Consuming death in celebrity culture



As I am writing this today I can assure you I am totally fed up with the news of Bowie's death and I wish people would stop talking about it, writing about it, posting on Facebook and Twitter,  everyone desperately trying to get a piece of Bowie and feel involved, while the tabloid press in its usual predatory fashion revisits his life, attempting to give us morsels of his 'real self' to consume.
Let me be clear, I have absolutely nothing against David Bowie. I spent my teenage years listening to him. I even went to the blockbuster exhibition about him at the V&A in 2013 and enjoyed it - I have a weakness for blockbuster exhibitions, I went to the Alexander McQueen's three times at the very least, I am a member of the V&A so I  go whenever I wish.
I am truly sorry that David Bowie, a cancer victim, has passed away at 69. His wife and children must be truly devastated - the loss of a loved one is always a major blow, I certainly know as lost a family member recently.
What confuses me is this way of mourning the passing of celebrities, something that began with the mayhem unleashed by Princess Diana's death and has now reached tremendous sophistication in the way it is being manipulated  - think about it, we are going to have David Bowie T shirts, new releases of old albums, the new one of course, TV programmes, David Bowie fashion, a biopic or two. It's only just begun, the construction of David Bowie's immortality is on its way, his legacy currently being assessed in terms of how profitable it can be.


I am tired of hearing that Bowie was a genius and an icon of our times - oh, that word icon is so overused. Why,Victoria Beckham is hailed as an icon. Without meaning any disrespect to either Bowie or Mrs Beckham I think that nowadays everyone is an icon - mostly of mediocrity.
Everyone seems to be at great pains to let everyone else know how influential David Bowie was in their lives. I don't get it, maybe it's me, but I truly don't get it.
I lived through the time Bowie became famous, he was funny, he had great talent, he was an amazing performer, he was very good at reinventing himself - so is Madonna by the way, yet people are always  bitching about her and the way she looks.
But I would not go as far as saying that David Bowie influenced my life with Ziggy or with Aladin Sane or Let's Dance - as for the latter I really do like the way French choreographer  Jerome Bel used it in The show must go on .  Now, Jerome Bel is truly someone that  entertained me and made me think long and hard abut the meaning of dance.
I was influenced by the time in which I lived, the books I read, the conversations I had with people I met in different contexts, the films I saw, the art I encountered, the performances I attended, the countries I visited.  Music played a big part but I did not listen only to David Bowie, there was other music too - for example, classical music figured prominently in my life and still does. I am sure this is  the case for most other people too. Unless they were perhaps trying to break into the music business and so, yes, perhaps David Bowie's music inspired them, as I am sure the music of others must have. But Bowie as the most influential person in my life? How?I never even met him!

Praeficae

I intensely dislike the big emotional scenes reported in every single detail in the media, inviting us to be spectators of grief and participate eg Bowie's ex-wife breaking down on camera.
This kind of praeficae like behaviour is totally repulsive to me. In Roman times the praeficae were hired to lead funeral processions and they lamented the departed, to whom they were not related at all, creating intensely dramatic scenes. The Romans were not alone in doing this, other ancient people relied on variants of the praeficae because of their belief that the departed should be led into the after world.
Celebrity culture is turning all of us into praeficae divested of the spirituality that was once attached to the notion.  Celebrity deaths are ritualised spectacles stage managed by the media in a bid to secure profitable immortality for the dead celebrity through the commodification of their death . We consume celebrity death, we lap it up, we want to have some part in  it, we are hankering after that immortality, we want it to be ours too.
The media led representations of celebrities and their death wilfully confuse us over what is public and what is private. There is also some kind of bullying behaviour at work: David Bowie has died, you must mourn, if you don't, something is wrong with you.
But of course we are not mourning Bowie. It is  those who were close to him, who knew him well, who knew his qualities and weaknesses as a human being that mourn him.  We are only being manipulated into participating in the act of canonising Bowie, turning his death into an ever lasting success.

To anyone interested in reading up on celebrity culture I would like to recommend the book by Ellis Cashmore, Celebrity Culture, 2006, published by Routledge.

Comments

  1. I totally agree with all that you have written and my belief is that the media sensationalise for monetary gain.

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