Celebrity Sudden Death Cults and Public Life

There was a moment during Michael Jackson’s funeral when millions of us around the world were supposed to come together and mourn the passing of genius. We were supposed to stop and share in an investigation of emotion conducted in anticipation of our yearning for a common bond of grief.

‘This is big’, the global media organisations said to themselves, and we had wall-to-wall carpet bombardment of the life and death of the King of Pop. News-providers across the world took up the challenge of connecting with what the premature death of a world-famous pop star means to people. To fill the pages and airwaves and screens with so much coverage, news executives must have decided, all at once, that: This is where the people come together; this is a moment when millions will all look in the same direction with unwavering scrutiny; the great lens of human civilisation will swivel and focus on the circumstances of Jackson’s death; the full force of the shared gaze of every eyeball will burn its way down through the experiences of all concerned; and thousands and millions will demand we explore every aspect of this celebrated person in our pages and broadcasts.

Jackson no doubt suffered a great deal of intrusion from the media while he was alive, but his death would become a seminal moment of networked reverence for his reconstructed memory. The king is dead; long live the myth of the king. The circumstances of Jackson’s death are murky but the many retellings of his last days suggest that the entertainer’s great achievements were in the past. Tabloid coverage publishes different theories by different members of the family or entourage. Broadsheet coverage assesses the cultural impact of Jackson’s legacy. This stuff and every kind of coverage in between screams ‘something important has happened; the world will never be the same again!’

Live broadcast of Jackson’s funeral on both BBC2 and Five shows how far up the pecking order of celebrity Jackson was, compared to the (relatively) private arrangements for Jade Goody. News and media organisations want big audiences, naturally. Superstardom produces a sudden cult of grief in the media because it gravitates to, and feeds off, events in which there is a demand for information. Jackson is in that category of celebrity of whom it can be said that they ‘touched millions of people in their everyday lives’.

The news corporations, particularly the BBC, once they had confirmed the initial reports, moved with great speed to replace their output with Jackson-related content. He was everywhere for days. The public displays of private grief by family and friends, making speeches for the TV at his funeral, completed the cycle of the sudden death cult. Jackson can now be remembered through the prism of the reaction to his death and how much the media told us his passing had ‘touched’ us.

Bit it was too much. Jackson has long existed in that celebrity hell where the brand barely survived the accusations and suspicions fame attracts. He was ‘Wacko Jacko’, he was beyond eccentric and he sent his kids out in public wearing veils. Whatever his past achievements, Jackson was a sad and lonely figure, much as Princess Diana was. She was openly ridiculed in the press the week before her sudden death and post-mortem rehabilitation into a different kind of saintly public figure. The transformation from ‘Wacko’ to King Michael of Pop is only partially complete. Accusations of abuse, drug-addiction and eccentricity notwithstanding, Jackson had no place in the national life and consciousness of the people like Di had, at least here in Britain. She was the outsider in the Royal Court, the quiet girl thrust into international diplomacy and the emotionally vulnerable victim of an uncaring establishment. Unlike Di, Jackson’s success was built on hard work and his reputation as the greatest pop star was earned by himself. He must take much of the responsibility for his fall from adulation as well. Jackson’s eccentricities, such as when he told Martin Bashir he liked children to sleep in his bed, were alarming. He acted as if he could not see why people would be alarmed and as if he no longer lived in anything like our world at all.

A person who enjoys the esteem of so many cannot rely on it when they appear to want to change themselves. It was who he was and what he achieved that made Jackson popular. He tried to change what he was with plastic surgery (accusations of his changing colour have always been denied). He did not try to regain his youthful looks, as is usual and tolerated; he tried to radically change his appearance. Jackson tried to become someone different from the person who won fame and fortune with their talents. It’s hard to forgive that or sympathise with that for most people.

It was all too much, the coverage. When contrasted with the recent anecdotes of watching the moon landings back in 1969, the funeral of Michael Jackson is barely an event at all in the sense that people really are thinking that the world has changed. Perhaps that sense of togetherness, that sense that, whatever happens, we are all in this and it affects all of us is something that cannot happen again.

Maybe there is just no reason any longer for people to surge together in great numbers. Recently, the financial system and its bankers, the political system and its politicians and now the press and its journalists have been pilloried for their behaviour in the name of the public interest. When the public is disconnected from, and suspicious of, these institutions and most others they can no longer play a role beyond that of the spectator who watches, cheers or boos and then exits.

Is the death of a pop star the last thing that the media can find to connect with the big, very general, public? Ersatz grief, mobilised by TV specials and special eight-page pull-outs is a tiny little piece of the common experience we once believed to comprise public life. The public, in whose name and in the name of whose opinion so much is done and justified, is barely engaged in any of the processes that directly affect it, but it is assumed still to feel, if not move much.

So media identify a big story and run with it. But that media identify this particular story as that big and that we the people are identified as that audience with those responses means that we are not really the public. We are not connected by experience of each other but by the emotion we may come to share about a cultural phenomenon of the broadest and most easily appreciated kind.

What else but the sudden death of a celebrity could change the TV programming, take over the news and create that shared spectacle in the space where we are all supposed to look? Probably not, say, a war breaking out or a big natural disaster in somewhere undeveloped. The exposure of wrongdoing by yet another set of personnel from a distrusted institution could not swing it. An unbelievably horrible crime such as the long-term imprisonment and sexual abuse of a woman by her father did not do it. The election of a black US president did, but one could say that Obama’s success story was interesting despite its political nature, rather than because of it.

Our society returns to normal service now that Michael Jackson has been interred. This week, accusations that News of the World hacks have been bugging celebrity phones may provoke politicians still smarting from the expenses scandal to re-regulate the press for the first time. One more public institution threatens to be rocked by another in a landscape of wobbly institutions. All of them wobble because the public in whose name they operate no longer trusts in them. Institutions such as banking, politics and the press were once central arenas where the future of society might be contested. If they pass away in their present forms, die off to become other kinds of public things, the public will not even be there for the funeral.