Why do we mourn celebrities?

Posted on February 25, 2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman died on February 2, 2014. He was one day younger than my husband, Scot.

And Harold Ramis died today, February 24, 2014. All I can think about is Bill Murray’s line from Stripes. Near the start of the movie, Bill Murray’s (that is, John Winger’s) girlfriend is moving out because John is unmotivated and she’s had enough. He begs her to stay, finally yelling,

You can’t go! All the plants are gonna die!

Scot quotes that line to me regularly, and he has done so since the first year I met him. It’s not just a line from Stripes anymore; it’s a line from my marriage. I don’t know if Harold Ramis wrote that line since he was one of three people who worked on the screenplay for Stripes, but I do know that I tend to attribute it to him.

This attribution comes partly because of Ramis’s work on Groundhog Day and the way it allowed me to see Scot and his family in a larger context. I didn’t know what to make of Scot’s family when I met them on Easter day and they gathered in the living room to watch PayPerView wrestling. I have never watched wrestling with my family, never mind on Easter day.

Then, in Groundhog Day, I saw Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, encounter small-town Pennsylvania life, and it all started to make sense.  When Phil Connors gave a newlywed couple tickets to WrestleMania, I felt like that moment in the film had been written just for Scot and me. We looked at one another and said, “It’s funny ’cause it’s true.”

***

In the Proserpine myth (or Persephone, if you’re partial to Greece), Ceres (aka Demeter) mourns her daughter who has been kidnapped and taken to the Underworld. The mourning of Ceres, who is goddess of agriculture, results in the death of all growing things: fruits, grasses, trees. The world grows barren.

You can’t go. All the plants are gonna die.

It’s not funny, ’cause it’s true.

***

Philip Seymour Hoffman. Harold Ramis. Countless other celebrities whose deaths touch us, even though we did not actually know them. Well, let me rephrase that. They did not know us.

But we knew them, at least a part of them that they shared with us. We may have hung out with them in a dark cinema while they made us laugh or cry or squirm uncomfortably. We may have invited them into our living rooms. We may have decided we didn’t want them in our homes at certain times and turned them away. We may have introduced them to our friends or our kids. We may have seen them again after many years apart and welcomed their return and the reminiscing over shared memories.

We may have used them to forge stronger bonds with one another. And they let us.

Sometimes I don’t understand why people are upset about celebrity deaths because I don’t feel a connection with a particular celebrity who has died. Sometimes I hate celebrity culture and the way we obsess over building people up and tearing them down. Sometimes I think fans and fan culture must just be annoying to celebrities, and I don’t want to be part of it. Sometimes I think celebrities are part of the suckiness of the world and I hate myself for enjoying looking at sparkly dresses at award shows.

Other times, Harold Ramis dies. I tell my husband the news, and I think to myself all day:

You can’t go. All the plants are gonna die.