Rant on Celebrity

[bjarvis]

I just don't understand the mournful hand-wringing over the recent death of Heath Ledger. More fundamentally, I don't get the whole cult of celebrity thing.

Why is Ledger's death so newsworthy? Because he was wealthy, good-looking and well-known because of his career? Is that all? I'm at a loss to figure out what else it might be. Thousands of other people make their contributions to the world and pass away quietly and with dignity but because they aren't millionaires or graced the big screen, they die anonymously and uncelebrated.

People are dying here & abroad who have contributed more to the world than the likes of, say, Anna Nicole Smith but get not one inch of newsprint. People are dying of preventable diseases, of natural calamities, of accident & misadventure but are all overlooked because of the overdose of an actor.

I'm sorry for his family but I think there are better uses for our time and energy than public displays of angst over his passing. His death is sad and unfortunate but it is not front-page news.

Comments

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

I think the fundamental question here is "how exactly DO humans empathize with other humans ... particularly ones they don't spend personal, physical time with?"

The entertainment industry (or the much older art of acting) depend on the fact that humans DO empathize with all kinds of things .... unreal people, people they haven't met, faces on a screen, things they think they see in the sky. We don't understand why we have the underlying capacities, but we have been trading on them for millennia.

In the case of Heath Ledger, well, he was handsome, and my friends list features a lot of people who like handsome men and tend to get emotionally invested in them. Plus he was in a big movie where he played a handsome GAY man, something we used to think we'd never see. People probably got caught up in that, too.

Where Ken calls for perspective, I'm left noticing how non-automatic it is for humans to have appropriate perspective about these things.

While I don't feel a great need to wring my hands over Heath Ledger, I did notice myself a little sad over it last night. The same capacity for empathy underlies why I can feel feelings about LJ friends I haven't met yet. In both circumstances, perspective and lack-of-perspective both seem like questions about "how is it even possible to have these kinds of feelings at all?" ;-)