Interview excerpts from Andrew S. Hughes, "When Stars Die," South Bend Tribune, July 20, 1997. Followed by full article.

When Jimmy Stewart died on July 2nd, it wasn't difficult to predict what would happen in the days afterward. Film critics wrote tributes to the actor for his talent; editorial writers wrote tributes to the man for his virtue and video stores experience to run on Stewart's most popular films... In many cases, such as Stewart's, however, more than just the person dies. The era he or she represents also ceases to exist.

"[The] Grape Road [mall] is Pottersville, and Jimmy Stewart is dead," University of Notre Dame sociology professor Eugene Halton says, referring to the uncaring, undemocratic capitalistic town of Stewart's It's a Wonderful Life was set during the fantasy sequence when Stewart sees what the world would have been like without him.

Halton is the author of The Meaning of Things and Bereft of Reason, a book about contemporary social life and social thought.

"Perhaps part of the reason we feel sad about Jimmy Stewart's passing is because we now live in Pottersville and something in us longs for the small-town life that the character he portrayed stood for," Halton says. "It probably touches on the public consciousness today that that small-town feeling is gone for the most part."

What has replaced close-knit community associations has been a mega-mechanical image of the world," Halton says.

"We have a whole modern world view which sees the universe as a vast machine and that outlook is part of our culture, our economy, our policies, our general outlook on things," he says.

The result is that life becomes mechanized and the virtual reality of celebrity culture assuages the boredom of a bureaucratic, mass existence.

Halton says normal socialization occurs through lessons gleaned from parents, friends, teachers and other role models encountered face-to-face.

"In our modern mass-consumer society, those processes get infiltrated and colonized by the mass media," he says. "Children get bombarded with celebrity images and learn to identify with celebrity images. I think there's something normal and identifying with heroes, but when it becomes pathological is when the images one is constantly bombarded with stand for commercial, ephemeral values."

Nothing, however, compares to television's influence - the main source of those celebrity images - on our collective obsession with celebrity.

Certainly there were celebrity deaths and funerals before television - former Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne's funeral was broadcast on radio - but television's combination of visual images and near-total saturation of the culture has made it the leading definer of American culture since the 1950s.

For four days in November 1963, the nation watched television, and the lines between hard news and entertainment news became blurred forever.

"Kennedy is a real interesting transitional character in the process of transforming politics into celebrity," Halton says. "It's often claimed he's the first president to win the election through television. So, with Kennedy, you have the first president to enter office through television and who left office in a shattering, tragic event portrayed through television. His death was probably the first public outpouring of grief and a ritual of mourning conveyed directly through television. I mean, I can tell you the rhythm of the drums on the march to the cemetery."

The day the music died

When John Lennon was murdered on Dec. 8, 1980, many people said the former Beatle's death was the end of the 1960s. As many as 15,000 fans gathered in various cities across the globe to mourn Lennon and the era he represented with candlelight vigils and sing-alongs.

In an odd way, celebrity deaths possess the ability to unite people in a public form of grieving.

"That can give us the surrogate images of mourning and grief and make it safe for us to experience them vicariously," Halton says.

When Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia died on Aug. 9, 1995, at California's Serenity Knowles drug re-habilitation center, vigils similar to the ones held for Lennon - and Elvis Presley before him - occurred around the country. The same thing had happened a year earlier when Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain shot himself on April 8, 1994, at the age of 27... In the case of Garcia's death, the vigils were even more endemic of the culture that had sprung up around the 1960s rock band.

"I think it's interesting to ask why did the Grateful Dead have such a large following of an almost quasi-religious nature," Halton says. "I don't think it's just due to their music, but to how the celebrity culture works in the Grateful Dead, which is to give people surrogate feelings of community."

The vigils became virtual final conce1is for the band's fans.

"That's the way they experienced Jerry Garcia, so they probably wanted to have a ritual of mourning closer to what the experience of Jerry Garcia was," Halton says. "Concerts are mass events with a very immediate sense of a mass of people, so maybe it's more important to have a grouping of people together."

... "Nothing sells like death," Orbit Music owner Doug Zimmerman says. "That raises the profile of the artist ... People don't miss something until it's no longer available to them. I think that, coupled with the added publicity, people say, 'Maybe I should check it out and see what the fuss is about.' "

Although Halton does not downplay the "vulturistic" nature of these sales increases, he does see another, somewhat sentimental side to it.

"It's probably that phenomenon of seeing the person for the last time, or a way of seeing a person for the last time, even though the last time has already gone," he says.

... Just as romantic as Shakur's death for many teen-agers was Kurt Cobain's suicide.

"His suicide was tragic, but what I find interesting is that the teens who worship Cobain seem to deny the tragic aspects of his death," Halton says. "His death seems to be a death denial for the celebrity culture, a way of avoiding the bad feelings that caused his suicide."

For Halton, such death denial is often a hallmark of how society in general deals with a celebrity's death, thus making the event interesting.

''A lot of the culture of celebrity has kind of built into ii the fountain of youth and death denial, so when a celebrity dies, it can be taken as either a celebrity event or as an occasion for mourning, as in the case of Jimmy Stewart, and down emotions, blue emotions, become something to be experienced," Halton says. "Suddenly, there can be a general public feeling of mourning for Jimmy Stewart, for the loss of that old, small-town feeling, and personally, one can feel that one's grandfather is gone.

"Then, because of the dynamics of celebrity culture, that has to be wiped clean by the next celebrity event..."