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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 - 3 Comments »
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On Charlie Sheen and an Ethical Line in the Sand

Okay, look.

It’s fun to make fun of someone who’s making such a public display of bottoming out as Charlie Sheen is right now. I get it. I think partly our drive to point and laugh at the tragedy of a person falling apart is that it’s kind of fascinating to watch someone completely deteriorate … if you don’t know that person. Not so much when you do. And I think partly, we watch, and we snicker, and we pass around links to other people making fun of the implosion, because, well … because we can look at a Charlie Sheen falling to pieces in front of the world and thank God (or whatever deity we pray to) that it’s not us.

But people, really. A worldwide audience with 1,000,000 + people on Twitter egging on someone who’s clearly off his fucking rocker right now? Is like standing on a bridge egging on the suicidal jumper to take a leap. What’s happening in media around the Charlie Sheen debacle is just tragic, and really pushing the boundaries of any kind of ethics.

I’ve dealt with addiction in my life. I’ve watched a loved one sink into the depths of addiction faster than I ever thought possible, seen a person I thought I knew well turn into someone completely different. I’ve had my heart ripped out witnessing it. I’ve trembled in fear because of it. It’s like being Danny, the little kid in The Shining, desperately loving the kind, gentle father who turns into a monster with a roque mallet because of his narcissism and addiction, banging holes in the walls that will soon be your skull if he finds you, while you cower in fear.

A person falling off the deep end in this way is not, I assure you, funny to his kids. Or his parents. Or to anyone who knows him personally and cares about his demise in a way that the world, obviously, just does not.

And while there is a way back out of it — for some people (Robert Downey Jr, may you stay forever sober, please) — for many there is not. For Charlie Sheen, there may not be a way back. So tell me, please. What the hell is funny about that?

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3 Comments »

3 Responses to “On Charlie Sheen and an Ethical Line in the Sand”

  1. Shut says:
    March 2, 2011 at 5:40 pm

    Comment deleted on the grounds the commenter was being an abusive douchebag.

  2. Evan says:
    March 2, 2011 at 7:16 pm

    Wow. Is that you, Charlie?

  3. Rob says:
    March 3, 2011 at 9:22 am

    If I could, I’d like to make a distinction between schadenfreude at the misfortunes of someone’s son and father, and just plain giggly appreciation of the rhetoric. I don’t have anything against Charlie Sheen, except that if the allegations of abuse against women are true he’s a dangerous douche. I don’t take pleasure in public celebrity meltdowns in and of themselves, though if someone like Sarah Palin had one on this level I’d go make popcorn. What I HAVE been enjoying during the whole Charlie Sheen cycle is his cascade of instant-classic quotes. Yes, it could be drugs or mental illness talking. But not every addict or manic-depressive refers to himself as a “high priest Vatican assassin warlock.” I mean, that’s some kind of poetry right there; and if we can appreciate the wordfuckery of a Bukowski or a Burroughs, maybe we can get behind the verbal convolutions of a Charlie Sheen without feeling like we’re laughing at a mental paraplegic who just fell down rhetorical stairs. I mean, he certainly has made this whole thing infinitely more interesting than it had to be.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon