Charlie Sheen, You’re No Marlon Brando

03.21.11 | George D. Allen | Staff NotesPrint this Post

Tags: Marlon Brando

Everyone’s all a-Twitter (oh, ugh, sorry) over the many colorful turns of phrase we’ll now always associate with the very public meltdown of Charlie Sheen. No doubt you’ve heard some of these repeated already in mixed company. Maybe you have already received some of them in unsolicited e-mail forwards. Perhaps you’re good and sick of them. For sadists’ eyes only, here’s a brief recap:

I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen.

I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total, bitchin’ rock star from Mars.

I’m bi-winning. I win here, and I win there.

(Need more? If so, go here. Otherwise, let’s keep moving.)

Those quotes are just crazy enough to survive a few news cycles. Maybe even a generation. But it’s time for pop-culture junkies to take a deep breath and realize that, as amusing as these bon mots may be (to the extent that we do choose to snicker over the wretched details of a man’s mental and physical travails), they can’t hold a candle to the best off-the-cuff remarks made by Hollywood’s greatest quote-spinner. I refer, of course, to the one and only Marlon Brando.

Sure, Brando’s just as noted for his conspicuous absences—be they from the stage, from the screen, or from the podium at the Academy Awards—as for anything he actually said or did, but while the man long (and still, in many circles) regarded as the world’s greatest actor was among us, he let fly some of the oddest, most confrontational, funniest, and downright puzzling comments of this or any age.

And, he wasn’t trying to leverage the batsh*t things he said into T-shirts or God knows what other form of merchandising scheme.

Well, then again, who’s to say what Brando would have made of YouTube? From a remote seclusion on Tetiaroa, perhaps, the late-20^th-century’s answer to Orson Welles might have deemed the Internet to be the perfect distribution channel for his sometimes-idealistic, sometimes-unhinged messages. Freed from the interference of writers, directors, co-stars, editors, and the rest of the vast machinery of Hollywood filmmaking that could act as a filter clouding his artistic desires, Brando would have had to find a way to make use of the biggest online video platform (launched less than a year after his death) to express his vastness as only he could.

And then, the modern world would have been much better acquainted with these sentiments from the Wild One:

I don’t want to spread the peanut butter of my personality on the moldy bread of the commercial press.

With women, I’ve got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end. I slip the loop around their necks so they can’t get away or come too close.

I have eyes like those of a dead pig.

If John Wayne ran for president, he’d get a great following…I think he’s been enormously instrumental in perpetuating this view of the Indian as a savage, ferocious, destructive force. He’s made us believe things about the Indians that were never true and perpetuated the myth about how wonderful the frontiersmen were and how decent and honorable we all were.

The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to be brutalized, develop scabs and never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.

Wow. Now that is a legend in action.

I like Sheen. He does drama well (see Platoon); he is a gifted comic actor—he’s the only man who was able to compensate for the lack of Leslie Nielsen with his performances as Topper Harley in Jim Abrahams’ Hot Shots films...no small feat, that; and, once upon a time, he could poke fun at himself and his foibles without things turning into a freak show, as he proved with his sidesplitting turn as himself in Being John Malkovich.

Never caught a single episode of Two and a Half Men, so I can’t say that his departure from the show (or its survival, or his possible return) will likely impact me in the slightest. But I’d sure like to see Sheen break away from this current wave of viral pleading and get back to business. Whether he is pulling a Joaquin Phoenix or is in the actual midst of serious, serious problems, the man with tiger blood running through his veins ought to give up trying to outshine the man who played Superman's father.

Jack Nicholson once said that he and other actors of successive generations were all "Brando's children." Ah, if only the Godfather was still with us. Some of his "kids" would quickly be on the receiving end of a sublime verbal spanking.