Liam Payne and our grim cultural obsession with celebrity deaths

Celebrities have rarely been allowed dignity in death, at least not when they die young or unexpectedly. Paparazzi photographers were first at the scene of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash, snapping away at her final living moments and blocking police officers from coming to her aid. In 1993, a recording of the desperate 911 call which Joaquin Phoenix made as his brother, River, was dying of an overdose was immediately leaked to the press, as were photos of the hotel room where Michael Jackson died in 2009. There is a thriving market in morbid memorabilia, and at the Museum of Death in Hollywood, visitors can enjoy an exhibition of celebrity autopsies, including of Marilyn Monroe, and crime scene photographs from the brutal murder of Sharon Tate.

But while people have always had a fascination with celebrity deaths, and the media has always been enthusiastic in exploiting this, the internet has made the surrounding coverage so much more inescapable. Paparazzi photographers might have captured images of Princess Diana’s dead body, but no editors were willing to publish them (if TMZ had been around back then, it might have been a different story). You would have heard the news directly through a friend or through an announcement on the radio or the TV. It’s quite a different thing to be scrolling through social media and suddenly find yourself confronted with images of the partial corpse of a young man.

Thanks to TMZ, and everyone who reshared this image, this is how millions of people learned about the death of former One Direction member Liam Payne. TMZ’s haste to get an exclusive scoop means this number may well include people who personally knew and loved him. Not only is this the worst way to hear about tragic news, it is immediately followed by cold jokes, call-out threads, people feeling compelled to make self-important and “nuanced” statements. The loss of a real person is flattened into discourse, before his loved ones have had time to even begin the process of grieving.

What is there to say about the death of Liam Payne other than that it is desperately sad? He was a young man, the father of a seven-year-old boy, and he meant a lot to millions of people. We know that fame – particularly when it comes at a young age – can exact a terrible cost, and that celebrity often brings with it painful loneliness. If the reports that he was struggling with addiction are true, this isn’t surprising; he wouldn’t be the first to seek that kind of escape.

The X Factor, in particular, has long faced accusations of mistreatment and exploitation. As Rebecca Ferguson, who appeared on the same series as Payne, wrote in a statement this morning, “I’ve spoken for years about the exploitation of young stars and the effects – many of us are still living with the aftermath and the PTSD.” Katie Waissel, a former contestant from the same year,  posted a tweet last night which read: “If Simon Cowell dare put a statement out on the heart wrenching, tragic loss of my dear and darling friend Liam, he would be a fool. We all know the truth… and I’ll be sure it all comes out.”

At the same time, we should also have sympathy for Payne’s ex-girlfriend, Maya Henry, who was in the process of taking legal action against him, after alleging that he was obsessively trying to contact her following their seperation. Although it stops short of being an allegation, she recently published a fictional novel, Looking Forward, which she has said was inspired by her own life: in it, the protagonist falls in love with a former member of a boy band, who pressures her into having an abortion and subjects her to physical and emotional abuse. She is now facing a vicious harassment campaign and being blamed for his death. It is a bleak, miserable situation all round.

It also seems like something we don’t need to know about, at least not in the details. We don’t need to see pictures of Payne’s dead body, obviously; we don’t need to see (alleged) pictures of his hotel room, and the snapshot they provide of a profoundly troubled man. The expectation that we should know these things is part of the problem: while it is in the public interest if allegations of abuse are made against a famous man, the culture of celebrity plays a role in making that abuse possible. Men don’t need to be famous in order to abuse women, but fame does often seem to damage men in a way which makes them more dangerous to those around them.

This is not even a point about Liam Payne – I’m neither accusing nor defending him – but it seems obvious that having to live within a system where there is a market for photographs of your dead body is not going to be conducive to forming functional relationships or being a well-adjusted person. The fascination with his death is just another expression of the same culture – so relentless in its surveillance, so ravenous in its invasion of privacy – which evidently made his life intolerable.