The majority cult: love and grief for media friends1
p. 133-162
Texte intégral
1“John Lennon Killed by Stranger” screamed the headlines in December 1980. But for assassin Mark David Chapman, John Lennon was no stranger. Although Chapman had never come within a hundred miles of the former Beatle until that winter, he knew him very well, so well that he often seemed to believe that he was John Lennon.
2As a teenager, Chapman wore his hair like Lennon’s, learned to play the guitar, and joined a rock group. He played and sang Lennon’s songs over and over again. Chapman, like Lennon, married an older Japanese woman. At his last job, as a security guard at a Honolulu condominium, he even taped Lennon’s name over his own on his identification tag. And on the day he quit, he signed out as “John Lennon” in the logbook3.
3But Chapman must have been acutely aware of the gap between himself and his alter ego. The last stroke of his pen in the logbook crossed the name out. Within a few weeks, Chapman was on his way to New York City to close the open psychic circle. First he played the adoring fan, asking for and receiving an autograph outside Lennon’s apartment building, the Dakota, at 72nd Street and Central Park West. Then he returned later in the day to empty his gun into Lennon’s body, thereby defining the rest of his own life in relation to the life he ended.
4In a sense, John Lennon was killed by the sinister side of the same force that makes millions of people still mourn him and other dead media heroes: a new sense of personal connection to selected strangers. This sense of connection is fostered by media that simulate the sights and sounds of real-life interactions.
5We are still lacking in the terminology and conceptual frameworks to analyze fully these strange bonds. In their seminal 1956 essay on this topic in Psychiatry, Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl use the term “para-social interaction” to analyze how mass media can provide audiences with the illusion of face-to-face interaction with performers. John Caughey4 uses the term “media figures” to describe the contemporary celebrities, historical figures, and fictional characters who inhabit our “imaginary social worlds”. Richard Schickel5 writes about celebrities as “intimate strangers” who exist in a confused realm that inappropriately blurs public and private life. Jib Fowles6 analyzes how we have become “starstruck” by a relatively small group of celebrities who stand in for the neighbors in the villages most of us no longer live in. Joshua Gamson7 analyzes the culture of “celebrity” in the United States and its foundation on the conflicting American values of equality and distinction. Susan Drucker and Robert Cathcart’s8 anthology explores the evolution in conceptions of “heroes” from ancient times to the present.
6In this essay, I draw on several familiar terms, including celebrity and “media hero”, but I focus primarily on an elaboration of my concept of “media friend9 “. Each of these three terms addresses an aspect of the complex relationships with contemporary media figures. The term “celebrity” captures the fact that modern media enhance the possibility that someone could be widely known for being widely known10. The term “media hero” embraces the sense of awe that one may feel concerning the accomplishments of a person one knows about through the media. But, to my thinking, the concept of “media friend” addresses the strangest and most significant dimension of these relationships: the sense of intimate knowledge and empathic connection. We feel a direct, one-to-one tie to a media friend that exists apart from, and almost in spite of, how widely known the person is. Further, as with real-life friends, we feel bound to the person, not simply because of what they can do, but based on a more personal set of feelings about who they are – and how their “presence” makes us feel.
7What we expect from heroes is often different from what we expect and accept from media friends. Great heroes may make boring or awkward friends, and media friends may make poor heroes. Indeed, a revelation that would destroy heroic aura may only deepen the sense of intimate connection with a media friend. The natural mental space for a hero is at a distance and on some sort of pedestal. The imagined space for a media friend is at our sides – hanging out together at home, riding in the car, sharing an adventure. The multi-faceted role that John Lennon and others have played in our lives has all these dimensions – celebrity, hero, and friend.
8Unfortunately, Mark David Chapman is not the only unbalanced person to push the media relationship to extreme ends. There have been many other similar attempted or realized assassinations that have grown from this new form of intimacy. John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in order to impress actress Jodie Foster. “You’ll be proud of me, Jodie”, he wrote to her. “Millions of Americans will love me – us11”. Robert John Bardo, obsessed with actress Rebecca Schaeffer, star of the TV sitcom My Sister Sam, shot and killed her in 1989. Dozens of other celebrities have been threatened, stalked, or attacked. Actor Michael J. Fox received more than 5,000 letters and death threats from one fan who was upset about his marriage, and actress-singer Olivia
9Newton-John was followed twice to Australia by an Illinois mental patient12. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, TV talk-show host David Letterman’s home was broken into at least four times, and his sports car was taken for drives by a woman who called herself “Mrs. Letterman13”. In December 1999, Michael Abram, who “nursed an irrational obsession with the Beatles” and believed them to be witches, broke into former Beatle George Harrison’s estate and stabbed Harrison repeatedly, seriously wounding him14.
10Fan reaction to the sudden death of a media friend can be equally strong. Following John Lennon’s murder, a teenage girl in Florida and a 30-year-old man in Utah killed themselves. Their suicide notes spoke of depression over Lennon’s death15.
11Because simulated intimacy drives the attachment, celebrities who present the kindest personae to the public are, ironically, the ones most prone to violent threats and acts on the part of obsessed fans. These celebrities appear more approachable, more seductive. Performers who present harsher fictional or nonfictional personae may receive more hate mail, yet are less likely to be stalked and killed by those who see themselves as jilted lovers16.
12One does not have to be mentally unbalanced, however, to feel a close bond with celebrities. Except for the attempts to hurt these media heroes or to demand that they return the personal attention and affection, the behavior of these “obsessed fans” is often not that different from the behavior of ordinary fans. (Indeed, the word “fan” itself is derived from the word “fanatic”). When Chapman was a teenager, for example, he was only one among millions who felt devoted to Lennon and emulated aspects of his appearance and behavior. Harrison’s attacker was not alone in believing that the Beatles held mystical powers. Beatle fandom persists to this day, shaping the actions and perceptions of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom view Liverpool as a kind of mecca17. Each year, more than 600,000 Elvis fans still make pilgrimages to Graceland, the late singer’s home in Memphis, Tennessee18. About four million people visit President John Kennedy’s grave each year19. And the growth of the World Wide Web has spawned the development of thousands of personal web sites, newsgroups, and chat rooms devoted to particular celebrities, both living and dead.
EVOLUTION OF THE MEDIA RELATIONSHIP
13Over the last century, the evolution of communication media has fostered an increasingly intense sense of intimacy with those who would otherwise be strangers. Every era may have had its heroes, but until the eve of the 20th century “special people” were experienced primarily through abstract or distancing media: oral or written stories, statues, images on coins, or painted portraits. On rare occasions, a hero could be seen in the flesh, but generally only from a great distance, for a short time, and by only a small minority of the population.
14A new relationship between the adored and the adoring was born with the rise of the film industry. Audiences could see the facial expressions and body movements of performers with greater clarity than from a front row seat at a live performance, and individual performers could quickly gain a following much larger than would be humanly possible through a lifetime of live appearances. Early filmmakers were taken by surprise by the strong emotional attachment that developed between performer and audience. At first, film companies, such as Biograph and Bison, did not even bother to share the names of the performers with the public. But when audience members wrote fan letters to the “Biograph girl” and their other favorites, film producers quickly realized the economic value of “stars20”.
15The nature of media relationships changed again with the addition of sound to film, which reduced some of the mystery surrounding movie stars. In some cases this demystification destroyed careers; in others it enhanced the closeness of the relationship between star and fan. In both silence and sound, however, film fostered a relatively distant closeness. Performers were seen sporadically, from afar, and much larger than life in an oversized room in the public sphere. Such settings generated awe along with a new sense of personal bond. Indeed, many early US movie theaters were designed as splendid palaces for Hollywood-created royalty.
16The radio era also fostered its own unique media relationships. Radio personalities were close in aural space and often entered people’s homes daily, but their “presence” during these visits had no visual dimensions except in the listener’s imagination. Media performers who were experienced through the radio were like friends at a pajama party who came after the lights were turned off and left before daybreak. With radio there was an odd mix of intimacy and distance, of knowledge and mystery.
LIFE-LONG VICARIOUS INTIMATES
17Compared to the film and radio eras, our own time is characterized by a greater intimacy, encouraged by the closeness and smallness of the speakers and video screens in our homes and cars and by the many media through which we experience the same performers. As a result, a broader array of social performers has more fully entered our personal spaces on a more regular basis.
18Through media experiences, we come to feel that we really know a John Kennedy or a John Lennon, a Magic Johnson or a Woody Allen, a Peter Jennings or a Lady Diana. We feel we have spent time together, that we have met some of their family members and friends, that we understand something about who they are as people.
19The more we see and hear them, the more actors, sports figures, newscasters, singers, politicians, and talk-show hosts become part of our extended network of social ties. Some of them are there to say “Good morning” to us, others to whisper “Good night”. Our media friends are cheerful with us at breakfast, and they solemnly and reliably fill us in on the day’s news over dinner. We can find reflective or playful media buddies to hang out with in the evening. And there is always a media friend who will sing for us as we jog. The voices and faces of our media friends often provide a backdrop even to the most intimate scenes of our lives, including lovemaking.
20There are obvious surface differences among our relationships with different types of media friends – presidents, rock stars, sports heroes, actors, and news anchors, for example – but there are also some important underlying commonalities. We often feel that our media friends share themselves with us more easily than other people do and that we know them better than most of the people we see in our daily lives. Also, because of the unidirectional nature of most of the media through which we experience them, we can closely watch and listen to our media friends without being distracted by concerns over how we look, what we say in return, or what they think of us.
21We follow celebrities through various phases of their personal lives and public activities, and their life stages often become some of the key signposts we use to mark and recall the different periods of our own lives. With the help of television programs such as Entertainment Tonight and publications such as People magazine, we keep up with their romances and problems, their good years and bad years, their changing hairstyles and different phases of dress, the birth of their children and the death of their family members, their successful and unsuccessful plastic surgeries, their addictions and recoveries. With some performers, such as Cher, we are allowed to see new tattoos. With John and Yoko, we even saw them naked.
22There is, of course, a great deal of variation in how significant a role media friends play in the lives of media audiences. As Rosengren and Windahl21 describe, media relationships may merely “supplement” relatively full social lives, “complement” live relationships that do not fulfill an individual’s need for social interaction, or “substitute” for social interaction among those who are socially isolated. The individual’s degree of involvement with media figures also varies, note Rosengren and Windahl, from “detachment” to “para-social interaction” to “solitary identification” to “capture” (both interaction and identification).
23Given how many celebrities there are to choose from, it is likely that most people do not care deeply about most media figures. Yet, in a mediated society, most people do seem to feel a close connection to at least one, or some, media friends. For many fans, the distant intimacy with celebrities spawns detailed fantasies about relationships with them, including imagined courtships, rescues, even fights22. And media figures appear in many people’s dreams, where “they are more likely to do so as a friend, collaborator, or associate rather than in their ‘real life’ role as celebrity23”.
24Our relationships with media personae frequently outlast our relationships with many of our neighbors, coworkers, lovers, and real-life friends. Indeed, our permanent relationships with media friends often form part of the shared experience that binds us to our temporary real-life friends. Conversely, a lack of sharing of similar media friendships can immediately terminate negotiations for friendship with people we meet (such as when a Sinead O’Connor fan discovers that the guy sitting next to her is humming Tammy Wynette tunes; or a Barry Manilow fan dismisses the notion of becoming close to a devoted David Bowie fan). On the Internet such mismatches are often avoided, as fans “gather” at web sites and chat rooms dedicated to particular celebrities. Some of these virtual interactions among fans eventually build into embodied encounters at festivals devoted to the celebrity or in more private physical interactions.
25For many fans, relationships with living and dead media friends become a way to engage with various social issues that the celebrities come to embody. Over the last thirty years in the United States, these personality-linked issues have included: patriotism (John Wayne), radicalism (Abbie Hoffman), reincarnation (Shirley McLaine), liberalism (Ted Kennedy), conservatism (Ronald Reagan), feminism (Gloria Steinem), and the right to bear arms (Charlton Heston). Richard Schickel24 fears that such personifications weaken our ability to think abstractly and thereby undermine democracy, while Jib Fowles25 believes that the same trend democratizes the culture by expanding the number of citizens who confront social issues. In either case, it is clear that many of us use celebrities to develop our “positions” in the culture and to align with, or against, other real-life acquaintances.
26Relationships with media friends partially compensate for the impermanence of many real-life relationships. But they may also increase the instability of real-life ties by making it easier to end them. As difficult as it remains to leave one’s home, get divorced, or travel to another part of the country or world, each of these changes is now made simpler by the fact that not all our social relationships are severed. Wherever we are, whether living alone or with others, we may continue to enjoy the company of our media friends. How can we feel completely alone when the likes of Bill Cosby, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jordan, Paul McCartney, Howard Stern, Paul Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Tom Brokaw, Puff Daddy, Willie Nelson, Jay Leno, and scores of other fascinating and talented people – both living and dead – offer companionship? Similarly, young children in the US always live near Mister Rogers’ neighborhood (even if now only in reruns) and just down the block from their friends at Sesame Street.
SELECTED PERSONALITY FACETS
27Of course, we see only selected dimensions of the personalities of our media friends. Those who watched talk-show host’s Johnny Carson’s first program after the death of his son realized how much of Carson’s personality and emotional life had remained hidden even after thousands of late-night chats. Similarly, David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Conan O’Brien, for all their irreverent humor, reveal very little about their personal emotional lives. As Horton and Wohl26 suggested in the 1950s, talk-show hosts “play themselves”. That is, what we see is often a genuine dimension of a media friend’s personality, but it must be “played” to the extent that other dimensions of his or her personality remain purposely hidden. Indeed, the general consistency of our media friends’ behaviors may be what often makes them seem to be more trustworthy and reliable than the people we interact with in everyday life. Unlike real family and friends, our media friends let us into their personal spaces (however constructed or controlled) and entertain us with high energy, without making any reciprocal demands on us. In fact, one of the factors that seems to separate “normal” fans from the “crazed” ones is that the latter often react as if some personal demand on them were being made, only to become angry and violent when they feel themselves ignored or rejected.
28In addition to selected dimensions of personality, media friends’ performances often rely on other means of “staging” as well. When we watch a singing performance “taped live” in front of a studio audience, for example, we are rarely told that what we are watching may actually be the best takes from two or more sequential performances. Similarly, national politicians now typically arrange to speak in front of largely supportive audiences so that “live and unrehearsed cheering” can contribute to an upbeat media performance. In such situations, the pictured audience members are not actually those for whom the performances are designed; rather, they function as extras in a drama constructed for a mediated audience of millions.
29Media production variables are also manipulated to shape a celebrity’s image. Soft filters or special “skin contouring” cameras are used to hide lines on faces and to create a warm, glowing feel (not only for actors and actresses, but even for male and female news anchors). Camera angles and distances are selected to establish the desired image: low-angle medium shots for power and level close-ups for intimacy, for example. Journalists are usually shown in level medium shots, suggesting that they are neutral and objective reporters (“on the level” and not personally involved in the story). Visual editing, equalization filters, echo, multiple-tracking, and other variables add dynamism, enhance positive features, and mute negative ones.
30Indeed, increasingly sophisticated technologies have reversed the relationship between live and recorded performances. In the early days of image and sound recordings, the live performance was the standard by which the quality of the recording was measured. The concern was with “high fidelity”, or loyalty, to the live performance. Now, however, sound and image technologies can yield recordings that are beyond anything that can be produced without them, and we often evaluate our media friends’ live performances by how well they reproduce the aura of their mediated performances. With such a challenging standard, many singers now “perform live” by lip syncing to their recordings or singing along with prerecorded vocals. If the visual performance is strong enough – as in many of Madonna’s stage shows – the fans seem willing to accept the result.
31The awareness that a media friend may be “performing for us” rather than simply “being with us” leads to a lively trade in offstage anecdotes. That is, stories circulate about how media friends behave in situations in which the cameras and microphones are off – or in which the media friends think they are off. These behaviors, it is often believed, reveal or confirm the media friend’s true personality. One hears about the performer with the caring public persona who is abusive toward an airplane attendant, about the “sensitive” actor who is charged with beating his wife, about the politician who condemns others for using bad language but is then exposed in her own cursing, and so on. There is, for example, the old story of “Uncle Don” who, after closing his children’s radio program and mistakenly thinking the microphone was off, said: “I guess that will hold the little bastards27”. Such incidents can weaken or destroy a media friendship. But there are also frequent tales about offstage behaviors that confirm a public persona and thereby strengthen fans’ devotion.
32Ironically, media performers are often so aware of the power of offstage behavior to enhance onstage personae that they may work hard at shaping their seemingly unshaped behavior. Talk-show host Jay Leno, for example, not only reportedly shakes hands and signs autographs almost everywhere he goes, he also chats with other drivers through his car window and even telephones some of the people who write him letters of complaint. Leno, it is said, believes in President Lyndon Johnson’s dictum that “every handshake is worth 250 votes” because, as Leno notes, “each person then goes and tells someone else you’re a good guy and then they go and tell more people28”.
THE SHIFT FROM RÉSUMÉ CRITERIA TO DATING CRITERIA
33Although it is clear that media friends reveal themselves to us only in selective ways, it would be a mistake to miss the increase in personal revelation that has been fostered by changes in media. In the past, if national figures were seen at all, it was usually from afar, where facial expressions were invisible. In newspaper quotes or transcripts, the flesh-and-blood person was absent. Even still photographs did not commonly replace engravings in newspapers until the threshold of the 20th century29. At first, motion pictures were missing the key component of sound, and even early sound movies required a cooperative subject who was willing to move into the light and step up to the microphone.
34Today, smaller and more sensitive cameras and microphones create less disruption of ongoing occurrences and thereby encourage greater revelation of what was once part of the “backstage” aspects of all social performances30. Even the most formal of our media friendships have become more intimate as media have entered many social arenas from which they were once banned – presidential press conferences, Senate hearings, and courtrooms, to name a few. And the pictures and sounds have become more revealing: President Nixon shoving his press secretary, President Ford tripping over words and down stairs, President Carter collapsing while jogging, President Reagan falling asleep in an audience with the Pope, the elder President Bush passing out after vomiting at a Japanese state dinner, President Clinton nervously answering questions about his sexual activities, and the younger President Bush mangling the English language by using such non-words as “misunderestimate” and nonsensical sentences such as “Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes”.
35As Lance Strate notes, “different kinds of communication will result in different kinds of heroes31”. As awareness has increased regarding the behavioral styles that work best on television, we have seen a general shift in the sense of which people have the appropriate personalities to fill various public roles. Stiff, wooden styles rarely make a good impression on television, regardless of the accomplishments, credentials, or other capabilities of the individual. Such considerations seem to have influenced the success and failure of a wide array of performers, including newscasters, rock stars, presidential hopefuls, and recent Supreme Court nominees. As I have detailed elsewhere, there are even indications that the Catholic Church took into account a good “television personality” in electing Popes John Paul I and John Paul II32.
36Citizens once knew the actors in the public, political realm primarily through their words. Words can be used to talk about anything, distant or close, abstract or concrete. But the images and sounds in modern “presentational” media are always, in basic ways, about the performers themselves33. As a result, our culture has been increasingly moving away from abstract, word-based “résumé criteria” in evaluating public figures toward concrete, image-based “dating criteria”. Rather than ask “What does he know?” or “What has she accomplished?”, we increasingly ask “What is he like?” and “Do I like her?” By these criteria, the young and not very well educated Lady Diana easily triumphed over the older, more accomplished, and well educated Prince Charles. To the camera eye and ear, Diana was warm, likable, and engaging, while
37Charles seemed cold and aloof. Similarly, the charming and handsome John F. Kennedy, Jr. had more hopes attached to his imagined political future than his professional résumé could easily support (especially when contrasted with the more extensive political experiences of his less photogenic cousins).
38A common response to the reading of a speech in a newspaper is to ask whether the statements are logical, whether the facts mentioned are true, and whether we agree with the arguments. But a typical response to a similar speech viewed on television is to think about the personality and performance of the speaker: “Does he seem nervous?” “Is she forceful?” “Is he sincere?” Thus it somehow makes sense that polls of voters in television-era presidential elections have found that people will vote for someone they disagree with on the issues, or vote against someone they agree with, based on whether they “personally like” the candidate34. Television gives us that feeling of personal connection.
39Caughey35 notes that in spite of the absence of real face-to-face contact with media figures, audiences describe them – both positively and negatively – in the language of interpersonal interaction. Rather than impersonally describing celebrities as “talented”, “entertaining”, “not well-trained”, for example, most of Caughey’s informants used personal terms such as “sweet”, “shallow”, “kind”, “phony”, and “manipulative”.
40With the focus on personal style and image, rather than on words and ideas, mediated relationships cross language and cultural barriers more easily than many other types of relationships. Attachments to rock stars have fostered the sense of an international youth culture. And Americans of all ages have displayed feelings of personal caring for members of the British royal family, Lech Walesa in Poland, Cory Aquino in the Philippines, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in Russia, and many others. Such mediated relationships sometimes have an impact on international diplomacy. President Ronald Reagan found that he had to tone down his talk of an “Evil Empire” as the public gained a sense of Gorbachev as a “nice person”. Similarly, when Americans saw thousands of Aquino supporters facing down Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ tanks, President Reagan retreated from his position that Marcos’ declared election victory should stand because “there was cheating on both sides”.
41And during the failed Soviet coup of 1991, President George Bush reportedly found that his own negative views of Boris Yeltsin were transformed by watching television images of Yeltsin shouting defiance from atop a tank36.
42The sense of personally knowing our media friends may explain why the public is now rather tolerant of ghostwriters and the openness with which they are relied upon. In a newspaper era, an explicitly ghost-written speech would have seemed rather odd, even insulting to the public. After all, the public could know a national figure only through his or her printed words. Today, who performs the words matters more than who writes them. It would be unacceptable for a contemporary president to follow President Thomas Jefferson’s approach to his State of the Union addresses: He crafted the words himself, but had the speeches read aloud to Congress by a clerk. Yet, the public does not seem at all disturbed by the fact that media friends Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather typically perform news scripts that are written by others (as did the legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite). Newspaper reporters, in contrast, are expected to write their own material, and small scandals erupt when newspaper articles are shown to contain passages written by someone other than the bylined reporter.
43Even when President Reagan’s speechwriters had him reading a letter from a little girl within a speech that was itself ghostwritten – and thus speaking words two steps removed from his own – Reagan’s performance appeared to tell the public a great deal about his personal being, beliefs, and passions. We saw tears well up in his eyes, we heard the catch in his voice; some of us sensed personal conviction, others sensed deceit. With such a rich conveyance of personal attributes, it did not seem absolutely necessary for the words to be his alone, any more than Elvis and Madonna fans would insist that the singers perform only songs they had written on their own. Similarly, we rarely insist that our real-life friends tell us only those jokes they themselves have crafted. In these real and vicarious associations, we seem to crave the intimacy of interaction more than the artistry of invention.
44Of course, the sense of intimate knowing can be even greater when the content of the performance is also created by our media friends. There was a special deepening of the relationship with the Beatles, for example, when they moved to recording only their own songs. And fans’ devotion to singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs in the 1960s had very little to do with their skill as musical performers. Those music critics who could not understand why these songwriters did not license their songs to technically superior singers and musicians missed the whole point.
45As we come to know new media friends or deepen our relationships with old ones, we also come to know ourselves in new ways. The self, after all, is not simply something that resides within each of us. Although we often prefer to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals who march to our own drummers and shape our own destinies, most of the concepts we use to define ourselves are relative and social. When we think of ourselves as being short or tall, hesitant or daring, smart or dumb, kind or harsh, we must compare ourselves to others. Each of us develops a social self as we begin to see ourselves and judge our actions as they would be viewed by “significant others37”. And our sense of self is changed, then, as we gain new significant others – live or mediated – from whose vantage points we can view our own actions. When Mark Chapman experimented with drugs, for example, he knew that his parents would be horrified – but John Lennon would understand.
BLURRING OF PERSONALITY AND SKILL
46We become emotionally tied to our media friends as people, apart from our reactions to their artistic or professional activities. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it often becomes difficult to separate the personal and the professional dimensions of the relationships, as media friends push their art to service the media relationships themselves.
47After the Beatles broke up, for example, the individual members of the group, particularly John Lennon, recorded songs that were increasingly personal in nature. One Lennon song called to his Mama “don’t go” and to his Daddy “come home”. Thus, his own art began to comment on the biographical details known to every dedicated fan: that after Lennon’s father abandoned the family, his mother left him to be raised by an aunt, and then, just as mother and son began to become reacquainted, his mother was killed by a drunken driver (an off-duty policeman) while she waited for a bus. Other songs commented on publicized feuds with Paul
48McCartney and on Lennon’s devotion to his wife, Yoko, who was not well liked by Lennon’s ex-partners or by many Beatles fans.
49Fans’ evaluation of the “quality” of Lennon’s musical artistry, then, was difficult to separate from their sense of intimate knowledge of his life and problems. What in other contexts might be considered an unpleasant scream on a song, could be cherished as an invitation to share the emotional discoveries of the primal therapy through which a close friend was passing. Indeed, the excesses and experiments of some of our media friends can be as endearingly annoying to us as the sounds of one of our children learning to play an instrument.
50Perhaps the most ironic paradox arose when Lennon’s later songs tried to puncture the myths that surrounded him and the Beatles. Thus, he increased his intimacy with fans by ridiculing the intimacy that had been previously established and developed. What would otherwise seem absurd comes to make some sense when one realizes that media friends tend to promote the relationship with their fans by speaking to millions of us at once as if they were speaking to each of us alone38. Lennon, then, could seem to be saying to each one of us that his relationship with all the other faceless fans was somewhat silly and overblown.
51With the media’s primary focus on personality, we see an increasing overlap of entertainment, sports, journalism, and government. Actors become politicians (Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono), and politicians become part-time actors (Jesse Jackson, Tip O’Neill, Mayor Ed Koch, and others have all played themselves on TV comedy programs). Sports figures turn to acting in advertisements, TV shows, and movies, and famous actors participate in celebrity sports competitions and in shows such as The Circus of the Stars. Similarly, TV journalists such as Mike Wallace, Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings have all appeared as celebrity guests on talk shows, and five newswomen appeared as themselves in the baby shower episode of the situation comedy Murphy Brown. The talk-show circuit has been playing an unprecedented role in US presidential elections, especially since appearances on CNN’s “Larry King Live” launched the “Perot for President” drive in 1992. Of course, major media stars, such as presidents and popes can create their own “talk shows” at any time and in any place by granting exclusive interviews or creating other media events. Even fictional characters who are seen often on television may develop a personal following. Soap-opera characters are a common example. Yet similar bonds may develop in prime-time drama. During his five years on network television, for example, “Dr. Marcus Welby” (portrayed by actor Robert Young) received a quarter of a million letters, most requesting medical advice39.
52Because we experience TV journalists’ personal expressions and their responses to events, we now often feel as close to them as we do to the public figures they report on. After revealing the personalities and homes of many world leaders and celebrities, Barbara Walters apparently felt it only fair and sensible that she do a television program on her own home and personal life. Similarly, Walter Cronkite’s retirement from the CBS Evening News and Dan Rather’s troubled attempts to fill the role played by “Uncle Walter” were themselves major news stories. Ironically, Cronkite was considered “the most trusted man in America” and was viewed as a viable presidential candidate, even though no one knew – until years after his retirement from the nightly news – what his political views were.
CALCULATED INTIMACIES
53The degree to which our sense of intimacy with media friends is coincidental or calculated varies tremendously. As noted above, early filmmakers seemed genuinely surprised by the personal attachments to the “hired help”. Later, however, film studios devoted much energy to courting and shaping the emotional attachments of fans. Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein probably helped make the Beatles more acceptable by softening their rough edges before introducing them to the world, but Beatlemania ultimately relied as much on what Epstein could not control about the quartet’s irreverent behavior as on the aspects he could shape to his liking.
54Although the media-induced bonds with Elvis, President Kennedy, and the Beatles were planned, there remained a sense of innocence and freshness to those relationships. They were among the first of their kind, and the nature and scope of such media friendships were unanticipated by the performers, their handlers, and the public. Subsequent relationships seem more familiar, and more calculated.
55Now, those media friends who trade on the mystique of their “offbeat, creative personalities” more willingly expose dimensions of their lives that could remain private, as Madonna has done in the movie Truth or Dare and as a very different sort of media friend, Francis Ford Coppola, has done in a release of a revealing “home movie”, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about the personal and professional problems he endured during the making of Apocalypse Now. In a similar revelatory vein, Lady Diana stunned the British Royal Family with a TV interview in which she admitted to having an eating disorder, engaging in adultery, and attempting suicide. The even bigger shock for Diana’s in-laws, however, was that these revelations, rather than destroying her public image, only deepened most of the public’s affection for her.
56Even when the media attachments are calculated, celebrities often express bewilderment over their immense popularity. And the experience for media friends may indeed be more intense and disorienting than any of the rest of us can imagine. The young Elvis Presley offers a case in point. Perhaps it was just part of a crafted “humble, country boy” persona (or his emulation of his own media hero, James Dean), but TV interviews with Elvis following his early televised singing performances seem to reveal a genuinely confused and overwhelmed person. On one mid-1956 interview show, Hy Gardner Calling, Elvis was asked to describe what had been passing through his mind lately. An exhausted Presley responded: “Well, uh, everything has happened to me so fast in the last year and a half til, uh, I’m all mixed up, you know, and I can’t keep up with everything’s that’s happening”. It was as if he were experiencing his bodily and spiritual essence being spread over an impossibly large area, with millions of viewers suddenly feeling that they knew him, loved him, wanted him. The previously human scale of his interactions with the world had been exploded. Similarly, although Lady Diana clearly learned to use the media to her advantage in a public relations war with Prince Charles and his family, the difficulty she had escaping the cameras when she wanted privacy made it almost impossible for her to have any “offstage” life.
57One of the more calculated media friendships in recent memory was the one created with Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who was chosen to travel on the US space shuttle Challenger. Realizing that television deals better with personalities than with the abstract idea of “space exploration”, NASA decided to involve us in its next shuttle flight by focusing publicly on a single person, the first civilian astronaut, someone like you and me. Christa was chosen to be our representative, the first extraordinary ordinary person to travel into space. Surely, her game-show-like enthusiasm and her picture-perfect family played a part in her selection as an appropriate television performer and media friend. And through the media attention, NASA and the press sent her into an orbit of celebrity. The six other astronauts were kept in the background.
58NASA had also hoped that the very concrete, personal dimension of Christa’s flight would overshadow in the public’s minds the more abstract Pentagon debate over the relative usefulness of shuttle and disposable space vehicles. And the television teacher in space was to provide the Reagan administration with an image of leadership in support for education without any actual increase in educational funding and without any clear policy for trying to raise US schoolchildren’s low test scores relative to students in other industrialized countries.
59Then everything went wrong. The same powerful thrust of fuel and engines that promised to bring glory to Christa McAuliffe also sealed her fate, leaving her and the rest of the crew ten miles above ground, in an inferno, without protection or parachutes. Similarly, the media blitz that thrust McAuliffe into our lives left the public’s emotions up in the air, raw and exposed to the elements.
60What was to have been both good politics and good television became instead an exposure of the dangerous symbiosis of government and news organizations, caught in the webs of their own routines and desires. The networks, enjoying their access to dramatic images, allowed themselves to be lulled into believing that shuttle takeoffs were safe and routine. NASA, dependent on the news media for publicity, allowed itself to feel the heat from the impatient media – despite the freezing weather that they knew posed a threat to the shuttle’s O-rings.
61Ironically, the unnecessary accident robbed McAuliffe of the very accomplishment that would have at least partially justified all the media attention she had received. Yet beneath the since-uncovered tangle of politics and mismanagement, our contrived media relationship with Christa McAuliffe remained emotionally powerful, perhaps unique in its brevity and intensity.
62Media relationships have also been calculatingly fostered or suppressed for ideological reasons. The Hollywood blacklist, for example, made it almost impossible for performers who held certain political beliefs to establish, maintain, or enhance media friendships with the public. Similarly, the US news media have historically made a strong effort to foster posthumous media friendships with the victims of terror and aggression committed by enemies of the US, while downplaying or ignoring victims of the United States or its allies. For example, there was more US press coverage of the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko by communists than the combined coverage of the murders of 100 religious figures in US-supported countries in Latin America between 1964 and 1985, including the assassination of Archbishop Romero and four US churchwomen women raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard40. Similarly, there has been a great imbalance in coverage of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (who were individually pictured and described over many weeks in The New York Times, for example) in contrast to the civilian men, women, and children killed in the US “War on Terror” in Afghanistan. And few Americans can fathom the hostility toward the United States that has spread in the Arab world as a result of the thousands of Iraqi children who have died every month since 1991 as a result of the US government’s intentional destruction of the Iraqi water supply and US-led sanctions41, because the policy is largely unreported and the innocent victims have been almost invisible in the US media.
63Besides great variations in the amount of coverage, there are also significant variations in the style of coverage. Those killed by official enemies are resurrected in images and in emotional accounts by family and friends, and descriptions of their murders include details of wounds, torture, and abuse, which enhance sympathy for the victim and hostility toward the murderers. But such details are generally suppressed for the victims of “our” actions or those of our official friends42.
A NEW GENRE OF GRIEF
64It is when a media friend such as John Lennon, Elvis, or Diana dies before his or her time that the unusual nature of the relationship is most evident. For unlike the loss of a real friend or relative, the mourning for a media friend is not eased by traditional rituals or clear ways to comfort the bereaved. Attempts to attend the actual funeral or to speak to the dead person’s family are, after all, intrusions by strangers.
65In order to banish the demons of grief and helplessness, thousands of people spontaneously gather in the streets or parks, or hold vigils near the media friend’s home or place of death. Instant shrines are created. Within two hours of Lennon’s 11 p. M. murder, for example, nearly a thousand people had gathered outside Lennon’s apartment building43.
By morning, the gates of the Dakota looked like the wall of a Mexican church, or an instant Lourdes, covered with a collage of flowers, messages, photographs, drawings. The crowd had been brought together as if to some new Holy Place, expressing a deep primitive need to mourn44.
66Others gathered in Dallas’ Lee park, the Boston Common, San Francisco Marina Green, the ABC entertainment complex in Los Angeles, and similar locations around the country45.
67The sudden death of a media friend often leads real friends – new, old, and half forgotten – to telephone or e-mail each other to mourn their shared media friend. Strangers embrace and cry. Crowds stand in silent witness or chant the dead hero’s words or songs. The pain is paradoxical: It feels personal, yet it is strengthened by the extent to which it is shared with the crowd.
68On October 9, 1985 (John Lennon’s birthday), a permanent memorial site for Lennon, Strawberry Fields, was established in a section of Central Park near where he had lived. One can go there any day to meet fellow Lennon devotees. Crowds gather there annually on Lennon’s birthday and on the day he was killed (December 8), surrounding the mosaic that bears the title of one of his most famous songs, “Imagine”. Beatle fans spontaneously assembled there again when the news of George Harrison’s death from cancer was reported in November 2001.
69Just as media friendships develop over national borders more easily than place-based friendships, the feelings of mourning for a media friend may be surprisingly deep in distant lands. The assassination of President John Kennedy spawned torchlight processions in Berlin and Berne, moments of silence in Tokyo department stores, crowds that gathered around radios and television sets in Paris, and other spontaneous rituals of mourning from Nairobi to Seoul46. Similarly, John Lennon’s murder led to an outpouring of emotion around the globe. Even in Warsaw – for one day at least – newspapers gave more coverage to John Lennon’s death than to the Soviet troops massing on the border47. One hundred and twenty three countries contributed to the establishment of the Strawberry Fields gardens in Central Park.
70Millions of scattered mourners draw on a stock of shared intimacies and “secrets” that bring similar spontaneous worries, concerns, and shattered dreams. With Lennon, these included the pain that stemmed from the knowledge that he had played the key parenting role for his five-year-old son, Sean, and would not be able to fulfill the comforting promise in his just-recorded lullaby, “Beautiful Boy” (“have no fear… your Daddy’s here”). There was the empathy for Lennon’s teenage son from his first marriage, Julian (named after John’s mother, Julia), who was just getting to know his father and, now, like John, had lost the same parent twice. There was the sadness felt for John’s Aunt Mimi, who had raised him from the age of three. There was also every die-hard Beatles fan’s hope – often unexpressed (John, after all, would not approve) and now meaningless – that the Beatles would somehow, sometime, someplace perform together again. There were even sillier shared notions, such as that we would never get to see if John indeed would grow to look like the spirited old man pictured in artist Michael Leonard’s well-known picture of the aged Beatles, an illustration for the song “When I’m Sixty-Four”.
71Ironically, but appropriately, the media that give birth to the relationship also provide the most ritualized channels for mourning a media friend’s death. Radio and television present specials, retrospectives, and commentaries. Following John Kennedy’s assassination, US television networks suspended their regular programs and commercials for four days. After John Lennon’s murder, many radio stations throughout North America and Europe played nothing but Beatle music and Lennon songs and interviews, or opened their phone lines to grief-stricken callers. Even Radio Moscow devoted 90 minutes to Lennon’s music48. Other media friends guide us through our grief by hosting the media memorials. But the ultimate tribute to a widely-loved media hero is the suspension of all media friend magic – a minute or more of media silence.
72To be prepared for their important role in mourning the heroes they have helped to create, media professionals must always be ready to turn their growing collections of the sounds and images of a living media friend into an instant memorial. The media stalk some celebrities almost constantly, not only to capture the ongoing stream of their lives, but also to be near when the end comes. Ever since the news media had to rely on an amateur movie (the Zapruder film) to replay the assassination of President Kennedy, network news cameras have kept what is grimly called a “death watch” on the president and major presidential candidates whenever they are in public49.
73The case of Lady Diana offers a tragic irony on this point: The drive to photograph her every move is widely seen as having contributed at least indirectly to her untimely death in a car that was speeding through the streets of Paris to escape the pursuing paparazzi. In a similar vein, John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s hunger to pilot the type of small airplane in which he, his wife, and sister-in-law were killed was stimulated in part by his desire to avoid the commotion and media intrusions that accompanied his boarding commercial airliners.
74In a more humorous incident in June 1998, members of the US Congress eulogized comedian Bob Hope in an impromptu memorial service televised by C-SPAN before it was realized that the Associated Press had mistakenly posted an “advance obituary” of the still-living Hope on its web site. As the embarrassed news service explained, many major news organizations prepare obituaries on celebrities ahead of time so “copy can be moved quickly when they die50”.
75Media friends are not allowed to rest even after their deaths. Unlike most of us, media friends often perform at their own memorial services. In media specials, public vigils, and private rituals the mourned media friend’s “live” image and voice are played and replayed as if to revive the dead. As television cameras focused on President John Kennedy’s flag-draped casket in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in 1963, for example, the images of the ending of a relationship with a President were contrasted with the sounds of its inauguration: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country51”. “Family album” images of
76Kennedys – both living and dead – were displayed again in 1999 during the media coverage of the JFK, Jr. plane crash and funeral. Similarly, familiar images of Lady Diana were broadcast as part of her 1997 funeral as the visual accompaniment to Elton John’s eulogistic adaptation of his song “Candle in the Wind” (originally written about another media friend, Marilyn Monroe).
77The final irony is that, in many ways, the media friend never dies. For the only means through which most people came to know him or her – records, films, and audio and videotapes – are still available. Dead media friends’images and voices continue to live all around us.
78Even ten years after his death, John Lennon was still with us to perform his song “Imagine” to one billion people simultaneously over radio stations in 130 countries, in celebration of what would have been his 50th birthday52. Lennon was there again on New Year’s Day 1992 to mark a peace accord in El Salvador by singing “Give Peace a Chance” on the rebels’radio station53. Long-dead comedians Gilda Radnor and John Belushi still visit us and make us laugh on late-night television. Months after his death, actor Michael Landon was in my living room trying to sell me a program to help my children do better in school. And Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart maintain an embodied presence in our media experiences, long after their real bodies have turned to dust. Advances in digital technology now allow dead media friends to add performances to their professional résumés, as their images are inserted into new advertisements, situation comedies, and variety shows.
79When a media friend dies, the relationship is embalmed more than it is destroyed. In a sense, we lose nothing that we have already had, but the sense of loss is profound nevertheless. Perhaps it is the potential and hope for increased intimacy that dies, and the never-to-be face-to-face consummation of the relationship that is most mourned.
LIVING WITH THE LOSS
80The feelings of loss after a media friend’s death and the dashed hopes for a potential deepening of the relationship are partially addressed through a variety of channels. There is a steady stream of “never-before-published” photos, “rare footage” of personal moments, bootlegged tapes of performances that were thought to have gone unrecorded, and reprocessed and remastered versions of old recordings. There are even a few “new” performances, such as when John Lennon sang his “Free as a Bird”, accompanied by the other three former Beatles, fifteen years after his murder. There are interviews with people who knew the media friend personally. There are impersonators who recreate the live performance style of the media friend for audiences who want to experience it again and for those who are saddened by having missed the real thing when the opportunities were still available. There are other media friends, new and old, who write and sing tributes to the deceased. And there is sometimes growing fame and affection for those who lived with them. Priscilla Presley’s successful career, for example, seems to keep alive a part of Elvis’ youth; he saw something special about her when she was only 14. Similarly, Yoko Ono’s prestige and appeal grew after she became John Lennon’s widow54. The loss of future facets of the media friendship, then, is offset partially by adding dimensions and depths to the past.
81For those who are more patient, there is the fascination with the offspring of deceased media friends and the hope that they will grow up to carry on the name and style. Julian Lennon, for example, rocketed to fame with a debut album in which he sounded eerily like his father. The glimpses of Lisa Marie Presley’s slightly crooked smile, inherited from her father, are enough to give fans some small solace. The children of John and Robert Kennedy are scrutinized for hints that they may have within them some of the greatness of their fathers (which explains part of the intensity of the sadness surrounding JFK, Jr.’s untimely death). And death seems to take a holiday when singer Natalie Cole is able, through the wonders of modern recording technology, to sing duets with her long-dead father, Nat King Cole.
82Media friends tend to be accepted more widely after they are dead. Many political differences dissolved in the face of the growing JKF legend. (It is difficult now to imagine, for example, that Kennedy had taken his fateful trip to Dallas, Texas, in part because he had significant concerns about not being reelected in 1964.) Elvis’death brought on an interest in his music among those too young and too old to embrace him when he was alive. And, after his death, John Lennon – who lived on the radical side of the pop culture spectrum – was praised by conservatives (such as William Buckley) and by high-culture institutions (the Tate gallery in
83London, for example, broke precedent and mourned him even though his work was not represented within its walls55).
84For long-time fans of the media friend, the wider cultural embrace of their dead hero is both upsetting and pleasing. On the one hand, there is a negative feeling of the relationship being diluted and co-opted: “He was my friend, not yours, while he was alive”. But on the other hand, there is the positive sense of vindication for believing in the importance of the media friend while he or she was alive: “Now the whole world understands”.
85Fans may also hope to gain some solace by sharing their relationship with the media friend with their own children. Yet, given the origin of the strongest emotional bonds between fan and media friend – in vicarious interactions over real time in the lives of both parties – the deep mourning for a media friend is often specific to the members of the age cohort or subculture who have spent the most time “with” the media friend. Even in the case of those figures who have transcended specific ages and subcultures – such as John Kennedy and John Lennon – the sense of loss is not easy to convey to those who were very young or not yet born when the media friend died. Unlike traditional societies with relatively unchanging cultural heritages, each generation has its own media experiences and special media friends. In this sense, media friendships not only emotionally bind strangers together, they also create new emotional rifts between generations growing up in the same household.
86Nevertheless, because of the continued existence of the actual means through which the media friendship grew – mechanically produced images and sounds – the current media environment also allows for new means of sharing these experiences across generations. Perhaps even more than in traditional societies, we are able to have our children see and hear exactly those things that we saw and heard before they were born. Our children may follow in the same footsteps of discovery, watching early performances and then later ones, or they may work backward, or they may follow a random pattern.
87Of course, the contexts that gave some of the original performances their cultural impact and meaning are often gone. What teenager of today could understand the outrage and sensation over Elvis Presley moving his legs, for example, or the disgust and excitement generated by the short bangs on the Beatles’ foreheads (which were seen at the time as shaggy “long hair”)? Further, the titillating anticipation of a new relationship of uncertain future is missing. And the often tense negotiations over the media friend’s place in the culture are largely over. But some of the magic may remain. My children, born in the 1980s, have been enchanted by the early Elvis’ sad eyes and crooked smile, by the Beatles’ irreverent humor and cheeky demeanor, by Martin Luther King’s powerful oratory, and by President John F. Kennedy’s youth and dynamism.
88Fans’ sense of loyalty to the memory of a media friend may make them angry over the seeming disloyalty of the media friend’s spouse and real friends, who may refuse to play and replay the roles set for them in the media images from the days immediately following the media friend’s death. “How could Jackie remarry?” “How could Yoko seem so happy?”
89In addition to placing constraints on survivors, the sense of intimate personal knowledge of media friends also places new limits on artistic and scholarly work. Even in nonfiction and history, there has always been dramatic reconstruction of dead heroes’ presentational styles. We omit some things about people and invent others. Thomas Jefferson speech impediment or Abraham Lincoln’s high, squeaky, feminine voice are rarely mentioned or portrayed. And many of the stories about young George Washington – such as the one where he, unable to tell a lie, confesses to the chopping down of a cherry tree – were created from thin air. But such omissions and inventions depend on not having a detailed visual/aural record of people. By giving us realistic visual/aural memories, modern media have been narrowing the range of believable and acceptable dramatization. When the lives of dead media friends are portrayed, we expect the directors and actors to reproduce as closely as possible the look, sound, and feel of the media images we have already experienced and of those we discover after the media friend’s death. Thus, the power of the movie JFK derives partially from director Oliver Stone’s careful recreation of the scenes so familiar from news and documentaries. In The Buddy Holly Story, it was important that Gary Busey look and sing like Buddy Holly. Val Kilmer was praised for his capturing the appearance, stage presence, and singing style of Jim Morrison in The Doors. And it is difficult to imagine John Lennon being successfully portrayed by an actor who does not generally look and sound like him.
90New technologies raise the question of how much time fans will devote and how far back they will go to maintain a lifelong relationship with a dead media friend. Image scanners and digital audio already allow for easy reproduction, personalization through manipulation, and the posting of available images and sounds on personal web sites. Over the coming years, the potentially obtainable documentary material is likely to increase. Rather than having only a limited number of still photographs or brief silent home movies of the childhoods of our media friends, we are increasingly likely to have hours of camcorder-produced videos shot by parents, neighbors, friends, and relatives. We may be able to observe our politicians, newscasters, and artistic performers when they were whiny children, fighting with their siblings, making a mess at dinner, or desperately in need of a nose-wiping. (The publicly available hardcore home videos of figure-skater Tonya Harding’s wedding night and of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sexual escapades may also herald a trend.) All these kinds of material are likely to change our perceptions of our media friends while they are alive, as well as narrow the range of artistic license in re-presenting their lives to us after their deaths.
91Because of a sense of personal knowledge, many fans would prefer to watch a documentary with the “real” images and voice of the media friend rather than see a play or movie in which an actor portrays the media friend (just as many people would find greater satisfaction in looking through old photographs, films, and tapes of a deceased relative than in seeing an actor portray the relative). Ironically, the images of media friends are in one sense a step closer to reality than the images of real friends or relatives: They constitute the media friend’s existence in our lives. That is, one of the reasons it is difficult not to watch the television set when dead media friends appear is that these are the actual images and sounds of our own life experiences. These recordings are more similar to the outcome of a successful seance than to the recollections stimulated by a moving eulogy.
CONCLUSION: UNREAL, BUT REAL
92There are, in short, many things that are odd and mechanical about attachments to media friends. At the same time, these relationships have features that are very human, very warm, and very caring.
93Unlike face-to-face relationships, we have limited control over media friendships. We can rarely influence our media friends directly and personally. Further, we cannot create the friendships on our own; we can only select from those that are offered to us. And the array of widely accessible media friendships is often limited by powerful political and economic forces. Nevertheless, there are many media friends from which to choose, and they generally enrich our lives while placing few if any demands on us.
94While some fans are driven to try to see, touch, and influence their media heroes, most other fans do not seek to experience media friends in a close face-to-face encounter. For the latter, perhaps, the spell of vicarious intimacy would be weakened or broken by a media friend’s real-life blank stare, or a look of annoyance or fear. It is through their media performances, after all, that most media friends create the greatest sense of comfort and intimacy with each of us.
95One can think of the spread of media friendships as a sad commentary on an impersonal society, a world where, as Baudrillard56 warns, we have substituted “signs of the real for the real itself”. Or, more reassuringly, we can view the feelings toward media friends as part of a broadening of human caring across a wider field. Media now expand the sphere of empathy that was once restricted primarily to those who shared the same physical spaces. Even brief TV-fostered relationships – with starving Ethiopian children, with a teacher chosen to travel into space, with Chinese students protesting for democracy, or with the victims of a bombing in a television war – have potent emotional impact. It is almost as if we, as a species, are hard-wired to react in a personal way to those whose faces we can see in detail. When the camera moves from long shot to close-up, our emotions are engaged57. Even with the selected people we are permitted to see through the mainstream media, the age-old ability to dehumanize physically distant others – one of the bases of war – may be growing weaker. And to the extent that the Internet continues to flourish largely beyond direct government and corporate control, it will continue to foster new links and relationships between a wider range of celebrities and their fans, as well as new forms of media friendships among non-celebrities, regardless of physical distance. Such media undermine the power of place to define communities, while fostering new forms of kinship and communion58.
96In the world of media friends, the sacred and profane blend – in style, location, and conversation. Talk-show hosts and rock stars develop devoted followings that are the envy of religious leaders, while religious leaders increasingly adopt the informal behavioral styles of other media friends. Formerly distinct settings blur; the Pope and Madonna share the same airwaves. And both ends of the sacredness spectrum collide in humor by and about media friends – “John Paul Elected Pope; George Ringo Pissed”, ran one mock newspaper headline.
97For those who hound, stalk, or kill their media friends, the relationship is often an all-consuming passion. But even among the general population, the array of media friendships takes an important place among daily live interactions with family, friends, and colleagues. Real friends and associates often discuss the antics of their media friends. For many members of society, celebrity gossip is a game that ties real-life friends to each other and that is not necessarily accompanied by reverence for, or deep emotional ties with, the celebrities being discussed59. But for many others, as uncomfortable as it can be to admit, the death of some media friends may hurt more deeply than the deaths of some of our acquaintances or relatives.
98In the final analysis, no theoretical discussion of these unreal, but real relationships can explain them away or weaken their emotional power. We may never have seen them in the flesh, and they would not have taken note of our deaths, but when our media friends die or are killed, we feel pain. We worry about their widowed spouses and fret over their children who have lost a parent. We dwell on ways the tragedy could have been avoided. Sometimes, we even feel partly responsible, as if we could have saved or warned them.
99I understand the absurdity of relationships with media friends, but I have also felt all these things. When a TV program airs a clip of President John Kennedy, I am riveted to the screen. The negative information I have learned about John Kennedy’s backstage behavior somehow coexists with, rather than mutes, the positive feelings engendered by his media persona. As for John Lennon, I continue to find it difficult to listen to the last music album he released before his death. Although more than two decades have passed since Lennon was murdered, my emotions remain raw. Yes, I never really knew him. Yes, he was not even aware of my existence. But I still miss him.
Notes de bas de page
1 The author wishes to thank Candice Leonard for her comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this essay appeared as “The Life and Death of Media Friends: New Genres of Intimacy and Mourning”, in Robert Cathcart and Susan Drucker, Eds., American Heroes in a Media Age, Hampton Press, 1994, pp. 52-81.
3 Mathews (T.) with Abramson, (P.), Morris (H.), & Maier (F.), Lennon’s alter ego, Newsweek, December 22, 1980, pp. 34-35. Clarke (G.), A lethal delusion, Time, December 22, 1980, p. 29.
4 Caughey (John), Imaginary social worlds: A cultural approach, Lincoln, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984.
5 Schickel (Richard), Intimate strangers: The culture of celebrity, New York, Doubleday, 1985.
6 Fowles (Jib), Starstruck: Celebrity performers and the American public, Washington, DC, Smithsonian, 1992.
7 Gamson (Joshua), Claims to fame: Celebrity in contemporary America, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1994.
8 Drucker (Susan) & Cathcart (Robert), Eds., American heroes in a media age, Cresskill, NJ, Hampton, 1994.
9 Meyrowitz (Joshua), No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior, New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1985, pp. 118-122.
10 Boorstin (D.), The image: A guide to pseudo events in America, New York, Harper & Row, 1961.
11 An innocent life, a heartbreaking death, People Weekly, July 31, 1989, p. 64.
12 An innocent life, a heartbreaking death, People Weekly, July 31, 1989.
13 Toufexis (A.) with Lafferty (E.) & Sachs (A.), A fatal obsession with the stars, Time, July 31, 1989, pp. 43-44. Gilatto (T.), Fade to black, People, October 26, 1998, pp. 133, 136.
14 Lyall (S.), George Harrison stabbed in chest by an intruder, New York Times, December 31, 1999, pp. A1, A10.
15 Cocks (J.), The last day in the life, Time, December 22, 1980, pp. 18-24.
16 Toufexis (A.) with Lafferty (E.) & Sachs (A.), A fatal obsession with the stars, Time, July 31, 1989, pp. 43-44.
17 Leonard (C.), Liverpool: You will never lose affection, Boston Sunday Globe, March 7, 1999, M1, M19.
18 Marshall (S.), Media Coordinator, Graceland Mansion Tours, personal communication, November 20, 1991.
19 Grunwald (L.), Why we still care, Life, December, 1991, pp. 34-36, 38, 40, 42-44, 46.
20 Sklar (R.), Movie-made America: A cultural history of American movies, New York, Random House, 1975.
21 Rosengren (K. E.) & Windahl (S.), Mass media consumption as a functional alternative, in D. McQuail, Ed., Sociology of mass communications (pp. 166-194), London, Penguin, 1972.
22 Caughey (J. L.), Imaginary social worlds: A cultural approach, Lincoln, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984.
23 Alperstein (N. M.) & Vann (B. H.), Star gazing: A socio-cultural approach to the study of dreaming about media figures, Communication Quarterly, 45 (3), 1997, p. 149.
24 Schickel (Richard), Intimate strangers: The culture of celebrity, New York, Doubleday, 1985.
25 Fowles (Jib), Starstruck: Celebrity performers and the American public, Washington, DC, Smithsonian, 1992.
26 Horton (D.) & Wohl (R. R.), Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance, Psychiatry, 19, 1956, pp. 215-229.
27 Goffman (E.), Radio talk: A study of the ways of our errors, in E. Goffman, Ed., Forms of talk (pp. 197-327). Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, p. 267.
28 Stengel (R.), Midnight’s mayor, Time, March 16, 1992, pp. 58-61.
29 Sandman (p. M.), Rubin (D. M.) & Sachsman (D. B.), Media: An introductory analysis of American mass communication (3rd ed.), Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1982, p. 51.
30 Meyrowitz (Joshua), No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior, New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1985.
31 Strate (Lance), Heroes: A communication perspective, in S. J. Drucker & R. S. Cathcart, Eds., American heroes in a media age (pp. 15-23), Cresskill, NJ, Hampton, 1994.
32 Meyrowitz (Joshua), No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior, New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1985, p. 299n.
33 Meyrowitz (Joshua), idem, pp. 93-114.
34 See for example Clymer (A.), Poll finds Reagan popularity rating misleads, The New York Times, Juanary 31, 1982, p. 22.
35 Caughey (J. L.), Imaginary social worlds: A cultural approach, Lincoln, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984.
36 Mathews (T.) with Bogert (C.), Coleman (F.), Breslau (K.), Defrank (T. M.), Waller (D.), Barry (J.), & Warner (M. G.), The people vs. the plotters, Newsweek, September 2, 1991, p. 42.
37 Mead (G. H.), Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (Ed. Charles W. Morris), Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1934.
38 Horton (D.) & Wohl (R. R.), Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance, Psychiatry, 19, 1956, pp. 215-229.
39 Gross (L.) & Jeffries-fox (S.), What do you want to be when you grow up, little girl? in G. Tuchman, A. K. Daniels, & J. Benét, Eds., Hearth and home: Images of women in the mass media (pp. 240-265), New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1978.
40 Herman (E. S.) & Chomsky (N.), Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media, New York, Pantheon Books, 1988, pp. 38-39.
41 Nagy (T. J.), The secret behind the sanctions, The Progressive, September, 2001, pp. 22-25.
42 Herman (E. S.) & Chomsky (N.), Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media, New York, Pantheon Books, 1988, pp. 37-86. Entman (R.), Framing US coverage of international news: Contrasts in narratives of the KAL and Iran Air incidents, Journal of Communication, 41 (4), 1991, pp. 6-27.
43 Mayer (A. J.) with Agrest (S.) & Young (J.), Death of a Beatle, Newsweek, December 22, 1980, p. 36.
44 Hamill (P.), The death and life of John Lennon, New York, December 22, 1980, p. 39.
45 Mayer (A. J.) with Agrest (S.) & Young (J.), Death of a Beatle, Newsweek, December 22, 1980, p. 32.
46 American Heritage Magazine & United Press International, Four days: The historical record of the death of President Kennedy, 1964, pp. 48-51.
47 Sharing the grief, Rolling Stone, January 22, 1981, p. 73.
48 Mayer (A. J.) with Agrest (S.) & Young (J.), Death of a Beatle, Newsweek, December 22, 1980, p. 32. Flippo (C.), Radio: Tribal drum, Rolling Stone, January 22, 1981, p. 19.
49 Mankiewicz (F.) & Swerdlow (J.), Remote control: Television and the manipulation of American life, New York, Ballantine Books, 1979, p. 108.
50 Bob Hope laughs at report of his “death”, Foster’s Daily Democrat (AP), June 6, 1998, p. 1, 14.
51 Barnouw (E.), Tube of plenty: The evolution of American television (2nd rev. ed.), New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1990, p. 337.
52 Lennon broadcast is beyond imagination, Portsmouth Herald (AP), October 5, 1990, p. D8.
53 Mine (D. G.), Salvadoran guns to fall silent, Foster’s Daily Democrat (AP), January 2, 1992, p. 7.
54 For examples from immediately after the killing, see Brownmiller (S.), Yoko and John, Rolling Stone, January 22, 1981, p. 25 and “Sharing the grief”, Rolling Stone, January 22, 1981, p. 75.
55 Mayer (A. J.) with Agrest (S.) & Young (J.), Death of a Beatle, Newsweek, December 22, 1980, p. 36.
56 Baudrillard (J.), Simulacra and simulations, in M. Poster, Ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected writings, Stanford, Stanford Univ. Press, 1988, p. 167.
57 Meyrowitz (Joshua), Television and interpersonal behavior: Codes of perception and response, in G. Gumpert & R. Cathcart, Eds., Inter/Media: Interpersonal behavior in a media world (3rd ed.) (pp. 253-272), New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1986.
58 Meyrowitz (Joshua), sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior, New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1985 and Shifting worlds of strangers: Medium theory and changes in ‘them’ vs. ‘us’, Sociological Inquiry, 67 (1), 1997, pp. 59-71.
59 Gamson (Joshua), Claims to fame : Celebrity in contemporary America, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1994.
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