Whatever people say I am...

Let us not do the dead any disrespect by lying — Farrah Fawcett, who tragically but remarkably lost her battle with cancer, will not be remembered for her acting talents. Neither can we remark on the legacy of Michael Jackson without acknowledging the eccentricity of his celebrity and the peculiarity of his actions. Their deaths have seemingly absolved both of them of their perceived failings, at least in the interim. Yet it’s worth noting now how their reputation stood before and after.

For Fawcett, her fame rests on her work on the first season of the hit TV show Charlie’s Angels and a popular poster. Not to diminish those considering that Fawcett remains the most popular “Angel” (despite the presence of gorgeous co-stars such as Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, who also stayed around longer) and that image of her in a red bikini has been called a defining one for the ‘70s. (A professor of TV and popular culture at Syracuse University, Robert Thompson, even told the LA Times: “If you were to list 10 images that are evocative of American pop culture, Farrah Fawcett would be one of them.”) But even after the flightiness of her later years, pre-cancer (the disjointed interviews, the video of her making art with her breasts, her tumultuous relationship with Ryan O’Neal), she proved herself an indomitable figure in raising awareness of and fighting her disease. Fawcett showed she was still beautiful physically when she posed for Playboy at age 50 but it was only as her body deteriorated did we appreciate much more than her curves.

Jackson was the inverse of that. He had dazzled early on, first as a child prodigy then as bona fide superstar in the ‘80s. His talent was acknowledged from the get-go, it matured into this extraordinary tapestry of music, dance and spectacle. The press and his fans (well, okay, just about everybody, really) hailed him as a genius even before he was 30 years old — and deservedly so. But he stayed around long enough for the public to see him wither in front of them. The much-speculated-upon facets of his personal life and the grotesqueries of his appearance weighed upon him and his music. Far from the fleet-footedness of his earlier records, everything became heavy with credulity and suspicion. And when 9/11 happened, the posters promoting Jackson’s last album, “Invincible” — plastered as they were all around New York — just seemed to be a bad joke. The unintentional irony wasn’t lost but nor was it really forgiven.

That’s all difficult to bring out now as CNN, the BBC and ANC pump out the updates of how these media personalities should be grieved. Lives lived so long in public cannot be lamented in private. But this “society of spectacle,” as the Situationist thinker Guy Debord coined the phenomenon, should be called out for what it is. “The manufacture of a present where fashion itself, from clothes to music, has come to a halt… is achieved by the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same short list of trivialities, passionately proclaimed as major discoveries. Meanwhile, news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes rarely,” Debord writes.

So let the eulogies continue but take caution to not believe a word of it.