Public Grief: Seeking Peace in the Media Ether

By now, there is a poignant familiarity to it. First comes the tragedy: the Oklahoma City bombing, the horrifying abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, the crash of TWA Flight 800. Then come the grieving relatives: parents, grandparents, siblings, sometimes cousins and in-laws. Some, understandably, looking as blank as automatons, others weeping copiously, they sit before the TV cameras and exhibit their pain while we uneasily look on--voyeurs in suffering. Last week it was Marc Klaas, apparently soothing his grief and anger by shuttling from one camera to another in the wake of the sentencing of his daughter’s murderer. Next week, it will be some other devastated soul.

To many, the ghoulish exploitation of people at a time of obvious vulnerability, when all they want to do is talk about their trauma, is yet another example of the media running amok. Journalists need an angle to humanize the abstraction of tragedy. Teary relatives provide great visuals. The tragic event itself is over--reduced to strewn wreckage or an empty crime scene. But a camera fixed on the cracking mask of the grieving is recording high drama.

In light of this, it seems pointless to ask why the media shuffle talk with benumbed mourners. They are simply doing what they’ve always done, all the way back to the tabloid Sob Sisters, who reported heartbreaking tales of woe in the 1920s. The real question is: Why do people who have suffered terrible loss now routinely bare their souls for television? The answer may say less about the media than about our own changing definition of privacy.

It wasn’t so long ago that stoicism in the face of adversity was regarded as a virtue. We would speak approvingly of how people bore their grief, how they held up. One of the most powerful allures of Jacqueline Kennedy was this very quality: the quiet dignity she displayed during and after the national mourning for President John F. Kennedy. We admired her strength and her grace, and one imagines her stature would have shrunk considerably if she had instead granted an interview to Barbara Walters and, sniffling and red-eyed, publicly aired her distress.

That’s because we all accepted the division between public and private conduct. We assumed that, at some point, Mrs. Kennedy had broken down, torn her hair and railed at fate. She would have been inhuman if she hadn’t. But we also knew that her breakdown was behind closed doors because this sort of personal exposure wasn’t for public consumption. In public, she understood it was more appropriate to conceal her emotions than to reveal them.

Her public decorum was precisely the kind of behavior that cultural historian Richard Sennett applauded in his landmark study “The Fall of Public Man.” Once upon a time, Sennett argued, people had an admirable sense of reserve and propriety. They obeyed a set of public conventions--a code of behavior--and the conventions governed social relations. In Sennett’s view, this role-playing was neither dishonest nor hypocritical. It was necessary to maintain order and community. There were certain things best kept private. A sensible world recognized that.

What Sennett lamented was the steady erosion of these public conventions under the onslaught of the cult of the self--what we call today “releasing the inner child” or “awakening the giant.” Convinced by the new psychobabble that the old social conventions inhibited one’s self expression and denied one’s true feelings, people began chucking those conventions. Where a person once guarded his privacy, now he seemed only too eager to reveal his inner self--his fears, needs, hopes, even his dysfunctions. Sennett thought this narcissistic and destructive of the social order, but it was, nonetheless, irreversible. Before we were just cast members in a large social drama. The cult of the self made us all stars.

What Sennett didn’t foresee is that the self would become a role, too. Sooner or later, all our forms of self expression, all our problems, emotions and claims of individuality, would also become conventions--just as routinized as the old social conventions he had extolled. In fact, what we have seen over the last 20 years is not only the transformation of once private behavior into public conduct, but the transformation of this “publicly private” conduct into something predictable.

No doubt, many of the victims’ relatives who go before the cameras have been borne along by the wave of the self and believe that showing their grief is both legitimate and, one hopes, therapeutic. Riveted by their tragedy, they need to talk as a way of anesthetizing their hurt, and if the audience happens to be millions, rather than one, so much the better. Perhaps they also believe that, in this age where nothing is private, public stoicism would seem a form of not caring for those they had loved. Sadly, they may think only television can validate their loss and give it the requisite amplitude.

But however beneficial these televised appearances might be for the grief-stricken, one also suspects that, without even realizing it, the participants are playing out a new role of mourner in much the way Jacqueline Kennedy played out the old role. We now expect these appearances. We know the routine of anguish and, subconsciously or not, the bereaved have learned how to conform. That is why Susan Smith could murder her children and then appeal to an alleged kidnapper to return them. Smith had watched enough TV news to be able to enact the whole gamut of sorrow: the tears, the screams, the clutched hands, the desperate entreaties. And she was savvy enough to know that the media and the public would attend.

Public grieving has become so formulaic that mourners go through the motions even when the media don’t demand them. Many thought it peculiar that relatives of the victims on Flight 800 called their own news conferences to discuss their feelings. One didn’t doubt their sincerity or agony, but it seemed odd to have them asking to face the cameras to show just how agonized they were--as if this confessional was now a necessary stage in the mourning process. Indeed, a recent TV news report here in New York showed the mother of a hit-and-run victim swooning around her tiny apartment, kissing a photograph of her son and keening for him in what for her was real suffering, and what for us was grand histrionics--mourning as performance.

That may be the awful danger lurking within these heart-rending appearances--as well as the hidden lure. Once one is facing the cameras, one may no longer be just a mourner. One may become a celebrity, unwittingly exploiting one’s own tragedy as the media exploit it--especially since celebrity promises to fill the void the tragedy has created. Edye Smith, the young woman who lost two sons in the Oklahoma City bombing, has become just such a celebrity. She is visited by hordes of media who see her as the symbol of the tragedy, and she proudly keeps track of every journalist who comes. The National Enquirer even paid for the wedding when she decided to remarry her dead sons’ father.

It is a macabre trade-off. They give us their pain, and the media give them short-lived celebrity. Obviously, it is not a trade-off anyone would willingly make. But in a society starved for new drama, and to people too disoriented to see clearly, it seems to work. Again and again, they open their private wounds, hoping to do their loved ones honor by proclaiming their public grief--hoping to find peace in the media ether.