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8 - Heath Ledger—I’m Not There
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147 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 8 Heath Ledger I’m Not There CLAIRE PERKINS At the time of his death, Heath Ledger was twenty-eight years old, with the looks that Lasse Hallström once summed up as “that physicality” perfectly intact (Belinda Luscombe, “Heath Turns It Around,” Time, 28 November 2005, 68). He had recently wrapped the role that sent the “rugged” and “mischievous” dimension of his star image into overdrive, but at this moment he lost the tenuous control that any actor ever has over this image. His persona was simultaneously frozen—in the performances he had already given—and abandoned—to the powerful play of memory and speculation. “Heath Ledger” was lost, but he also became what he had only ever been. On James Dean, Edgar Morin has written: Death fulfils the destiny of every mythological hero by fulfilling his double nature: human and divine. . . . Thus amplified in the character of James Dean are the phenomena of divinization that characterize but generally remain atrophied in the movie stars. . . . His death signifies that he is broken by the Heath Ledger. Courtesy of Photofest New York. hostile forces of the world, but at the same time, in this very defeat, he ultimately gains the absolute: immortality. James Dean dies; it is the beginning of his victory over death. (100–7) This “victory” crystallizes the mysterious process that allows for the creation of every star image. A star who dies is in this way a doubled or pure star, but also a reflexive one and, in this sense, an autonomous star whose performances can never again be completely absorbed into the dramatic fiction of which they are a part. It is the concern of this chapter to examine Ledger’s persona in terms of this particular and peculiar autonomy: his image as filtered by his death, and as a victory over death. ★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩ Untimeliness The case of Ledger raises the broad and interesting question as to how a star’s death affects spectatorship. The focus here is on a death perceived or constructed as “premature” or “untimely.” An article titled “When Icons Die Young” that appeared in the New York Times five days after Ledger died unhesitatingly placed him alongside figures such as John Keats (died at twenty-five), Rudolph Valentino (thirty-one), Marilyn Monroe (thirty-six), and Kurt Cobain (twenty-seven). Other commentators made comparisons to Elliott Smith (dead at thirty-four), River Phoenix (twenty-three), and Jeff Buckley (thirty-one), all of whom have entered the particular iconography of fated youth, of potential untapped (Colin Carman, “Heath Ledger and the Idolatry of Dying Young,” Gay and Lesbian Review, 1 May 2008, 28). The thousands of tributes to Ledger stress this injustice: that “to stare at him was to receive a sense of power, and potential. . . . That’s why his death feels wrong [because] it means youth and vitality aren’t enough” (David Lipsky, “Heath Ledger 1979–2008,” Rolling Stone, 21 February 2008, 35), or that, in Naomi Watts’s comment in an Interview article, “deep down, he enjoyed that he was being recognized for his talent—I think he was starting to own that and that’s the deepest tragedy.” Many articles also comment on the instantaneous web activity that followed his death: “The blogosphere went into overdrive. In two days his memorial page on Facebook had over 30,000 members. . . . Hundreds of eulogies for the 28-year-old Australian appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald’s site” (see Jenny Lyn Bader, “When Icons Die Young,” New York Times, 28 January 2008). As Bader suggests, Ledger’s “transformation” was underway immediately, “from acclaimed actor to most-searched internet term, from film star to cultural touchstone.” In this transformation lies a pure expression of stardom as a mythologizing process. As semiotic, intertextual, psychoanalytic, and audience148 CLAIRE PERKINS [52.54.103.76] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:23 GMT) based studies have all variously emphasized, the star is an image—an ideological sign, a shifting series of interactive texts, and an incomplete object of desire and/or identificatory fantasy (McDonald 81–95). While this logic is too well known, it contains the contradiction that the anchor of the deciphering refraction and desire is a real aging body that both is and is not fundamental to the star image. The knowledge that this body is “out there,” existing, is the foundation of a “paradox of presence” (McConnell 168) that is only fully recognizable once the body is taken away...