I never knew Heath Ledger, and I’m not going to write like I did. Neither did most, if not all, of the people reading this. It doesn’t matter. It never will.
We lost someone.
What set Ledger apart from most cookie-cutter actors his age is that he never cared what we thought of him. He never wanted to be a role model, a teen idol, or the pin-up of the week on 14-year-old girls’ walls around the country. He was a professional. He was an artist. He was an actor. Exploring the unchartered corners of the soul with Brokeback Mountain and straying into the civilized depths of madness with The Dark Knight, Ledger was set to become the next Johnny Depp -the unconventional actor who managed to capture mainstream success.
While most people will write that Ledger’s most powerful moment will be found somewhere (usually the heartbreaking final moment) in the tragic love story Brokeback Mountain, I dare you to sit through the final moment of Lords of Dogtown and deny Ledger’s heartbreaking ability to throw himself into the most tragic of moments.
As Rod Stewart’s "Maggie May" drifts slowly in the background, Ledger, a broken and overrun "lord" who finds himself fated to a heart-wrenching descent from the top, slowly sands away at the latest surfboard order that has come in. As Stewart’s voice rises in the background, singing "Wake up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you," Ledger turns up the radio and starts to sing along.
In one of the most bittersweet scenes of his career, Ledger reminds us to make life be about those moments when you’ve crashed hard but are the moments to somehow see some kind of beauty in the world.
Ledger’s work as an artist will certainly outlast the chaos that surrounds his untimely death – I just wish it would hurry up and do so.
While it may be nothing more than an exercise in futility to stress the importance of maintaining respect for this great actor and not diving into the cannibalistic frenzy of making assumptions until all the facts are released, I’ll risk the chance of dabbling in futility for this moment.
The unimaginable sense of loss that comes with Ledger’s death is not that he was so young, but that his talent was a vast, strange world that we, as an audience, were just beginning to map. He was an actor who was always praised with an ever-growing potential but was robbed of his chance to ever prove to us just what he could do. To write about Ledger’s career in the past tense is perhaps the most awakening and devastating aspect as a writer – or even a fan, for that matter.
The last time I ever saw Ledger on screen before his death was at an early screening of the obscure Bob Dylan bio-pic, I’m Not There. Playing the actor Robbie Clark, a shade of gray from Dylan’s enigmatic persona, Ledger plays an actor struggling with the disappointment of a career – and more importantly, joy – he was promised that was never delivered in life. Like Robbie, we will all find ourselves struggling with that disappointment.
We’ll never see him live through the era that he was bound to define. We’ll never see him deliver beyond what he always proved he had the potential for. We’ll never see him the same again.
While I’m Not There will not be the last time I’ll see Ledger on screen – The Dark Knight arrives in theaters this summer – it will surely be the last untarnished vision of him that I’ll ever have the memory of seeing. And, as the acceptance begins to replace our hope that it can’t be true, I can’t help but think back to seeing Ledger as Bob Dylan, hearing Dylan’s famous words: "Yesterday is just a memory / Tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be."
While our memories will always be fond of a great talent robbed too soon, tomorrow will never be what it’s supposed to be without Ledger in front of the camera. Without Ledger, tomorrow is just another day.
