young gods

for some reason or another, the news of heath ledger's death on tuesday affected me more than i ever thought it would. so i wrote about it, in an attempt to clearly understand why the death of someone i've never met and who could never have been more than a symbol for me affected me as it did...


it is amazing how some horrible news, when you first hear it, can be nothing but completely unbelievable. the momentum of heath ledger's recent work has been so strong, that news of his being found dead seemed against the laws of nature.

i will be the first to admit that i was drawn to him in my teeny bop years for his roles as a very attractive, dashing teen knight (figuratively in "10 things" and literally in "a knight's tale), but it was his appearance in "brokeback mountain" that changed my perception of him, as it did for many. he seemed to find himself as an actor in that film, by embodying the self-doubts, sorrows, and self-accusations of a man so wholly that i forgot that who i was watching on screen was not a real person, but in actuality a character created by an actor.

the saddest part of the news was that that excellence of ledger's acting, glimpsed at in "brokeback," was the raw material that, as he would have grown and matured as an actor, would have been slowly molded and hacked at and constantly reformed into wonderful iterations. the analogy to james dean will be made too often, but the likeness of the situation is too strong to be denied. with the all too quick ending of ledger's life, not even to touch on the tragic ending of his personal relationships with family and loved ones, the world that did not know him has been robbed of the opportunity to watch his genius along the way.