Memory: Alec Baldwin, Heath Ledger, & Jon-Erik Hexum

I was having dinner with a friend and the subject of Alec Baldwin's accidental shooting of Halyna Hutchins came up. As we talked we went from "How did a live round get onto the set?" to "Even blank rounds can be dangerous." At this point my friend agreed and said look what happened to Heath Ledger. I was puzzled, as I did not remember Ledger being involved in gun violence, so I asked what she meant. She told me that Ledger had been playing around with a gun on set, and had put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger, thinking that since it was loaded with a blank (only one, so it was also a Russian Roulette thing) that he was in no danger. It ended up killing him.

I was pretty sure that that wasn't what had happened to Ledger, but I'm a non-confrontational fellow most of the time, so I just left it there and moved the conversation on. But later on I went online to see if I had actually completely misremembered Ledger's death. And I found that Ledger had died from an accidental overdose of prescription medications. No blanks, no gun.

So I Googled actor death gun blanks to see if anything came up.

And the name Jon-Erik Hexum--which I didn't recognize--was the first hit. I read the story on Wikipedia. Here's the relevant part:

"On October 12, 1984, the cast and crew of Cover Up were filming the seventh episode of the series, "Golden Opportunity", on Stage 18 of the 20th Century Fox lot. One of the scenes filmed that day called for Hexum's character to load bullets into a .44 Magnum handgun, so he was provided with a functional gun and blanks. When the scene did not play as the director wanted it to in the master shot, there was a delay in filming. Hexum became restless and impatient during the delay and began playing around to lighten the mood. He had unloaded all but one (blank) round, spun it, and—simulating Russian roulette—he put the revolver to his right temple and pulled the trigger, apparently unaware of the danger."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon-Erik_Hexum

An incredibly sad story...a 26 year old man with a promising future ahead of him whose life ends because of a moment of fooling around.

But not Heath Ledger's story.

So how did my friend conflate these stories?

I felt the twitch of a vague memory in my brain, and Googled Joker puts gun to his head. And this image came up:

https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/33523/why-did-the-joker-take-the-risk-of-placing-a-gun-in-harvey-dents-hand

And this Joker is played (of course) by Heath Ledger.

So my friend, who is an intelligent, mature person, had, unknown to herself, taken a fictional moment, combined it with a story which appeared in the news 24 years earlier on, and then made that conflation a part of her everyday reality.

And I am absolutely sure that we all do this. 

All of the time.

Thus do we build our worlds.

P.S. This is a political diatribe.