Abstract
The moving pictures, with their enduring visual images, offered a kind of triumph over death, but they weren’t alone in fostering the illusion that death could be outmaneuvered. As we have seen, everything about Southern California combined to further dreams of immortality—the weather, the architecture, the lack of history, and the theme-park aesthetic of the cemeteries. If Forest Lawn promised a happy eternal life for the price of the funeral, decades later the creators of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery promise eternal fame, featuring tombstones with touch screens where the dearly departed can star in the movie of their lives. Despite the sentimental diction of its publicity materials, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery makes clear in a very modern technological way the connection between death and celebrity that defines Hollywood culture.
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Notes
Christopher Ames, “Shakespeare’s Grave: The British Fiction of Hollywood,” Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 407–30, 412.
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Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995);
Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 );
Clive James, The Meaning of Recognition ( London: Picador, 2005 );
James Monaco, Celebrity ( New York: Delta, 1978 ).
P. G. Wodehouse, “The Juice of an Orange,” in Blandings Castle ( New York: Overlook Press, 2002 ), 253.
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See Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 ), 13.
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John Fowles, The Journals, Volume I, ed. Charles Drazin (London: Jonathon Cape, 2003 ), 590.
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© 2013 Lisa Colletta
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Colletta, L. (2013). Movie Stars and Celebrity. In: British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935–1965. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380760_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380760_5
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