First Brad Renfro, Now Heath Ledger
“Anybody who posts something snarky about this is going to hell.” It’s the first user comment on Gawker‘s top post about the death of 28-year-old Academy Award-nominated actor Heath Ledger. And it’s telling, given the site’s propensity for vitriol. Only one day after Brad Renfro’s body was laid to rest in Knoxville, Tennessee (where the 25-year-old actor spent most of his childhood), Ledger was found dead in a SoHo apartment owned by Mary-Kate Olsen, surrounded by containers of Xanax, Valium, Ambien, Donormyl, and Zopiclone, reports the New York Post. Both men had children; Ledger, a 2-year-old daughter with ex-girlfriend Michelle Williams, and Renfro, a young boy who lives with his mother in Japan. Both had promising careers, a wealth of talent, and yes, drug demons. Neither death has been fully explained, but press—from The New York Times all the way down to traditionally venomous gossip blogs—are giving Ledger’s death the attention it deserves. But where does this media frenzy leave the memory of Brad Renfro?
And, we wonder, how must this affect the average rag flunkie, who spends his day relishing celebrity train-wrecks? A sentiment that seems to resurface over and over again is not that this shouldn’t have happened, but that it should have happened to one of the usual suspects. Forget sad, people seem to be saying; these are tragedies that simply came out of nowhere. Just the other day, the Associated Press confirmed that it had written a pre-fab version of Britney Spears’s obituary—just in case—while hours prior to Ledger’s death, videos were circulating showing Amy Winehouse on a crack binge.
Bloggers and mainstream media outlets aren’t going to change from these sudden, tragic deaths, but we—and that’s we in a very literal sense—need to question our collective porn fantasies that have public figures ruining themselves and their families for our pleasure. And that’s all. This is sad, and shouldn’t have happened, and as Michelle Williams says (with tact, but without public histrionics), ”devastating." —Nick Haramis
