celebrity gossip, academic style

Note: The following will also function as the first half of the epilogue to my dissertation, which I’ll be handing in IN ITS 400 PAGE GLORY on Wednesday. In the meantime, I would *love* some feedback….

On February 28, 2011, as I was completing the finishing touches on my dissertation on the history of the celebrity gossip, something fortuitous occurred. A major star, with very specific economic value to multiple media identities, underwent a very public meltdown. At the time of this writing, the star has been fired from the program in which he was starring. Perhaps even more importantly, this star submitted to mainstream media outlets to air his grievances, but was quickly disillusioned with the way that he, and his story, was mediated. He has since made a series of decisions and statements that effectively lay the industry, its machinations, and his place within it, bare.

This star is by no means the first to undergo a very public self-destruction. But he may be the first to fully engage the particular powers of the online gossip industry to do so. As will become clear, this star, the extent to which his behavior was tolerated and capitalized upon, and the resultant media frenzy illuminate the inherent conflicts that characterize the current production of stars — and the potential for those conflicts to be be exploited.

The star in question is Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen, brother to Emilio Estevez, and, for much of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, a major film star. For the last eight years, Sheen has commanded upwards of $2 million an episode for his work on the Two in a Half Men, which has consistently been ranked as the top sitcom in America. Years of drug use, repeated accusations of domestic abuse, public dalliances with porn stars and prostitutes, and an intoxicated rampage through the New York Plaza Hotel culminated in a Cocaine-induced bender spanning January 26th and 27th. Sheen ended up and the hospital, and his publicist released an official statement that the star was suffering from “severe stomach pains,” which Sheen later claimed to be related to a hernia. The next day, Sheen entered into a self-fashioned rehab in his home, and Two and a Half Men officially went on hiatus.

The show was scheduled to resume production in early March once Sheen regained sobriety. But throughout February, Chuck Lorre, the creator and executive producer of Two and a Half Men and several of the most popular and profitable sitcoms in America, levied a public critique of Sheen. Since his first sitcom, Lorre has placed “vanity cards” (small print musings on life and the industry) at the end of each episode. Lorre has subtly decried Sheen’s actions in the past, yet following Sheen’s January hospitalization, his criticism became increasingly overt. A card at the the February 14th episode of Men read “If Charlie Sheen outlives me, I’m gonna be really pissed.” The same day, a card at the end of the Lorre-produced Mike and Molly alluded to Sheen’s lifestyle: “He felt dead inside. No matter how hard he partied, he could never escape the simple fact — inside, dead.”

Sheen retaliated by calling in to the radio show of friend (and conspiracy theorist) Alex Jones on February 24. He described Alcoholics Anonymous as a “bootleg cult” and exclaiming “I have a disease? Bullshit, I cured it, with my mind!” Sheen also called Lorre “a stupid little man,” referring to him as “Chaim Levine.” The same day, he released a “public letter” to TMZ, claiming “I fire back once and this contaminated little maggot can’t handle my power and can’t handle the truth. I wish him nothing but pain in his silly travels especially if they wind up in my octagon. Clearly I have defeated this earthworm with my words — imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists.”4
In response, Warner Bros. Television and CBS (Two and a Half Men’s production company/distributor and home network) issued a definitive statement, declaring that “based on the totality of Charlie Sheen’s statements, conduct, and condition” they had decided to cancel the duration of the season.

The purportedly sober Sheen then filmed interviews with ABC and NBC in which he continued his attack against Lorre and declared “I am on a drug — it’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body. . . . .Too much?” Unhappy with the way the interviews were edited and lit, Sheen invited TMZ to perform a live interview in the backyard of his Hollywood Hills home.

TMZ had, of course, been tracking the Sheen story for months, publishing dozens of quips from Sheen in print and taped form. But this was something different. An unvarnished, real-time quality characterizes TMZ content, and the Sheen interview was no exception. But this conversation was streaming live, just hours after his interview had aired on ABC. The interviewer, a jeans-and-t-shirt-clad TMZ staff member, sat in lawn chairs with Sheen, who chain-smoked, demanded coffee (mixed with Vodka), interacted with members of his entourage (including his two “goddesses”) and pontificated for forty-five minutes on his critics, their jealousy of his lifestyle, and the inability of the world to understand the fact that he was “winning at life.”

Sheen has since taken to Twitter, accumulating one million followers so quickly that he broke a Guinness World Record.7 His rhetoric has been transformed into internet memes, his soundbites transformed into haikus, captions for New Yorker cartoons, and juxtaposed it with the rantings of other famous “Charlies,” such Charles Manson. He has been called a one-man sideshow and a visionary. Whatever Sheen is, it is clear that he, like a handful of stars over the last fifty years, has challenged the way that the industry has traditionally mediated stars and their behavior.

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I have made this detour into the recesses of Sheen’s mind with purpose, as his rhetoric — and the mediation thereof — have, more than any recent scandal or celebrity event, illuminated the way that the industry works. In the process, he has articulated uncomfortable truths about the way stars and gossip about them are “made,” and what audiences expect, and demand, from these products.
Sheen exemplifies the importance of stars today: his name and presence in Two and a Half Men helped the show get picked up; his particular brand of humor, coupled with that of co-star Jon Cryer and the writing, directing, and overall production of Chuck Lorre, made the show a phenomenal success. That success, in turn, allowed Warner Bros. to charge unprecedented amounts for domestic and international syndication rights; as of 2011, the show airs in forty-eight countries around the world. But Two and a Half Men is dependent on Sheen — his character’s bad-boy behavior add necessary (albeit slight) spice to an otherwise bland family sitcom. Warner Bros. and Lorre could replace Sheen, but as the example of James Garner and Maverick made clear all the way back in the 1960s, a popular show’s identity hinges on the presence of its star, as validated by Sheen’s $2 million an episode paycheck.

Some speculate that after eight years, Two and a Half Men had run its course, and Lorre was looking for a way out. But the show still consistently placed in the top fifteen, and every episode “in the can” meant millions in additional syndication revenue. The imperatives of the marketplace demanded that it continue, even when Sheen spent the hiatuses between filming trashing hotel rooms, using illegal drugs, and abusing the women in his life. Other stars, including Lindsay Lohan to Mickey Rourke, have engaged in similar vices and have been chastised or fired. In Rourke’s case, his erratic behavior made it nearly impossible for the film to be “bonded” and receive funding. In contrast, Lorre, Warner Bros., and CBS tolerated Sheen’s behavior, however repugnant, because it did not effect the bottom line — a reality to which Sheen pointed during his interview with TMZ. Put bluntly, a star’s actions are not judged by their morality or legality, but by how they effect the products with which they are associated.

But the tolerance of Sheen, both on the part of audiences and the industry itself, goes beyond simple economics. He is a white male and the son of a well-respected star, with a long career in Hollywood.8 Sheen’s offenses are also studded with glamour: he parities, but he parties with entire baseball teams, inviting All-Stars to a private yacht for a screening of his hit film Major League. As clearly evidenced by the TMZ video, his lifestyle is luxurious, seemingly filled with beautiful blondes willing to fulfill his every wish. As Sheen explains, he is a “bitchin’ rockstar from Mars,” and the media has done very little to disabuse viewers of this notion: his lifestyle may be a little crazy, but it is one in which he clearly revels. In contrast, female stars who lead a similar lifestyle — whether Lohan or Britney Spears — have been consistently framed as pitiable. Women who live outsized lives are grotesque, while Sheen is just, in his words, “grandiose.”

The public’s willingness to accept or gloss over Sheen’s actions is directly linked to the specifics of his picture personality. Even before Two and a Half Men, Sheen’s star image hinged on his portrayals of rogues, cheeky jack-asses, and philanderers in Major League (1989), Men at Work (1990) Hot Shots! (1991), and subsequent sequels. Two and a Half Men took his existing image and placed it in a domestic environment, where it took on a crucial narrative function as the unruliness against which his brother and nephew defined themselves.

If the roles were exchanged, and Sheen, rather than Cryer, played the upright, loving father, Sheen’s actions would seem quite literally “out of character,” puncturing audience understandings of what his star image represented. As is, his actions seem a natural, albeit amplified, extension of the role he plays on-screen. Instead of shocking fans, they function as yet another source of entertainment and pleasure: a repeat of Two and a Half Men, aired the evening of the TMZ interview, garnered 9.3 million viewers, as did the complete ABC interview, which aired at 10 p.m. on March 1st and won its time slot.

Sheen himself is cognizant of the harmony between his extra-textual and textual lives. While he admits that Two and a Half Men’s writers do not use actual experiences from his life, the show nevertheless “took all my gold, and used it, and then went thanks, good bye.” Sheen emphasizes that his antics have had no negative effect on the popularity and profitability of the show: “Negative press?!? Did you see the numbers on the show? It’s all about commerce, dude.” In other words, Sheen’s overarching star image — his on- and off-screen antics — are at least part of the reason for the show’s enduring popularity. Why punish him for living out the life of the character audiences love to watch on screen?

Indeed, as David Carr points out, Sheen was not fired for living out the life of his on-screen counter-part, but for his willingness to insult his boss, who, at this moment, is one of the few working in Hollywood television that has been able to deliver network product that attracts consistent ratings.10 Despite rumors that Lorre himself has mistreated and verbally abused his staff and crew, the fact remains that he is one of the most powerful men in the business. Warner Bros. and CBS will lose millions as a result of the early termination of the season, but both realize that keeping Lorre happy far outweighs. such losses. The rhetorical mudslinging is, in truth, a battle between oversized egos, with Lorre’s ego the more precious of the two.

As evidenced throughout Sheen’s slew of interviews, he understands his worth as a star — at one point, he even claimed that he would need another $1 million per episode to continue, a demand he has since rescinded. But Sheen is also willing to undercut attempts, whether forced rehab or confessional interviews, to sustain that value. Throughout the interview with TMZ, Sheen mocked the process by which stars attempt to pay “penance” for their sins, appearing in interviews, explaining their actions, and admitting their wrongs. As I’ve talked about several times on this blog, scandal of all forms require this sort of “reckoning,” which may manifest in the form of interviews, a new romance, a trip to rehab, or a come-back role. When Sheen agreed to participate in the interviews with ABC and NBC, the expectation was for him to humble himself, make it clear that he was sober, and win the support of his fans. Instead, the jittery Sheen seemed unhinged and fragile, and his rhetoric flew in the face of any expectations to make amends.

In the TMZ interview, Sheen derides the previous attempts to rehabilitate him, spoofing the types of questions, cuts, zooms, lighting techniques and facial expressions that other programs use to convey repentance. At one point, Sheen cheekily instructs the videographer: “If you can create the moment, though, where you ask that hard-hitting question about when I hit rock bottom and a shot of me like, blinking and looking down.” Later in the interview, he directs “Don’t get too close to me like they did on the [ABC Interview]. . . they put me in bad light, they put her in good light.” In this way, Sheen not only points out the otherwise hidden “tricks” of the gossip trade, but makes them look ridiculous.

Sheen likewise undercuts attempts on the part of the publicity apparatus to weave a narrative to soften the impact of his behavior. Sheen’s publicist had issued statements explaining the star’s hospitalization as the result of “mixed medications.” When asked why this statement was released, Sheen replies “I dunno, I was asleep during that moment. I respect Stanley [Sheen’s publicist] and he was doing the best he could. . . . . but if I conferred with him I probably would’ve come up with something better.” With this statement, Sheen lays the lie of the star making machine bare: publicists lie. And while not all publicists are tasked with covering up their clients’ recurring drug use, if this publicist lied, it seems natural that other publicists lie as well. While few gossip consumers are naive enough to believe that all publicist statements are absolutely true, never before has a celebrity stated so loudly, and so unequivocally, and to such a large audience, that the publicity apparatus manufactures the truth. It is telling that Sheen’s publicist resigned immediately after the conclusion of the interview.

Clearly, Sheen is aware of the repentance expected of him. But unlike misbehaving stars of the past, from Robert Mitchum to Mel Gibson, he refuses to cater to those expectations. Some stars, once embroiled in scandal, simply retreat; others choose a single, well-placed outlet to offer their exclusive confession or “side of the story.” In contrast, Sheen seems to be talking to anyone who will listen, flooding the mediascape with soundbites, each more outrageous and inflammatory than the next. As he explains, “I’m supposed to be out there begging for my job, I’m sorry, I don’t do that.” In a nation where the use of drugs and prostitutes is coded as shameful, his lack of repentance startlingly honest: “I don’t understand what I did wrong, except live a life that you all got jealous of?” Or, nearing the end of the interview, “you guys don’t even get the winning concept? The reality of winning? Sorry my life is so much more bitching than yours. I planned it that way.”

* * *

Perhaps most importantly, the coverage of Sheen underlines the close connections between the entities that hire stars and those that exploit gossip about them. TMZ, while housed under the Time Warner umbrella, has defined itself on its willingness to exploit gossip about all celebrities, regardless of their conglomerate affiliation. One can thus view the “collaboration” between Sheen and TMZ in one of two ways. First, TMZ is operating independent of Time Warner editorial oversight, and is approaching the scandal as it would any other: as an opportunity to attract visits to the website and viewers to the television show, even as it continues to bolster its brand as a go-to source for first-hand, unvarnished gossip. Alternately, Time Warner is mindful of the ways in which they can exploit Sheen even after his utility to Two and a Half Men has been exhausted. In other words, what Time Warner loses in profits from future episodes Two and a Half Men, it may (at least partially) gain in advertising revenue from TMZ, not to mention renewed interest in Two and a Half Men reruns. Whether TMZ is privy to this strategy — or whether it is an explicit strategy at all — matters little. When Time Warner decided to cultivate an investigative, no-holds-barred, video-heavy gossip outlet, it laid the groundwork for just such a situation as this one.

As a result, Time Warner was able to exploit Sheen’s star image while he was on the payroll for Two and a Half Men and can continue to do so now that he is not. Whether Sheen realizes the irony of the situation is unclear, but his continued willingness to provide TMZ (and other media outlets) with an endless fount of material again evidences his understanding of the gossip game. If he provides copy — the more unvarnished, crazy-sounding, and clippable the better — it will create a spectacle that will out-shine his adversaries.

In this way, Sheen is building a new star image on the wreckage of his old one. His message was getting lost in mediation, so he cut out as many mediators as possible. Instead of official statements or press conferences, he invites the cameras into his backyard, starts a Twitter feed, and “webcasts” live from his house on a Saturday night. He is attempting, as Ashton Kutcher once said of his own Twitter-use, to “take back his own publicity.”

Which is not, of course, to say that audiences have access to the real Sheen: “Crazy Sheen” is still just as much of an image as before, only this time, it has accumulated the varnish of authenticity, in part due its pure outlandishness, but also because of his reliance on tools (live streaming video, Twitter) that connote such authenticity.

* * *

Sheen’s star value, image, and maneuvering of the gossip industry thus serve as the natural, albeit blustering, extension of four phenomena put in motion following the disintegration of the studio system:

1) the embrace of “negative publicity,” e.g. publicity related to scandal, as “good publicity”;

2) the transfer of star management from the studios to the stars themselves;

3) the growth of gossip outlets and technologies that enable round-the-clock celebrity surveillance, and their accompanying connotations of intimacy, “realness,” and authenticity, and

4) the increasingly conglomerated gossip industry, wherein properties that rely on stars (movies, films, music) co-exist with others that produce gossip about them.

Each of these trends has roots in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the stars began to self-incorporate, take on their own publicity teams, and refuse to adhere to morality clauses. At the same time, gossip outlets gradually embraced scandal coverage, expanded in focus, and, increasingly, found themselves under conglomerate ownership, where they served a distinct promotional function. In the last twenty years, as more and more outlets, both friendly and “unfriendly,” attempt to exploit celebrity discourse for profit, celebrities have responded in turn, hiring massive teams to control the type and tone of discourse circulating around their images.

Sheen’s meltdown has shown how vulnerable the star image is once the publicity carapace is removed — and how willing gossip outlets are capitalize on that vulnerability. In this moment, Sheen’s antics seem outlandish, hilarious, and even refreshing: here, for once, is a celebrity who is not afraid to revel in his privilege, who recognizes that much of the disdain directed towards him — and towards any celebrity — is rooted in jealousy and resentment, and who is offering himself up, without the protection of a publicist, editor, make-up artist, or flattering key-lighting, for audiences to consume. Sheen may not be “Just like Us” with his dozen cars, multiple mansions, and stream of “goddesses,” but his efforts at communicating are a close as a celebrity can get to sitting down in a living room and having a one-on-one conversation.

As the market for paparazzi photos, Us Weekly, and gossip blogs expanded over the course of the last decade, the demand seemed to be for “authentic” celebrities, who communicated via New Media technologies, who did not seem manufactured, who did embarrassing things and shopped at the grocery store, but who, at the same time, lived glamorous lives, dated attractive people, had beautiful babies, and consumed on a level of which most could never dream. These contradictory impulses — one towards authenticity and normalcy, the other towards glamour and superlativeness — have helped guide the production of star images since the first generation of Hollywood stars.

The point, then, is that Charlie Sheen and his actions are exactly what many viewers seem to be asking from the industry: a pedigreed star, living an extraordinary life, but who is also available at all times, and dedicated to shattering all attempts at constructing him as something he is not.

But is The Charlie Sheen show a farce, or a tragedy? Is he lampooning the entire entertainment industry, and laughing his way to a higher paycheck, a more lavish lifestyle, and even more renown? Or does his attempt to do so — and the ability of the industry to profit from him — render him a tragic figure, trapped by his own game? Do his antics (and the ease with which he circumvented the traditional modes of celebrity production) prove that the gossip industry’s strategies are becoming obsolete? Or has he merely demonstrated that there is no outside of the publicity machine?

Put differently, is this apparent rupture in the gossip industry modus operundi merely proof of its resilience?

We will not know the answers to these question for months, if not years. But for now, I would argue that for all of Sheen’s apparent rebellion and willingness to humiliate himself to an international audience of millions, he has merely ratified the system. Sure, he lacks a publicist and has rejected counsel. But his ostensible refusal to play the game makes it easier for outlets to game him: they use the signifiers of his “freedom” (the screed from his mouth, the haggard look to his face) to sell tickets to the spectacle of an imploding star. Sheen’s actions have changed the tone and tenor of his image, but no matter of rants can change the fact that his image is packaged, disseminated, and exploited upon by the gossip outlets.

Sheen thinks he is a rockstar from Mars, that his life is grandiose, that he’s “winning at life” and the world is jealous. All these things may be true, and many others may believe them as well. But he also unemployed, his sons have been taken from him, and his ex-wife has filed a restraining order against him.

In truth, Sheen is a cog in a complex, tremendously exploitative industry, with close ties to all forms of media industries. That machinery has expanded, it has grown more complex, some parts have become automated, others rely on digital technology, and some fancy themselves independent. And while each cog — the celebrities themselves, publicists, entertainment new programs, gossip blogs — is essential to the industry’s smooth operation, it may also be readily replaced, left to rust in the junk pile of discarded celebrity. In this way, Sheen’s meltdown demonstrates the power of the contemporary industry to exploit its celebrity products in real time, on multiple platforms, and around the clock. At the same time, it telegraphs his eventual decline, and the industry’s overarching fickleness in regard to the celebrities that fuel it.