Charlie Sheen is the master of his own downfall

Mike Sholars
Features & Opinions Editor
“I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning. I win here and I win there; now what?” Charlie Sheen
On March 2, Charlie Sheen was more popular than God.

According to Google Insight, Sheen had a 100-point interest rating on the day following his profile on 20/20, while God had a paltry rating of 85. The ABC program, Charlie Sheen: In His Own Words, raked in 9.3 million viewers in an hour.
It was the interview that launched a thousand memes. Sheen, covered in sweat from his morning workout and sipping fruit juice, answered Andrea Canning’s questions with a mix of confidence and absolute batshit insanity. As much as the general attitude toward the man is one of somewhat genuine concern, the average person doesn’t seem to have any issue quoting the man ad nauseum.
#Winning and #TigerBlood were highly used hashtags on Twitter at the start of the month. More and more people are calling themselves warlocks every day, and my own mom asked if I was on “a drug called Charlie Sheen.”
Speaking of Twitter: on the day of the interview, Sheen created his own Twitter account. In less than two weeks, he has gained over 2.5 million followers, a record number for the service. Those hashtags I mentioned earlier were hugely supported by Charlie Sheen, before the full interview even aired. Every other news item about him is predicting his catastrophic downfall: he has lost custody over his infant sons and he was fired from Two and a Half Men, the show that made him the highest-paid actor on television.
We feel justified in watching Sheen collapse in on himself like a dying star, because he’s our latest Greek tragedy; he flew too close to the sun, and now we are right in watching him fall to the ocean. In our rush to condemn the man while consuming every new piece of info that’s released about him, we have forgotten to ask an important question: is this actually his downfall, or the greatest flood of PR he has ever received?

“I think my passion is misinterpreted as anger sometimes, and I don’t think that people are ready for the message that I’m delivering, and delivering with a sense of violent love.” – Charlie Sheen
Let’s dig through pop culture history and compare Sheen to other “fallen” celebrities: Michael Richards, formerly known as Kramer from Seinfeld; and Mel Gibson, formerly known as Mel Gibson. Their downfalls were no less publicized; millions of people watched Kramer’s “racist rant” on YouTube, and typing “sugar tits” into Google brings up the Wikipedia page for “Mel Gibson DUI accident” as the first result.
These are true celebrity downfalls: their names are synonymous with the crossing-the-line moments that brought them down. Richards was a washed-up victim of the Seinfeld curse to begin with, but his racist diatribe against black members of the audience at one of his stand-up shows brought him into the limelight long enough to ensure that he’d never see it again. Gibson spent years of public goodwill on a series of encounters with the law, followed up by a short series of shockingly anti-Semitic interviews that he granted afterward. These moments were not charming, amusing or even weird: they made us see an ugly new side of the guys who played Kramer and William Wallace.
For all intents and purposes, Charlie Sheen is not playing against type. In Two and a Half Men, he plays a womanizing, hard-living charmer…named Charlie. He has lovingly cultivated an image as Hollywood’s bad boy for years, the black sheep of an established acting family. All we wanted from him was to be a charming wreck, and he has delivered in spades over the last month. The reason that all eyes were on Sheen was not because he was acting insane, but because he was being crazy with style.

“I tried to fit into their format. Their format is cat shit stuck to the bottom of my world record-breaking, sprinting perfect, platinum Nike.” – Charlie Sheen
Anyone can yell incomprehensibly and call it a day; it’s a personal hobby of mine. Sheen elevated it to an art form. He operates on a plane of alternate universe logic, but it’s still some form of logic.
He’s articulate; he crafts more new phrases per minute than Shakespeare. In the face of news anchors that range from “incredulous” to “condescending” in their treatment of him during interviews, he comes off as patient and good-humoured.
As a writer, I cannot stop admiring how he walks the line between incomprehensible and unstoppably quotable with every sentence. I truly believe that he immediately realized the power of his own brand; his Twitter feed reads like a slogan writer’s wet dream. There has not been a single moment where he has been caught off guard or been cornered by an interviewer. This could have been a spectacle of self-destruction, but it really seems like the beginning stages of his comeback tour.
And I mean that quite literally; his mini-tour, My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option Show, sold out in 18 minutes. Sheen thanked his fans on his website (with a portrait of him as a flying warlock in tiger stripes at the top of the page) for their support, and said that $1 from every ticket sold will be donated to the Red Cross Japanese earthquake relief fund. That’s our Sheen; always topical.
Now to drive the point home, I’m going to exploit our woefully short public memory and ask you all to think back to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Please, let me finish.
“I’m ready to get out of my own way. The ego is overdone…it’s like hoodies.” – Kanye West

So, we had an insane celebrity known for his huge ego and volatile public persona. That celebrity, acting within our expectations but shocking us nonetheless, publicly snubbed Taylor Swift at an awards ceremony. The media prophesized his downfall, and in turn, he took on a variety of side projects. From increasingly frantic marathon Twitter posts, to starring in a short film directed by Spike Jonze – We Were Once a Fairytale, an autobiographical piece that ends with him literally cutting a demon out of his body with a knife – West was constantly in the public eye.
Yet people still insisted that he was beyond redemption, that he was just too much of a crazy asshole. On Nov. 22, he released the first album he made since his Taylor Swift debacle, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. On Jan. 11, the album was certified platinum by the RIAA, taking just over a month-and-a-half to move a million copies in the USA alone.
No one can deny that West’s antics made him into a gigantic ass on the public stage. But it also kept him relevant for a whole year, during which he completed and released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2010. By sending a few tweets and speaking his mind, Kanye West reinvented the way PR could be built.
Charlie Sheen has a word for that. I believe he calls it “winning.”