I grieve, therefore I am

When a celebrity dies, the media now knows how to build a dramatic tragedy around it. But who determines the length of the play?

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By Ritva Liisa Snellman
     
      When a close relative or friend dies, we grieve. Our grief follows its own prescribed formula: shock, gradual recognition, going through the sense of loss, recovery. The healing process can take several years.
      And then again, how does one grieve for a musician and entertainer, who was a nice guy and whose 40-year career has left behind one or two decent songs that might possibly get into the soundtrack of your life?
     
The late-edition tabloids showed us how. This is the way it is done: 18 pages, 6 pages, 15 pages, 2 pages. By the fifth day the grieving process is dealt with.
      Iltalehti required forty-one pages to provide an adequate account of the death at 56 of Kirill Babitzin, better known as Kirka. The rival paper Ilta-Sanomat needed five more pages to complete the job.
      It is not really done to criticise grief journalism. I mean, you cannot go saying that there was too much grieving, or that the grieving was done all wrong.
      The grief of those close to the deceased is always raw and genuine, but does this mean that the emotions set in motion by a celebrity demise are somehow something else, and not the real deal?
     
We have taken the habit of calling it grief, because the g-word sounds rather less coarse than "shock-horror", morbid curiosity, fear of dying, feeding-frenzy, or an inflated sense of self-importance. And those are all perfectly genuine emotions, of course.
      British think-tankers have come up with their own terminology for this mass compassion. Expressions like grief-lite, recreational grief, and mourning-sickness have all been applied to the public outpouring of emotion on the passing of a celebrity or other victim, as and when the media seem to be demanding it.
      In its turn, the sudden and massive spread of public grieving and communal compassion says something about the declining significance of our own immediate community.
      Once-nuclear families are scattered and keep little contact with one another, the neighbours are not much more than a name-plate on the door, and the only discussions with friends are of "nice" things, because in these post-emotionalist days it is important to remain cool and composed at all times.
      Going to church of a Sunday has been replaced by mass spectacles where you are recognised and where you can do something: they provide an opportunity for recreational grief in the form of giant piles of flowers and soft toys at the place where someone died or a sea of candles placed around the grave.
     
It is quite natural that the British should have invented such terms as those above, since the death of Princess Diana was for many the highpoint of the recreational grief phenomenon.
      After the passing of Diana and more recently Pope John Paul II, there was even discussion of a dictatorship of grief that the media advocated. If you did not show your emotions on your sleeve, you were cold and unfeeling. Even Queen Elizabeth II herself was urged to shed a public tear.
     
The death of Princess Diana set a benchmark on public outpourings of grief that will be hard to beat: in the course of a week in late August and early September 1997, some 15 million kilos (that is 15,000 TONS) of flowers, cards, and teddy bears and other soft toys were stacked up against the fences of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace.
      During the same week, the price of cut flowers on London market stalls rose by 25 per cent. Nobody has ever even tried to calculate the number of column inches and centimetres that were dedicated to the royal death in the course of that week.
      The past seven days will almost certainly go down in the annals of Finnish grief journalism.
     
Kirka has been mourned so much that the newspapers have found themselves up against a tricky situation: how many pages will be required when the next artist "beloved by the entire nation" turns up his or her toes?
      Media researcher Erkki Karvonen from the University of Tampere believes that the grief-packages can hardly grow any larger. On the other hand, they are not going to disappear, either, since emotions are the stock-in-trade of the tabloids.
      Grieving sells just as well as unbridled joy, and it is the task of the media to dress feelings in words.
     
In the case of grief, the results in words are often little short of embarrassing.
      The flood of tears is endless. Longing gnaws at the mind. The grief is immense, the pain is enormous. Great sense of grief. The Esplanade is not what it once was.
      Huh? The Esplanade?
      Yes. [Kirka] will no longer come smiling broadly to meet you in Helsinki's Esplanade... Espa is not what it once was. (Ilta-Sanomat Plussa, 3.2.2007)
      "The methods of grief journalism are rather simple and the result is pretty thin", says Karvonen. "You go ask a few people how they feel after hearing the news. Everybody says they feel bad. Kirka was a nice bloke."
     
What is also new in all this - courtesy of the blogs and message boards - is that the grieving process can become increasingly interactive.
      Readers recall their encounters with the deceased through the medium of the newspapers' discussion forums, leave their own messages of condolence, and argue with others.
      It allows people to be a part of the celebrity's life for an instant or two - even though the celebrity himself or herself has already passed on.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 11.2.2007


Links:
  Mourning sickness is a religion (BBC, 2004)
  Conspicuous Compassion and other terms
  On celebrity, public deaths in a death-denying culture

RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi