I can't understand getting really sad about a celebrity's death

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Perhaps music isn’t as important to you it is to some people. For me, music is the single most important thing that isn’t another actual living being. Many songs are locked into my brain the way that smells are locked in for other people: a single riff, a few notes from a melody, a particular rhythm, sometimes even a single sound can trigger memories of things that would otherwise remain hidden, buried under decades of experiences.

(MASSIVE SNIP)
I don’t know if my explanation of why I feel really sad about the death of someone I don’t know personally is all that eloquent, but there it is.

I totally get that it is important for you and that’s perfect.
I simply can’t imagine a stranger’s death that would have any effect more than “fuck, man”, especially if they were young.

---

Also, what I cannot stand is suddenly, as **thelurkinghorror **said, we have to admire the celebrity.
For example, Carrie Fischer’s best line in SW was the salve-girl bikini. Trying to make her, ex post facto, into some sort of badass warrior is wrong. Or a role model for women or a poster child for the well being of mental health patients. Carrie Fischer wasn’t Leia, Leia was the real person to which CF’s name was attatched. When TFA came, people didn’t want Carrie Fischer to say some simple lines, they wanted Leia.

[Skara_Brae]

I read something on Facebook to the effect of: “We mourn for artists, not because we knew them, but because they helped us know ourselves.”

I think that is very true.

[ThelmaLou]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Perhaps music isn’t as important to you it is to some people. For me, music is the single most important thing that isn’t another actual living being. Many songs are locked into my brain the way that smells are locked in for other people: a single riff, a few notes from a melody, a particular rhythm, sometimes even a single sound can trigger memories of things that would otherwise remain hidden, buried under decades of experiences.

…<snip>…

I don’t know if my explanation of why I feel really sad about the death of someone I don’t know personally is all that eloquent, but there it is.

That was quite an eloquent and lovely post. I’m like you, and I think you’ve helped explain this to others.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Aji_de_Gallina

I totally get that it is important for you and that’s perfect.
I simply can’t imagine a stranger’s death that would have any effect more than “fuck, man”, especially if they were young.

Ah, well, I prolly can’t help you imagine something; that seems a difficult task. I was just going by the OP and trying to help you understand why I (and others) can get really sad about a celebrity’s death.

Do you never tear up at a movie, a song, a book?

@ThelmaLou

That was quite an eloquent and lovely post. I’m like you, and I think you’ve helped explain this to others.

Thank you for your kind words.

[suranyi]

@Skara_Brae

I read something on Facebook to the effect of: “We mourn for artists, not because we knew them, but because they helped us know ourselves.”

I think that is very true.

Indeed, I remember being heartbroken when I heard Isaac Asimov died, because his writings on science had been enormously influential to me, and now there would be no more.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Ah, well, I prolly can’t help you imagine something; that seems a difficult task. I was just going by the OP and trying to help you understand why I (and others) can get really sad about a celebrity’s death.

Do you never tear up at a movie, a song, a book?

Tear up? Definitely, all the time. I remember once, driving on a fantastic road with my family and I was enjoying myself like crazy. Adele’s “Someone like You” comes in a BOOM and I start tearing up like it was no one’s business. Somehow, it reminded me of my oldest sister who’d died 8 years before at 40. It never happened again, though

However, Adele wasn’t thinking of me or even about a similar situation. I won’t mourn her death because “she’ll never create music like that” because someone else will.

When Frodo “died” it was like “WTF!!!” and yup, a couple of tears. But I’ll never think “too bad JRRT died because he won’t make stuff for me.”

[SciFiSam]

Well, imagine that my world is made of lego bricks. Some of those bricks are the people in my real life, some are animals, some are places, some are movies, books, TV or music.

For example, Star Wars takes up more lego bricks than you might expect, for the fun of the film (and the books), the experiences I’ve had watching it with various people,conversations about it, childhood games based on it, my daughter’s childhood games based on it, exhibitions I’ve seen about it, board games. Es I’ve played based on it, etc etc. That’s quite a lot of bricks placed in my world at regular periods across my entire life and it’s always been positive (the prequels less so).

Princess Leia was a major part of the attraction for me - for once being forced to be “the girl” when playing with my male friends was actually a good thing - and Carrie Fisher herself wrote books that I enjoyed, appeared in TV shows I like Catastrophe was a recent one) and just seemed like a lovely, humorous person who’s a loss to the world. Generally if someone I don’t personally know dies I don’t know enough about to them to know if they leave a hole in the world, but with some famous people I do. So Leia, and Carrie Fisher, occupy quite a few lego bricks in my world and now they’ve been taken away, leaving a hole. I haven’t taken to my bed (that much of a reaction is unusual, I think) but I do feel really quite upset.

Tbh I find it a little odd when people claim that no famous person’s death could ever affect them beyond a few minutes’ grief. I’d rather have a varied world where I don’t have to have shared the same space with you in order for you to matter.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Aji_de_Gallina

Tear up? Definitely, all the time. I remember once, driving on a fantastic road with my family and I was enjoying myself like crazy. Adele’s “Someone like You” comes in a BOOM and I start tearing up like it was no one’s business. Somehow, it reminded me of my oldest sister who’d died 8 years before at 40. It never happened again, though

However, Adele wasn’t thinking of me or even about a similar situation. I won’t mourn her death because “she’ll never create music like that” because someone else will.

When Frodo “died” it was like “WTF!!!” and yup, a couple of tears. But I’ll never think “too bad JRRT died because he won’t make stuff for me.”

When Frodo died, why do you think you teared up?

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@SciFiSam

Tbh I find it a little odd when people claim that no famous person’s death could ever affect them beyond a few minutes’ grief. I’d rather have a varied world where I don’t have to have shared the same space with you in order for you to matter.

This is why I never post on the threads where people do mourn.
For some, Carrie Fischer was important part of their lives and, thus, feel sad about her death. For me, she was the actress that played Leia and nothing else.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Aji_de_Gallina

This is why I never post on the threads where people do mourn.
For some, Carrie Fischer was important part of their lives and, thus, feel sad about her death. For me, she was the actress that played Leia and nothing else.

Well now I’m confused. From that, you seem to understand why people get really sad about a celebrity’s death.

If that is so, what was the point of your OP?

[Sampiro]

(Note: there’s a difference in people saying they can’t understand it and people being dicks about it- this was addressing the latter.)
I have seen posts, and unfriended one poster (a purely FB friend), in which the poster expressed great disdain over how anybody could mourn somebody they never met, especially a rich celebrity. Some posters are just contemptuous in general, others fly the banners of a more self-righteous brigade that laments how many people die from (American imperialism or pollution or hate crimes or whatever disease they find particularly ghastly and avoidable at the moment or any of a literally never ending drop down of life’s legitimately awful and fatal discourtesies) but without getting the healthcare or the fanfare of some rich celebrity we never met.
While I generally think “go fuck yourself” is the only response such comments really warrant, I’ll attempt to get a concise explanation and hope that helps one of them who is actually curious understand or at least kills some blank space.
Think of iconic celebrities as common loved ones, yet also something like demigods, or patron saints, and what they embody is more than just a fragile (and sometimes diseased or drug addled) mortal frame. It’s a concept. They are incarnations of shared memories, shared feelings, shared emotions, of a particular time, living avatars of when and where you were and how you felt when you were there, embodiments of a moment or many moments from your past.
That’s the divine half of their demigod nature; the mortal half provides their relatability. Their aging since the event provides chronology- it’s been a while, sure, and maybe the years have not been kind, but the celebrity, like the moment he or she gives flesh to, is still breathing. Often there’s something personally likable or relatable.
Carrie Fisher was by all accounts a very cool funny self-effacing charming person. I didn’t know her, once saw her across the room at a sci-fi convention-I guess that was sort of a minor theophany- but from her writing I felt a connection with her. I did not grow up rich or famous or in Hollywood, but, I know that she leaves a larger than life mother she adored but with whom she had a tumultuous relationship, and also a daughter and a dog who loved her. I don’t have a daughter but I have a dog that I love and it’s sad to think of what he would do if something happened to me, and I had a larger-than-life mother who I adored when she wasn’t making me beat my head against the wall and who who would’ve been devastated if something happened to me, so there’s that connection.
In some ways it is better than a conventional religious experience, because unlike Saints or mythological demigods these have the benefit of being real and flesh and blood and mortal and imperfect. Anything Moses or Jason have ever done they’ve already done- they’re stories are over- but celebrities are still with us. Carrie was in the midst of a career renaissance. And they also have the disadvantages of being real and flesh and blood and mortal and imperfect. And as with a demigod you are mourning something that transcends and whose importance was apparent to many others.
I will here admit that the deaths of David Bowie and Prince did not gut punch me. I enjoyed music from both of them but I did not grow up listening to either, neither provided the soundtrack to any particularly profound or memorable life moment for me, they weren’t idols on MY altar, but that’s fine. I totally understood that people I care about did see them that way, and while I don’t personally feel a connection I understand it. I have friends who don’t really feel strongly about STAR WARS, it’s not something that takes them immediately back to being a kid in 1977, or again in high puberty in 1980, or a near adult in 1983, or for that matter a a completely different person- a sadder and wiser and happier 48-year-old- in 2015 who was simultaneously 10, 13, and 16, as well as the 40 something-year-old guy who said a few years ago “Holy fuck that’s Carrie Fisher walking in front of me- The celluloid is made flesh and she is among us!” at DragonCon, And also the one who laughed his ass off at the book WISHFUL THINKING, and even if she was fat and sounded like Harvey Fierstein it was great to know that she was still there and warmed and lit by the same sun I was. And now she is not there, and I can’t explain why but the moment with my grandmother in 1977, or with my mother in 1980, seems to have slipped just a little bit further away without the towering illuminated gorgeous princess who triangulated us as we both stared at her in the final scene.
Or maybe I’m completely wrong and we shouldn’t mourn somebody we haven’t met and did not know. But, it’s not like I’m crying in the corner, I’m not going to be calling in sick to work over it, it’s not “really” like a death in the family, but it’s… something. So don’t be a dick.
As for the life of one celebrity I liked being felt harder than the lives of thousands of people I don’t know who aren’t famous, yeah, that’s true. I’ll go one further for you: if my dog were to die on the same day that 100,000 people died in a man-made catastrophe in a country I’ve never visited, I guarantee you which one I would shed more tears over, and hint, you ain’t going to like it. But thank God for it: I can recognize the horror of events that are far more global in significance and greater in number, but if I truly truly viscerally felt every death from every tragedy that is in the news, even if the ramifications are more horrifying or victims more deserving of adulation, I’d be a total basket case. Shit, I’d never have gotten out of bed again after the first time I read about the Holocaust, or Andersonville, or an earthquake that killed thousands, or any of a million other horrible injustices. How much we let in is such a super delicate balance. And perhaps sometimes when it’s something like a celebrity we perhaps let them in more than we should, but whether you can express why or not it fills some void. We no longer make idols out of clay, but that doesn’t mean we no longer have the need for idols.
TL;DR version: if it doesn’t affect you, don’t be a dick.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Well now I’m confused. From that, you seem to understand why people get really sad about a celebrity’s death.

If that is so, what was the point of your OP?

I can understand that they do feel sad, I can’t understand why the do, how they got to the place where David Bowie’s death affects them more than “sad, man, sad.”

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Aji_de_Gallina

I can understand that they do feel sad, I can’t understand why the do, how they got to the place where David Bowie’s death affects them more than “sad, man, sad.”

Well, why did Frodo’s death make you sad? You didn’t know him, he didn’t know you. In fact, he’s not even a real person. Why do you think you teared up when he died?

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Well, why did Frodo’s death make you sad? You didn’t know him, he didn’t know you. In fact, he’s not even a real person. Why do you think you teared up when he died?

Because Tolkien is a genius writer and I had just read The Hobbit two nights before, and Fellowship the previous night and now after about 10 hours of slipping into this world, the main character dies,. He built up tension, page after page. I didn’t “feel numb” or anything like that, it was the emotional release. I’ve read it a couple of times more and it never hits you again the same. If I’d read it ten pages a week, it wouldn’t have been the same.

If I was having the time of my life talking to John Lennon for three hours and then someone appeared and shot him in front of me, then that would hit me hard. If, as it happened, someone shot him without my being part of it, then, “fuuck” and that’s it.

[SciFiSam]

@Aji_de_Gallina

This is why I never post on the threads where people do mourn.
For some, Carrie Fischer was important part of their lives and, thus, feel sad about her death. For me, she was the actress that played Leia and nothing else.

I do appreciate you starting your own thread rather than threadshitting on RIP threads like some people do. Has the thread enlightened you at all?

Also remember that taking to your bed out of grief at the death of a famous person really is unusual. I would suspect then that there was more going on than just the death and that had just been the trigger.

[msmith537]

I think there can be a number of reasons:

1. Knowing that artist isn’t going to make any more films, music, books, etc. The death of MCA, for example, made me a bit sad knowing that there would never be another true Beastie Boys album (unless they put their heads in jars Futurama style).

2. It is a reminder of how time passes for us all. I was 5 years old when the original Star Wars came out. While the film a timeless the actors who stared in it obviously aren’t. I think it’s a bit disconcerting to be able to view the entirety of someone’s life on film.

3. It is a reflection of our own mortality. On some level I think we all believed Prince would be partying until it’s 2099. If Mr Fast & Furious himself Paul Walker can die in a car crash, what does that say about the rest of us?

4. People become emotionally attached to an image of a celebrity in a different way than they do with an actual person.

[Penfeather]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Perhaps music isn’t as important to you it is to some people. For me, music is the single most important thing that isn’t another actual living being. Many songs are locked into my brain the way that smells are locked in for other people: a single riff, a few notes from a melody, a particular rhythm, sometimes even a single sound can trigger memories of things that would otherwise remain hidden, buried under decades of experiences.

It was beautifully said. I miss David Bowie not because I knew him as a person, but because his music meant so much to me at different points in my own life: it’s a cliche to say that some artists are the soundtrack of our lives, but it’s nevertheless true. I can’t hear Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man album without being taken back 25 years ago to a messy breakup: it’s bittersweet, but it’s also the memories of me being 23 and knowing that that was the last time I would ever had my heart broken in that way. I can’t hear Husker Du’s “Ice Cold Ice” without remembering being the 19 year old kid who was discovering that there was a world of music beyond Deep Purple {and I mourned Jon Lord, because I remember being 17 and my first car and driving fast to the beach in summer to the guitar solo in “Child In Time”}, and so when Bob Mould {and don’t go getting ideas, 2016} goes I will miss him too. I miss Joey Ramone, I miss David Bowie, I miss Mark Linkous, I miss Sharon Jones, I miss Elliot Smith, I miss Joe Strummer, I miss Mick Ronson, I miss Ronnie James Dio, I miss all of them who gave me so much, and I will miss the ones to come when it’s their turn to go.

[Martini_Enfield]

@Aji_de_Gallina

This is why I never post on the threads where people do mourn.
For some, Carrie Fischer was important part of their lives and, thus, feel sad about her death. For me, she was the actress that played Leia and nothing else.

This is pretty much how I feel about it too. In my world, she was the actress who played Princess Leia and was also in The Blues Brothers. It’s only since her death that I’ve discovered she was doing Other Stuff more recently than that - stuff that resonated with her fans.

I’ll be honest: none of the celebrity deaths this year have made me feel really sad on a personal level. Probably the closest was that of Alan Rickman, who was a great actor and in many movies I thoroughly enjoyed. I was saddened somewhat when he died as I recognised the fact he wouldn’t be able to create and entertain anymore, but as the OP has noted, it’s not like every film he was in will magically blink out of existence now (which is just as well, otherwise Christmas viewing habits will have to change a lot!)

And Sampiro, I agree one shouldn’t be a dick in spaces set up specifically for memorialising a decesased person, but I honestly think there is nothing wrong with saying “I am not emotionally affected by this person’s death” elsewhere.

We need to be able to have these conversations, lest our discourse turn into “I Am More Sad Than You” groupthink, IMHO.

[SciFiSam]

@Aji_de_Gallina

I can understand that they do feel sad, I can’t understand why the do, how they got to the place where David Bowie’s death affects them more than “sad, man, sad.”

It just occurred to me - you’re religious; do you believe in life after death, at least a bit? I wonder if that makes a difference. To me those people aren’t going on somewhere nice, they’ve lost the world. Carrie Fisher will never find out how her last film is received, will never meet any grandchildren she has, will never go to rehab again. If you believe in an afterlife that’s not true.

I’ve had a lot of personal loss this year too and that’s left a wound that’s easy for other losses to reopen.

[TBG]

I can get getting sad about celebrity deaths if they happened to be a particular favorite or important to them, or even someone who’s actively appearing on TV every week when they suddenly die. I’m certainly going to feel some pain when Stan Lee eventually goes (knock wood, many years from now)

What I can’t get is this fucking garbage about “2016”. As someone who’s actually suffered personal losses this year, frankly I find it disgusting when people perpetuate this abhorrent meme.