“Day of the Locust” Redux
This is so Nathanael West.
I was just hanging out at CNN.com for a spell and I figure, what the hell, why not click on the link for video of Heath Ledger’s body being removed from a New York apartment building? So I ask … was anyone else out there who saw this video jaw-droppingly shocked by the sheer volume of onlookers and photographers snapping away? The flashbulbs and light bars poured an especially gruesome light onto the whole scene.
“Oh my God,” I kept uttering over and over as the totally obscene two-minute video played out. “This is wrong in so many ways.”
Of course I clicked on the link, which proves that there’s an audience for such images because I’ve never seen a Heath Ledger movie in my life and wouldn’t know the guy from a toad passing me on the street but I still clicked through and watched the video.
Some days I’m ashamed of myself.
UPDATE: From the AP:
Outside the Manhattan building on an upscale street, paparazzi and gawkers gathered, and several police officers put up barricades to control the crowd of about 300. Onlookers craned their necks as officers brought out a black bodybag on a gurney, took it across the sidewalk and put it into a medical examiner’s office van.
As the door opened, bystanders snapped pictures with camera phones, rolled video and said, “He’s coming out!“
January 22, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Geeze, that’s the most horrifying thing I’ve heard in a while. Celebrity culture, I guess.
January 22, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Yes, David, this is the kind of media exposure that should be reserved for the passing of heads of state. Why this sense of urgency and tragedy over the death of an actor? Is the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog? That’s the media-related question I tried to pose in my posting.
January 23, 2008 at 4:29 am
Gee, I dunno, I wouldn’t expect anything less from the media. It’s unseemly and intrusive, but that’s the media. I’m repulsed by it all.
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January 23, 2008 at 4:54 am
I think the media was tiring of Britney stories.
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January 23, 2008 at 8:33 am
That sounds pretty disgusting. The thing that is really odd and offensive about it is this was an actor the paparazzi had generally not bothered with. A large portion of the population has not heard of him (or at least long forgotten about “Brokeback Mountain”
precisely because he wasn’t usually in the media spotlight. There is a sickness to the fact that now that he’s dead they want to jump all over the story like a pack of vultures. I did a post because I’m a fan of his work and I knew many people in my circle of friends who were looking forward to the new Batman movie would likely be sad to hear of his passing, but this video is beyond opportunistic and exploitive.
Although, maybe not surprising. I’ll have to agree with Kitty on that one. Considering the entertainment “news” appears to be nothing more that the goings on of people who have not made a movie or gone on tour or had a decent song in who knows how long, it’s probably not surprising they all jumped at the chance to do something other than hang around the Los Angeles courthouse.
January 23, 2008 at 11:30 am
Very tragic. For young stars right now. It certainly isn’t like old Hollywood under the studio system where they had protection or privacy.
Hi, David & Mailander. Miss the Martini blog. David, films used to be made for art’s sake?
It wasn’t about the $$$ they were going to make. The films that R & M & I saw at the NuArt –it was an Art House. Some theaters were like that — run by independents — in those days. Going to the movies (sometimes 2-3 on one day) was a weekly deal for as long as I can remember growing up. I saw Apocalypse Now at the Cinerama down there when it came out. There were also “drive-ins” where families would go in cars when I was really little. Now you guys are making me totally nostalgic.
For: The Apple Pan, Musso & Franks, The Formosa, El Coyote and even Club 88. Remember those clubs on Main Street in Santa Monica?
I do believe there is a place for screenwriters from our gen right now.
Time for the “thinking film” to make a giant comeback. The whole baby boom is going to resonate to those, and younger gen will love them, too. I remember being able to get “Bravo” channel ages ago. They ran those sorts of films on that and maybe that is when the big shift began from going out. Or maybe it was the VCR?
Anyway, R. Your blog is fab.
Boy is it ever thunder & lightening right now. I mean giant thunder & lightening!
heading Santa Monica way if not there yet. Yikes!
January 23, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Julie, You’ve expressed my sentiments to a tee.
Kitty, it’s not just the media. The AP counted 300 people on the scene, many of them “gawkers” and “onlookers”. This is the “jaded palate” crowd that West wrote about in the concluding chapter of “Day of the Locust”.
January 23, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I see the same thing every day. Oftentimes, there will be an accident on the side of the road. Even if it’s all cleared to the side, people slow down (even stop), for a hope of glimpsing the destruction or gore.
I think part of it is that even though we see destruction and gore on television all the time, we rarely see it in our everyday lives. So, along comes an opportunity to actually experience what you’ve always seen from afar… people just can’t help themselves.
Even I have to make a conscious effort to look straight ahead and focus on driving instead of contributing to the traffic.
January 23, 2008 at 12:50 pm
True, Zel; that’s why I pointed out in my posting that I, having chose to watch the CNN video, participated in the process that I found so disgusting.
January 23, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Thanks. I was thinking we were on the same page, but thought I’d elaborate, just in case.
January 23, 2008 at 1:47 pm
How many of those 300 were reporters/paps and the like? It’s NYC, so you’re bound to get a crowd of gawkers and onlookers for something like that. Hell, you’d get that here where I live, and I live in an area with a combined population of maybe 30,000. But I’ll bet a good portion of them were media related.
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January 23, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I don’t consider this episode par for the course, Kitty. I go back to what Julie Scott said earlier: within hours after his death, the media elevated Ledger to a stature he did not enjoy while alive. Sure, he was a “name” actor with some marquee value but his stock really rose in value as a dead celebrity.
January 23, 2008 at 6:48 pm
within hours after his death, the media elevated Ledger to a stature he did not enjoy while alive.
I tell ya it’s because the media needed a new story to gnaw on, and poor ol’ Heath’s corpse fell into their ink-stained laps. Like mana from heaven.
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January 23, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I’m disgusted with all the speculation as to how he died. Without trying, I keep tripping over suicide theories and NEWS ALERTS about drugs. I heard on TV that they’ll scour his computer hard drive for any evidence of whatever. For this reason alone, I’m thankful I’m an unknown. However, it does give the prankster in me ideas … ;~)
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January 23, 2008 at 7:10 pm
It’s just all around sad and disgusting. On message boards all across the vast internets people who really, sorely need a life are spinning speculations and accusations as if their deductions means a damn thing in the larger scheme of things. C’mon, people, spend some of that time and energy on something productive. Playing a guessing game on how a celeb died is an almost existential exercise in Being and Nothingness.
January 24, 2008 at 5:04 am
I’ve been flashing back on the Diana Death Debacle. People all over the world blubbering on camera. The tons of rotting crap piled up on the streets of London. When the Queen tried having it removed — it was a health hazard after all — she was called insensitive. The constant video looping of her life and death. This doesn’t come near to that, but it’s the same mentality.
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January 24, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Have the media for all their overindulgence taken on the spooky angle yet? That the role of The Joker is sort of That Scotch Play of movie roles? You look at yourself getting made up, you think of how you must act, it trips you up, it freaks you out, you lose sleep…have nightmares in the day…mess up your drugs…
January 24, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Yes, Joseph, actually much has been made over Ledger’s recent comments that he found the role/character uncomfortable to play. “A psychopath with no redeeming qualities whatsover,” is, I believe, how he described the character.
January 24, 2008 at 7:32 pm
I was struck last night by this passage from Updike’s “Rabbit Redux”. What we are observing is a crowd that has gathered to watch a tragic house fire in a quiet suburb. Long after the last hot spot is put out by firefighters –
“Yet still the crowd waits held by a pack sense of smell; death is in heat. Intermittently there have been staticky calls over the police radios, and one of them has fetched an ambulance; it arrives with a tentative sigh of the siren. Scarlet lights do an offbeat dance on its roof. A strange container, a green rubber bag or sheet, is taken into the house, and brought back by three grim men in slickers. The ambulance receives the shapeless package, is shut with that punky sound only the most expensive automobiles make, and — again, the tentative sigh of the siren just touched — pulls away. The crowd thins after it.”