2016 was a legendary year for so many reasons. Not just because it signaled the true demise of American politics, but because it offed so many legends in one fell swoop–most noticeably the trifecta of David Bowie, Prince and George Michael. Granted, this was a vaguely 80s motif, and one supposes each year might see its share of people from a certain era dying. But no, 2016 was especially special, if for nothing else because of the Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds one-two punch that 2016 felt compelled to inflict in its very last days.
So it was that 2017 was a rather quiet year for death. No icons of incredible import lost to the abyss called the Grim Reaper’s playground (though Miguel Ferrer was kind of upsetting). 2018, however, isn’t content to remain so complacent, upping its form of celebrity death ante by incorporating suicide into the mix. Starting with Avicii and then continuing with Kate Spade, whose “signature” isms now feel incredibly macabre with the hindsight of knowing she would take her own life, followed by Anthony Bourdain, it seems 2018 is out to send a very deliberate message to the masses: money and fame ain’t shit. Considering these two pursuits have been especially peddled ever since Paris Hilton made it look so easy in the early 00s, this is the first time we’re seeing a true cautionary tale against the conventional American ideals that have taken an especially grotesque turn in the twenty-first century.
And while other deaths of the year have been “garden variety,” including the common cause of dying from being an old white man like Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe, the ones that have stood out are these suicides, largely committed by middle-aged people with “everything”–as though thumbing their nose at the Heathers-created band Big Fun for writing a song called “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).” No, instead it seems that–save for Avicii–it should be: “Middle-Aged Suicide (Don’t Do It).”
Then again, it makes quite a bit of sense to off oneself in the later years of existence. After all, and most especially if you’re a woman, your skin has become saggy and grotesque to anyone who touches it (particularly if you don’t have the money to back up being so grotesque). Desirability, is, in point of fact, what makes so much of life worth living–aesthetics are key darling, fucking key. That’s why an entire industry has been formed to pump you full of synthetic plumping materials, in addition to extracting unwanted plumpness in other areas. So you see, Virginia Woolf’s decision to check out at aged fifty-nine (something of a median range between Spade’s fifty-five and Bourdain’s sixty-one) was rather innovative (and makes even more sense when considering the limited amount of plastic surgery options available at the time), foretelling in a sense. For just because you are a success, heralded by a society that somehow was miraculously able to recognize your genius (except in the case of Kate Spade, that was just mass appeal), does not mean that the sinking feeling that this is all bullshit is going to go away. If anything, it’s augmented by having so much freedom–“time to think,” as the philistines like to call it.
As we cross the threshold into the halfway mark of 2018, dealing with those unpleasant statistics about suicide in the U.S. released the same week as Spade and Bourdain’s deaths, it seems a dichotomy that addresses the class divide in America. On one spectrum, you have “commoners” killing themselves because they don’t have enough money (financial ruin has been cited as a top factor in the spike that has been occurring since 1999–that dotcom bubble, yo), and on the other, you have people who have found that life is just as meaningless, if not more so, when you have ample riches (none of that “I’m rich in spirit” hogwash). So who gets the fuzzier end of the lollipop, really? Or are we all just at the mercy of life’s cruel and sadistic sense of humor, largely only funny to itself and Donald Trump?
