Scenes of wailing crowds assembled around Michael Jackson's Hollywood Boulevard star revive memories of my 1998 visit to the ad-hoc shrine atop the Paris tunnel where Princess Diana had died a year earlier. All that year, fans had taken to plastering memorial messages, flowers and photographs over a fifteen-foot-high flame-shaped sculpture, as I wrote in my book The Farewell Chronicles:
A driving rain was making the inscriptions run, and pelting petals off the bouquets flanking the pedestal. You could still read some of the messages, blurry and pale.
Diana & Dodi Together in Heaven!
Princess of Our Hearts For All Time.
The cards and photographs were warped from the weather, their corners curled. Coins glinted on the pedestal: impromptu votives....
Conveniently, the monument was already in place before their deaths. It had been erected ten years earlier to mark the Statue of Liberty's centennial.... But in the wake of Diana's death, many mourners who rushed in those first weeks to the scene of the accident very likely assumed that the monument had been erected for Diana's sake, and marveled at how quickly it had been done. By the time I arrived, a year's worth of devotees had decoupaged it with layer upon layer of their homages, assembled bulwarks of flowers which withered and blew away to be replaced with bulwarks and further bulwarks.
And I thought, What are you all doing here? It's raining. It's cold. Most of you are obviously tourists, which means that you have traveled all this way at great expense to make public obeisance to a total stranger -- not merely a stranger but one whom, were you to have approached her when she was alive, would most likely have either run away or set her security guards on you. Many of you aren't even British. You could be doing anything right now but you are doing this. If you must memorialize someone, have you no one of your own to do it for? Wouldn't you rather be indoors having fun? Have you nothing better to do?
Millions among us mourn total strangers.
For their fans, celebrities are surrogate friends, lovers, sisters, brothers. They are masters, sovereigns, saints, confessors. So close yet so far. Fans fantasize that multimillion-selling CDs speak to them directly. That the star knows them better than anyone else does. It is a one-sided relationship, sort of like playing with dolls. In daydreams, fans cast themselves as disciples, handmaidens, vassals and soulmates. All for strangers. Blame the media. Blame fairy tales.
Whatever ceremonies the rest of us dodge for our own flesh and blood, whatever memorial prayers we never learn to say and whatever bouquets we do not buy, whatever epitaphs we do not write -- these grieving fans do. You see them weeping on TV. They are not faking it, not all of them. A few days after Hong Kong superstar Leslie Cheung jumped to his death from a hotel's 26th floor in 2003, traffic was cut off as a line of 10,000 wended its way through the streets to the funeral parlor where Cheung's remains awaited visitors. Piles of floral arrangements towered six feet high at some points along the route.
In their throngs, those who mourn stars feel their grief as part of something larger, something for the ages, something magical and monumental, mortality mixed with majesty.
You might say any reverence anywhere is better than no reverence at all, that odes to strangers are better than sacraments unsaid.
Then again, as today's headlines predict that Jackson's funeral will be "bigger than Diana's" ... you might also say that odes to famous strangers are wasted odes, proof only that media-driven celebrity worship has further eclipsed real feelings about real people in the real world.
