Celebrity Death: Culture And Consciousness

"One cannot be aware of one's own mortality without conceiving of the inevitability of death as an affront and an indignity; and without thinking of the ways to repair the wrong."  Zygmunt Bauman

The death of a celebrity, or a well known admired public figure, creates a profound sense of collective loss.

It is strongly suggested that due to contemporary culture's repression of death; our inability to accept and explore death as a natural and inevitable event, the subsequent outpouring of collective shock, disbelief and grief after the death of a well known figure is therefore exacerbated.

In many ways it is felt the media has a strong role in this. And it is not only because of the celebrity's larger than life presence in collective culture, the very horror of death itself persists in our collective consciousness.

We have seen this throughout modern American history many times; the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Princess Diana and now Michael Jackson.

To explain why millions of people can experience such profound grief for someone they did not personally know, we look to sociology, psychology even anthropology to explain it for us. We are desperately enthralled by the idea, image and symbolism of celebrity. We have in most ways, set them apart from us.

We raise their humanity to unbelievable levels, expect them to deliver things to us not asked of, nor expected from everyday people. We hold their behavior, their habits, their ability to entertain us and inspire us, and their mistakes under a microscope.
When they speak we listen, when they endorse a cause, an entity or a product, we join that cause, endorse that entity and rush out to buy that product.

And when they make a mistake, commit some wrong, or fail us in various different ways, we turn on them and crucify them.
What is this phenomenon of human behavior that is inherent in us as a culture, a society? Can this be dated all the way back to antiquity? Is the story of Jesus Christ a good place to begin?

"The trivialization of death lies at the very heart of our cultural difficulty in treating seriously matters such as bereavement and loss and gives rise to a dramatic sense of death as an obscene event."   Anthony Elliot

Certainly the concept and experience with death has changed for us over the course of history. In earlier times, death was accepted as a natural and expected event in the course of life. In modern times, death has been a subject of medical and technical "control".

Death is hushed and hidden away. We do not as societies incorporate the experience of death as a normal process, nor do we embrace the learning and acceptance of death.

Death is the greatest symbol of fear. Death is the greatest fear. It lives in our collective consciousness as the ultimate horror.
We must have an explanation for death. And because there is no explanation for death outside of it being natural and inevitable, we have great trouble accepting it. This is always true and when it happens to us personally, it is devastating and life altering.

When it happens to a celebrity, one who is such a constant "unaverage" presence in our collective daily lives and memories, it can be just as devastating to many people. Especially because we have created them to be larger than life, personally admire them, and many times feel as if we do now them personally.

Celebrity itself, the making of, the psychology of, and awareness of it, is an entirely different subject. And these celebrities themselves often work hard to create such an image and presence in collective societal consciousness. But celebrity death has much to do with collective self knowledge, a shared sense of admiration and stored memory, and a sense of collective identity and security.

The death of a celebrity is a collective mourning of ideals, a fracturing in society. We feed upon and react to each others senses of the world and celebrity as we know it and understand it. And our identity as a nation is wrapped up in our collective memory. The everyday man's death comes and passes silently; because their deaths are not in that place of collective memory, they are only grieved within their families and friends psyches.

It is a fine line one must walk between public and private life, between identity and it's presentation, between a normal life and celebrity.

If "larger than life" human beings, if those very ones we have set above all others dies, especially suddenly, under circumstances that could have been prevented, or that was an unnatural death such as murder or accident, death becomes all the more shocking collectively. And the real imminence of our own mortality screams at us in the mirror of their death. "If these larger than life people die, how fragile are we really?"

We feel as if our collective identities have been stolen, melancholy echoes of their work, their music, their art or their humanitarian efforts can in the beginning haunt us, leaving us grieving as if they indeed were our very own family. In the larger collective sense, we have made them part of our family. A part of our everyday lives.

Unable to mourn, to release the very real part of someone we have incorporated into ourselves as a part of ourselves, leaves us unable to withdrawal from their death, unable to release them in order to make sense of their lives, our own lives and the concept of death in order to live again. Society should be able to mourn the losses of their cultural "identity" just as they should mourn their personal and individual losses.

Without this mourning, we are left not only with perpetuating the disbelief of death, but the coming to terms with and understanding, the meanings of our collective memories and symbols.

It is not irrational to expect great mourning in those who have incorporated an individual into their contemplative thought, memory, admiration and history. Public figures, or celebrities that may have existed throughout most of our lives as presences, on any extended or elevated level, that suddenly are no longer a presence, causes to some extent the same sense of loss and sadness, as do extremely personal losses.

And as collectively territorial as we become of our dead cultural deities, we also experience and even participate in, collective exploitation of them when they die.

Do we subsequently trivialize death through commercial exploitation? Certainly history repeats itself regarding celebrity death and the immediate reaction of commercial dissemination of images, products, and a bombardment of glamorized tributary events. This phenomenon is ten fold when that celebrity is known and admired not only in this country, but throughout the world.

For the most part the reaction of this sudden scrambling to buy t-shirts, CD's, posters or other memorabilia of a celebrity, is a nostalgic idealization. A sense of perpetuating the lost one through the saturation of their image. In some ways it seems indicative of a cultural crises.

And in the short term, it is a cultural crises. A collective sorrow, a questioning and an attempt to understand not only in individual terms, but in cultural terms, all that the celebrity has meant to culture, how they may have changed it and fought for change that represented our own ideals but our inability to achieve them.

There is commercial exploitation that results in celebrity death foremost by media and commercial industry sources. Are we participating in this exploitation by tuning in to those media outlets that saturate us, by purchasing those products and materials related to the celebrity? There is a line to draw here as well. In order to realize the fact of a celebrity's death, accept and move forward from it; just as in the extremely personal deaths which we must work through, we must also process "cultural" deaths.

"It's fear of the unknown. The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everyone scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love hate."   John Lennon

But there is a difference between the media assisting the public and the collective culture by reporting on new details, allowing us visual opportunities to come to terms with celebrity death; and shameful, disrespectful, dishonest trivialization of their death. The media itself has become "circus." And in many ways corrupted.

Being glued to our televisions is not what is wrong. In the beginning it is expected and it is okay, even healthy if it has assisted you with feelings of shock, disbelief and grief. It is when we find ourselves screaming in anger or indignation at those television screens, when it perpetuates our feelings of grief when we walk away from that television that it becomes harmful.

We may never be able to reconcile ourselves with our love/hate relationship with the relentless driving force of media, but we can put it in perspective. We can compartmentalize it's role in our lives. And until we can collectively change the face of media and it's role, change the rules of the game and the boundaries, if ever, we must create them for ourselves.

There are some for whom celebrity death is a nuisance, an afterthought, they have no opinion either way of the death and it doesn't affect them at all; they do not participate in collective cultural grief. That is healthy too. What is not healthy, is the disregard or the refusal to recognize the fact and effects of cultural grieving.

There have been few celebrity deaths that have had the magnitude of setting into motion a global grief. That too is a whole other subject. But I urge you to study and learn of this very natural human reaction and cultural grieving's place in society.

Collective grieving brings us together as a nation, a global community, and as human beings. It reminds us the rituals of storytelling, the continuation of memory and experience, and it bonds us into a future time. It can not only help us to understand our culture, our humanity and ourselves, but the process of death and dying.

{ All photographs provided were taken from the worldwide collection of captured moments in the collective grief of the death of Michael Joseph Jackson 1958-2008 Requiescat In Pace }