ledger had emotional problems or drug problems, we would know about it. And yet, blog after blog and posting after posting all say things like, "he seemed like such a nice guy," as if we've all met him at a party one time. I'm not saying I'm any different but this is perhaps the oddest cause of our sense of loss but one that cannot be ignored. He seemed like a decent guy because no one showed us anything shitty that he did. Maybe that validates him, and I certainly am not implying that he wasn't a decent guy, but the truth is we just don't know. And the fact that we don't know - that he wasn't a paparazzi magnet like Britney or Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty - is enough to make me think that he was doing something right.
I'm anticipating a few people just won't get why we're taking this as hard as we are when, at the end of the day, he's just an actor. They may make fun for even suggesting that his death may resonate with our generation for many years in the same way that James Dean's or John Lennon's did. But it's not him specifically, so much as what he symbolizes, that's got us freaked out: that someone so young and so talented, living the dream but working for it, someone that we all hope to be after a fashion, is still just as much flesh and blood as one of us. This isn't just an exaggeration of feelings over losing someone who entertained us. In Heath Ledger's death, we see our worst fears justified. We see our own mortality reflected in his and we're not quite sure what to do about it. Except wait.
