Heath Ledger and the Status of a Tragic Icon

It's become something of a cliche at this point (after only a few days) to post comments about Heath Ledger's unexpected death (I almost followed another cliche and typed "untimely" until I realized how absurd that would be: is death ever really "timely"?). The most common tropes available to us at the moment point out his rapid improvement as a serious actor in the past few years, and the fact that we will never be able to know if he ever reached his full potential in his craft. And, if we follow some scholars' thinking on the subject of "tragedy" (Bryan Reynolds comes to mind), it's because of this sense of lost potential, this impossibility to know, that allows us to call his death tragic.

And yes, tragic it was. I can only join in with the chorus at the moment by pointing out how great of an actor he was, and how great of an actor he could have been had he lived. His resume is packed with wonderful performances: not just his subtle sense of longing in the oft-cited Brokeback Mountain (I have serious reservations about the film as a whole, and I find it hard to see good performances in films I don't like), but in a number of other films that I find more interesting and fun (his charismatic, charming, energetic, funny, slightly sadistic, very over-the-top but not off-the-deep-end turn as Patrick/Petrucchio in 10 Things I Hate about You has been on my mind for the past few days, as has his charming heroism in A Knight's Tale).

But in this tragic tale of lost potential, I think we can see the birth of a genuine icon. I don't want to sound like the increasingly Tom-Cruise-crazy-sounding John Travolta on this one, but Ledger has the potential to become this generation's James Dean. Scholars have pondered at length about what it means to become an iconic figure (Matt Hills's highly problematic interpretation of icons in his book Fan Cultures is worth reading), but they always seem to think of this question in retrospect, in the way that a celebrity is retroactively turned into an icon after his/her death. They rarely talk about the process through which this occurs, and I think we're seeing it with Ledger right now. In thinking of a few other icons as examples, we can safely say that there was a cult of Marilyn during her life, but I suspect that there wasn't with someone like James Dean. And I can't recall anyone calling Kurt Cobain the "voice of a generation" until after his own tragic death. This seems to be the case for Ledger as well: I can recall the angry message boards for The Dark Knight questioning whether he was the right actor for the role of the Joker, and, truth be told, I had my own doubts until I saw the first photos. That doubt seems to be effaced now, as if we have collectively decided to incorporate any problems with his life and his work into the overall image of Heath Ledger as icon.

I, for one, am pleased with the development, and I take it as small consolation right now that his work will be remembered even more now than it might have been had he lived longer.