The Pop Culture Death Trap Part 2: The Death of Beauty

Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it […] And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Celebrity worship in industries other than sports is less driven by the projection of absolutes of triumph and abjection. Other avenues of pop culture are similarly concerned, however – especially when anchored by images of youthful beauty – with narratives of life and death. This second entry in “The Pop Culture Death Trap” series shifts focus from symbolic to literal death, highlighting a continuing cultural preoccupation with mythic meaning in spite of the ever-accelerating pace of cultural change. Within this dynamic, popular forms, from novels to films and beyond, are born, evolve, and eventually will be consigned to the trash heap of history like those aging idols, yesterday commodified, and today disposed of in relative anonymity in the celebrity graveyard of the Hollywood Hills or, at least, of Sunset Boulevard.

The spectacle of death is a powerful, if typically elided, undercurrent of our celebrity culture. Implicit in the paparazzi baiting of such troubled or self-destructive figures as Lindsay Lohan or the briefly bald Britney Spears is, it can be argued, a simmering, mean-spirited expectation of death, like that observed by Nathanael West in his Day of the Locust portrait of the unhappy Americans who come to California to gawk, to die, and, if necessary, to kill, ideally at a movie premiere. Where else? Such spectacles of death are not always the conscious directive of our superficially festive culture, which is, nevertheless, continually if unpredictably punctuated by instances of death as entertainment. Despite having seen it all before – the rock star and the blonde actress – we look on each such instance with the same mixture of surprise, curiosity, horror, and glee. In this way, pop culture is reflective of our more general capacity to simultaneously ignore death and make of it an obsession.

As it does to all, death comes to celebrities in a variety of forms. We are made aware at periodic junctures, however, of the distinctive cultural potency bestowed on celebrities, both garden-variety and superstar, by the romantic consecration of youthful death. Confirming or exaggerating the importance of a given figure – say, James Dean – death enables the elevation of his image above the visual detritus of our culture. The ensuing translation to pure symbol, or Dean’s sudden embodiment of ideal beauty now frozen in time, concerns the relationship of death not only to art but to modern consumerism, with its intensification of practices of disposal, replacement, and obsolescence. This fetishization of death and selective remembrance both honors and thoroughly transforms the dead; it also subtly transforms our perception of the dying potentialities of the still living and newly forged celebrities remaining on our streets and screens. The fascination with celebrity death may only be in fact a logical extension of a culture predicated on disposability.

”He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.

She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it–then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.”

— Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

There is a paradox by which the dead celebrity is a more malleable symbol than the living individual. Perhaps especially, the death of an actor in our visually driven culture represents an abstraction to the realm of pure image. The more impossibly lovely the actor, the more mournful their loss – by a similar logic, we might suppose, the more desirable their succumbing to youth-preserving death.

Dean certainly became a visual receptacle of fantasy or myth following his death, not least as an exceedingly beautiful pop culture archetype of generational rebellion. Rather than through any radical commitments, his rebel associations emerged largely from the fictional roles he played onscreen and the fast cars he famously drove, and which killed him. In his heroic posturing and hedonism, Dean prefigured the rock star deaths of subsequent decades. (He also prefigured the generic good looks of teen idols to the present day: Even Justin Bieber rode to fame at least in part on the strength of a replica James Dean quiff.)

Dean may indeed be seen as the prototypical icon of pop culture, a figure uniting popular heroism and sex appeal with quasi-religious worship. In the model perfected by the authors of Dean’s cultural legacy, the worshipper becomes consumer, purchasing and displaying proximity to the departed idol by way of films, posters, and t-shirts. Such expensive gazing affords a figure like Dean unique power; he becomes an object both of desire and vicarious identification for the viewer.

The Rebel Without a Cause’s evident link with youth culture is typical of consumerist icons. Only gesturally political, Dean provided a template for rebellion to be expressed and finally absorbed within the culture of capitalism. The commodification and cooptation of the rebellious impulses of young people may in fact be the key to capitalism’s perpetuation.

The cultural afterlife of Marilyn Monroe, on the other hand, illustrates the gratifications of an image of femininity that was vulnerable and individual yet undeniably manufactured or mass-reproduced. Andy Warhol observed and exploited this “seven-year itch” or apparent cultural need for repetition. It’s apparent also in recent portrayals of Monroe by Michelle Williams (in My Week With Marilyn) and Scarlett Johansson (in a Dolce and Gabbana ad campaign in 2010).

As with James Franco playing Dean in a 2001 TV movie, these instances of actorly dress-up reveal an absurd cycle of wish fulfillment and fantasy at pop culture’s core. Why else should we be asked to suspend disbelief in order to accept a recognizable actor in the role of another recognizable actor? Simply, to aid in the retrenchment of the cult of consumerist nostalgia.

”There was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.”

— Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

In 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved a rare and genuine, if short-lived, fame as 23-year-old literary celebrity. The terms of his early reputation were established following the publication of his first and most immediately successful novel, This Side of Paradise, a charming if ragged Bildungsroman fictionalizing the author’s early romantic entanglements and his Princeton years. His celebrity status did him few favors with many among his initial critics, and, with the arrival of a more proletarian literary fashion in the ‘30s, the perceived obsolescence of his prodigals and debutantes seemed further pronounced. Even The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, fell for a time out of print.

In his letters and essays, Fitzgerald indulged a hard-luck narrative in which a faddish public abandoned him to frustration and ill health. What many (and perhaps he) regarded as his own wasted potential, his dissolution in drunkenness and anxiety, at least retrospectively, became part of his legend. The crucial factor in his popular resurrection was, of course, the romantic consecration enabled by his death, in 1940, at 44. By reissuing The Great Gatsby, with the fragment The Last Tycoon, in 1941, his publisher Scribner’s, at least, demonstrated an awareness of the cultural appetite for narratives of youthful death – in this case, both Fitzgerald’s and Gatsby’s. By the mid-‘40s, The Great Gatsby was firmly established as a central document in American literature. It currently sells some 400,000 copies annually, an impressive feat for a story telling us that the hero’s fondest desire – to repossess an ever-receding past – is, finally, doomed.

The Transformative Capacity of Exquisite Death

No modern American writer has been more consumed with the tragedy of inevitable loss than Fitzgerald. Describing the septuagenarian body of another protagonist’s grandfather, he dwells almost cruelly on the visible wastes of time: “It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others–callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paintbox.” Through Fitzgerald’s eyes, old age is a remote and repulsive distortion of our natural condition of youth. This fear of the archaic might be attributed, however, as much to his apprehension of the impending death of literature as to that of his own physical demise.

Fitzgerald contended, during Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age, with the sneaking suspicion that he had edged into artistic extinction. In his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up”, he reflected that a writer was “not ever going to be as famous as a movie star,” and indeed, that the threat of literary obsolescence posed by “the talkies” was a source of “rankling indignity.” This indignity was further confirmed during three separate Hollywood residencies (1927, 1931, and 1937-1940) during which he unhappily and mostly unsuccessfully attempted to write for the movies.

There may be good reason for his failure in this commercial sphere. Despite his popular alignment with the youth culture of his era, his aesthetic sensibility was always backward looking, less attuned to Modernism, and certainly to Hollywood, than to the Romantic mode best embodied by his idol, John Keats, himself a tubercular young corpse a century earlier.

Despite its obvious textual biases, even the ascension to literary immortality is powerfully visual, as the frequent reproductions of Fitzgerald’s many youthful photographs – like Shakespeare’s few portraits – reveal. Given Fitzgerald’s desultory end in West Hollywood (on Sunset Boulevard, no less), it may seem a cruel fate that his most celebrated novel will live on for many in the 21st century’s generic multiplexes.The Great Gatsby, with its characteristic mix of Jazz Age glamour and tragedy, will see the release of its sixth film adaptation in 2013, this time under the frenetic directorship of Baz Luhrmann.

In the eyes of his critics, Fitzgerald was more celebrity than artist, an assertion given further credence by Tom Hiddleston’s buffoon-like portrayal in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a characterization certainly inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s ungenerous recollections in A Moveable Feast. It may be appropriate, then, that Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Gatsby seems bound to become, at least for one impressionable generation, Fitzgerald’s pop culture surrogate, as an only vaguely similar figure: a calamitous misguided Romantic dressed in dapper period clothes. (Robert Redford once fulfilled the same function; more surprisingly, Gregory Peck portrayed Fitzgerald himself in Beloved Infidel.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was no stranger to modernity as we recognize it: he loved football; he dabbled in songwriting; he drank too much while listening to popular music in clubs. He was, in other ways, the aesthetic and emotional captive of an earlier century. As such, he represents a bridge between past and present cultural modes. He arrived too soon for Hollywood, where, he told Zelda three months before his death, he would achieve his true if secret ambition only by becoming a director himself: “If I had that chance, I would attain my real goal in coming here in the first place.” He may have arrived in the nick of time, however, to fulfill the role of the mournful poet, a figure since diluted and absorbed into the spectrum of pop music.

”The victor belongs to the spoils.”

— Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Despite the excesses of his poetry, shamanistic and otherwise, Jim Morrison may best exemplify pop music’s assimilation of the prior mode. Interred in Père Lachaise Cemetery alongside the likes of Molière, Chopin, Proust, Wilde, and Apollinaire, all earlier breeds of pop star or poet, Morrison stands astride the Parisian necropolis like an American Alexander the Great, attracting flower-and-candle-bearing bards and guitar strummers from every nation, State, and generation, illustrating the superior pull of pop culture even in the very home of the classical arts.

While Fitzgerald’s words above stress death’s inevitable, “Ozymandias”-like negation of any earthly triumph, they scarcely address the transformative capacity of exquisite death. (In his famous poem, Shelley showed the passage of time laying waste even to monuments of once-incontestable power in a sort of Egyptological prefiguring of the closing scene of Planet of the Apes.) More often than with such admonishments to ambition, the litany of dead rock stars is recounted alongside clichés about the “27 Club” or it being “better to burn out than to fade away”, the latter not from Morrison but from Neil Young, one of rock’s current megalosaurs. The lyric, from 1979’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)”, appeared near the end of Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide note. It would also be quoted in a memorably profane scene in Highlander, probably one of the strangest pop culture meditations on mortality in recent decades.

Not long before his own violent death in 1980, John Lennon would claim of Young’s lyric, “I hate it […] No, thank you. I’ll take the living and the healthy.” Despite Lennon himself professing logic that would dignify the recent career of Paul McCartney, the spirit and celebration of hedonism survives among rock ‘n’ roll evangelists. And indeed, not all dead musicians or their discographies are as melancholy to contemplate as, say, Nick Drake’s. The familiar roll call of the genre’s early corpses – Buddy Holly, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, Sid Vicious – consists mostly of boy kings forgiven for their tyranny and petulance for having served us with their dying (and living) theatrics. As rapper Danny Brown’s 2011 track “Die Like a Rockstar” confirms, this brand of pop-culture-death-by-excess has become its own self-perpetuating meme, a public narrative lending often simplistic unity to a continually enlarging constellation of individual tragedies.

“There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses–bound for dust–mortal–”

— Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

As well as through the combat of sports, death and youth are linked in popular culture through the cycles of nostalgia that dominate our consumer patterns. Not all pop culture products duplicate the knowing sentimentality of a Wes Anderson film, but it can be argued that the content of any product is nostalgic – if it isn’t now, then it will be. Like Gatsby, we each have our Daisy Buchanan. Consumer patterns dictate that our deepest loyalties are typically reserved for figures and products associated with our own idealized youth – the period of our indoctrination in the culture of disposability. Perhaps inevitably, if perversely, dead celebrities are often understood as emblems of our own coming of age, our loss of innocence, our coming to grips with a sense of pop culture’s paradox of consisting both in execrable shallowness and unfathomable depth.