In one of her awkwardly phrased but extremely pertinent voiceovers, My So-Called Life's vacillating protagonist Angela Chase proclaimed, "It seems like some people have to die young. Like it fits them or something." Chase's choice words seem applicable to famous people. The premature passing of a star seems almost to be an annual event*. We are shocked, but also half-expectant, it's kind of a high price for living life in the fast lane- as if it fits them. There is a phantasmagoric quality about these deaths- the screaming sirens; the blinding flashbulbs of the papparazzi cameras in the media crush; the brooding, troubled shadows that inevitably lurk beneath the glitzy surface - all read like one of the deceased star's movie scripts, creating an atmosphere both eerie and surreal. It's hard to articulate what I mean, but it feels to me that the death isn't quite real, that it's just another tabloid stunt, or an extension of a movie role, and that the celebrity themself has been unable to differentiate reality from the warped fiction of their microcosmic lives until it's too late.

*The death of an icon, as with Michael Jackson (and to a lesser extent Farrah Fawcett), is much less common. Princess Diana and John Lennon are good examples. Others, however, achieve iconic status via their early death (Heath Ledger, River Phoenix), forever framed in a picture of youth, surrounded by the juxtaposing aura of possibility and devastating waste.