The idea of collective grief is nothing new- community tragedy is often grieved by the larger society as communal bonds replace familial bonds. The death of a famous person, while not perhaps tragic in the same sense as natural disasters, or terrorist acts, can still evoke the same sorts of collective grief.
The assassination of John Kennedy produced an outpour of grief beyond the national borders. While the news of Kennedy’s death was broadcast across the world, it was still hindered by the technologies of the mid-1960s. Yet, the way in which foreign nations mourned a murdered President of the United States provided keys to some of the necessary elements to collective grief.
Sudden tragedy-
The unexpected death, especially a death surrounded by violence, is a shock that begs for collective expression of mutual condolence. The comfort individuals find in other individuals sharing similar grief helps to mitigate the shock of the unexpected loss.
Centralization to power-
The closer the person in question was relative to some type of power structure (politics, media, or other cultural touchstones), the more people feel attached to the death. Their lives are more likely to have intersected society at various points along the public consciousness, and those points are as likely to have involved tangents beyond their normal area of reference. Thus a politician may have touched lives not just in political ways, but in cultural ways as well. The higher the office of a politician equals a larger constituency creating a larger pool of mourners. The same is true for entertainers, who may have moved beyond their narrow field to articulate political change, or through their potential wealth, perhaps making substantial real change in communities.
Time in the spotlight-
The longer a figure exists in the public consciousness, the more time they will have to develop such connections that make collective grief possible. In our Kennedy example, the dynastic quality of the family name made the collective grief over the death of John Kennedy, Jr., who Americans (and the world) had watched from birth, in some ways a stronger outpouring than that of his father.
Each of these three rules has been infused in the modern era with the instant communication technologies of the time. The death of Princess Diana was an example of collective grief in the modern world. Technology- television, instant information broadcasts, viral videos- all compete to make the mass mourning of the famous a truly global event.
Freelance British journalist Jeremy Seabrook, in an article titled “Love and Grief in a Savage Society” has noted the importance of these modern forces in the death of Princess Diana and the collective grief it spawned.
“Diana was the first truly global icon to perish, and in that she presaged and accelerated forms of cultural integration, whereby her image was as familiar in the villages of India as on the streets of London. She embodied an iconography of wealth and success, but allied to a deep humanitarian commitment; the perfect emblem and emissary of everything we stand for; yet snuffed out in a meaningless and banal accident.”
Seabrook goes on to argue that “Celebrity”, is a form of worshipping the famous, and has become a new type of religion in the global communications world. Famous figures are the new gods that the public looks toward to divine cultural customs and norms. They simultaneously drive and reflect the zeitgeist of their times.
Add to this the length of time the very famous exist in the culture, and thus how much drive and reflection they can create.
Elvis was an icon of the 1950s rebellion of youth culture. Merged with the dawn of television, and his foray into film, Elvis was perhaps the most famous entertainer of the 20th century, and upon his death, was greeted with swarms of fans, who have since built trips to Graceland as a type of religious pilgrimage. The Beatles moved beyond music to become the sages of the 1960s global socio-political revolutions. Beatle songs became global anthems of Love and Peace at a time of heightened Cold War tensions and the Vietnam War. When John Lennon, perhaps the most visible and overtly activist Beatle, was assassinated, his death brought upon a collective grief that signaled the end of a certain age.
“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones”
Antony’s invocation of the effects of fame on death articulates the idea of collective grief. He is spinning the cultural zeitgeist from resentment of the dead, to resentment of Caesar’s killers. He understands the nature (and power) of collective grief, and further understands that history, once written, is difficult to fully rewrite. In the modern age, however, media is largely controlled by the most vocal, and truth is lost in perception. History today tends to favor the dead. Elegiac stories are written, passed about, and seep into the consciousness of the culture. Images become viral, building a momentum until the image becomes the reality.
As the scenes of collective grief over the death of Michael Jackson poured out from television screens, the Internet was flooded with hits from all over the world, temporarily slowing down, indeed almost crashing servers everywhere. Meanwhile, fake stories of the death of actor Jeff Goldbloom began to surface, via Twitter feeds and social networking updates. Why Jeff Goldbloom would be the target of such a hoax is a question unto itself.
Jackson is being hailed as an innovative entertainer, a cultural icon. Yet, he is also being remembered as a strange and enigmatic figure that bought the bones of the Elephant Man, built an amusement park at his house, had a monkey for a best friend, and was accused, though ultimately never convicted, of being a pedophile.
The competing visions of the individual will battle for the public consciousness, and eventually one will, if not obliterate the other, at least obscure the image of the other. This debate will last far longer than the collective grief, which will, as grief does, slowly heal itself. In the end what is not about us, becomes about us, before finally turning back on itself and becoming about the person who passed away and the people they left behind, but that does not mitigate the intense passions that exist, nor soothe the collective grief expressed.
