On Sunday night, I wrote a blogpost about Anton Yelchin, the young Russian-born actor — most famous for playing Chekov in the new Star Trek movies — who had died at 27 in a freak accident.
I wrote about the sweet, childlike openness of his face, his excellent performance in the millennials’ romance Like Crazy, and the poignancy of the way he was starting to look leaner and tougher in Jeremy Saulnier’s hardcore horror Green Room. It was only on reading Tom Hiddleston’s online tribute to Yelchin the next day that I realised to my mortification that I had forgotten about his subtly excellent work opposite Hiddleston in Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive.
This has been a grim and horrible year for deaths: Victoria Wood, David Bowie, Alan Rickman ? and of course the country is still absorbing the horror of MP Jo Cox’s killing. But is it that we’re writing about deaths more, discussing them more, making each take up more media space? Is it a neurotic tic, a hangover from Princess Diana’s death, itself a rerun of Grace Archer’s fictional death in 1955, weirdly greeted by floral tributes delivered to BBC Broadcasting House? Or a more thoughtful, civilising tendency, a kinder and gentler discourse on the web?
Until quite recently, a celebrity death would be attended with a news story, a sober, pre-cooked obituary, and for very famous showbiz figures there would be an item on the TV news for which the newsreader would have a special briskly elegiac tone. And that was that. But the web age has made much more space available and gratified a greater and unsuspected taste for de mortuis tributes and analysis for even relatively minor figures. Movie stars are uniquely eligible for this kind of extended, personal and almost euphoric tribute. We often wonder about how the web is changing film criticism. But did we realise that it would make critics and writers feel sadder? I didn’t realise quite how many articles I would write in a blur of tears.
Nowadays, no awards ceremony is complete without a “these-we-have-lost” montage reel, along with a social media row about who has been left off. Michael McIntyre used to joke that there are only two acceptable reasons for waking your sleeping, exhausted spouse: someone famous has died, or it’s snowing. The first reason dominates social media — I’ve heard it called the Twitter death cult: the one time the usual acrimony dissolves and everyone unites in sadness. Everyone knows how you get many RTs and likes just by saying “RIP...” and the name of the departed. Media executives know that you get some serious site traffic with this sort of coverage. Ersatz-grief signalling? I wonder: it could be a chance for everyone to reach through the cynicism and abuse of daily online debate and find something in the way of decency — and a little bit of that web interconnectivity that we were once promised.
The first time I registered someone famous dying while in a newspaper office was my first job at the London Evening Standard; it was May 1994 and earlier that day the then Labour leader John Smith had been rushed to hospital after a heart attack. The tough managing editor came in and told us something about page layout and then fixed me with a piercing glance and said: “You know he’s dead, don’t you?” I curtly nodded (though I didn’t know) and it was a motion I converted into just discreetly looking down because to my horror I could feel myself choking up. Not cool. Not in those days. And it wasn’t as if I knew him, or anything! It was just unthinkably embarrassing and babyish!
But now it seems to me news of a death triggered natural physiological feeling of sadness. From then on, in public and private I mastered the acceptable media response: a respectful acknowledgement of the death being shocking — without of course ever in word or deed actually seeming to be shocked — with, in political cases, a cool appraisal of what the death means.
This was before Diana changed the media language. But I sometimes suspect that in reporting the deaths of movie icons — old or tragically young — even the savviest and most wised-up media journalists believe in their deepest hearts that being a Hollywood movie star is the best thing anyone can be, the richest privilege for any human being and so their deaths must somehow be a VIP film-starry kind of death, not the private banal endings that the rest of us mortals must one day endure — and that our continued attention is in any case proof of immortality.
When Heath Ledger died in 2008, I felt moved, like so many others, to compare the case of James Dean, and in doing so caught myself in a bizarre thought. This is different because Heath Ledger’s death feels wrong, like the script is wrong — whereas surely the life of James Dean, that beautiful, fast-living doomed youth, was the chronicle of a death foretold? Wasn’t he sort of meant to die? Isn’t it part of his icon-brand? The romance of early death on a thousand bedroom posters? Of course not. It was just as shocking and wrong at the time as it was for Ledger. And the rapid reaction of web tributes can interestingly register the shock and wrongness and disorientation more closely than stately print elegies.
Some time ago, I asked Tom Hiddleston how he was enjoying Hollywood and he thoughtfully said: “Well, it’s like the Wizard of Oz. You get there and you see that the wizard is just a little man.” Movie stars are perhaps in a huge industry conspiracy to conceal the wizard’s actual size. But film stars die in the same wizard-sized world as us: Anton Yelchin was a bright, ambitious twentysomething guy with a lot to live for, snuffed out by an arbitrary event.
The hyper-instantaneous world of death reporting on the web, that shudder and shock of genuine sadness, is a more truthful way of registering our recognition of where the paths of glory lead. — The Guardian