Celebrities We Mourn

A friend of mine went to Hollywood Forever Cemetery over the weekend; by implication, she seems to have gone there several times this year. Her intent this time was to pay tribute to David Lynch. I know, because the way she told me about it was to send me a picture of her hand with its Owl Cave-themed ring. She then sent me a picture of the Black Lodge ofrenda that had been set up at the cemetery by someone who’d beaten her to the idea. She informs me that there have been tributes at his grave every time she’s gone there. We agreed that most of the people who’d left them had likely never met him.

It’s a curious aspect of our modern culture, one that’s difficult to explain because it’s so normal to us and sounds so strange. Our lives are influenced by celebrities all the time. We consume media all the time in one way or another—music, books, movie, TV, and more. Our news is brought to us by people who become famous for bringing us the news. If you stopped to count every person you’d interacted with in a day who doesn’t know you exist, you’d be surprised.

But I won’t mourn when the women who founded the company that makes the bath bombs I like die; I won’t know, and the company will likely keep on going. (Also I’m older than they are, so there’s that.) Even for a lot of creators, my reaction will be more along the lines of, “Oh, bummer!” I write a lot of obituaries, and generally I’m sad at the loss and then move on with my day. No offense to, say, Richard Chamberlain, but my feelings about his death weren’t comparable to someone who actually matters in my life. He seemed pretty cool, and I was slightly bummed.

Yesterday, YouTube suggested to me a video of Alan Rickman reading “The Raven,” and as I listened, I thought about how much I miss him. But why Alan Rickman more than Patty Duke, who also died in that horrible year of loss that was 2016, who was part of my childhood in a way he was not, who had the same illness I do and with whom I felt a certain kinship? Why David Bowie over Abe Vigoda? (My first Celebrating the Living honoree because I couldn’t resist.) Why do some people get so deeply into your heart?

Let us, then, consider David Lynch. For one thing, I can think of many aspects of my life shaped by Lynch and his works. There are friendships that involve a lot of “and then we watched Twin Peaks,” for example. The college roommate who gave me Dune for my birthday. Also, David Lynch the man was so fun and seemed so nice. Weird, fine, but so are most of my friends. If weird kept me from mourning someone, I’d need a different social circle and can promise you I wouldn’t work for Magpies.

With David Bowie, I remember going to the concert in 1995 with my sister and her then-partner, and there are great memories there even beyond all the others. With Carrie Fisher—well. My entire generation has longstanding memories of Carrie Fisher, and so does yours whatever generation you are. It was hardly surprising to me this year that we published two tributes to Val Kilmer. That we all in our behind-the-scenes writer chat shared memories of Graham Greene. That we talked a lot about Diane Keaton.

I don’t want to jinx anyone living and so I will not mention people in the first movie I saw with my partner, the man who sings the closest we have to an “our song” and so forth. The musician who is a longstanding running joke with my best friend for obscure reasons. But when Tom Petty died, it was hard not to think of summer nights listening to Full Moon Fever. When Mary Travers died, I thought of evenings with my family during PBS pledge drives. When Terry Pratchett died, it was only partially because I’d actually met him once that I cried.

And, of course, we here at Magpies all hold kinship with Roger Ebert. Even the ones who never interacted with him and therefore don’t have a “Roger was so nice!” story. (I do know someone online whose dad went to college with him and hated him, but we’ll consider that guy an outlier.) He shaped our profession, and he let us understand that it’s a calling. That there is more to film criticism than “see movie write about movie.” His columns let me think there was an audience for rambling essays like this one. Of course I mourn him.