jack
The Legendary Troll Kingdom
I've been thinking about the morbid focus the media plays on celebrity deaths, especially this past year. It seems like we "celebrate" celebrities in large part so we can watch them die. We prefer to have them die young and beautiful, so we can preserve them as such in our paintings (Andy Warhol's Marilyn comes to mind), video games (Kurt Cobain/Guitar Hero), and action figures (Heath Leger as The Joker springs to mind immediately), but we'll make do with the ones long forgotten, like the montage of faces the grotesquely haunt the Oscars every year, as if to say " Hey Brad and Angie, soon you'll be dust too".
Statistically speaking, no more celebs died in 2009 than any other year, but the way the news and the web have been covering these deaths, you'd the the entire Actors Guild passed in the last 12 months. Can't blame CNN or the bloggers, they're just giving us what we want.
And it's not like we're grieving either; we're indulging in memorial orgies that turn the dead into the people we need them to be. Perhaps it's to assuage our own anxieties about death (both our own death and "America's") Do not ask for who'm the twitter tweets, it tweets for thee.
Celebrity memorials and funerals are some of our more bizarre rituals, too...occasions for forgetting famous lives, rather than remembering them. If you're famous and want to change your image, all you need to do is die. The enduring image of Farrah Fawcett isn't the eraser sized nipples poking through her red bathing suit, but in a hospital gown on NBC's watch-a-celeb-die-with-courage-a-thon. Remember when they cycled that for heavy airplay just before and after her death? We won't even talk about MJ, who spent most of his consciousness hacking every bit of cupcakeer off his face...nonetheless, Q-Tip and Spike Jones held competing "parties" to celebrate his first year as a dead black man. Remember Joe Jackson and Usher at the funeral? :::brrrr:::: turned Michael from predator to victim in three short hours. Chilling.
Ted Kennedy's death was an even more obscene case of postmortem identity reversal. It's remarkable how quickly (and easily) everyone began calling him one of the great forces for good in American public life when said life represented precisely just what the failure of progressive politics was from 1980 until 2008. He was the "soul of the Democratic Party" allright, during the time when the Party was a complete failure. The last months of Kennedy's life culminated in the idea that Obama was somehow the fulfillment of the Kennedy Dream (if you will), the new generation receiving the old torch, which makes me say WHAT. THE. FUCK? Because (imo) Obama is the complete opposite of Kennedy. He's no cheat, certainly not at Harvard, and definitely not on his wife.
Dead celebrities turn out to be the best kind, so much easier to twist and turn for our own purposes. Right now, as we head into the new decade, we need Farrah to be brave and Michael to be innocent and Teddy to be heroic because we need to compensate for the atmosphere of doom that's settling over America like spiritual smog. This years Oscar bait (Amelia and The Lovely Bones, for example) fetishizes death and memorialization to unprecedented degrees, and todays best TV is about cultures and cities and people who are dying. "Mad Men" is a very painstanking construct of a dying world, a dying society with dead fashion and ideals. The hero of Hung is literally huddled in a tent in the dead city of Detroit. Nurse Jackie shows how much worse moral decay is than physical, it just GLOWS with despair..
In our society, in major industries like newspapers and automobiles, in faraway fields of battle like Iraq and Afghanistan, we seem to be falling apart, and we're all waiting around, breathless almost, for Obama's first failure. Look at this, he's a charismatic president with a filibuster proof Senate and full control of the House, and he's finding the country ungovernable. What we're talking about here is the death of Hope. It is for sure, coming. The only question is WHEN.
More celebrities will have to die, so we can go on feeling better about ourselves. They'll have to be the right kind of celebrity though. We lost some truly significant figures this past year, Les Paul and Walter Cronkite come to mind, but they received muted tributes, remember? Their greatness entitled them to a separate peace. Instead we focused on Michael Jackson. So far he's had 5 funerals, and Jermaine wants to turn the Ranch into a perversely permanent Graceland with all his machinations. Think of that, a permanent grief center where all of his followers can pretend he wasn't the WEIRDEST MOTHER FUCKER TO WALK ACROSS THE EARTH BACKWARDS AND ON TIPPY TOE. His corpse is providing a greater public service than his living body ever did.
By remembering Him, we can forget our own impending doom, I guess.
:::gets off rant pedastal:::
Statistically speaking, no more celebs died in 2009 than any other year, but the way the news and the web have been covering these deaths, you'd the the entire Actors Guild passed in the last 12 months. Can't blame CNN or the bloggers, they're just giving us what we want.
And it's not like we're grieving either; we're indulging in memorial orgies that turn the dead into the people we need them to be. Perhaps it's to assuage our own anxieties about death (both our own death and "America's") Do not ask for who'm the twitter tweets, it tweets for thee.
Celebrity memorials and funerals are some of our more bizarre rituals, too...occasions for forgetting famous lives, rather than remembering them. If you're famous and want to change your image, all you need to do is die. The enduring image of Farrah Fawcett isn't the eraser sized nipples poking through her red bathing suit, but in a hospital gown on NBC's watch-a-celeb-die-with-courage-a-thon. Remember when they cycled that for heavy airplay just before and after her death? We won't even talk about MJ, who spent most of his consciousness hacking every bit of cupcakeer off his face...nonetheless, Q-Tip and Spike Jones held competing "parties" to celebrate his first year as a dead black man. Remember Joe Jackson and Usher at the funeral? :::brrrr:::: turned Michael from predator to victim in three short hours. Chilling.
Ted Kennedy's death was an even more obscene case of postmortem identity reversal. It's remarkable how quickly (and easily) everyone began calling him one of the great forces for good in American public life when said life represented precisely just what the failure of progressive politics was from 1980 until 2008. He was the "soul of the Democratic Party" allright, during the time when the Party was a complete failure. The last months of Kennedy's life culminated in the idea that Obama was somehow the fulfillment of the Kennedy Dream (if you will), the new generation receiving the old torch, which makes me say WHAT. THE. FUCK? Because (imo) Obama is the complete opposite of Kennedy. He's no cheat, certainly not at Harvard, and definitely not on his wife.
Dead celebrities turn out to be the best kind, so much easier to twist and turn for our own purposes. Right now, as we head into the new decade, we need Farrah to be brave and Michael to be innocent and Teddy to be heroic because we need to compensate for the atmosphere of doom that's settling over America like spiritual smog. This years Oscar bait (Amelia and The Lovely Bones, for example) fetishizes death and memorialization to unprecedented degrees, and todays best TV is about cultures and cities and people who are dying. "Mad Men" is a very painstanking construct of a dying world, a dying society with dead fashion and ideals. The hero of Hung is literally huddled in a tent in the dead city of Detroit. Nurse Jackie shows how much worse moral decay is than physical, it just GLOWS with despair..
In our society, in major industries like newspapers and automobiles, in faraway fields of battle like Iraq and Afghanistan, we seem to be falling apart, and we're all waiting around, breathless almost, for Obama's first failure. Look at this, he's a charismatic president with a filibuster proof Senate and full control of the House, and he's finding the country ungovernable. What we're talking about here is the death of Hope. It is for sure, coming. The only question is WHEN.
More celebrities will have to die, so we can go on feeling better about ourselves. They'll have to be the right kind of celebrity though. We lost some truly significant figures this past year, Les Paul and Walter Cronkite come to mind, but they received muted tributes, remember? Their greatness entitled them to a separate peace. Instead we focused on Michael Jackson. So far he's had 5 funerals, and Jermaine wants to turn the Ranch into a perversely permanent Graceland with all his machinations. Think of that, a permanent grief center where all of his followers can pretend he wasn't the WEIRDEST MOTHER FUCKER TO WALK ACROSS THE EARTH BACKWARDS AND ON TIPPY TOE. His corpse is providing a greater public service than his living body ever did.
By remembering Him, we can forget our own impending doom, I guess.
:::gets off rant pedastal:::
