This Is Running for Your Life (10 page)

With someone like Whitney Houston, a pop superstar who slipped away in the bathtub of a Beverly Hills hotel in February of 2012, there is a sudden rush to return the artist to her prime. Alongside the tawdry police-blotter gawking, people share YouTube clips of old performances and iTunes explodes with sales. Within a day of Houston's death publicists were circulating bulletins about the cash crop already being planted on her grave. “She died young, tragically, and mysteriously,” one blared, “the three hallmarks of a value investment.”

At the time of her death, Houston had a film awaiting release—a value investment, no doubt, but also an opportunity for her fans to mourn together. In the meantime, final images of her were made public even before she died—frantic paparazzi shots of Whitney Houston leaving last night's party. Most felt like fragments: she appears disheveled, even a little wild, in a short black dress ruched to her body. Hair hangs in her face, and as always her gleaming skin appears to be a single high note away from breaking into one of her famous flop sweats. She is partially hidden by others or seems to be twisting away from the camera with bared teeth, yelling or having just yelled. Together the photos give the feeling of a predatory altercation in progress; this is a woman who couldn't walk to her car without producing images out of a Picasso detail. Some were helpfully cropped to direct your attention to points of interest and together cataloged the scratches on her wrist, the liquid—blood? wine?—running down her leg, the distended belly in profile.

They called her bloated, but we've all been watching Whitney Houston's body for long enough to know that what little extra weight she has on her she carries up front. It's kind of lovely, actually, and the most mortal hint of her most of us ever got. But in the same way that nothing illuminates the body's divinity the way talent does, rarely does a body appear more wretched to us, more useless and husklike, than when that kind of talent is destroyed or disappears too soon. And so the sadistic theme of the past decade's coverage of her life was fulfilled in the hours after those pictures were published: habeas Whitney.

7

It's the television programs that drive home how we have come to crave these stories.
Behind the Music
,
A&E Biography
, and
E! True Hollywood Story
have broken the formula into beats and commercial breaks. Because the narrative arc is now paramount,
A&E
can get away with a one-hour “biography” of Amy Winehouse that contains fewer than six seconds of her actual music. These kinds of shows air with a persistence that would make a North Korean broadcaster proud. They also share a ruthless structural genius: unless its subject is already dead, each episode is understood to be an unresolved, changeable document—downfall, decay, and sudden or premature death are just a few edits and a rebroadcast away. Within days of Heath Ledger's 2008 death we could watch his whole story play out, now new and improved with its “tragic” and, let's face it, more satisfying final act.

Because they are cheap and there are many hours to fill, you don't have to be a lodestar of tragic greatness—a Whitney or a Michael—to get the treatment or have anything much to do with Hollywood to fuel a
True Hollywood Story
. Our appetite has grown deep and indiscriminate; the demand is too great to be met by the few brontosauric talents still roaming the landscape. It takes too long to invest in the real thing anyway: we lack the attention span required to sustain an artist's forty-year career, and the market is no longer built for that kind of longevity. We rely on corporations to mass-farm artists seasonally and look to the story of Elvis wandering into Sun Records, Madonna at the Danceteria, or Michael Jackson being shepherded into the presence of Berry Gordy as relics of an almost adorably organic past.

Instead faded teen idols, troubled B-listers, and reality stars like Anna Nicole Smith have become the tragic-star narrative's bread and butter. On a twenty-four-hour news cycle, squeezing tragic ecstasy from these stories is a tall order even when our most cherished artists are the subjects. The substitutes get the same forensic treatment, but the results are that much grimmer. Within hours of child star Corey Haim's death in early 2010, a popular entertainment site carried the banner headline “VIDEO: First look at home where Corey Haim died.” As though we had all been waiting for it. Another gossip site released the 911 call documenting the sudden death of Brittany Murphy in late 2009. For ten minutes, listeners are invited to imagine the actress's lifeless body on the floor as her husband counts off chest compressions and her mother falls to animal keening. Many of the comments on the Murphy 911 call expressed bewilderment and self-disgust, as if those who clicked through had expected to hear something other than an audio recording of a young woman dying in her mother's arms.

Every few weeks now, it seems, this kind of thing hits a fresh apex. All along the collision of cravings for the “real” and its inverse—escape from reality—is breeding spiritual confusion, especially when it comes to the stories we tell about things that used to matter to us, that we used to do well. Instead of drawing collective succor from supernaturally gifted individuals, we're left with sucking the private lives of lesser and no-talents dry, drifting that much further from a meaningful idea of what it means to
die
.

8

In October 2009, a young woman thrust a flyer into my midsection as I entered the midtown Manhattan theater where Michael Jackson's
This Is It
was making its world premiere. I folded it into my bag and found a seat. In his live-from–Los Angeles introduction of the documentary, cobbled together after Jackson's death from rehearsal footage, choreographer Kenny Ortega called it “the last, sacred documentation of our leader and our friend.” When it was over, the dead man having danced and sung and issued dazed protestations of L-O-V-E for his long-suffering crew, I pulled out the densely printed piece of paper. It was an urgently worded warning about all of the things we weren't going to see that night, things hidden “by those who are making a profit from the screening of this movie.” Michael was not well, the flyer said. Two color photos were offered as proof: 1997 Michael—athletic, vital, and sheathed in tailored lamé—and 2009 Michael, with his sunken chest and two red licorice strips for legs. His management was working him to death; it was Colonel Tom Parker all over again.

The flyer only spelled out what we were all thinking; some of us were there specifically because of those thoughts. The hope, running beneath the surface of the average viewer's mixture of conflicted penitence and morbid curiosity, was that this “sacred documentation” would retrofit some evidence of suffering, of ultimate sacrifice, to Michael Jackson's story. Traditionally, the posthumous artifact completes the story of tragic greatness by allowing a star's public to implicate and then exonerate themselves from responsibility for his or her death.

“So far as we feel sympathy,” Susan Sontag wrote in
Regarding the Pain of Others
, her examination of the moral complexities engaged by images of human suffering, “we feel we are not accomplices to what caused suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.” When it comes to our most blighted stars, the generation of this sympathy is both an indulgence and a relief. In Jackson's case, anything short of drooling catatonia would do. He was transformed from an industry joke and fifty-cent freak show back into an exalted deity, and all it took was a glimmer of the old magic and a few well-executed dance steps.

In the same book, Sontag refers to a gruesome photo that Georges Bataille kept on his desk. Of the 1910 picture of a Chinese prisoner being subjected to death by a thousand cuts, Bataille wrote, “This photograph had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.” Sontag explores this response, comparing the subject to Saint Sebastian: “[Bataille] is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation—a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime.”

If Sontag's assertion is true in a personal sense—and I am not convinced it is—when applied to the pain of others, it is refuted by almost every facet of modern celebrity culture. Still uncertain is whether our attraction to publicly staged suffering is as deeply rooted in religious thinking as it has long seemed. In the case of widely acknowledged talents like Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson, pain was linked to sacrifice, and sacrifice eventually to exaltation. That is how that story goes. And yet more and more that telling is the exception to the rule. For the Greek tragedians suffering was a key to knowledge—less for the sufferer than for those looking on. That the exploitation of washed-up models, sex-tape curios, former child stars, and anonymous tormented civilians is currently paying for half of the advertising on television suggests that the hunger we are sloppily trying to satisfy is less for holy transfiguration than tragic catharsis. But finding meaning in popular mythology is less and less possible when we consume these cut-rate knockoffs of a master narrative while eating cucumber sushi alone at our desks. What that produces is the opposite of ecstasy.

“People don't become inured to what they are shown—if that's the right way to describe what happens,” Sontag wrote, “because of the
quantity
of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.”

9

Catholics are taught not to use the word
worship
with regard to anyone but God Himself. And although the extreme adulation of any one of us would seem inherently dangerous, the need to single each other out seems as equally an intrinsic part of our nature. The fight against that nature, some say, has led to everything worth anything in Western civilization. It has also led to a degree of self-consciousness that precludes the outlet of tragedy or even traditional cults of personality; whatever role each played in facilitating a kind of cultural health has been ceded. Yet our appetite for myth persists, like an embarrassing growl from within.

The great twentieth-century tragedies bordered on Grecian in their balance of the enlightenment of individualism and the darkness of its dissolution. We followed these stories in real time, sometimes over decades, and found meaning in their full expression. But the terms of realism began to interfere with the stories themselves, and their mythology became a marketable commodity—something to be broken down and sold off for parts. The institution now requires little more than willing bodies to run smoothly, mass-producing a form of popular tragedy that doesn't leave room for more than a quick revel in the misfortune of others. Apollo has left the building, and it behooves us to wonder what becomes of a culture left to its own undirected desires and devices. Without gods, in other words, is everything permitted?

It's hard for me to feel anything other than lucky that I caught the wave just before it crashed. That I got a taste not only for death but
dying
. The stories were too powerful to resist, and because I wore the T-shirts and bought the books and slid a little too passively along the vector of celebrity intrigue, I am implicated in the current state of affairs. I am part of the reason that the
National Enquirer
is now eligible for a Pulitzer Prize. I am responsible for the irreversible mutation in the narrative of tragic greatness: I've been here this whole time, clicking confusedly away, reshaping the stories that matter and the way they get told.

And yet I can't regret it. I don't. Because I saw Michael Jackson move and in a single, seismic heartbeat I wanted to know everything, about everything. Funny that it seemed less possible to be like him than to
be
him. I longed to become that sublimity, to meld with it somehow. I still do.

 

One Senior, Please

GOD:
A man down on Earth needs our help.

CLARENCE:
Splendid. Is he sick?

GOD:
No, worse. He's discouraged.

—
It's a Wonderful Life

What a dramatic animal a plane is—always racing against some evil spirit!

—E. B. White, 1935

Only recently, in one of those dubiously fine moments where a dried mess of twigs accidentally ignites a perturbed little flame of observation, I noticed that the American relationship to mortality and the American relationship to flying share certain pathologies. Though routine in practice, both death and flight remain pretty outrageous in theory, which means a liberal application of denial is required to keep things running smoothly. How else could it be that despite a morbid aversion to reminders of our mortality we have normalized a form of travel that was at first quite logically regarded as the Death Wish Express and remains by any standard but the statistical one the most dangerous thing you can do while reading a Patricia Cornwell paperback. It seems significant that much of the flying experience—the personal entertainment centers, the pilfered Xanax and bihourly running of the snack cart, the contrived casualness of phrases like
cruising altitude
—is designed to obscure what's actually going on.