Training | 2010.01.03
The baiting and the snark | Hadley Freeman
The gossip sites mourning Brittany Murphy reveal more about the bullying scrutiny actors now face
With a tidiness that usually only happens in Hollywood movies, 2009 has ended with a celebrity death that depressingly and diligently ticked all the cliches of the past decade and, in particular, the past year. When 32-year-old actor Brittany Murphy died in the early hours of Sunday morning, a pattern followed that has now become as inevitable as the inclusion of the phrase "in the early hours", which never sounds more ominous than in celebrity obituaries. The news was broken by the website tmz.com; an entertainer who had fallen into near obscurity was swiftly bestowed internet ubiquity; rumours from gossip websites were reprinted in tabloids as fact; then came the tweeted expressions of grief from celebrities – some who sounded suspiciously like they just wanted to get involved in the news; Facebook tribute sites were established. Michael Jackson – you know the score.
Parts of this pattern are as old as the desire for fame itself: starlet dies suddenly, finds recognition in death. Others, though, are distinctively associated with this decade. The eagerness of certain websites and newspapers to bestow on Murphy the label of "anorexic" alongside "troubled", replete with obsessive photomontages detailing her "fluctuating weight", give a distastefully pungent insight into the levels of scrutiny suffered by actors that would make most lose their appetite.
News of celebrity deaths is now almost always broken by gossip and news websites. Yet these websites communicate in a tone evocatively described as " snark ". Although they try to restrain themselves when reporting events that just don\'t work in the key of snark – such as death – their keenness to get extra hits leads them to linking to previous articles about the mourned celebrity. Just hours after Murphy\'s death was announced, gawker.com felt the need to link to a previous report on its site describing Murphy with a palpable cackle as that "batshit, insane actress". As eulogies go, it\'s not exactly up there with Auden\'s "stop all the clocks".
Hasty turnarounds by hypocrites are par for the course when someone dies, but these kinds of fast rewrites – one hand banging out an obit while the other is held over the mouth to suppress a snicker – suggest something else.
Gossip websites also give an unwitting insight into the life of a celebrity: the inescapable scrutiny, bullying jibes, the fact that any denials issued about damaging rumours are taken as an admission of guilt (tellingly, Murphy was decreed "batshit insane" because she committed the unforgivable sin of telling a gossip reporter that their magazine had "hurt my life"). Small wonder that the catatonia-inducing painkiller Vicodin, a drug few had heard of until recently, is invoked so frequently in relation to a celebrity\'s death that it has become Hollywood\'s kaddish .
But the most pathetic contrast between Murphy\'s life and too early death comes not from the gawkers at the autopsy but the glorious 1995 comedy, Clueless. Murphy played Tai, the naive brunette who moves to Beverly Hills. Her almost normal body weight makes her as much of an anomaly in the town as her lack of guile. She falls for the common delusion that the most important thing in life is to be the queen of this tiny coop, which means changing her appearance as much as it can be changed. In the film, Tai is saved by love. In reality, Murphy just became thinner and thinner, blonder and blonder, and more and more obscure. And then she was found in the shower, dead of a cardiac arrest at 32.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]elebrity-death-gossip-websites
