Celebrities, watch out.
Some of us aren’t going to cut you a break just because
you’re dead.
While adoring fans pile gaudy flowers, fragrant candles and
handmade knickknacks in front of the coffins of recently deceased
superstars, most of us wonder why.
When famous people such as Elvis or James Dean pass on, people
continue to think about them religiously.
However, many of those who constantly grace the cover of People
magazine don’t deserve this adoration.
There should be no more prayers to Saint Elvis, who died after a
lifetime of drug abuse, or fan-worship of Dean, who made a few
mediocre movies.
They contributed to the arts, but they’re not worth
fussing over when they’re gone.
And that’s the problem with funerals, and celebrity
funerals especially: They play up the good parts of a
person’s life and ignore the bad.
For example, the Godfather of Soul, the late James Brown, is
just one in a long line of famous people who will be venerated now
at least as much as he was when alive.
Brown will best be remembered as the writer of “I Got You
(I Feel Good)” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New
Bag.” With a statue, a bridge and an auditorium named after
him, it’s obvious that Brown was loved.
Of course, most people don’t know the fact that Brown
pleaded no contest to domestic abuse charges and was convicted of
threatening people with a shotgun in Georgia while high on PCP,
according to CNN.
After a 15-month stint in jail in South Carolina, he was granted
a pardon by a parole board, which I doubt he would have received if
he hadn’t been the famous James Brown.
But who cares if he endangered lives or broke the law? After
all, he had a bunch of hit records.
At least that’s the impression you get when you examine
one of the packed celebrity funerals complete with Hollywood stars
crowding the pews trying to get some free face time with the
media.
Rather than serving as photo ops, funerals should be a time to
remember what a person has done, whether it’s good or
bad.
After all, everyone has made serious mistakes in life, and the
funeral should not mention only the respectable things a person has
done.
Author Orson Scott Card proposes a different type of funeral in
his novel “Ender’s Game.” He creates the idea of
a “Speaker for the Dead” who would “say what the
dead one would have said, but with full candor, hiding no faults
and pretending no virtues.”
Card predicts that these services would be “painful and
disturbing,” but that in the end some would decide before
they died that their lives were meaningful enough for someone to
tell the whole truth about them. This system would work especially
well for celebrities.
Take the late former president Gerald Ford, for example.
Using Card’s Speaker for the Dead method, Ford’s
funeral would have mentioned his good decisions like his creation
of amnesty laws for draft dodgers, his service of his country in
World War II and his addition of Canada to the G7 summit.
But it also would have identified his horrendous actions, like
his pardoning of Nixon and his decision to support an Indonesian
invasion of East Timor that left one-third of the population
dead.
I doubt most of us would want to put all of our faults on
display when we pass on, but anything would be better than
listening to the fawning lovefest that is a celebrity memorial.
More than merely remembering that the rich and famous have good
and bad sides, it’s important for us to stop being so
obsessed with them.
The next time you see a funeral of someone of notoriety, take a
moment to remember those who really matter, those whose funerals
will never make it onto television.
Send comments, love letters and sandwiches to
jcrandall@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.