The Rule of Three is Dead

Conventional wisdom suggests that celebrity deaths occur in threes.  Just where this notion comes from is a bit of a mystery, likely solved to some satisfaction with a relatively brief Google search.  And yet the events of the past week or so have laid this concept to a sudden and hopefully peaceful rest.

It all started with Ed McMahon, but Farrah Fawcett died (albeit with some advance notice)… and then Michael Jackson met his sudden end…  And then Billy Mays… and now Karl Malden has passed on.  Is our 3-count down for the count? I suspect that it, like many of our superstitions, was more a matter of perception than of actual substance.  With that said, I believe that their proximity is of note.

Two things are at work here – and both of them have to do with great thinkers from the mid-century. The first is Andy Warhol’s prescient statement that everyone has, on average, 15 minutes of fame.  While this statement has come, for many, to mean that each and every person will have 15 minutes of fame, I’ve always understood the Warholian axiom to mean that fame averages out among the population.  For example, if there were only 6 people on the planet, and all of them knew me, but they didn’t know each other, then my 100% of fame would mean 15% fame for everyone, on average.

Said differently, if there are 6 Billion people on the planet, and each of us has 15 minutes of fame, that means that there is 90,000,000,000 minutes (or 1,500,000,000 hours, or 62,500,000 days, or 171,233 years) of fame to go around.  Now take a guy like Michael Jackson, who saw roughly 36 years of fame (from 14-50).  If we use him as an average ’superstar’ and divide his fame-life (36) into the total number of fame years available (171,233) we wind up with 4757 people who can have as many fame-years as Michael did.  Obviously, there aren’t 4757 superstars like Michael Jackson, so in order to accommodate all the fame, we need to move from superstar to D-list (and cut down the fame-years for each appropriately). If you keep sub-dividing celebrity (and expanding the definition), you’ll ultimately end up at Warhol’s conjecture that if you take all the fame-time that is possible in life and divide it across all the people on the planet, you end up with 15 minutes per person.

In 1960, the global population was estimated at 3,039,451,023, a number expected to grow to 6,848,932,929 by next year (thanks infoplease).  This doubling of our population in 2.5 generations (and still within most folks lifetimes) means that the amount of fame-time available has also been amplified, meaning more celebrity is available… This is one root cause for the increase in celebrity deaths (and one reason why it’s going to get more pronounced).

To borrow on David Cronenberg’s insights regarding Warhol, Celebrity = Disaster(death) and Disaster(death) = celebrity.  In this way, a celebrity’s death is a disaster, and the death of anyone is a disaster that makes them a celebrity – consider that the only times not-so-notable people are mentioned in the Newspaper is for their obituary.

The other cause of the death of the ‘rule of three’ can be traced back to another mid-century titan: McLuhan.  The Electric Media that McLuhan predicted, manifested by the Internet, has created more niches and more opportunities for global promotion than any other innovation in history.  From Perez Hilton to Paris Hilton, the mechanisms for production and distribution have been democratized (to paraphrase Chris Anderson), and we now have more mini-celebrities than ever.  Take for example this week’s user-generated content work of Julia Bentley & Andrew Gunadie who, with a well-produced and toungue-in-Canadian-cheek internet video became national celebrities.

The point is, when everyone has so much access to fame-time, and whenever there is so much opportunity to distribute this fame, the number of celebrities, and the number of the celebrity deaths, will naturally increase.

Warhol and McLuhan were fare more morbid and prescient than we ever considered, an underestimation that can only end in disaster…