It's always an enormous tragedy when someone takes their life, but particularly so when they are young and talented, and have their lives and careers ahead of them. A permanent solution to a temporary problem, as they say. You just never know what torment lies just beneath the surface of even seemingly happy, well-adjusted people.
Rest in peace.
I was quite shocked to hear that. He had an unusual amount of artistic maturity for a 28-year old--really a great deal of talent.
ReplyDeleteIn a post from Jan. 22, Steve discovered that
... out of 141 comments so far in this Free Republic thread, a mere 2 suggest that doing gay love scenes in Brokeback Mountain might have done so much damage to his psyche that suicide was inevitable. ("I often wondered how warped the Brokeback Mountain fling would effect his mind"; "But you can’t help but conclude that his Brokeback Mountain experience escalated his despair!") Only 2! I guess that's a sign of progress.
Yeah, I have been hearing really good things about his performance in the upcoming Batman movie (and, as you may have guessed, I can take or leave most action movies, but I did like Batman Begins and have been looking forward to The Dark Knight). There's no doubt Ledger had a tremendous career ahead of him.
ReplyDeleteEveryone's looking for an ulterior or sinister backstory, but sadly, it sounds like he just wore himself out. He apparently had pneumonia, was exhausted from working and not sleeping, and was self-medicating on top of it all.
Perusing the Freeper thread Steve linked to, I note that both those comments come from the same assclown, one "RushingWater". In the first comment, after mentioning the "effect" Brokeback Mountain supposedly had on Ledger's psyche, this sage also notes that "He ran to his girlfriend right after and had a kid.", forgetting apparently that Ledger met and became involved with Michelle Williams while working on that movie. I mean, shit, he can't even get his bigot points....well, straight.
This other one was really something else, apparently removed by the moderator (post #16), so no attribution, but referenced in a later post (#27):
I hope he doesn’t burn in hell too much for that awful piece of homo-prop he inflicted on us.
To be fair, there were several people in there who were the voice of common sense and reason, but jeez, it's an uphill battle in there. It's been a long time since I checked in on the freepers, even for the entertainment value, and now I remember why. Even their taglines give me a headache.
Months ago, Dan Savage mentioned, in the print-edition of his column, a website where straight men can meet transsexuals for NSA sex or something like that. A week later, a reader emailed him to ask what the address was, as he had lost the newspaper. And Savage directed him to Free Republic. I thought it was funny. I would have used Coulter's website--she actually looks like one.
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