Most celebrities involved in scandals fight tooth and nail to stay out of the spotlight. Charlie Sheen is not one of these celebrities. After giving his first interview last week, the public wanted more and Sheen is continuing to give it to them. He has been very open about his past behavior, his present sobriety and his unconventional lifestyle. He has even opened up his home for interviews. The more he talks, the more people are talking about him. Even bad publicity is good publicity, right?
A lot of people follow celebrities on Twitter. This past week the Sheen Machine set up a Twitter account and broke a record - the Guiness World Record for the fastest person to reach 1 million followers. He accomplished this feat in less than 25 hours. Take that Lady Gaga!
Here is a link to the Charlie Sheen fan page on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Charlie-Sheen/17799829247
You have to give it to Charlie. He has taken all of this negative publicity and is using it to his advantage. The man really knows how to market himself. Sheen is releasing his own line of official merchandise. He is capitalizing on t-shirts, coffee mugs, decals, etc. If you have been following all of his interviews and social media rants, he is repeating all of his coined phrases: "tiger's blood, trolls, warlocks..."
The only reason that Charlie Sheen is able to successfully market himself after all of the negative publicity is because he knows he can. Sheen knows that we are going to eat it up. We have to ask ourselves- why are we so hungry for it? With all of the other news worthy topics in the world - why is Charlie Sheen at the top of that list? I'll tell you why. Because we are on a drug - it's called CHARLIE SHEEN. We have to dig deeper to understand why we started using in the first place. Celebrity meltdowns are always going to happen, but the real cultural phenomenon is how fiercely we follow them. Here is a 12 step program for curing your Charlie Sheen addiction: http://flavorwire.com/157814/a-12-step-program-for-curing-your-charlie-sheen-addiction
Although Charlie Sheen has lost his job, his son and many people's respect, he is still winning. With our help, Sheen will continue to profit off his bad boy behavior and incoherent sayings. You too can win by marketing yourself through Web 2.0, but probably not if you weren't born with "Adonis DNA." I will leave you with a parody of Charlie by Jimmy Fallon. "BRING IT!"
Well written and very timely. He's everywhere he's everywhere! Why do we really care? What is the cult of celebrity that leads us to follow his (and others') every move? Why are we so fascinated with the seemingly larger-than-life dramas of these (unfortunately) very mortal people who in the end are just as human and flawed as we are--maybe more so.
ReplyDeleteMaybe because some of us long for the fame so much, celebrity melt downs remind us that we are better off as average joes. Even if you have everything, you can still have problems. Maybe we are just bored with our own lives and live vicariously through these stars.
ReplyDeleteYou've got a point. But on the other hand sometimes we don't want to live through them--we just want to see them meltdown because their real lives become a drama (or comedy) for us--what will happen in the next episode??
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