Celebrity Death

Are more famous people dying, or has the nature of fame simply changed? Michelle Santiago Cortés explains.

Blame the decline of The Monoculture, but I expected to be made aware of Betty White’s death by a raucous media circus–reports live from the funeral, gatherings outside her home, quotes from celebrity friends, tribute shows, montages, Twitter hashtags–the works. Instead, I found out two years after the fact while watching The Kardashians, the episode where Kris Jenner pays $800 for her dollhouse furniture. Now, any time a given celebrity makes one too many appearances on my feed or For You page, I suspect it’s because they died, and I’m right about half the time. Hypervigilance took over the vacuum left behind by the decline of the celebrity-death-as-media-event.

I remember exactly where I was when I learned that Michael Jackson died. I was in the back seat of my mom’s car. She was driving us home and telling me about Farah Fawcett: “You know, the one with the hair. You’ll know what I mean when I show you her picture.” I was learning about Farah Fawcett on the occasion of her death, June 25, 2009, just hours before Michael Jackson died. There was no escaping Michael Jackson’s death–his doctors, his children, his siblings, his dad, his lawsuits, his drug use, his music, or his career–that summer in 2009.

That was the last time I remember the death of a famous person demanding the whole of the media’s time and attention. Even the 2022 death of Queen Elizabeth II, the literal monarch of the British Empire, didn’t whip up the media the same way as Jackson’s passing. There were headlines, sure, and plenty of memes. No doubt that all over the UK the signs were more obvious. But even Her Majesty’s death felt like one of many. Since about 2009, changes in the media landscape–the rise of social media platforms, streaming, the Golden Age of reality television–have drastically changed the very concept of celebrity. The category of “celebrity” itself has grown to include new classes of famous people–reality TV stars, influencers, creators, meme protagonists, and the famous-for-being-famous. As the category swells so will obituary sections.

2016 was a landmark year for celebrity deaths–Carrie Fisher, Fidel Castro, and George Michael, to name a few. According to the New York Times, the BBC’s Obituaries editor and Legacy.com each conducted separate studies that confirmed that 2016 was a year saturated by celebrity deaths. The New York Times did its own count and also found that its Notable Deaths feature, an annual collection of prominent deaths, had grown significantly larger every year since it was created in 2010. Despite the subjectivity of the term “celebrity” enough of them had died to surprise and overwhelm. The authors of the BBC and Legacy.com studies warned, “that the deaths of major figures had been trending upward” in the years observed and “that they expected the trend to continue.”

A generational consideration is, for once, actually appropriate here. Laura Sullivan Cassidy, writer of Griever’s Ball, a newsletter about death and grief, recently found herself looking around a party and thinking: “All of you people are going to lose your parents and we are not prepared.” And while it’s true that everyone dies, and has always died, Cassidy is keenly aware of how her parents’ generation, boomers, are the largest living generation (second to millennials) and they’re aging.

This crescendo of celebrity deaths demands new forms of commemoration and memorializing. In the absence of “a subjective, shifting frame of reference” that cosplays as reality, otherwise known as a monoculture, what celebrity death means and to whom, becomes similarly fragmented.

After K-pop idol Jonghyun died by suicide in 2017, his fans turned his Twitter account into a living memorial. But in 2019, when Twitter tried sunsetting inactive accounts, fans mobilized to put a stop to it and the page is still live today. In 2023, the most notable celebrity deaths are also memes. The @LiZaOutlives Twitter account, started in 2020, uses the format “Liza Minnelli has outlived” to report on the deaths of celebrities (Christopher Plummer and Larry King) and even institutions (Copacabana, Broadway shows, Pamela Anderson’s marriage). These pages are mostly funny and contribute to an increasingly absurd culture: This is how some people found out Queen Elizabeth II died. But like the case of the @RipTornOutlives account, which used the format “Rip Torn has outlived” to mark the passing of other celebrities, the namesake celebrity’s death also killed the platform.

In 2018, the New York Times launched Overlooked, a running series where the Obituaries desk publishes long-overdue or “overlooked” obituaries for famous people that the New York Times neglected to memorialize contemporaneously like Marsha P. Johnson, Klaus Nomi, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (the theme here is rightfully upsetting). The internet doesn’t just make more people famous, it makes it harder to forget those who should not have been forgotten.

I can’t say I’m mourning the death of the celebrity-death-as-event, but Cassidy makes a good point about one of its minor benefits: “When someone like Pee-wee Herman [Paul Reubens] dies, we're all going to have our own national week of mourning, and it's going to be really cathartic. And maybe, hopefully, we're going to learn something about what we need, in times of grief.”

The range of celebrities to be memorialized and the range of methods to do so has a cumulative and dizzying effect. An expanding category of celebrity doesn’t just include a new kind of celebrity, but old celebrities that were never properly mourned. We now have newspaper obituaries, Twitter account tallies, social media memorial pages on top of the traditional media circus that follows the death of an especially famous celeb. And a new generation of entertainment “news” providers like PopCrave that circulate often-unverified death announcements, like the case of Lil Tay. 

This fraying experience of celebrity death is augmented by the proliferation of celebrity death hoaxes, which can be said to have eclipsed the actual death of a celebrity as a major media event. Cassidy warns also of a new-found elasticity in the very concept of “death,” especially when it comes to celebrity, thanks to emerging “death tech.” Think of the AI-generated posthumous narrations featured in the Anthony Bourdain or Andy Warhol biopics. The Tupac or Prince holograms. “It's denial of death,” Cassidy adds, “we can just keep denying that this person has died if we have enough media around to make it seem as if they're not dead, you know?”

The future of “celebrity death,” as a pop cultural or mass media event, is that both the words “celebrity” and “death” will blur.

PLAYBACK

• LeVar Burton replaces Drew Barrymore as host of National Book Awards (NPR)

• Rebecca Jennings on the return of “stomp clap hey” music (Vox)

• The Epoch Times is the fourth-most subscribed newspaper in America (NBC News)

• AirMail hires Jessica Diehl to direct new style vertical (Business of Fashion)

MIXTAPE

• On Burial, The artist making “audition tapes for our next selves.” (Pioneer Works)

• When did the plot become the only way to judge a movie? (New York Times)

• What Was Literary Fiction? (The Nation)

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