This hypnotic scene near the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is when a few of us first really noticed Charlie Sheen, and it remains a key moment in his movie career, and it now seems to define and sum up everything that followed. Looking over his filmography, he was never again quite as magnetic until the breakdown he had in the winter of 2011, when he finally got fired from his starring role in the massively successful sitcom Two and a Half Men. Sheen grew up in 1970s Malibu and was expelled from Santa Monica High and he was never a trained actor—he just kicked around in a few underwhelming movies before starring within the space of a year in two key Empire films, both directed by Oliver Stone: Platoon (1986) and Wall Street (1987). Sheen was never considered a good actor, but he pulled off the “Who am I?” line as Bud Fox with just the right note of yuppie bewilderment, and the camera liked him. Yet even as he starred in the comedies and spoofs that followed he seemed wooden, more a good sport than a natural clown; he had too much pride to really cut loose on-screen. But he became TV’s highest-paid actor with Two and a Half Men, until the trauma of 2011, when he began to respond to his celebrity in the post-Empire world. This new world was all about personal transparency, just as the Empire world that had created and heralded Sheen was about masks and propriety, being an actor. Yet he abruptly shrugged off the secret burdens of Empire celebrity and in doing so, freed himself.
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The horror of 9/11 represented the end of Empire, a shock that moved us out of the twentieth century’s binary Cold War thinking (The center will not hold) and into a world where there was, and is, no center; our enemies are insurgent and decentralized, our media also decentralized and insurgent. The culture seemed like it no longer belonged to the titans but instead to whoever could seize its attention with whatever immediacy and force. If Empire was about the heroic American figure—solid, rooted in tradition, tactile and analog—then post-Empire was about people who were understood to be ephemeral right away; digital disposability doesn’t concern them—they’re rooted in traditions created by social media, which is solely about exhibition and surface, and they don’t follow a now dated path of artistic and cultural development. They’re about hypnotizing our attention for only as long as their loud bid can last, which is why they don’t adhere to conventional media pieties.
America as it existed at the height of Empire began to reveal itself in the prosperous postwar 1950s, defining and expressing itself through the rise of the mass mediums of television, movies and pop music, of celebrity itself, and it ran roughly through 9/11. Empire limped along through the rest of the Bush presidency, at least until the economy blew up, and then Obama was elected, social media grew dominant, and programming shifted to accommodate the new cultural needs that formed after this cataclysm. If Empire was the Eagles, Veuve Clicquot, Reagan, The Godfather and Robert Redford, then post-Empire was American Idol, coconut water, the Tea Party, The Human Centipede, and Shia LaBeouf. With expectations diminished everywhere there was a shrugging off of Establishment propriety, a refusal to bow to a system that wasn’t working, and outsider attitudes were pushed into the mainstream—attitudes marked by a lack of polish, a do-it yourself mind-set, an impulse to carelessly wear your pajamas in public. It was a brief moment that never fully flowered; it existed fleetingly and then, like everything else, became watered down and clamped shut, as the post-Empire merged into corporate culture. Yet post-Empire hasn’t entirely disappeared. Traces remain everywhere, and certainly Donald Trump is a post-Empire president, while the legacy media’s reaction to him has never seemed more reactionary and belongs to full-blown Empire.
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Post-Empire attained the mainstream in 2010 and 2011 with Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” gleefully providing the soundtrack and examples began flourishing everywhere. The Kardashians understood it, as did MTV’s Jersey Shore’s participants and audience. We saw it when Lady Gaga arrived at the Grammys that year sealed in an egg and stared down Anderson Cooper in a 60 Minutes segment, admitting she liked to smoke weed when writing songs and basically daring him, “What are you going to do about that, bitch?” Nicki Minaj grasped it when she assumed one of her various bizarre alter-egos on the red carpet, and yet Christina Aguilera didn’t get it at all when starring in Burlesque, while continuing to ape Empire attitudes by idolizing and glamorizing herself unironically. Ricky Gervais, freewheeling and insulting as he hosted the Golden Globes in January 2011, understood, while Robert Downey Jr., getting passive-aggressively pissed-off at Gervais during the same show, didn’t seem to, and Robert De Niro, subtly ridiculing his career while accepting his lifetime achievement award, generally understood it as well—though later, in lamely attacking Trump, he seemed like an unhinged old-school poser.
John Mayer at one point looked like he was going to be the original post-Empire poster boy for his TMZ appearances (he was the first celebrity to realize what a game changer TMZ would be) and also provided a key example of post-Empire in his racially and sexually charged Playboy interview in 2010, until he apologized for it. Kanye West scored a major post-Empire moment with his interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 Video Music Awards, as well as with his masterpiece post-Empire single “Runaway”—whereas Bruno Mars or Bono, not so much. James Franco, hosting that year’s Oscar telecast without taking it seriously, treating it with gentle disrespect, gave another instance of post-Empire performance, while his peppy and earnest cohost, Anne Hathaway, didn’t appear to have a clue. Post-Empire was Mark Zuckerberg staring with blank impatience at Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes when telling her how The Social Network got its genesis story totally wrong—by suggesting he’d created Facebook because he was rejected by a bitchy girl—and that this conceit had been dreamt up by the Empire screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. For every outspoken I-don’t-give-a-fuck Empire celebrity—whether Muhammad Ali or Gore Vidal or Bob Dylan or John Lennon or even Joni Mitchell—there were always dozens like Madonna, a true queen of Empire, who never seemed real or funny, everything about her looking, in retrospect, dreadfully earnest and manufactured, or Michael Jackson, the ultimate victim of Empire celebrity, a tortured boy lover and drug addict who humorlessly denied he was either. Keith Richards, in his 2010 memoir Life, was a rare example of a healthy, post-Empire geezer transparency, and for my younger friends this kind of transparency was increasingly the norm: What did shame mean anymore?
In 2011, post-Empire wasn’t just about publicly admitting doing “illicit” things and coming clean; it was a then-radical attitude that claimed the Empire lie no longer existed—realness, transparency, and the tactility of your flesh were the only qualities that mattered. To the former gatekeepers, someone like Charlie Sheen seemed dangerous and in need of help because he was destroying illusions about the nature of Empire celebrity—as did Trump five years later. Sheen had long been a role model for a certain kind of male fantasy, a degrading one, perhaps, but isn’t that true of most male fantasies? (I never knew any straight men who fantasized about Tom Cruise’s personal life.) Sheen had always been a bad boy, which was part of his appeal for men and women, and this was what Chuck Lorre, the co-creator of Two and a Half Men, initially responded to—a manly mock dignity that both sexes liked a lot. What Sheen exemplified and clarified was that not giving a fuck about what the public thinks about you or your personal life is actually what matters the most, that the public will respond to you even more fervently, because you’re free and that’s exactly what they all desire—everyone, that is, except for the network or the show’s creator or the corporation that has made you so fabulously wealthy.
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Post-Empire narcissism differed greatly from Empire narcissism. Eminem was post-Empire’s most outspoken mainstream character when he first appeared in the late ’90s, and we suddenly were light-years away from the autobiographical pain of, say, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, one of Empire’s proudest and most stylish achievements. It wa
sn’t as if craft wasn’t the point anymore, only that a different sort of self-expression was in play—less diluted, more raw, immediate, and prone to anxiety and fear and weakness. On The Marshall Mathers LP Eminem raged much more transparently than Dylan had against the idiocy of his own flaws and the failure of his marriage, as well as about his addictions and fantasies—maybe even more than any Empire artist ever had—and he fearlessly recorded the imagined murder of his ex-wife by his own enraged hands, a defiant act that Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen would never have even contemplated. Blood on the Tracks and Tunnel of Love had an Empire tastefulness and boomer elegance that in the post-Empire world—digital and disposable and DIY—had no meaning. This didn’t deny Dylan or Springsteen their power or artistry, it simply reflected that people no longer cared as much about these things.
Extolling celebrity in a time when it had never seemed more fleeting or ephemeral meant a lot more people became famous for doing nothing of much interest. In HBO’s 2010 documentary—produced by Graydon Carter and directed by Martin Scorsese, pranksters who became heavyweight champions of Empire—Fran Lebowitz complained that what had really been lost in American culture was connoisseurship: the ability for someone to recognize the difference between what was genuinely good and what was merely mediocre. She bemoaned the fact that we didn’t seem to be at a point anymore when being extremely good at something—and getting rewarded for that talent with attention, respect and money—was even regarded as possible. That era wasn’t really gone in 2011, at least not in Lebowitz’s alarmist perspective, yet every day in American culture it felt as if it might have evaporated, but, again, only if you had an Empire viewpoint. Very few people were becoming famous because they could actually do interesting things, and Charlie Sheen, admittedly, was not one of them. He staggered amiably through a bad sitcom—Sheen was fine, he was inoffensive, he barely engaged with anyone on the show and retained a semi-stunned look of disgust at the shoddiness and smarminess of the proceedings. If he’d been allowed to give Charlie Harper more personality—a spark, a genuine leer—this probably would’ve thrown the sitcom woodenness of Two and a Half Men off-balance.
The contempt for the material that Sheen voiced during his breakdown made the show briefly more interesting than it had ever been, but never enough to warrant enduring an entire episode. He had publicly denounced Two and a Half Men as “comfort TV” and a “tin can” of a show that was “a puke fest that everybody watches,” but did its fans actually care or were they really bothered if the star criticized his own show or snorted cocaine and bought hookers and allegedly abused women? Every time there was a lapse in Charlie Sheen’s imaginary morals clause (he didn’t, in fact, have one) the series ratings reliably bumped up. For Sheen to trudge through a sitcom he knew was awful in order to make the big bucks ($1.8 million per episode) had to itself be a kind of princely nightmare. It wasn’t as if he was playing Don Draper, or even Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock. He was playing an unamusing and watered-down version of Charlie Sheen, and that must have sucked. Performing those scenes and delivering those one-liners week after week after week probably would have sent anyone racing off for drugs and alcohol and hookers, and one might have expected the people who’d hired and rehired him, and who understood he’d helped make them an enormous amount of money, to simply ignore his weekend escapades and let the cameras roll when he showed up for work on Monday morning. But later, in that winter of 2011, Sheen no longer had to bear this onerous responsibility, since he got fired.
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During the fall of 2010, his Two and a Half Men costar Jon Cryer had noted that in the beginning of the eighth season Sheen had arrived on set gaunt and pale, sallow and sweaty; his timing was off, and he was rushing lines if he could remember them at all. After Sheen refused to talk to executives concerned about his behavior—when he refused to play that game—he walked off the show to complete an at-home drug rehab, his third attempt to get clean in a year. During this time-out, he publicly made derogatory comments about Chuck Lorre and demanded a raise that would have upped his episode price to $2.7 million, which Sheen said would still be an underpayment compared to what Lorre, Warner Bros., and CBS were making from the show. He also suggested that he was a “warlock” with “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA.” People were missing the point if they thought Charlie Sheen’s breakdown was only a story about drugs. They definitely played their part but were not at the core of what was happening or what made the flameout in the winter of 2011 so fascinating to the public. Functioning addicts aren’t that rare or interesting since everybody knows one or two, but Sheen’s reaction to it seemed like the crystallization of post-Empire conduct. This wasn’t about the wives, or his five kids, or even the HIV diagnosis he received during that period, a catalyst Sheen later blamed for his misbehavior (and he’d paid extortionists $10 million to keep quiet until his diagnosis was revealed by the media in 2015). This was about Sheen himself, the man who no longer could attempt his real life while working as an actor, a profoundly dismayed individual. The narrative that unfolded featured a well-earned midlife crisis that was playing out on CNN instead of in a life coach’s office somewhere in Burbank: the midlife crisis being the moment in a man’s life when he realizes he can’t—that he won’t—maintain the pose he’d thought was required of him for a single day longer.
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Tom Cruise had a similar meltdown at the same age in the summer of 2005, but his had been more politely manufactured and, of course, Cruise was never known as an addict. Cruise had his breakdown while trying to smile through gritted teeth, and he couldn’t get loose—there was a refusal to be up-front about it. This was a reminder that he had always been a good kid who couldn’t say “Fuck you” as adroitly as Sheen could; Cruise was still the altar boy from Syracuse who earnestly believed in the glamour of Empire. This was ultimately a limitation for him as a movie star and as an actor heading into post-Empire—it seemed like he was hiding something all the time, which might explain why he was so explosive in Magnolia as the liar who gets caught. Tact might have worked for Cruise in the days of Empire, but something like Knight and Day just didn’t fly in the new world. And Les Grossman, the monstrous, foul-mouthed studio executive from Tropic Thunder, gyrating on the MTV Movie Awards, wasn’t Cruise getting post-Empire loose because Les Grossman tapped into a giant part of how Cruise actually came off in the mainstream press—Empire control freakery at its most clenched. This was why some people thought Les Grossman was funny: because the character seemed to parody a side of Cruise that was recognizable. Cruise was a prince of the Empire and not even playing Les Grossman, swearing and in a fat suit, was going to erase that—even though it was the right idea. Sheen was a minor member of the Empire by comparison, so it was surprising that he became the star who solidified and paid the price for this transitional phase of post-Empire celebrity.
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What was another Les—Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS—thinking about Charlie Sheen during those travails in 2011? On one level he must have tolerated, if not exactly approved of, some of what took place years before the official firing: the arrests and the accidental overdose in which Sheen suffered a stroke after injecting cocaine; the half-hearted stints in rehab and his father Martin’s teary-eyed press conference; the briefcase full of coke and the Mercedes towed out of the ravine; the misdemeanor third-degree assault on his third wife, who also ended up entering rehab for crack addiction, and Sheen’s alleged threat to cut off her head, put it in a box and send it to her mother; or, later, Sheen’s appearance on TMZ, chain-smoking and gesturing to the twenty-four-year-old “goddesses” he was now shacking up with, in which he appeared alternately bored and enjoying himself while he railed against CBS and Warner Bros., who had, by that point, decided to cancel the rest of Two and a Half Men’s eighth season and later that week, fire him. (Of CBS executives he had remarked, “They lay down with their ugly wives in fron
t of their ugly children and look at their loser lives.”) What about the September 11 conspiracy theories Sheen believed in and the fact he was a member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, or that he’d fucked Ginger Lynn and Heather Hunter and Bree Olson, had shot Kelly Preston in the arm and been a regular client of Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam? What about him trashing a Manhattan hotel room, with a porn star locked in the bathroom while his wife Denise Richards and the kids were sleeping across the hall; or his refusal to admit that he’d hit rock bottom—“a fishing term,” Sheen scoffed—or claiming that his PR person had lied about the “medication mix-up?” Yet, up until the fateful eighth season, he had always managed to show up for work and hadn’t damaged Two and a Half Men’s reputation despite all the drugs and whoring. But in the aftermath, Sheen began putting on a mesmerizing and refreshing display of midlife-crisis honesty. He was only being himself, take it or leave it, an addict and an actor who just didn’t want to act anymore.
Sheen was all over the media landscape in the winter of 2011—on the new Piers Morgan show on CNN, on 20/20 and TMZ, and he never seemed like he was on drugs, whether he was or not. The uncut TMZ interview was a post-Empire triumph, and he looked great talking to Piers Morgan, who after an uneven inaugural month seemed finally, happily excited with Sheen’s aggressive transparency—try sitting through Morgan’s interview with Empire diva Janet Jackson, which was filled with so many evasive pauses you could have rolled boulders through them. And for the first time in his thirty-year career, Sheen himself seemed a genuinely interesting person—maybe a wreck and a mess, but real and as flawed and fucked-up as any of us. Transparency was now Sheen’s thing in that moment, and it was thrilling to watch someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview for the sham that it was. He was raw and lucid and intense and he was suddenly the most fascinating celebrity wandering through the culture. No one was used to these kinds of interviews because no one had ever seen anything like them—they almost approached performance art—because Sheen wasn’t apologizing for anything.
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