On Heath's death

Like many others, I am saddened by Heath Ledger's death, be it accidental or suicidal. At first I felt like the people who you always see on TV after a celelbrity dies. I loved him on The OC so much, I just can't believe he's dead. But then I realized there was something more about Heath Ledger, and it was Brokeback Mountain. I defer to AndrewSullivan:

Gay men responded to Ledger and not just because he was surpassingly handsome. He really inhabited a dark place many of us escaped from, and he evoked it with enormous restraint and integrity. The darkness clearly haunted him, but he turned it into a thing of beauty and redemption. For a while.

Thank you, for that, Heath. Rest in peace.

Here are excerpts from a very well written New York Times appraisal:

The defining performance of Heath Ledger’s tragically foreshortened career — more or less equivalent to what Jim Stark in “Rebel Without a Cause” was for James Dean — will surely be the role of Ennis Del Mar in “Brokeback Mountain.”

A portrait of inarticulate love and thwarted desire, Ennis is a rich, complicated character succinctly sketched in Annie Proulx’s original short story and brought to heartbreaking life by the film’s screenwriters, Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry; by its director, Ang Lee; and above all by Mr. Ledger himself. Outwardly, Ennis presents a familiar image of rough-hewn Western masculinity, and the longing that surges under his taciturn demeanor does not so much contradict this image as help to explain it. Ennis’s love for Jack Twist, whom he meets tending sheep on a Wyoming mountaintop in the early 1960s, takes Ennis by surprise and throws him permanently off balance. His lifelong silence, the film suggests, is less a sign of strength than of cowardice, a crippling inability to acknowledge or communicate the truth of his own feelings.

What made the performance so remarkable was that Mr. Ledger, without betraying Ennis’s dignity or his reserve, was nonetheless able to convey that truth to the audience. This kind of sensitivity — the ability to signal an inner emotional state without overtly showing it — is what distinguishes great screen acting from movie-star posing. And while Mr. Ledger was handsome enough, and famous enough, to be called a movie star, he was serious enough, and smart enough, to be suspicious of deploying his charisma too easily or cheaply....

Mr. Ledger’s work will outlast the frenzy. But there should have been more. Instead of being preserved as a young star eclipsed in his prime, he should have had time to outgrow his early promise and become the strange, surprising, era-defining actor he always had the potential to be.