ABSTRACT
Celebrity watching in the twenty-first century has been magnified by extensive coverage in both conventional and online media. Today, nearly every aspect of celebrities’ lives is visible to the public (James, 1993; McCutcheon, Maltby, Houran, and Ashe, 2004). We know where they vacation, when they are pregnant, and the current state of their weight. In this context, modern celebrities are known not so much for their accomplishments, but for the lives they lead (McCutcheon, Lange, and Houran, 2002; McCutcheon et al., 2004) – they are famous for being famous. As a result, reality television stars are often more famous than highly talented artists, musicians, or actors. Although celebrity watching is often portrayed as trivial (Jenkins, 2006), the connection to a celebrity is genuine and can provide an important component in self-definition (O’Guinn, 1991; Radford and Bloch, 2012). Through media consumption, people form vicarious relationships with celebrities that add meaning to their lives and enhance the self (McCutcheon et al., 2002; Rojek, 2001). An active identification with a celebrity leads many fans to feel that they have a personal relationship with the media figure (Giles, 2002); the celebrity may be even be considered a ‘friend.’ (Caughey, 1984). Recently, celebrities have strengthened these relationships by encouraging people to follow the details of their life through real time Twitter feeds (Greenberg, 2009) and personal revelations in media interviews (Rojek, 2007). Of particular interest here is the case where public fascination with a famous individual intensifies with death. The end of an important personcelebrity relationship may result in a profound sense of loss and feelings of grief. This chapter will investigate the intersection of the public realm of celebrity with the private realm of grief and mourning. This intersection has become increasingly relevant because the rise of celebrity culture has coincided with the reduction in public visual iconography of death (Aries, 1985). Increasingly in western society, expressions of grieving and mourning have become more subdued and increasingly viewed as inappropriate (Clark and Franzmann, 2006). However, fans of celebrities have become surprisingly comfortable in expressing their grief publicly. Tributes range from depositing gifts at the site
of the stars’ home, to impromptu ceremonies, to posting emotional messages on Facebook or Twitter. Public displays of mourning, such as those spontaneously enacted for celebrities, provide mourners with the opportunity to deal with loss in a culture where open mourning has been discouraged (Franzmann, 1998; Haney, Leimer, and Lowery, 1997). In other words, fans can engage in more dramatic mourning responses with celebrities than would be deemed appropriate with family or friends. These death rituals (Bonsu and Belk, 2003) serve as a means of dealing with the shared grief that fans feel for the loss of celebrities. These rituals demonstrate the traditional five stages of grief (Kubler-Ross and Kessler, 2005), but in the realm of celebrity, they also include the memorialization of the deceased through product consumption (Gentry, Kennedy, Paul, and Hill, 1995; Radford and Bloch, 2013) as well as the mythologizing of the celebrity through storytelling and shared experiences (Radford and Bloch, 2012; Wang, 2007). The current chapter provides an overview of what we know about consumer responses to celebrity death and identifies some of the process that influence these responses.
