"Media Martyr Machine"

by Dom B.
2001.07.05

You, in your little way, worship them.  You eat up everything you hear about them.  You cannot escape them.  They show up in your dreams, in your waking fantasies, in your everyday banter. And by saying 'you', I mean us.  All of us, like it or not, are hooked on celebrities.

I'm not going to rehash the old argument of "celebrities should have their privacy" versus "celebrities make themselves public, and therefore are public property".  I'm going to talk about the fascination itself, specifically on the death of celebrities.

There was a big fuss about the autopsy photos of Dale Earnhardt. I've actually seen autopsy photos of Chris Farley on the internet (trust me, we'll come back to the internet topic sometime).  Every one of us has probably seen the Zapruder film showing JFK's assassination, seen the mangled car that Princess Di was in, seen the street corner River Phoenix died on.  Why do we flock to these images?  Face this: you aren't watching the Zapruder film thinking "I have just witnessed the tragic passing of a monumental figure".  Your thoughts actually may be along these lines: "I have just witnessed a superhuman public figure get his brains splashed all over the back of a convertible.  Gee, JFK bleeds too".

I think most of the sensation over the death of a public figure is connected to some type of need to deconstruct things that seem greater than us.  Not necessarily a hatred of celebrity, but a way of saying "you, Mr / Mrs / Ms / Dr Moviestar / Politician / Rockstar / etc., you are just a bag of blood, guts, and bone like the rest of us", because we feel inferior and the media feeds our bitterness.

We also see through their bullshit.  Sure Britney, I bet you're a virgin, and yeah, Robert Downey Jr, I bet you've kicked the habit.  So just download some fake nudes of Britney or Anna Kournikova because no matter how much you work out or diet or how much money you make in your typical everyday type job, Carmen Electra will not go out with you.  You might be a kung fu master who can kick Tommy Lee's ass, but Pamela Anderson will not knob you and let you videotape it.   And you realize it a bit more every day.  You'll plateau soon, if you haven't already.

But what about heroes?  In some way, on some level, we need our heroes to die.  Because they lose their shine as they age and get boring and normal.  We love them more as legends, because they are immortal, 33 years old forever.  Always at the top of their career, always the thin, young, sober Elvis Presley.  Heroes and Legends are better than celebrities because they are not only their music or their smile or their famous role.  They are Time, they are the avatars of an era.  The cult of Elvis Presley wants to believe he's still alive because they can't stand the time they lost, when they were nineteen years old necking in the back of a convertible, or you mourn Jim Morrison because you could see yourself with long hair smoking 'grass' in the VW Beetle like it was yesterday.

In this Age of Information, you didn't have to be alive at that time, you can be there in your head and wish it was the Summer of Love instead of the Summer of Expensive Gas and Global Warming and HIV and Teen Pregnancy and Gang Warfare and Boy Bands and Gap Commercials and Urban Sprawl and Gingko In Your Iced Tea and Stomach Ulcers and Nuclear Annihilation and People in California Bitching and................