Boy, oh boy, what a year Charlie Sheen has just had! Let’s see, he was named highest-paid United States television star, getting $825 000 (about R6,3-million) an episode for the sitcom, Two and a Half Men, meaning that his salary is actually funnier than anything he says on the show, ever.
Oh, his third wife, Brooke Mueller, gave birth to their twin sons. Bless. He then finished the year by taking his family to Aspen, allegedly holding a knife to Brooke’s throat on Christmas Day. And this week he was charged with felony menacing, third-degree assault and criminal mischief.
For those of you thinking, goodness, I hope that last event doesn’t have any effect on the first — it would be just awful if taking a switchblade to one’s wife’s throat (and saying, according to Mueller’s affadavit: “You better be in fear. If you tell anybody I’ll kill you … I have ex-police I can hire who know how to get the job done and they won’t leave any trace”) affected one’s earning power on a sitcom.
Well, fret no more. After all, this is Charlie Sheen, the Teflon actor, and compared with the time in 1990 when he, say, shot his fiancee, actor Kelly Preston, in the arm (it was said to be an accident) and suffered no professional repercussions (Preston, however, soon exited stage left), what’s a little knife-wielding between husband and wife?
It seems many in the US feel the same way: this week his wife not only forgave him, hugging him in court although unable to get the assault charges dropped, but US papers predicted that he will escape jail and “will be given probation, community service and a fine — things that won’t interfere with his shooting schedule”, according to the New York Post.
On one level, Sheen’s career is something of a mystery. Drug abuse and a penchant for porn stars — both of which Sheen has indulged in throughout his career — are forgivable offences in Hollywood. Even wacko conspiracy theories can be tolerated, which is fortunate for Sheen, supporter of the ironically named “9/11 Truth Movement”. But the frequent allegations of violence against his girlfriends and wives are a different matter, as Chris Brown — the singer now best known and widely vilified for pummelling his then girlfriend Rihanna last year — could testify.
Sheen’s roll call of indiscretions is extremely well known, not least because his previous wife, actor Denise Richards, found his marital behaviour so shocking — allegations of violence, death threats, you know, the usual — that she has done little but talk about it since. Nonetheless, he remains the US’s highest-paid TV star. Cheeky Charlie.
Part of the problem — or, from Sheen’s point of view, genius get-out clause — is that being what is politely referred to as a “bad boy” has always been his appeal. To start punishing him for it now would, in the eyes of his fans, be as perverse as criticising Pamela Anderson for failing to adhere to feminist ideals. Brown, on the other hand, presented himself as a smoochy romantic singer; Mel Gibson — another star who has fallen from grace — tried to be a romantic lead and serious filmmaker, an image that was hard to maintain after an anti-Semitic rant at a police officer.
Sheen, however, plays bad boys with added jokes, allowing reality to elide forgivingly into fiction. His funniest role was his cameo in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which he played the druggie but strangely wise convict, cracking his knuckles and winking at girls.
But to see this image twist at its most blatant, one is forced, sadly, to watch Two and a Half Men.
The first thing to know about Two and a Half Men is that it is spectacularly unfunny and yet very popular. When it comes to American television, there is always an enormous market for deadeningly dull sitcoms that spin around the premise of the useless-but-ultimately-adorable man, replete with all the sorts of clichés one might have thought had died in 1963 (for further study on this subject, I refer you to the likes of Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens).
But Two and a Half Men takes it a little bit further and the entire show seems to have been constructed as part of Sheen’s image offensive. The premise is that two grown-up brothers share a house: one (Jon Cryer) is very boring and is raising a young son (the half man), one is a useless but wise-cracking bad boy. His name is Charlie and he is played by Sheen and he gets the better lines and the best girls. You see what they did there?
It’s, like, postmodernism for idiots, with the added concept that “Charlie” is just like every loser guy watching the show, except with better looks and better babes. In other words, he might be a bad boy, but he’s our bad boy. It just seems that the public forgets that, when he carries that image over into real life, the laugh track doesn’t follow. —