Recently, Howard Stern floated the insightful idea to Sheen that the actor was obsessed with the film Apocalypse Now of late because it represents a way for Charlie to commune with his father, Martin Sheen, who co-starred with Marlon Brando in that film, and in life appears to have distanced himself and deemed his son ill, like a cancer sufferer.
As Sheen makes his slow, staggered speeches on his Sheen’s Korner webcasts, he is riffing outrageously on Brando’s mad Colonel Kurtz and playing to an unseen, mystified Martin Sheen/Captain Willard who simply fails to “see any method” behind all of this madness.
In Martin Sheen’s opening monologue as Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now, he observes (of the Viet Cong) that “every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.”
Even Robert Duvall’s rebel yell “Charlie don’t surf!” (which became a Clash song) supports Charlie Sheen’s analysis and re-enactment of the 1979 masterpiece: Busted by errand boys for a grocery store/TV network, Sheen is exposing the true horror at large here.
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I don’t listen to Stern, so I wonder when he made his observations on the Sheens.
Because as I wrote last Friday in my talk radio recap:
Watching actor Charlie Sheen’s disintegration, Michael Savage asked [on March 8], “How does someone get to that point?”
Savage pointed out the similarity between the younger Sheen’s public acting-out and his father Martin Sheen’s drug induced “breakdown” in the movie “Apocalypse Now” (FREE audio).