![]() But Thanatos is far more convoluted and byzantine than that. Briefly, Thanatos is the drive towards death and the compulsion to return to an inorganic, inanimate state-the state before one was born. Along with the libido, Eros is essentially our will to live. The first, Eros, is responsible for our desire for sexual reproduction, self-preservation, creativity, and productivity. In Freud's 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the psychoanalyst advances the idea that there are two opposing forces, or drives, that vie for supremacy over us. What people never consider is that one element in the heterogeneous constitution of those desires that we project-sex, adoration, wealth, greatness-is the death drive. Beneath this surface infatuation, we are projecting our own unconscious desires on the actors, poets, musicians, and painters we adore. And if, when they die, we deem them martyrs, we remember them, mourn them, and fetishize their anguish. We treat our stars and luminaries like the Romans treated their gods, living vicariously through the visceral extremes and glimmering extravagances of their love, lust, jealousy, and solipsism. But in contemporary American society, celebrities loom even larger. Starlets and matinee idols like them were never dragged through old age and imperfection, tainting their immaculate portraits and spoiling the loftiest dreams of posterity. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe have a sense of immortality because they were never subjected to the ravages and vicissitudes of time. ![]() There is also, in the case of those who die young, the opportunity to remember an icon at his or her most picturesque. There are any number of reasons why the deaths of famous people pique our interest. Why Staley's story and fate enthrall me I don't know for sure, but I can tell you that is has something to do with Sigmund Freud and one of his less popular theories, the death drive. The sonorous fatalism of his voice and lyrics his scheming, vagrant father, who used his son for quick fixes the incredibly drawn-out demise, in which Staley turned his condo into a wanton drug den/solitary confinement/grotesque playland of painting, video games, and crack pipes for five years. Sure, I liked Alice in Chains' music, but Staley's life and death got under my skin. In 2002, he was found dead, his body a rotting heap of drug-riddled putrescence. After the band released just two albums and a couple of EPs, Staley barricaded himself in his Seattle condo, indulging in a dark, secret, lonely world of crack and heroin use. My personal morbid fascination has always been with Layne Staley, the lead singer for Alice in Chains in the 1990s. The artists, musicians, and ersatz celebrities whose lives end in magnificent denouements of anguish and abjection are the ones we remember, cling on to, beatify. There is the aforementioned Sylvia Plath bowing into the oven, playing Gretel to the wicked witches in her head Kurt Cobain and all the conspiracy theories casting a gaseous haze around that sinister shotgun even Anna Nicole Smith, who has been immortalized, paradoxically, because the narrative of her life seemed so destined to end in sordid, premature death. There has always been something highly conspicuous about our obsession with the macabre deaths of famous people. As the decades go by and we become further removed from her death, the enchantment surrounding her life and work only increases, as if it were a time-release spell on the popular imagination. It has been 50 years since Sylvia Plath killed herself.
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