Charlie Sheen's Not Crazy— He Actually Liberated Us

We should probably thank him for his 'astute analysis'
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 9, 2011 12:41 PM CST
Charlie Sheen's Not Crazy— He's Liberated Us
Charlie Sheen arrives at the Pitkin County Courthouse on August 2, 2010 in Aspen, Colorado.   (Getty Images)

In between all the shouting about “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA,” Charlie Sheen has also managed to spout off some “reasonably astute analysis” lately, writes Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times. Before you react with a shocked “wha huh?!” consider this: By revealing himself as exactly who he is—a rock star who is constantly “winning”—Sheen has liberated us “from the illusions we harbor about the stars.” America, after all, loves nothing more than to think celebrities are just like the rest of us. We want to think of them as ordinary, normal, “because it allows us to indulge the fantasy that it could be us up there on the screen.” But celebrities, in truth, are not just like us.

Think about it: “How many of us have two live-in porn star ‘goddesses’ or can profess to have consumed an amount of cocaine that would have killed a mortal?” Sheen’s recent media blitz violates the unspoken contract that exists between the masses and the stars, “which seems to have been Sheen’s point.” Ironically, it is exactly this type of rock star lifestyle that Sheen portrayed on Two and a Half Men, which is one of the reasons the show became so successful. But when he decided to embrace it in real life, the public turned against him. “Sheen is absolutely right to call this hypocrisy,” Gabler concludes. (If you're a fan of Sheen's "astute" antics, click for a hilarious auto-tuned version of his new catchphrases.)

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