International BusinessThe Farrah and MJ show
Poor Farrah Fawcett. At the peak of her stardom in the late 1970s as the most conventionally sexy of the Charlie’s Angels, her pin-ups helped a generation of young boys discover hormones they had never imagined existed. But in death, she found herself relegated to the sidelines by (as one Netizen impertinently put it) “a freakishly disfigured, putty-nosed paedophile”.
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“It’s ironic,” emailed a friend — a Fawcett nostalgist who was 14 when the original Charlie’s Angels TV show started airing — “that a serial crotch-grabber should have spoilt the tributes due to the heavenly woman who made millions of boys reach for their crotches.” Not tastefully put, but very true.
In the long list of great people who were overshadowed in death by more popular people, my own favourite is the Immortal Marx. I mean Groucho, of course. (Who else?) When he left the building in mid-August 1977, not many people outside his own family noticed: Elvis Presley had died only a couple of days earlier. If the Internet had existed at the time of Elvis’s demise, it almost certainly would have died as well. That came perilously close to happening last weekend when it seemed that every Facebook status update, every Twitter feed, every blog post — and what the heck, every website — was about MJ. It got so that I would experience an intense rush of gratitude if I logged onto the entertainment section of a news site and discovered a discussion about something else — even if that something else was Rakhi’s swayamvar or Shiney’s dinner sessions with Abu Salem.
There was way too much MJ discourse on the Net to summarise and you probably have it coming out of your ears by now, but among my favourites was the Facebook status update by Manish Vij of Ultrabrown: “Poor MJ. The president was black by the time he got done turning white.” Again, cruel but true. (Note: the world’s leading golf player is black too. How things have changed since the Billie Jean days.) Meanwhile, Jackson haters kept themselves entertained with updates based on the pop legend’s song titles and lyrics, from the pithy “Beat it!” to “It don’t matter if you’re dead or alive”.
Naturally, the most sarcastic comments were reserved for the singer’s ambiguous relationship with children. “Rather than being cremated, Jacko is being melted down and turned into Lego,” suggests a commenter on the Reuters Fanfare blog (http://tinyurl.com/ll6hbq). “That way the kids can play with him for a change.” The humorous Bogart Blog (http://tinyurl.com/n9qkt3) speculates on a connection between the deaths of the two celebrities. “When Fawcett reached the Pearly Gates, St Peter asked her if she had any last wish before she become an angel again. ‘Yes,’ replied Farrah, whose concern for underprivileged kids had spilled over into the afterlife, ‘I would like all the children in the world to be safe.’ ” Another email makes this connection: “Farrah had the hots for Majors while MJ preferred minors” (the first reference is to Fawcett’s relationship with actor Lee Majors).
At the other end of the spectrum, a post on BeliefNet (http://tinyurl.com/lfc86g) relates the obsession with celebrity death culture with the Buddhist concept of shunyata or emptiness, and makes a moving appeal for the deceased to be seen first as human beings: “Celebrity does not exist; it is a concept created from the void by the attention of media, corporate entertainment conglomerates, and people eager to project their own fantasies and failures onto another. All of this misses the point that we have absolutely no idea what it is like to be another human being.” Amen.
(jaiarjun@gmail.com)