By the time you read this Heath Ledger will have been dead for at least about 48 hours. Yet his death and his life have already been discussed, examined and analyzed, the analysis analyzed, a thousand theories raised and discarded and made into cover stories. No one waited for the newspaper headlines when they got home; this was something people called their friends about, texted each other about for details in class. The gossip and unconfirmed reports on the Internet meant you could wallow in variations of the same information endlessly, if so desired. I ate dinner in Booey’s with my eyes glued to the scrolling red bar at the bottom of the CNN screen, as full of disbelief and gut-punching sadness as anyone else.
This particular death seems to have caught people’s attention: he was one of the good ones, and that hurt. “I think I’m in denial,” said the friend who called me; I assume she’s made it to bargaining by now. Another friend was duly rebuked for a tasteless joke in his Google chat status.
There are two tempting ways to look at Ledger’s life, and now his death. You could see the salacious story of the golden party boy, rumours of Olsen twins and prescription pills, found naked by his masseuse. Or you can look at Heath’s death as a tragic accident that robbed us of our boy, a modern-day James Dean who died before his potential could be realized, “a beautiful flame,” like Michelle Williams’ dad said, who left us all hungry for more, a shooting star, an artist too good for this world.
The truth is probably both of these, and also neither—he’s just another prematurely dead famous person, nothing more. Much of the coverage tried to be either solemn or scandalous, full of beautiful-but-troubled photos, but there’s just nothing more to say. Every cocaine trace on the dollar bill turns out to be false, every tragic depression is just work-related anxiety.
But we live in a media-saturated world, and we know it. We’re too knowing to know things just for their own sakes, and everything has to have a broader significance, a societal one. Just look at the girl who was interviewed for the New York Times piece because she lived near Heath’s apartment and said, unprompted, something that started with, “Because of the way our generation is …”
Why shouldn’t we be upset at this death? We like to think we’ll live forever, we all think about our endless future and potential, and a 28-year-old who died reminds us that’s not true. He was all potential. Or it could be as simple as the fact that something that we enjoyed is no more. We can be disappointed (and I really, really, really am) that there will be no more Heath Ledger movies, no more Jokers in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies.
He seemed to be one of the good guys, but what do we know? He was talented, no doubt, but beyond that all we can really say is that most of the people who interviewed him liked him enough to not make him look stupid.
People die every day, and although Ledger left behind a two-year-old girl, a family and plenty of celebrity ex-girlfriends, there’s nothing else to draw on, no greater story or broader truth.
But I’ll let Heath have the last word, from the now “prophetic” New York Times profile in November on his role in I’m Not There: “People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. That’s fine. But there are many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note.”
