The Staples Center & The Strange Spectacle Of Public 'Grief'

This was a Michael Jackson-free zone all of last week, primarily because most of what was happening was not pop culture, but paparazzi culture. Assorted grotesques related to drugs, child custody, and other things best consigned to the dustbin of None Of Our Business were really all that was happening.

Now, inevitably, we have entered the stage of intense public "grieving," just as happened with Princess Diana, and there's no ignoring the fact that the entertainment news cycle over the next two days will be not just dominated but steamrolled by coverage of the memorial service taking place at the Staples Center tomorrow.

It's highly questionable to use the term "memorial service," of course, because a memorial service is not typically attended largely by strangers. Nor is a memorial service typically an event to which you raffle off tickets. Nor is it an event where the ability to attend is greeted by an excited trip straight to your Twitter feed to say, "OMG OMG OMG OMG i got tickets to the michael jackson memorial service!!!"

Dear Michael Jackson: We got tickets to your memorial service. OMG.

Counterfeit grief and the winners of the raffle, after the jump...

 

It seems that no one even knows what this "service" will entail. Any religious content? Performances? Clip packages? Eulogies? Will the concessions stand be open? Will there be souvenirs?

Being there appears, at this point, to be about being there. Weekend reports had it that 1.6 million people entered the ticket raffle, in spite of the almost total lack of information about the event. It didn't seem like anyone knew for sure whether his family would be there — whether maybe his body would be there — but 1.6 million people wanted to go.

Now and then, ticket-holders give you hints, some of them uncomfortable, about their thinking. MTV.com spoke to one winner — who posed, holding the printout of his email confirmation, like an angler who caught the big one — who told them that he'd always wanted to see a Michael Jackson concert, but of course, now he couldn't. "So this is the only way I can be close to him," he said.

There is something about public displays of sorrow over a celebrity death that has surface appeal — people are participating in a mass display of a fundamentally sympathetic emotion. But even without getting into the ethical ambiguities that hagiographic remembrances of Michael Jackson present, there is something deeply bothersome about the conflating of celebrity grief and real grief — about losing the distinction between mourning someone you don't know and mourning someone you do. And, too, with the idea that by attending a public event at the Staples Center after Michael Jackson is dead, you will realize your dream of being "close to him."

It is, in a sense, an inevitable result of the transformation of celebrities into public property. Reserving the right to see pictures of your wedding and pictures of your baby, wanting to know when you have a new boyfriend and when you're at Starbucks — it's not surprising that, at the end of your life, we will reserve the right to attend your memorial service, just as we would with someone we knew. To pay our respects, and to be close to you.

It may well be a touching tribute in various ways. It will surely be a massive display of artificial emotion, exploitations of all kinds that are allegedly undertaken out of nothing but the highest respect for the man as it says right here on this T-shirt, and logistical problems the city of Los Angeles will not soon forget. And then, mercifully, it will end.