Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

I’ve never been one for mass grieving over celebrities.

I’m sure those who do join in do so with the best of intentions, but from my outsider’s perspective, it seems insincere - like most things to do with celebrities, more about the person doing the grieving than about the object of grief itself.

Michael Jackson’s Dangerous was the first CD I ever owned (Kylie Minogue’s Enjoy Yourself was the first cassette tape). I remember singing Heal The World one afternoon in primary school, and I still think Black or White is a pretty awesome song. Yet, when he died I felt… not much - as I said, I tend not to when celebrities pass. Sorry in the way that you feel sorry when anyone dies, uncomfortable with the way his death was immediately exploited in the media (of which, yes, I am a part), conflicted about the sexual assault charges, and oddly guilty for even thinking about them while a flood of pro-Jackson images and testimonies were filling my Tumblr dashboard.

In the passsing days, I’ve begun to feel a twinge of meloncholy, though - not about Jackson’s death, but about what seems to have been a very tortured life of abuse and self-hatred. And I began to feel sad for our role as a public in creating that, in labelling him ‘Wacko Jacko’, in dismissing him as a freakshow.

And I think this is where a lot of the mourning around figures like Jackson and, ten years before him, Princess Diana comes from: our collective guilt at not treating them better when they were around. We can blame the media and the paparazzi all we like - and they do have a role to play - but they only give us what we want to see and read.

With all the horror stories and flashing warning lights we’ve seen by now - Jackson (who, by all accounts, had attention thrust upon him far more than he sought it), Diana, Britney Spears, Susan Boyle, Julia Allison - it’s a wonder that anyone still wants to be famous. And yet so many of us do. Whether it’s lining up to audition for a reality show or wishing more people would ‘like’ our blog posts, we’re all (well, not all - but a lot of us) caught up in the pursuit of attention. It’s not simple egotism; attention - from a distance, at least - can look like a synonym for love, or at least a sign we’re worthy of it, and fame is the shiniest approximation of love of all.

But while fame might look at first like the emotion of love, it looks nothing like the act of it. We may feel something approximating infatuation (hunger, excitement, etc) towards our favourite singers, actors and fameballs, but we certainly don’t enact it towards them. We build them them and when they get too big or start to stumble, we tear them down.

And then, when we tear them down far enough - if we tear them down far enough, and we have to do it a bloody long way - we grieve them.