Shortly after his election in March 2013, Pope Francis gave a homily in which he talked about how Judas traded information on Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, saying, “Jesus is like merchandise. He’s sold. … In the market of history, in the market of our own lives, when we choose 30 pieces of silver and cast Jesus aside, the Lord has been sold.”
He likened this to when people “gossip about each other,” explaining, “I don’t know why, but there is a dark joy in gossiping. Sometimes we begin by saying nice things about another, but then we slip into gossip, making the object of our chatter merchandise to be sold.”
Few industries turn individuals into commodities more effectively than entertainment. Earlier this week, The Hollywood Reporter published an excerpt from “Two and a Half Men” star Jon Cryer’s upcoming memoir, “So That Happened.”
In it, Cryer details co-star Charlie Sheen’s infamous meltdown — with the famous Twitter hashtag of #winning — in which his personal troubles and a feud with executive producer Chuck Lorre ended with Sheen’s March 2011 ouster from the hit CBS comedy, which came to an end this year (with replacement Ashton Kutcher).
Cryer’s hardly led a spotless existence — some of his tales involve prostitutes — but this passage struck me.
A curious phenomenon was bubbling up in the media as well. Entertainment culture had become so stultifyingly repetitive and predictable that Charlie’s antics felt like a breath of fresh air. To some authors, commentators and bloggers — seemingly intelligent people — he was a rebel, a truth teller willing to poke his masters in the eye. They defended his baleful screeds. (I’m looking at you, Bret Easton Ellis.) Of course, Charlie wasn’t those things. He was simply lashing out at the people who told him the party was over. That he was actually just a human being with a monumental drug dependency mattered less to the pundits than his value as something to write about to alleviate their collective boredom. The fact that he could very well be dead soon was not their concern. In fact, it’d just give them more to write about.
Charlie was never an insurrectionary guerrilla fighting the established order. He was a guy who got everything he had ever wanted from it. He even texted somebody at the show once, I think they gave the wrong guy too much money.
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Sheen’s father is Catholic actor Martin Sheen, who told the U.K.’s Catholic Herald in late 2011 that his youngest son once dug into his own pockets to save “The Way,” a film Martin Sheen made about a grieving father who makes a pilgrimage along the Camino, the Way of St. James, in northern Spain.
In the interview, his father Martin said that Charlie was “travelling a slightly different road from some of us – he’s on a different Camino, let’s say”, adding: “But we’re all pilgrims, after all, and his journey is not over yet.”
Charlie Sheen went on to star in the FX comedy “Anger Management,” which ran for two seasons and ended last December. Perhaps against the odds, he’s still with us, firing off some critical tweets at President Obama and also reportedly leaving a $1,400 tip for a Beverly Hills waiter on Thursday.
He doesn’t seem hard up for cash, but if anyone needed a few prayers …
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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