In the wake of his suicide in 2008, the story spread that Heath Ledger had been driven to end his life by his “method acting” approach to playing the Joker in The Dark Knight. The idea was that he had delved too deeply into the character, had somehow absorbed too much of that chaotic evil and spiraled into self destruction. It eventually came out that Ledger was dealing with serious trauma in his personal life, had suffered crippling insomnia for months, and could have even accidentally died from consuming a handful of sleeping pills in an effort to fall asleep. But those context clues didn’t matter that much to the narrative, and many will still claim that Ledger’s work on The Dark Knight led him straight to his grave. As the proverb goes, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling on its boots.” And that was said well before we had the Internet.
One could say the public effort to understand why Ledger killed himself was motivated by a desire to prevent other suicides, but it didn’t feel that way to me. It felt more like the rush to narrative that also follows murders and building collapses and industrial tragedies. And like all tragedy, it seems to me that there’s often a profound element of chaos embodied in suicide, internal as well as external, influenced by randomly timed triggers and abetting elements.
I lost my closest friend to suicide a few years ago — or at least that seems the best term to describe it from a mechanical standpoint. He did press the barrel of a gun to his own head and pull the trigger. The sole practitioner of his own execution. But his death that night would likely not have happened without a tragic confluence of internal and external variables that fell like dominos until he ended up dead on the floor of his apartment. An intense fight with a love interest. A cocktail of alcohol and pills coursing through his bloodsteam, swashing with the hormones of emotional stress. The proximity of the gun. That fiery anger that he so often turned inward instead of outward — he was so fundamentally a nice man to those around him. If charisma can be said to be the ability to project energy from the inside out, then my friend had it in spades, and maybe it follows that so many charismatic souls speed themselves right over a cliff. A soul’s energy is like fire. The right amount gives light and life, and too much destroys.
We will never truly know why Heath Ledger died, and I will never really know why my friend died, except that I know his chaos left him in a very vulnerable position more often than most people. But like with Ledger, a simple narrative has set in, and most seem ok with that. “He struggled with addiction,” they say, shaking their head. “It’s so sad.”
Of course we should strive to care for loved ones you sense might be in a state of despair. Just like all those danger factors that gathered like storm clouds around my friend that night, positive factors can likewise tip the balance at certain points in time. But each suicide is the awful climax of a very particular scene in a very specific story, one that is by its deeply personal nature a mystery to all outside of it.
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