roachboy

this brett easton ellis essay is kinda great:

Bret Easton Ellis: How Charlie Sheen is Giving Us What We Want - The Daily Beast

it's better to read the whole piece than bother with the bits i've bit below, but in case you're pressed for time or something:

post-empire is a kind of fuck you giddy tastelessness, a show of disrespect and dismantling of the fake decorum of celebrity....

and



so ellis seems to want to see charlie sheen as a sign of a change in the celebrity zeitgeist, a kind of extension of self-referentiality into a kind of i-dont-give-a-fuck approach to interacting with the media-scape.

all embodied not so much by charlie sheen as by chelsea handler.

i like the idea that it's dumb to look at this new "post-empire" disposition---because it is more a disposition within the frame than a new frame---as crap or even as an indication of some abandonment of craft (i like the way ellis uses eminem for this point). it's just something else, a different style predicated on using the rhetoric of intimacy in a different way. lines between fiction and non-fiction blurring out, the older forms of distance and control giving way to something else, a different performance style, a different aesthetic.


like he says:

Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire.


and this essay is what it talks about.

what do you make of this piece?
do you see what he's getting at? what do you think it actually is? do you buy the argument?
does it make sense to you to in a way celebrate the arrival of the sheen-reality? or is it merely something to accept? or not?

why call it post-empire?

what's going on here?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

mixedmedia

I chose this for this week's essay club get together. Wouldn't be right to pre-talk it much.

But suffice it to say, as much as I hate this essay, unfortunately it is right about a lot of things. I'll talk more later.

Empire, post-empire. Real subtle.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

ring

Watching Doctor Drew salivate over the idea adding Sheen's scalp to his coup,
is also pathetically interesting.

I knew many tweakers back in the early 80’s who were more intelligent,
charismatic, and uh...nicer, than Sheen.
They ended up mostly dead, dancing with red shoes on,
while their ‘uniquely’ perceived version of ‘screw you,’ played out.

Bleh…I might add more, later. Time out for now.

"Abandonment of craft." Yeah. That fits.

Vodka

the essay puts a whole new slant on my attitude towards Sheen....but i still think he's having a mid-life crisis

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Vodka TUWUF
The Untamed Wild Ukraine Fiend

Charlatan

I think the emphasis on the idea that this is not about drugs, is at the heart of the essay. It doesn't matter whether or not he's on drugs. It matters that he is flipping everyone the bird and we are (collectively) lapping it up.

I may be stuck in the Empire, according to Ellis (or is it Easton Ellis?) but I find Sheen just a tad boring (not to say he hasn't made me laugh, I just think he played the joke a several beats too long).

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Lindy

Much ado about nothing much. Or, in Ellis' own words, Less than Zero. Empire, post empire, prelude to neo-empire... Starfucker Central? Who gives a shit? I'll give Charlie Sheen and other celebs all the attention that they deserve, and... uh... what were we talking about? I think I'll find something more interesting, like the Weather Channel.

Lindy

roachboy

well first off the holy grail of any cultural critic is to be the one naming the zeitgeist. people try it all the time. time only tells which ones stick really...in the meantime, trying to name to zeitgeist is in a sense a cultural power move. so the essay is about b.e.e., really. that's one way in which it performs what it's talking about.

second empire/post-empire: that this isn't explained is obviously not accidental and is probably the way in which the essay most exactly performs the historical situation in which it was written. maybe the ambiguity about what the term designates reflects some ambiguity for b.e.e. about the situation. either way, it refers to the structures behind the security-entertainment complex (a term i still like and still am not sure about to the extent that i am not entirely sure what it refers to) and comportments that align(ed) with it during the (last--chronologically) american imperial phase, and to the imperial situation itself, so the whole american empire in the post-world-war-2 mode, which was associated from the outset with an invasion of consumer goods and entertainment options--you know coca cola and film noir--that kind of invasion. so charlie sheen is being positioned as a fuck you to the first--the Man in the local entertainment hierarchy kinda sense---and as a symptom of a mode of dealing with the implosion of the american empire, a kind of mockery of the older comportments and pathology at once, all of which is normalized because it appears as continuous on television. so pathology as a kind of aesthetic posture at a point of breakdown of obvious aesthetic postures. if you play the game of equating social power with distance from necessity (it's a sociological position) then it seems kinda reasonable to equate the loss of distance (performed through rituals of decorum) with a breakdown of power, and a loss of power (in both the local sense of the entertainment-security complex and more generally) with the breakdown of the invisibility of power---so with the distance that separates the exercise of power from the perception that power is being exercised--which is perhaps the most basic distancing in a hegemony.

or something.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Plan9

First:


...

So, let's consider the source of this commentary first.

Hah! The author of American Psycho wrote that?

The topic of rich people justifying their complacency is fun.

...

Mmm, I wonder where Ellis himself sits on this food chain.

That's like Stephen King suggesting that horror is cliche.

Of course it is. It's been the same novel since Rage.

...

I see this as the older generation of rich white people acting disgusted at the younger generation of rich white people's behaviors.

Old rebel is the old cool. New rebel is the new cool. Bad is the new bad. Old bad wasn't nearly bad enough. Changing of the guard.

Using the system that made you rich and elevated you to demigod status to insult the system that made you rich, etc. Deep.

Channeling Dr. Seuss: Just more stars on Sneetches.

...

These people are having temper tantrums in public because they're got the spotlight and don't know what else to do with it.

Certainly nothing productive. I mean, Sheen isn't trying to "save the tigers" like DiCaprio. He's just a well-dressed inmate.

Charlie sheen isn't really giving us what we want. He's just giving America what it's used to. Natural progression of trash.

...

Also, regarding the concept that Sheen is some type of zeitgeist:

Modify the quote to fit the man of the thread topic and it turns out Charlie Sheen is not a Nietzchean superman either. He's a drunken clown.

Nobody idolizes him. Many pity him. He's not cutting edge. He's a monkey on a spear. He's a large but forgettable ship... a sinking one.

...

I find the comments to the article, shown at the bottom of the page in the source link, just as interesting as the article itself:

"Yes the story is about drugs. And no it shouldn't be lost amid the infantile bombast of one whose brain is misfiring like firecrackers on Chinese New Year. To attribute insight, evolution and some enlightened capacity to see through the Empire's shroud to a guy who doesn't have an off switch is provocative, but it's wrong. Charlie Sheen is damaged goods. And he did the damage. To rationalize his behavior is the ultimate example of not getting it."
***
"Ellis is both right and wrong. He is perhaps right because Sheen is clearly behaving in such a way as garners him reward. (I say 'perhaps', because we - and this includes Ellis - do not have direct access to Sheen's actual thought process. We are all simply deducing his motivation based upon his behavior).

Ellis is wrong in another way, however - and the way he (& Sheen, and GaGa, and the Kardashians, etc) are wrong is much more important.

Ellis suggests that since this is the way media works that it is inherently good. That is the mistake that everyone willing to become a train wreck for a paycheck makes when they publicly barter their integrity and reputation in return for hard cash. This is prostitution - and the fact that it is the life's blood of media reality does not serve to grant such behavior value beyond the like value a whore gets for a back-alley job.

There is a distinctly postmodern aspect to this recent spectacle -celebrity phenomenon. Kim Kardashian may have been a wealthy socialite - but she is only famous because she was seen on the internet having sex. That's the only reason. And everyone in her family is cashing in on her enormous... spectacle. Everyone knows this, but since we have come to the point where celebrity -regardless of the cause - is itself a form of commodity, people like Kardashian (& Sheen) can reasonable view being mock-able as bankable. It's a tendency which goes hand-in-hand with the anti-intellectualism which sees certain political figures as viable simply because they are photogenic and willing to pander to the worst impulses of a public which confuses entertainment for reality.

Sheen is the Barbara Bachmann of Hollywood. Both will likely say being laughed at is worth the imbeciles they make of themselves. They are right. And they are wrong."
***
"The difference between Sheen and a functioning addict is...wait for it...he can't function."
***
"How appropriate the Bret Easton Ellis would write a treatise lauding self-indulgence and mental illness disguised as "honesty". He is a man who has made a career elevating addiction and mental illness to an art form fostered by the "Empire" rather than the sad results of people who struggle to deal with the demanding and often frustrating responsibilities of real life. I agree that in a world with real issues, real problems, real conflicts, naming Sheen as the most "real" person out there seems flawed in the most self-centered, repugnant way.

Celebrity is a show, by definition, and Charlie Sheen is wandering through the media machine like a Mad Hatter, sad and old and crazy. I guess if that perspective makes me part of the fictional "Empire", then I guess I will go back to my empirical life, earning a living (without slurring my employer), raising my kids (minus the porn stars and narcotics), tending to my relationships (without beating my spouse), and striving to be a caring and responsible human being."
***
"...but those who think the article is deep and has great insight just miss the point. Sheen is a mess, and whatever makes the mess needs to be taken care of. All the rest is verbal diarrhea."
***
"My god this is a stupid analysis. Charlie Sheen "gets it" just like every teenage does who hates everything and feels superior because he knows the latest texting shortcut and his parents don't. Sheen will not seem all that admirable and "New Empire" when he drops dead, which may very well be soon. And I've seen his latest videos and they are more desperate than funny. In fact, distinctly unfunny."

...

To say that this isn't about drugs and the disease of fame is to say that second world war wasn't about guns and bombs.

Of course it wasn't. But you have to admit that without guns and bombs it would have been a much different war.

...

Is all this the high brow equiv of reality teevee fart jokes? I think so. Fart jokes told in a Porsche while on coke.

...

I read the article and all the posts here. But as with most things posted by the OP, I'm too stupid to "get it."

Somebody clue me in.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

roachboy

i think you get it pretty well comrade 9. there's any number of ways to see what ellis is up to in this essay. but mostly i think it does what it talks about so is itself charlie sheen-like. it's a lot about attitude but in a way that is only possible in a televisually saturated environment and one that's particularly american in the way the fourth wall is dissolved. american teevee spills out into life and mixes up with it (people who watch a lot of sitcoms think they have more friends in meatspace than those who don't, they say) but at the same time there's a distance that allows for an aestheticization of everything. so charlie sheen---whose performances of late i have in the main been assiduously avoiding as i don't find them interesting to watch--to think about maybe for a minute at a time, or through something like the essay---but to watch....nah----isn't someone whose actual meltdown you or i experience like the actual meltdown of someone we actually know in meat-space. it's meltdown lite, really. tv framed. a spectacle. empty and performance art at the same time. qualities like "deep" or "shallow" don't really apply. its the difference between a trainwreck and a "trainwreck"....and there's something creepy and disturbing about the insertion of that aesthetic distance into everything really....nothing is real. or everything is real but in the same way. back in the old days when people still worried about fascism (not any more....now the word is a problem but the reality is fun fun fun) the aestheticization of politics was a bad thing. the aestheticization of everything a problem. not any more.

but it's hardly charlie sheen's fault. he's just using his agent to get maximum exposure creating a juggernaut of stupid in the process. the event is interesting. he is not so much.

i gotta go.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

This reminds me of David Foster Wallace's musings on the next literary movement beyond postmodernism. You can, of course, substitute literary with other cultural phenomenon:

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

--From "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (1993), David Foster Wallace

A friend of mine recently and possibly inadvertently hit this chord as well when he let the various threads of real-world issues intermingle with our pop-cultural obsessions. In the one stream, he was reeling over the information and images coming out of Japan in the aftermath of such sublime destruction. In the other, he was, of course, being bombarded by the noise of the entertainment-industrial complex, much of which is responsible for manufacturing the product we know as Charlie Sheen.

What a horrific admixture.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

mixedmedia

Since the discussion seems to be taking off, I will go ahead and try to fit together my own first impressions of this article.

I think to take what Mr. Ellis is saying at face value is missing the point. Rather than glorifying what he sees as the state of 'post-Empire transparency' I think he is making a pretty acidic commentary on the state of the symbiotic consumer-newsertainment relationship with a heavy dose of irony. Much like his own body of work (which was also never meant to be taken at face value), there is much more to be gleaned from his observations about the exploitation of the darker side of human vicariousness than the details of Charlie Sheen's life and behavior. I mean, we make these choices. I received an email last night from the Florida Film Festival and included in this event are no less than 10-15 pieces of filmed narrative and documentary art that are giving us stories much more meaningful and compelling (and no less shocking or reprehensible) than the story of Charlie Sheen's life and ad hoc philosophical views. I think what BEE is getting at is that, in 'post-Empire' America, we have finally eschewed all pretense at being a flawed but essentially enlightened society in favor of the figurative bloodbath. The public human sacrifice, quick and painless (for us) without having to consider the regressive implications that fuel our blood lust or bothering with cognitive notions like irony, satire and discernment or the complications of compassion and human frailty. I think what he is saying is, 'Here you go, America. You've gotten the dish you ordered off the menu, now eat it and shut the fuck up.'

The pretense at outrage over this pathetic, floundering fool is a sham. This is obvious by the mileage that it is getting. It's very sexy, media speak-wise, and only serves to put the vultures on the look out for the next quick and easy kill. Maybe they'll be able to drag Mel Gibson out of a hole somewhere and put him on public trial. That'll be fun.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

yournamehere

The author pretty much lost me when when he asserted that the members and audience of Jersey Shore "get it."

From what I gather, the difference between Empire and post-Empire is that the former celebrities became narcissistic because of their fame; whereas the post-Empire celebrities became famous because of their narcissism. Perhaps the other difference is that the former lack the hypocrisy of the latter; they all embrace their celebrity. When they stop cashing the checks, then you can try to convince me they are truly dismantling the fake decorum of celebrity.

Regarding Charlie Sheen - as long as Americans are willing to spend money to watch a train wreck, there will always be train wrecks.

BTW - this is nothing new - Don Henley wrote Dirty Laundry in 1982; Dire Straits wrote Money for Nothing in 1985. We've been self-aware of the folly of celebrity worship and media frenzies for quite some time now.

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If you want to avoid 95% of internet spelling errors:
"If your ridiculous pants are too loose, you're definitely going to lose them. Tell your two loser friends over there that they're going to lose theirs, too."
It won't hurt your fashion sense, either.

jewels

That's what I hear, too.

Tickets sold out in 3 hours? What's up, America?

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We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
Mark Twain

Plan9

Don't forget Huey Lewis.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Strange Famous

I kind of get that he is making a joke about the celebrity culture we live in. But the problem is (for him) he is making himself the joke. I think its a shame there is no one around him who cares about him enough to take him out of the public eye and stop him humiliating himself.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

EventHorizon

im with plan on this one. sheen is well on his way to becoming the forgotten "has-been" like so many others before him. dennis rodman, micheal jackson, britney spears, chris rock, chris tucker. its almost like they all lined up at birth, shuffled across a stage lit by spotlights and camera flashes and once they got across and didnt want the party to end, just just waved their arms and shit themselves in hopes of not being forgotten for a few more seconds. i will say though that to my ultimate disappointment, (American) people are becoming more and more obsessed with outdoing one another with shock value and vulgarity. the perfect example is 4chan. a bunch of mental juveniles competing for attention in a virtual place where someone wont beat the shit out of them for saying that 9/11 is funny or that egging someone on to suicide "for teh lulz" is sick in the worst way possible.

its truly a sad time when getting what you earn is for chumps and being successful is looking down the social ladder and kicking whoever is behind you instead of giving them a boost while grasping at the feet of those just above. I'm oddly reminded of the movie "gladiator" where the emperor wanted his people to love him so he put on the craziest games of all time: fights to the death. its worrisome that with so many influential people putting themselves first, they aren't helping anyone else out and by extension, are contributing nothing to the survival and improvement of mankind. i really hope that American entertainment (and society for that matter) aren't completely fucked, but i'm not so sure anymore. the massive apple tree that once rewarded everyone willing to work to pick their own fruit is quickly wilting from too much manure in an attempt to get more apples for less work

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Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.