It's time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger. He's not a tragic hero. He's not a beautiful martyr. He's just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn't get an Academy Award to memorialize his death.
Ledger's brief career culminated in his portrayal of the Joker in "The Dark Knight," a role that at first seems compelling ("mesmerizing," critics have fawned) but ultimately devolves into a can-can dance of snuffling pseudo-psychopathia. It has all the subtlety of a hangover -- exactly what I'd expect from someone who headed home every night to a pill party. Still, "The Dark Knight" has soared to unprecedented success, and Ledger's name is mentioned incessantly for an Oscar.
The current mania joins Ledger to a long line of creative figures who committed the ultimate failure and are, unfortunately, all the more famous for it: Dylan Thomas, Hank Williams, Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, John Belushi, Janis Joplin. Some drank themselves to death, some overdosed, some ran their cars off the road. As the saying goes in AA, the stories are the same, only the details are different.
"I want to live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory," Faron Young sang in a 1955 hit, unwittingly encapsulating this fatal phenomenon. People of every walk of life die from drugs and alcohol, but only a celebrity's death gets so heated in a devil's crucible of public sentiment that it is transformed into posthumous glory. And such adulation begets a mass social hysteria that continues the cycle.
The preeminent example is the deification of Hendrix. How many young men pick up a guitar to emulate him, and wind up under a bridge with a bottle of Colt 45 picking out a wobbly solo on a tinny set of strings? I see them every day in downtown Seattle.
Hendrix worship inspired billionaire Paul Allen to build a museum: Seattle's Experience Music Project. An exhibit there explains how Hendrix created his unique sound but equivocates his death in an utterly irresponsible fashion: "Hendrix's creative journey was cut short by an accidental overdose of sleeping pills." (Nine sleeping pills, accompanied by barrels of wine; he choked to death in his own vomit.) The Hendrix monument at a cemetery south of Seattle says nothing at all about his death. It's as if the angels just took him away to the big amplifier pile in the sky.
