Why do we let the death of a celebrity affect us so much?

Ever wondered why the death of celebrities—veritable strangers to us at the end of the day—significantly matter?

On the morning of 13 December this year, amidst news of a war with no end in sight and new legislation being introduced in a half-empty Parliament, the sudden death of American actor Andre Braugher disrupted many a morning commute. Braugher, who played the beloved character Raymond Holt on the globally popular cop-sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, died suddenly at the age of 61, after a struggle with lung cancer. “Captain Dad,” as he was fondly known on the show, was no more—and millions around the world expressed their shock and disbelief. 

Among those shaken by the news was Mumbai-based media professional Abhishek Mande. “I had just shut out [Matthew] Perry’s death, and now this,” he says, referring to the FRIENDS actor’s untimely demise just weeks before. “I actually welled up. One of the things I’ve missed is having a male role model. Holt was that for me—not to mention a father figure.” 

Holt’s moral centre, kindness and efficiency had also resonated with Vrutika Shah. The Mumbai-based media professional had come to the show years after its moment at the peak of pop culture zeitgeist. “I was in the worst job of my life, dealing with the worst boss possible, who didn’t allow me any opportunities to grow,” Shah recalls. 

But watching Captain Holt preside over the assortment of eccentric characters under his care at a New York precinct, and struggle through workplace challenges himself brought Shah reassurance.

Neither Mande nor Shah have watched any of Braugher’s other work, such as the ’90s police drama Homicide: Life on the Street, for which he received an Emmy; or more recently, in the final season of the legal drama The Good Fight, which also won him several nominations. And yet, they felt moved enough to instantly reach out to friends to commiserate, and publish long, loving tributes—to Holt—on platforms available to them. 

For the next few days, both Twitter and Instagram were awash with clips of Raymond Holt—the “amazing detective slash genius”. As it had been of Chandler Bing when Matthew Perry passed; of music videos from the 1990s when playback  singer KK died last year—as it has been happening in the cases of several public deaths lately, turning social media platforms into a sort of “wake,” enlivened by a sort of “peer-to-peer grieving,” as a New Yorker article put it in 2014.   

Striking a chord

Why does the death of celebrities—veritable strangers no more familiar to us than the neighbourhood grocer—matter so much to us? “Grief is a very important part of parasocial relationships,” explains Shreya Agarwal, a Gurugram-based psychotherapist. The death of a celebrity, she says, can evoke “loss of a sense of comfort, inspiration, values, or the loss of just entertainment or anything that person brings to their lives.” 

The concept of archetypes is very important to understand this, explains Agarwal. “Archetypal figures are universal or recurring symbols or characters in stories and myths, in dreams, in various cultural expressions. These are fundamental to human experience, to human emotions, and to motivate people. Rama is good, Ravan is the demon and evil, and so on—and this exists across cultures.”

“Celebrities often get elevated into such archetypal figures,” Agarwal continues. “Matthew Perry, for example, was romanticised for his struggle against addiction; Irrfan Khan, for his wisdom and poetic personability. People begin to resonate with this. There might also be an element of projection or transference, where you superimpose your emotions or feelings onto these celebrities. This evokes a sense of personal loss, as if a part of themselves or their own identity has been affected.”

Identifying the loss

Identification plays a very important role, but the roots of strong emotions evoked by the death of celebrities are also multifaceted—for example, it could have to do with nostalgia. “Sridevi’s death hit me hard,” says Padma Priya, co-founder of the podcast platform Suno India. “My earliest memory of watching a movie was one starring Sridevi, at my grandmother’s home in Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. It was Ram Gopal Verma’s first movie, called Kshanam Kshanam, which we watched on her VCR—it was the only tape she had,” she laughs.

The singer KK’s untimely death left music marketeer Roochay Shukla “heartbroken for days”. “My college playlist was made up completely of KK songs—whether it was love, heartbreak, hope, victory—there is a KK song for everything and it’s still incredible to think how one artist can be so versatile,” he says. 

Shukla’s way of memorialising KK was to listen to his songs “day and night for a whole month”. He even organised his birthday party themed around KK songs—to honour how his music encapsulated all of his millennial existence. Meanwhile, Akshay Naravane, a Mumbai-based writer, thinks he is yet to come to terms with KK’s death, which happened suddenly, right after his performance at a concert in Kolkata. “We weren’t ready for it,” says Naravane. “It felt like waking up one day and finding out that the partner that you are madly in love with has ghosted you and gone MIA.” 

Circumstances surrounding a death

“The circumstances surrounding the death also affect how the world responds to it,” says Agarwal. “For singer Lata Mangeshkar, there was respect and sadness—she died at 92, for medical reasons, and she had lived her life. When Sidhu Moosewala was assassinated last year, or when Sushant Singh Rajput passed away in mysterious circumstances in 2020, there was confusion, shock and disbelief. When Irrfan Khan died, there was a sense of hopelessness and helplessness—he wasn’t very old, nor very young, but we couldn’t save him from a fatal illness.” 

News of Khan’s death came at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, in April 2020, and it was the first and last time that Brinda Taparia, a Brisbane-based psychotherapist, felt truly shaken by the death of a celebrity. “His death seemed like the final nail in the coffin of a world that had flipped on its head anyway,” Taparia says. “I think one of the reasons why this loss felt so personal to me is because the grief I’ve been feeling at our lives being upended had been given an outlet that feels safe enough to be expressed in.”

“I will never know him personally,” Taparia wrote that fateful April evening in 2020 on her Instagram Stories. “But something about his artistic choices expressed a delicateness of nuance and fragility towards the every day and the ordinary, the espousement of the tragedies and miracles of everyday lives—choices that I believe have to be influenced in some part by his personhood.”     

Personhood, in the case of celebrities, is difficult to fathom—even in these Panopticon-esque times. But we do occasionally get a window to the person behind the persona, or indeed, the archetype, especially when a celebrity talks about their struggles on a public platform. “That can create a strong sense of empathy and identification,” says Agarwal. 

When the American actor and comedian Robin Williams died by suicide in August 2014, Delhi-based writer Megha (name changed on request) “called a friend who lived nearby. We got breakfast and spent much of the morning talking about him.” Like many ’90s kids, Williams was a big part of her childhood. “Mrs Doubtfire forever,” she says.“But as I grew older, I loved watching his stand-up routines online—he walked such a fine line between appreciation and comedy when he did impressions.” 

But it was a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder for Williams that deepened this bond further. “I’m a naturally funny person, the joker in the pack, the class clown—I always have been,” says Megha. “But it was very difficult to explain that one of the reasons I delight in the strange and the absurd and can see the lighter side of things is because I live with bipolar disorder (Type 2), and have suffered from chronic depression from a very young age.” 

“It’s not one of his popular works, but The Fisher King is the greatest Williams film ever,” says Megha. “It’s the story of a man haunted by a violent incident that broke his mind and yet nothing changed the core of who he was as a person—hopeful, seeking joy and sharing it too. That’s how I felt Williams was in real life: tender and vulnerable, sharp without being cutting, emotionally and intellectually flexible. I wanted/ want to be like him.” 

Agarwal believes that the symbolic meaning of these public individuals in our private lives has a lot to do with how we react to them in life and in death. And that symbolic meaning can swing anywhere along the curve of spectacular emotion—even anger. Queen Elizabeth’s death last year, and former US Secretary  of State Henry Kissinger’s demise earlier this year, both triggered an outpouring of negative emotion.                            

Other than being a factor of how long news of a celebrity’s death sticks around on the news cycle, our response to public death “also depends on how the public figure is being viewed,” says Agarwal. “Kissinger was a controversial figure. People might express their anger on social media to voice their opposition to his actions or policies. This could be a manifestation of the fact that the political issue remains unresolved, now that he’s gone.” 

“It could also be a function of the moral outrage an individual is experiencing at that moment, because of the strong disapproval this person has against this celebrity,” she continues. “And finally, on social media, people are experiencing this collectively, so in some cases, it can be a signifier of societal trauma.”

What celebrity deaths reveal about us

“The emotions associated with parasocial breakups, especially that of grieving, are vital to understanding the totality of relationships between spectators and sports figures,” writes James Bingaman, a media and strategic communication scholar at California Polytech, in a paper that reckoned with the response to basketball legend Kobe Bryant’s death in 2020. “Like real relationships, emotional responses of grief like sadness dissipate over time, while other emotional responses like love increase.”

“Parasocial grief, like real grief, is a process, not momentary,” writes Bingaman. But how do we process this grief? “I had a client once who spoke about feeling outraged about Rajput’s death because he was having suicidal thoughts and resisting it,” says Agarwal. “I’ve always tried to find where this deep emotion is coming from.” 

“The one thing I always say about grief work is that no amount of therapy can make up for the feeling of loss we feel when, say, Chandler Bing is gone,” says Agarwal. “But by processing it, we can give it a new understanding and make it a more manageable loss. Building on the strengths we have, we can in some sense move forward, and not keep holding on to those feelings within us.”     

Or it is as Mande says: Never meeting Dev Anand, Nora Ephron, Matthew Perry—all people he looked up to, who he watched on screens big and small, who informed his world, its edges and soft corners, and his way of being in it—“just becomes incidental”. “They remind us of who we were back then, when we were growing up with them,” he says. “In their passing, we come face-to-face with our own mortality. And we mourn not just them, but also the loss of our own innocence.”

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