Shannen Doherty is dead. 53—breast cancer, diagnosed nine years ago, went undetected during the year her health insurance ran out. Shannen Doherty, co-star of Heathers, who, in the words of screenwriter Daniel Waters, “didn’t know it was a comedy.” But she made her mark on television: Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed, a constant presence through the 1990s. And then what? “A disappearing world,” as Bret Easton Ellis calls it—anyone who’s listened to his podcast this year must be on the same morbid wavelength, because every episode without a guest is an hour and a half of dread and doom. “A disappearing world”—beyond all the media, physical and figurative, that’s vanished in the 21st century, the icons of that world, the American Empire of the second half of the 1900s, are dropping like flies.
In 2016, when celebrity deaths big and small were a constant presence in the news, many people talked about how “devastated” and “crushed” they were by, for example, the loss of Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, David Bowie, Prince, Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Debbie Reynolds, Alan Vega, Edward Albee, Phyllis Schlafly—okay, maybe not her, well, but then again, maybe… she died that September, deprived of what must’ve been the joy of seeing Hillary Clinton lose to Donald Trump. Small consolation, if any, if you hated Schlafly; still, just as any beloved celebrity, she was a presence.
The hyperbole is understandable: we may never meet these people, but we spend a considerable amount of time with their image and their voice, we see them and hear them whether we want to or not. And when they go, whoa—it is shocking, no matter how “lucky” they were. Roger Corman died at 98 just days after Steve Albini died at 61, the years between them the full span of the life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Corman, from the outside, lived a perfect life and got just about everything you can hope for from fate; Albini was robbed of his golden years. And that was in May, and it’s only July, but all of that feels so long ago now.
The attempted assassination of Trump has left me disturbed and anxious. His Vice Presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is a nightmare: a young Republican ideologue with troglodytic views on abortion that make Trump look like Betty Friedan. Before the assassination attempt, Trump had no successor, just as the Democrats have plenty of options, but none they feel confident enough to bet on. We know liberals are lemmings and will vote for Kamala Harris just as they would Joe Biden, but the DNC has already consigned themselves to a second Trump term, apparently. But why believe anonymous sources? And as crazy as this sounds, who cares about Biden anymore? An American President has been shot for the first time in 43 years. The first time in my life.
The future is slate blue, too bright to make out now, but who thinks that last Saturday was the climax of all this?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith