The Fictional Death of Heath Ledger

It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like. | For me, it was just like any other weekend in my life. I didn’t eat a last meal, I didn’t jerk off any more or any less, I didn’t climb a mountain or end up swinging from a noose with Mozart’s Requiem in the background. But suddenly it’s important exactly what I did, because they are the last few days, and what you do in the last few days, down to your last lunch, becomes a fairy tale.

So begins “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” easily, the most intriguing piece of “journalism” I’ve read in some time. Penned by Lisa Taddeo, “The Last Days…” is subtly slipped-in towards the end of the April edition of Esquire magazine; though, not so subtly previewed in just about every major newspaper’s culture section.

Taddeo’s pseudo-fiction re-romanticizes Ledger, not in the image of the tragic artist, or the drug-fuelled starlet, but, in that of the self-deprecating narcissist, the apathetic - nothing so special, except that I’m fucking famous - agnostic, dressed in a ski mask - “That’s right, a ski mask… the kind of shit you can get away with when you’re a celebrity… and [] still get laid.”

No doubt the piece channels elements of Gonzo journalism - a consciously self-obsessed celebrity on a bender from London to New York - however, it was the déjà vu, I received, of having read Brett Easton-Ellis' American Psycho (clearly where the self-deprecating narcissism comes from), which drew me into its sinkhole.

I felt as if, that at any point Heath was about to plunge an axe into the Malaysian bodice that he had brought home from the Bar Beatrice to his Manhattan high-ceilinged apartment on his second-last night; just to prove to himself, well, that he could, and then, recollect afterwards, "Yes. Heath Ledger can."

But more potent to my point was the protagonist’s weariness, his disconcern and existential nonchalance, as if he himself was stepping through this so-called dream named Heath Ledger. Today I'm Bob Dylan, tomorrow I'm the Joker, but right now, I'm a guy in the Lower East wearing a ski mask and pretending to be Heath Ledger, whoever the fuck that is.

There is an idea of a Heath Ledger… somewhere between Monday 7:04 and 7:27AM:

[I] get out of bed in this naked body, and I am aware of the very physicalness of myself. I look in the mirror, and this is one of those lucky times when I don’t see the movie-screen face or the love-scene body, just the grease on my face, my not-great hair, a body that is in good form, a body for sex and for running, but just as much for one as for the other.

Or as Easton-Ellis once put it:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.

Taddeo researched the short piece to quite an extent, tracing his movements down to the very last muffin. And so, what philosophical import am I to receive, safe in the knowledge that Heath Ledger's last meal on Earth was a dry banana-nut muffin from some café on Broadway, you ask; and, that if he were to do it all over again, he'd go out with “an endangered animal’s heart on toast with foie-gras crumbles and black-truffle shavings.”?

Taddeo certainly sees the nonsense in such superfluous observations, and the piece is partly a statement on the media’s psycho-journalistic habits when it comes to grieving over dead stars: “For those of you who will try to define part of my life by my death: Don’t.” This is, I think, where the first-person narration succeeds; that is, as a voice for the recently departed, saying, Hey, you, stop pissing on my grave and fuck off!

*Out now in the back of American Esquire with that other gay cowboy, George Clooney, on the front. I recommend it.