Even in death, some celebrities can’t escape the spotlight.
After actor Gary Coleman’s tragic passing, a controversy of sorts erupted when it came to light that pictures of his final hours—and some shots of him after his death—were apparently being shopped to the tabloids.
Surfing news sites last week, I saw some headlines about the photos and wondered, Why can’t we just offer Mr. Coleman some dignity? But even as I read a couple articles about his sudden demise, I couldn’t avoid seeing a picture of the former child star, hooked up to life-support, splashed across several sites. It made me, and I’m sure many others, shudder.
Not everyone shudders, however. Some folks, it seems, actually go looking for pictures like these.
Writing about our culture’s fascination with death, Newsweek writer Raina Kelly noted that when she Googled the phrase “pictures of dead people,” she got 200 million results. By way of comparison, her search for the phrase “pictures of naked people” netted 20 million images.
Which begs the obvious question, why do we want to see pictures of the dead? Kelly writes:
"The tabloid that reportedly bought those pictures of Coleman did so because of our culture's fascination with death—anyone's death. They know we may hold our nose, but we'll look at them. We can't help ourselves. When people buy that paper, they'll be motivated by the same urge [that compels them] to slow down for a better look at a car crash. Everyone seems to want a glimpse of the fate that scares us the most and that none of us will escape. How is looking at the body of Che Guevara or Gary Coleman any different from the hours we spend watching autopsies on CSI? We want to see it almost as much as we say we don't. … it's no wonder we are so curious about the faces and shapes of celebrity death. We are a culture that sees itself in the stars, and spying on a dead actor is a way to consider our own mortality from the safety of our living rooms."
I suspect Kelly’s ruminations on why anyone looks at such things gets at the dark heart of this macabre phenomenon. That said, I imagine most of us hope that images of our own mortality are never peddled to the tabloids.
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