Millions of people grieved last week for a trio of folks they most likely never met, lining up at landmarks, watching clips and revisiting memories attached to intimate strangers.
Ed McMahon’s death reminded a generation who went to bed with “The Tonight Show” under Johnny Carson of their own mortality. Farrah Fawcett’s extended passing sparked weepy tributes to the hair — and sexuality — of the freewheeling ’70s.
Michael Jackson’s demise registered, profoundly and globally, as a peculiarly American story whose sudden end devastated generations who grew up dancing to the always perplexing man-child.
How is it that so many experience the death of a celebrity as such a personal loss?
If you break up with a loved one, you sob to favorite old love songs and revel in the nostalgia. If you lose a loved celebrity, psychologists say, the mourning isn’t all that different. “Grief is grief,” said Lizzy Wagner, a Denver grief counselor.
People feel it profoundly because celebrities are part of our day-to-day as a culture. It’s a concrete loss, but also an ambiguous loss, she said, because we hold celebrities as idols or heroes.
“It stirs up a lot in our own grief journey,” she said.
And the fact that it is a collective mourning doesn’t mean each saddened heart doesn’t take it personally.
According to Leo Braudy, author of “The Frenzy of Renown,” we have a symbiotic relationship with celebrities’ lives. “A little part of our psychic lives die as well when a celebrity dies.”
But how much mourning we give over to our dead celebs may depend on how much of themselves they gave to us.
Cultural historian Neal Gabler defines celebrity as “human entertainment,” that is, not just an entertainer but “a person who, by the very process of living, provides entertainment for us.” Fame, he says, requires a narrative component.
For McMahon, there was the unfortunate narrative of recent financial difficulties. For Fawcett, it was cancer, set against her struggle to be taken seriously as an actor, a narrative that stretched well beyond the years when she was a TV regular.
No narrative was as captivating as Jackson’s. For decades he provided a quirky, brilliant, sometimes distasteful offstage narrative, nearly eclipsing his achievements on stage.
Jackson’s journey was always creative, confusing and maddening — which hooked the public, like a soap opera. And the more involved we are in a star’s story, the greater the loss we feel.
The timing is a bit sad for McMahon, whose narrative was workmanlike but not riveting, and for Fawcett, whose story arc — splash, disgrace, redemption, acceptance — was so near completion that she’d said goodbye in a TV special last month.
But fans remain overwhelmed and grieving for Jackson, who gave us chapter after chapter of stardom, physical changes, legal trials and then left forever. No one put us through a wider range of emotions in life, and no one left us more curious in death.
Gabler cites Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and John F. Kennedy as celebrities whose narratives continue “through revelations and reinterpretations long after the stars themselves have departed.”
The King of Pop will end up among them. To sociologists, his narrative represents everything going — racially, sexually, morally — during his time.
Braudy, a professor at the University of Southern California, said, “Michael Jackson will live on as an emblematic figure of the ’70s and ’80s, when he was most popular. He will become a cultural icon when you’re looking back historically.”
He fills what Braudy calls a “nostalgic” place in fans’ minds and hearts. Sometimes people seek that feeling of comfort from parents, sometimes from fictional figures, sometimes from half-real, half-fictional characters — like Jackson. The enigma that is Jackson will allow each individual to turn the star to his or her own meaning.
“That’s the thing about people who are mega-famous,” Braudy said. “It has something to do with their own talent, but it’s also about how they fit into the play we’re constantly writing and rewriting about what’s going on in our culture.”
Even in death, Jackson pushed the television narrative. We’re accustomed to seeing hearses, caskets, even bodies, lying in state. But never has a star’s body bag transfer to the morgue been so explicitly broadcast.
In one sense, Braudy said, it’s appropriate that Jackson died young. “The idea of a 75-year-old Michael Jackson is hard to envision.”
Drug concerns.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
