Heath Ledger ... and the American Dream?

Like everywhere else, sometimes people write stupid crap in the Australian press. A good example appeared in today's Sydney Morning Herald about the death of Heath Ledger. Sophie Gee, born in Australia and now an English professor at Princeton (as in New Jersey, USA), had an op-ed published in the SMH (and at least one other Australian newspaper in Brisbane) about Ledger - "How the American dream shattered an expat fantasy."

She talks about the low-key life Ledger apparently led in Brooklyn, which is fine. But then she says Ledger "went native" and

"started living the American dream. And everybody knows how that ends.

It ends with Jay Gatsby, a self-made man, lying face-down in the swimming pool of his mansion on Long Island."

I re-read Gee's piece, wondering if I had missed a leap of logic. But I couldn't find one. It went straight from "happy go lucky Aussie expat" to "American dream always ends in death".

I don't get it. Not everybody living the American dream ends up in a tragic death. Really. Hell, let's throw a few names out there right now of people who by any objective standard could be seen as living the American dream (i.e., getting rich and famous doing something they love to do) and see how many of them died too early or tragically:

Oprah Winfrey - alive
Bill Gates - alive
Joe DiMaggio - dead, but he lived to a ripe old age
Steve Tyler - improbably still alive
Steven King - alive
Meryl Streep - alive
Bruce Springsteen - alive
Spike Lee - alive
Warren Buffet - alive

Okay, that's a small sample - but so is the fictional Jay Gatsby. I'm still not quite sure what point Gee had, apart from the sad fact that Ledger did die "an American blockbuster death" - which ain't the same thing as dying from the American dream.

Maybe this is supposed to be a broader critique of American society. Well, American society has plenty of things to critique, true - but if that was the point, Gee did not develop it at all well in her op-ed, since most of it was a simple recitation of the facts of Ledger's too-short career and sad death.

Or maybe Gee, herself living the life of an Aussie expat working in the arts and living in the USA, somehow fears that she too will be contaminated in some way by overexposure to life in America and could end up facedown on a bed dead of a drug overdose, like the unfortunate Ledger?

But that would be cheap speculation...