Performance art meets eulogy as part of global funeral

By Ted Anthony
The Associated Press

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"I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others," one of Michael Jackson's closest friends said on Twitter this week. "I cannot be part of the public whoopla."

But on Tuesday, Elizabeth Taylor, hardly a stranger to a public life, seemed just about the only one.

He was a celebrity spectacle like no other, so it seemed natural that Mi-chael Jackson's end unfolded the same way. The staging of his final show Tuesday turned millions of fans into lottery players who chased dreams of front-row goodbyes.

The result: an unparalleled, though strikingly sedate, public memorial that offered, like his jumbled life, a little something for everyone.

Sharing grief with millions of others — on TV, in mass spectacles and across the Internet — has become as American as, say, churning out fresh disposable idols on reality TV.

This was eulogy as performance art, public outpouring as premium content — and, not accidentally, funeral as variety show. To call it a last performance is barely metaphorical. The service alone was a guided tour of show business — a little gospel telethon, a little Grammy ceremony, a little "Soul Train," a little "Weekly Top 40," even a little "Circus of the Stars."

The public mourning of prematurely departed celebrities isn't new. More than 100,000 people turned out in 1926 for the New York funeral of Rudolph Valentino.

It has only accelerated in recent decades: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Princess Diana. And of course there was Jackson's former father-in-law and brother in stratospheric fame, Elvis.

But contained communal lament is one thing. What unfolded Tuesday and in the days leading up to it felt like something else, something magnified beyond even the usual American embrace of the epic.

"In life, he was rejected by so many different groups of people. But, in death, everyone seems to want to claim him," said Jennifer James McCollum, 41, of Oklahoma City, who writes about generational issues in her blog, JenX67.

This absurdly talented, weird, tragic man who contained so many of the things that perplex and consume modern culture — from race and sex to obsession with appearance and attachment to childhood — seems to have touched most every chord at once.

"There are many Michaels for many souls," said CNN contributor Bryan Monroe, who interviewed Jackson at length in 2007.

There are also, suddenly, many more ways to connect, lament, magnify and share. The emerging mythology — that the communications explosion that followed Jackson's death almost "broke the Internet" — suggests the emergence of new communities and the hunger for some kind of public square of sentiment.

"People want to be a part of something. And this is something really memorable. Why did everybody go to Woodstock?" asked Rosemary Hornak, a psychology professor at Meredith College in North Carolina who studies how people remember.

Now they can. No longer, as in Sunday services, do you just turn to your pew mate and shake hands. This is the age of the global funeral, the interactive death, with mourners always on hand to prolong the experience — either with a big-time celebrity lament or an online guest book for a beloved great-aunt.

"The Internet was originally an exchange of ideas. It's almost as if, with Web 2.0, it's about exchanging emotions," said Paul Soper, 25, who works in retail in Columbus, Ohio.

That's not the only change, though. The usual suspects — a 24-hour news cycle, the digitization of music and imagery, the fragmentation of society, the democratization of the arts — helped set the stage for Tuesday's service.