Our recent readings and discussions have focused on the “resurrection” of dead celebrities; I find this premise intriguing particularly in how it contrasts living reactions to the deaths of the non-famous.
I’m reminded of when we watched the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back. We respond to events, like deaths, in frameworks of their relativity to ourselves. Martha in the episode, for instance, had a much more visceral reaction to losing Ash than, say, her sister did. Celebrity is built upon boosted amounts of people feeling connected to a distinct individual. The boundaries of that connection are not or perhaps cannot be designated except by societal opinion case-by-case, leading to transgressions.
Modern production, distribution, and media only encourages the relationships people feel they have with celebrities who usually do not know them individually. So, disruption happens most definitively when the famous person dies. The physicality of their relationship per fan never actually existed; it therefore cannot be taken away. If a family member dies, closure occurs in that those left behind cannot interact with that person anymore. When a celebrity dies, a fan can still watch movies, listen to music, buy memorabilia,etc. made by that person, just as they did before the death.
Thus, no boundary has been created, and celebrity deaths lose their grounding as applied to fans. It was odd when Martha, in Be Right Back, resurrected Ash’s voice and eventual body (sort of). Listening to David Bowie’s music after learning of his demise, though, was regarded as normal and in fact encouraged in reality. That example specifically goes further: Bowie’s posthumous music releases in 2016 garnered much higher listening rates as well as slews of comments about degrees of devotion to him and his work, attempts to physically connect with or to connect more than others with Bowie.
The absence of physicality in celebrity-fan relationships, as opposed to mere person-to-person relationships, fictionalizes them. I’d be interested whether more toxic behavior happens related to celebrity deaths or to more intimate deaths.