My content warning is that I’m going to politicize a death. The proviso is that I never knew her, never met her, and as far as I remember never replied to one of her tweets. Foolishly, now I wish I had. I don’t know her family and wish them peace as they grieve. She had a lot of talent and a great career an unforgettable laugh. Her behavior could be childish, and her politics were despicable. In this way, she chose to hurt people. Now, it’s too late to do anything about it.
There’s something sad here. Not in the way that death is sad, but that the death of Kirstie Alley is sad. In a sentence, she was a conservative actress who, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, appeared in mainstream movies and on primetime television, and later fell in with some idiot fascists—and wasn’t very quiet about it. She voted for Trump. She tweeted about Ivermectin. In a spattering of capital letters, she called trans activists a “minuscule minority of lunatics” for suggesting that “chestfeeding” replace “breastfeeding.” She had 1.5 million followers; I’d blocked her a long time ago. She also posted a lot of pictures of baby animals, wished people good weekends, and told people she loved them. I knew she’d been a scientologist for decades, but I think I assumed her “in your face” expression of fascism was a phase, that it would end. End differently, I mean.
The obituaries have covered a lot of what I’ve said here: she acted, then acted insane. That was her life. It made me think of Alexander Chee’s essay about working, briefly, for William F. Buckley—a man who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1986 that “advocated for the tattooing of people with AIDS on their buttocks and wrists.” Later, when Buckley dies, Chee wonders if he knew “that this column would be mentioned in his obituary, along with the names of his wife and son and his place of birth—that it would, in fact, tattoo him.” Whether we atone for it or not, the harm we do in our lives is there. It stains.
Thinking about Kirstie Alley isn’t the first time that Chee’s image has come to me, the tattoos that show up in our obituaries. I think of it every time J.K. Rowling, for example, appears in the news. As another mediocre artist whose work has brought great comfort and joy to millions and who nonetheless insists, relentlessly, on using her influence to hurt people, Rowling’s behavior now is something of a warning, something of a loss. It’s despicable, yes, and—the and is important here—it’s sad. How do you stop someone from doing this? How do you help them remember who they were? More disturbingly, were they even who you thought they were?
Yes, these are feelings—and, admittedly, they’re misogynistic ones. I highly doubt I’d feel this same sadness if, say, Tim Allen were to pass away, despite his similar role to Alley’s in the entertainment that nurtured me as a child. Both were bumbling caretakers who did their best in an age when television was still awful and sappy, not yet sharp, not yet cynical. Both were inept but both you could go to, with a problem. And this is perhaps where the real sadness comes from: not that Alley is dead and Allen is belligerent but that both became, because of the things they read and the news they watched and the people they associated with, unapproachable. The image they created and cultivated isn’t gone, but it is inaccessible. They cut themselves off—and in the same way that millions of people have done with their own families. This celebrity’s death is a reminder that every similarly estranged family, out here in reality, will have their own moment of “it’s too late.”
In February of 2021, Jesselyn Cook interviewed nine “children of QAnon believers in seven states” for the Huffington Post. Profiling one frustrated, lonely young person after another, as well as the banal way that QAnon—the conspiracy generator undermining democracy by proliferating its propaganda on social media—infiltrates and dismantles relationships by detaching vulnerable people from reality and turning them against their loved ones, the piece was titled, painfully, “I Miss My Mom.” Often, for these “lost” people, something was missing:
Fear and confusion are major drivers of conspiratorial thinking; a key reason why QAnon’s allure skyrocketed early in the pandemic is because droves of panicked people were desperate for answers about the coronavirus that expert authorities couldn’t immediately provide. QAnon quickly conjured up its own twisted version of events, tactically affirming people’s fears while seeding suspicion of credible information sources. (QAnon is also a common destination for white supremacists, whose racism can’t be explained away by their educational status.)
Not everyone has given up, of course: “Some are desperately trying to deradicalize their moms and dads—an agonizing process that can feel maddening, heartbreaking and futile.” But others, Cook goes on, “believe their parents are already too far gone and have given up trying to help them. A few have made the painful decision to cut off contact entirely, for the sake of their own mental health.” One of Cook’s great strengths is to illustrate just how taxing it is to feel that the person you loved is no longer there—that they’ve been, in a sense, replaced.
Obviously, conservatives aren’t the only ones vulnerable to the way media gets inside people. Liberals, as I think I’ve made clear, become reactionaries if they perceive that something like genocide is beyond rational debate. Leftists, too, as Sarah Schulman has pointed out, can easily assimilate pop-psych vocabularies of “abuse” and “trauma” and turn them against those they love, destroying rather than repairing their relationships. Obviously these are all in very, very different registers. A white supremacist finding QAnon is likely to try to murder someone, whereas a leftist posting “give yourself permission to cut toxic people out of your life!” memes is probably just going to get a flare-up of psoriasis. But both are lonely, and both are made lonelier, because someone found a way to profit on media that pushes them deeper into isolation. Each person who retreats into themselves this way has made some shareholder or CEO just a little richer, even if, when it all adds up, it’s only a few more cents.
This is, largely, what drove me to write Image Control at one of the loneliest times of my life: anyone you love can be replaced by the vacancy of “entertainment values”; anyone’s mind, to use Schulman’s phrase, can be gentrified. And the hate that comes out of it—you hate that your mother says this; you hate that your uncle believes this; you hate that your friend won’t listen to you, won’t see you, any longer, as a person—quickly turns into hatred of the person themselves, the person you once loved and trusted, when in reality this hatred is grief. You’ve lost someone who meant the world to you. You lost them because someone took them away, and they did it for pennies.
Thank you for reading! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ve noticed this letter is now called Entertainment, Weakly. Since social media seems so much less stable than it was a month ago, I’ve remodeled a bit. Going forward, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell. Talk to you again soon <3
Yet another really excellent essay. THANK YOU for the important intellectual work that you do. Your mention of Buckley and the damage he did hit close to home for me, literally. Buckley's lifelong sidekick and brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, was my mother's cousin - the two families were from the local gentry of Omaha; my grandmother's older sister was his mother. My father once remarked, acerbically, that my grandmother (his mother-in-law) "basked" in the Buckley connection. And I knew Brent Bozell, slightly, when I was a kid. He was "nice" to little-kid me on occasional family visits. His wife, Buckley's sister, was extremely nice, especially to my brother into adulthood, e.g. taking him to lunch when he moved to DC and comforting him in the failure of his first marriage. It fully dawned on me only in middle age how completely nutty that whole bunch was, politically and ideologically, in ways far from harmless. She was a true-believing right-wing, Opus Dei-type Catholic and edited books for the Regnery publishing outfit. The political harm that Brent did is a matter of extensive public record. All of which is nausea-inducing on a personal level, whenever I take a moment to reflect on it, as now. But what's really sobering is remembering that he, Brent, was, legitimately, mentally ill (long story). There were episodes in his life story when that impinged on the wider family, like the time he showed up unannounced at our front door in small-town Wisconsin. And it's fair to ask (as with, say, Herschel Walker): To what extent did his personal head problems also impinge on American public life and society, via his assertive celebrity and influence?