When Heath Ledger died of an apparently accidental prescription-drug overdose last year, one of the celebrity weeklies -- Star, In Touch, Us Weekly, Life & Style, one of those, I wish I could remember which -- ran this headline...
...referring to the distraught Michelle Williams, Ledger's former fiancée, to whom he'd remained close despite the couple's break-up in 2007. I felt rage when I read that headline. It seemed to me that the decent thing to do was to let Williams (and Ledger's family, and his child with Williams, and his friends) grieve in peace, as opposed to putting her pain to use as a way to sell magazines.
Last night, when news had broken that Natasha Richardson had been in a severe and likely deadly skiing accident (the New York Post was reporting that she was "brain-dead"), Larry King contributed to the body of distinguished journalism surrounding this news by having not one but two medical doctors on his show who specialized in brain trauma. One of them brought a model of the human head, explaining that one of the problems with the human head is that on the outside, it's really hard, but on the inside, it's really soft, so basically, some really bad shit can happen if someone accidentally smashes theirs onto a rock or into a tree.
There was, of course, much talk about "hoping for the best" and about thoughts being with Richardson and her Richardson's family and such, because that's what Larry King and his putrid ilk do when someone is at death's door: they show concern for the almost dead person and his or her "loved ones"; they speak in appropriately somber tones; they care. They care, and they help us, because they're journalists, to learn what we can about what happens to someone's brain when it's moving really fast and then all of a sudden it's not moving at all.
(Richardson is, of course, dead as of this afternoon: not just "brain-dead" -- and thanks, classy Post people, for choosing that jarring and rather grotesque phrase as opposed to, for example, "in a coma" or "not expected to live" -- but completely dead.)
There's something really ugly and really wrong, I think, with the way we choose to receive news of a celebrity's death and the utterly worthless details surrounding it, particularly if the death is untimely or violent or otherwise especially "tragic." The ugliness and wrongness, I think, goes beyond they way slimeballs like King and pain-purveyors like Star magazine cover normal celebrity "news." It's one thing to hope for the continuing, imagined misery of Jennifer Aniston because reading about other people's agony is something that people are willing to pay money for. It's another to sell the misery which people feel when someone they love has died, serving that misery with as many banal side dishes as possible of "bedside vigils" and "last fateful moments" and "final words."
I read an essay a while ago by David Foster Wallace in which he discussed, roughly, this type of "news" (he's pondering what he calls the "murder-anniversary" television interview that O.J. Simpson gave a few years ago):
(My emphasis on that last sentence, which I think really sums things up: just because you can, doesn't mean that you need to feed the dark part of yourself that might want to cheat on your wife, or gamble away your retirement savings at OTB, or eat seven Krispy Kremes in the space of an hour -- which I've done, btw, and Wallace was right, it didn't really even feel good at the time.)
Anyway, when Larry King slithers into my living room to help me get to the bottom of exactly how much someone else's life really, really sucks, or when I see the primary-colored "HER PAIN" headlines at a newsstand, I think of this passage.
Oh, and finally: the standard excuse for reporting news of celebrity misfortune is, "hey, we just give the people what they want." Well, so do pimps.
(The Wallace essay, "Host," is excellent, btw, as are most of the pieces in The New Kings of Nonfiction
