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Superman is dead
The death of celebrity actors always brings a series of mixed feelings to me. I am aggravated by the media's insistence that somehow people who look good on a television or movie screen are in some way more important than anyone else. By my own hasty generalizations, many times famous actors and actresses are infamously stupid, greedy and/or ignorant. They attain their place by cashing in on the insecurities of a society that wants to be beautiful and/or incredibly talented at pretending to shoot guns or having sex with people. However, there is a case in the news recently that proves to be an exception. This is a case where I have to step back a few feet and pay attention to what a man did during his lifetime, despite being a successful actor. Christopher Reeve died Sunday. A bedsore turned into an infection turned into a heart attack turned into a coma turned into death. Not exactly a fortunate series of events. Add to it that this all happened after his nine years of near-complete paralysis caused by a horse and a rock. This is not a pretty picture, but the expiration of life does not always fall into attractive packages, even when you're talking about Superman. Reeve's last 10 years tell a story about celebrity, about money, about motivation, about the drive to survive catastrophe and still be positive and goal-oriented. He is quoted in several articles about his desire to commit suicide during the days after his accident, but maintains that his children and his family gave him the hope to want to continue living. I never paid much attention to the Superman movies starring Reeve or any of his other films, either, but after reading some of the articles about what he did during his life, I was amazed. Throughout the last decade, Reeve was a major proponent of stem cell research, as well as a soft-spoken advocate for Hollywood to take a stance on more social issues. I think maybe the media is actually giving proper due to a man who lost everything, but then through sheer tenacity, held on as long as he could and used all of the resources at his command to try to perform a service to the world. Since I've been old enough to be cognitively logical, I've run into conflict with how typical U.S. culture (at least from a media perspective) deals with death and dying. I remember a Time magazine article from a few years ago that wrote that in the United States, most people will die painfully alone in hospital beds. I now make it a point to observe how television and newspaper media portray the death of highly visible people (i.e. famous actors), and how this compares with the statistics from the Time article. Something always seemed wrong about a huge, full-color photo of an actor or actress running on the front page of a newspaper, complete with a story about how perfect and flawless that person was, when most people statistically depart in a rather somber state and don't receive much recognition, other than a five-line obituary in the local paper. It especially bothered me when the dead celebrity never did anything special during his or her life other than act. I couldn't help but think: These people don't deserve any more mention, any more credit, than the majority of Americans that were laid up in hospital beds -- who'd spent their lives working outside of celebrity status working just to get by. Where's the fanfare for the common man? But Reeve was just a little different. I don't see the whitewashing of facts and statistics this time in the reports. I see the work of a disabled man who wanted to help other disabled people and did everything he could to help make it happen -- something worth noting and celebrating at his time of passing. Today, unfortunately, a lot of celebrity actors take their worthless, pretty lives for granted, spending to excess, while the media blissfully devours their elite status. I feel that if a few more actors took note of how Reeve went through life and perhaps if the media took a look at the implications of their emphasis, tomorrow must be better. |
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