on the death of mr. ledger
I know that everyone else is posting about Heath Ledger, but I'm going to add my voice to the wailing mourners anyway.
It just freaks me out a little. I mean - he was 28. Young. Successful. Intelligent. Incredibley talented. The thought that, when I got up 9am yesterday morning, he was alive, and when I got back from class, he wasn't, is more than a little upsetting to me.
The other thing that makes me think is this: when I found out, my roommates and I put on the TV, looking for a news report about it on CNN. But all that Wolf Blitzer talked about for the first thrity minutes was the upcoming election, the "tanking" economy (his words, not mine), and various international issues. And my roommates and I were irritated - we wanted to hear about Heath Ledger. The sudden death of an actor affected us much more strongly than the first new administration in eight years, or our futures as working adults in the United States. But I don't really think this is a bad thing, necessarily. After all, Heath Ledger was a part of our youth culture, so to speak. He was in many of our favorite movies. He represented a kind of idealized male figure to us, as well - regardless of what he was really like. And to hear that someone who is ingrained as part of the immovable distant universe of the pop-culture world is suddenly dead - someone relatively close to us in age - is upsetting. Suddenly, Heath Ledger was real. A person who was just a suceptible to the machinations of the human reality as any of us.
This is what it means: that no one is immune. And I think that's why we care so much.
It just freaks me out a little. I mean - he was 28. Young. Successful. Intelligent. Incredibley talented. The thought that, when I got up 9am yesterday morning, he was alive, and when I got back from class, he wasn't, is more than a little upsetting to me.
The other thing that makes me think is this: when I found out, my roommates and I put on the TV, looking for a news report about it on CNN. But all that Wolf Blitzer talked about for the first thrity minutes was the upcoming election, the "tanking" economy (his words, not mine), and various international issues. And my roommates and I were irritated - we wanted to hear about Heath Ledger. The sudden death of an actor affected us much more strongly than the first new administration in eight years, or our futures as working adults in the United States. But I don't really think this is a bad thing, necessarily. After all, Heath Ledger was a part of our youth culture, so to speak. He was in many of our favorite movies. He represented a kind of idealized male figure to us, as well - regardless of what he was really like. And to hear that someone who is ingrained as part of the immovable distant universe of the pop-culture world is suddenly dead - someone relatively close to us in age - is upsetting. Suddenly, Heath Ledger was real. A person who was just a suceptible to the machinations of the human reality as any of us.
This is what it means: that no one is immune. And I think that's why we care so much.