Sheen started a Twitter account during his breakdown, literally setting records for follower growth when he did, before even publishing a single tweet. They would quickly learn that they couldn’t just make him go away. After he insulted showrunner Chuck Lorre in multiple interviews, in March CBS fired Sheen, then their highest-paid sitcom star at nearly $2 million per episode. The larger internet’s impact on what kind of stories would be reported was already real, however, and very presently becoming much realer. In 2011, social media was firmly on its path to cultural dominance but its presence was also still just a fraction of what it is today - Twitter’s total userbase was less than a fifth of its current figure. His 2011 bluster has, ever since, been endemic to the platform, embedded in its personality. This is when he - again, not intentionally, because he was entirely too drunk and coked out to be calculating in this way - began writing the blueprint for a new kind of fame, a pioneering form of burning out that has since taken regular boundless flight on Twitter. ![]() Sheen, too obviously fucked up to wittingly do much of anything, stepped into the eye of this hurricane, caused by the rising friction between a growing internet and old-school media institutions. Much of the omni-directional energy that people brought online was being consolidated into the arenas of just a handful of tech giants, suddenly working on a scale large enough to disrupt traditional media and drastically change the way journalism works. ![]() The internet’s promise of utopian sprawl was beginning to wear off, as it narrowed into a limited collection of hegemonic data networks masked as community spaces. Whether or not it was Sheen who was somewhat randomly chosen by the meeting of technology and time, though, someone would soon be the face of this shift. In a few scant years, the rules had changed entirely: Imagine if Britney Spears, who suffered through an indefinitely cruel newscycle following a public breakdown in 2007, had the same media ecosystem, and could have told her story more her own way. Celebrity implosions had been manically covered for years, but Sheen’s breakdown came at an inflection point for media, showing how Wow, This Guy Is Actually Nuts would become a defining narrative structure in the years ahead, and how a collapsing protagonist could actively shape the way they were covered. Sheen’s spectacular, protracted breakdown was similar to that of Howard Beale’s in Network, not in message ( “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore”) but in how thoroughly it exposed the lack of ethical foundation in media - how little of a push the industry needed to turn into an unfettered clown show, a carousel of unwell men being pushed into worse and worse shape so that the public would never look away.Ĭharlie Sheen doing some good old-fashioned drugs in order to revel in his most manic and egotistical self after his dismissal from Two and a Half Men was not, in either a traditional or a for-the-public-good sense, a newsworthy event. He is calmer, now, because he is no longer on a ton of drugs and lying about it, and he is no longer the gleeful antihero in an absurd saga, about the lowering of standards for broadcasted human behavior. ![]() He is not, as he once was, proclaiming that he is “winning” while he clearly suffers. He is not shaking, twitching, hyperbolizing, and arching his eyebrows disturbingly whenever he speaks. Now he is so much more still and measured. While surely figurative, Sheen’s contemporary rhetoric about his past is appropriate given the contrast of his recent form to that of eight years ago. “It’s as though there were some alien or demonic possession going on,” he continued, evoking a kind of eldritch, body-invading nemesis in remembrance of his old months-long televised bender. ![]() “To this day I’m not sure how I created such chaos and wound up in that headspace,” Charlie Sheen said in an interview this past April, reflecting on his infamous 2011 meltdown.
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