Sheen: Is it time to look away?

“I’ve Sheen enough,” said Seyward Darby in The New Republic online. For a day or two after CBS suspended hard-partying Charlie Sheen, 45, from the hit sitcom Two and a Half Men, it made sense that the media would give the actor a platform to air his side of the dispute. Several weeks later, though, the Sheen-a-thon continues, and it’s become clear that “the media is doing exactly what it should not: exploiting a mentally ill person” for the sake of ratings. Sheen’s twitchy, grandiose rants about his “warlock brain,” his “tiger blood,” and his “epic” adventures are compulsively watchable, in a horrific sort of way. But the last thing this “clearly unwell” man needs is to have his delusions of grandeur confirmed by more attention. And turning his ravings into a national running joke does a disservice “to the millions who are suffering from drug addictions or mental illness.”

Really? said Joanna Weiss in The Boston Globe. The Charlie Sheen I’m watching “seems to be enjoying himself immensely.” I’m not suggesting the whole thing’s a performance, but “by every measure of pop-culture currency,” Sheen’s claims that he’s “winning!” are pretty accurate. Within hours of joining Twitter, Sheen set a new speed record for gaining a million followers, all of whom clearly can’t wait to hear his latest “gloriously quotable” aphorism, or get an update on the two “goddess” porn stars who share his bed. Indeed, there’s something “weirdly refreshing” about Sheen’s grandiosity, said James Hibberd in EW.com. Unlike most celebrities, with their “carefully crafted humility,” he’s cheerfully admitting to what “we secretly suspect all stars think about themselves”—that they are unique, enchanted, indestructible beings leading, in Sheen’s formulation, “perfect, bitchin’, rock-star lives.”

Deep down, said Alexandra Petri in WashingtonPost.com, we all think we’re special, which is why Sheen’s public display of unfiltered self-regard has so firmly “latched onto the public consciousness.” Americans raised in the self-esteem movement secretly feel, as Sheen proclaims publicly, that our “genius is not adequately appreciated,” and that we’re being held back by “fools and trolls” who just don’t get how wonderful we are. Now that the public has thoroughly enjoyed the first two acts of the Charlie Sheen show, of course, we’re ready for the inevitable, tragic denouement, whatever form it may take. Charlie Sheen may be “winning!” at the moment, but all of us know, from our own imperfect lives, that “eventually, the house always reasserts itself.”

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