Culture, Celebrity, and the Cemetery

Hollywood Forever

Linda Levitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138609785
• eBook ISBN: 9780429880384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Monuments and memorials commemorating the dead and past events around the world have recently gained importance, not least because we are living in an era in which many are driven to record and archive the events of their lives. Cemeteries, in particular, are increasingly viewed as places associated with popular culture and cultural memory, with many now being considered as heritage tourism sites. Culture, Celebrity, and the Cemetery analyses the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, USA, examining how the cemetery presents itself as an attraction, whilst also safeguarding and promoting cultural heritage.Focusing on an analysis of the articulation and performance of commemoration, Levitt examines how the cemetery leverages its rich resources to draw visitors and the diverse ways in which visitors interact with the cemetery, considering the influence of celebrity culture, fandoms, and cinema culture. Combining ethnographic research with cultural analysis, the book situates Hollywood Forever in the context of cemetery development in the United States and argues that touristic visits to cemeteries more generally have become similar to visits to more traditional memorials. Providing more than just a critical analysis of this fascinating cemetery as a landscape of famous death, Levitt coherently weaves the theme of cultural memory and meaning-making throughout every chapter.Offering the first book-length study of the cultural impact of Hollywood Forever in particular, and the cemetery as public heritage space in general, Culture, Celebrity, and the Cemetery will be of interest to scholars and students of heritage studies and tourism around the world.

1 Introduction

Locating Cultural Memory

Monuments and memorials to the dead and past events are scattered across the built landscape of America. They are especially important today, an era in which many are driven to record, commemorate, and archive the events of their lives, both personal and cultural (Doss, 2010; Zerubavel, 2003). The digital revolution has created easy documentation opportunities and expansive storage, enabling one to create a personal archive of one’s life, including both personal experiences and cultural artifacts that have meanings attached to them. Such archives range from personal photographs and video to recorded film, television, and music. Thus, the past is especially personal and accessible, and as such it changes relationships with memory and history. As individuals engage in these archival activities, they mark new territories in the relationship between personal memory and cultural memory.

In their research, historians Roy Rozenweig and David Thelen (1998) discovered that history matters, significantly, to people in the United States. Yet history matters in ways that are personal rather than necessarily being patriotically attached to the nation-state. Seeking out historical knowledge is about finding ways to situate oneself in the world. What is my relationship to my community? How do I belong? Visitors can form a temporary bond with strangers when they stand together at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or at the Strawberry Fields¹ memorial in Central Park, as well as spontaneous memorials that take form in the aftermath of tragic events. Bearing witness may be significant because it allows one to join together with others in a shared experience. Feeling oneself as part of the history of a community to which you belong—local, national, cultural, or otherwise—is a fundamental reason to engage with history and cultural memory.

In her work on public memory and commemoration, Erika Doss (2010) proposes the idea that the United States is engaged in a practice of “memorial mania” marked by a driven and determined need to commemorate. Doss argues that the “excessive, frenzied, and extreme” proliferation of memorials is drawn from a pressing need to create material “repositories of feelings and emotions” (p. 13). Doss’s argument for a need to physically manifest our cultural traumas and triumphs is accompanied by an ephemeral sense of reality. A culture that contends with an overabundance of news and information is also subject to the feeling of one crisis rushing up on the heels of another, making it difficult to mark any particular moments as relatively more significant than the last. Those who have a personal connection to or investment in an event will store the relevant digital artifacts on a private hard drive or cloud memory, an act of preservation that is also one of isolation. The tendency to hoard digital photos, video, and articles that tie the individual to the event is a private endeavor, and because digital storage can be rendered invisible (in contrast with magazines, newspaper clippings, and printed photographs), they are easily forgotten. French historian Pierre Nora (1999) puts this dilemma in the contrast between memory and history. He notes that the “fear that everything is on the verge of disappearing, coupled with the anxiety about the precise significance of the present and uncertainty about the future, invests even the humblest testimony, the most modest vestige, with the dignity of being potentially memorable” (pp. 296–298). Unable to determine what should be saved, the default response is to save everything in the hope that something will eventually be valuable. Part of the impulse to create memorials is to insure that important public events are not forgotten. The built memorial also functions importantly on one hand to create a means for individuals to tie themselves to events, and on the other hand to create a physical place that represents people or events, enabling and promoting shared commemoration.

The touristic visit or pilgrimage to the cemetery can be, like the visit to a sanctioned memorial, a means of stitching oneself into the cultural past. This book considers the articulation and performance of commemoration in contemporary culture, specifically situated at Hollywood Forever. Because of the public figures who are interred there, Hollywood Forever functions as a site of pilgrimage for fans and as a tourist attraction for those with an interest in the various histories that are represented at the cemetery. Each chapter examines how the cemetery leverages its rich resources from the past to generate new collective experiences and attitudes in the present.

Through the outdoor film series Cinespia, a community-wide Día de los Muertos celebration, and annual memorial services and commemorative events, Hollywood Forever invites visitors to use the cemetery as social space. In examining the rituals and performances surrounding celebrity fan culture, this book looks as how fandom creates a sense of community that is deeply connected to the physical space of Hollywood Forever. Using the space of the cemetery for entertainment and leisure has the potential to change perceptions of the cemetery as uneasiness with the setting fades and visitors become comfortable and enjoy their experience. As Hollywood Forever functions as a space that can provide both solitude and community, perceptions of the cemetery change in the process.

Cultural Memory

As sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel (2003) points out, cultural memory is “more than just an aggregate of individuals’ personal memories” but rather comprises what a group, culture, or nation “collectively considers historically eventful” (p. 28, emphasis original). Where some instances of personal memory are performative, individuals who participate in acts of memory collectively are marking an event as significant. Commemoration becomes an event in itself. The nascent field of memory studies shows that people want to participate in making history. In an era of media convergence and access to extensive archival and contemporary media, people do this by creating documents, websites, and YouTube videos. They post Tweets, write blogs, and update their status messages, all means of one-to-many communication that becomes a part of public discourse, no matter how insignificant individual voices may be. Individuals participating in social media want to be stitched in—they want theirs to be one of the voices that is heard and represented on the landscape of cultural memory.

A similar perspective from Svetlana Boym (2001) places memory first in the quotidian. She writes of her own work in studying the former Soviet Union that “collective memory will be understood here as the common landmarks of everyday life. They constitute shared social frameworks of individual recollections” (p. 53). While on the one hand there is a desire to capture the present and sanctify it by transforming into a medium like a photograph, a status message, or a file that can be stored and saved, there is on the other hand the everyday movement through the world that is at the heart of what constitutes cultural memory. What is recalled and brought back through nostalgia and retro movements are not only groundbreaking and catastrophic events, but also the coffee mugs, the fashions, and certainly the films that were commonplace and taken for granted in their time.

Cultural memory is not merely a matter of looking back to the past, but rather looking back with a purpose—to reify, to restore, to transform, or to otherwise use the past to serve purposes for the present. Cultural memory is comprised of stories and images that communities and individuals hold up to remind themselves of who they are. By sifting through both personal and cultural memories, individuals work to create a narrative of a world they wish to belong to while also remaking, or choosing to ignore, the stories and images that conflict with a desired worldview.

Public monuments, memorials, and cemeteries are material articulations of that narrative in the realm of cultural memory. Communication scholar Barbie Zelizer (1995) asserts that cultural memory is concerned with “the establishment of social identity, authority, solidarity, and political affiliation” rather than with historical accuracy (p. 217). Visiting sites of cultural memory is a way to set into motion the relationship between the present and the past. Activating the past by remembering people, events, disasters, and celebrations works to establish group and community formation. Memorials often serve to form communities of like-minded individuals who remember together, building cultural significance through the value of collective memory. Such acts of forming community can also be a means of exclusion, as is often seen in acts of commemoration where some individuals feel the performance of memory does not represent their position. The addition of statuary at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the bitter infighting among family members, first responders, and other stakeholders at the September 11 Memorial & Museum are recent examples.

Many contemporary cemeteries eschew monuments, preferring the serene visage of a lawn park, intended to soothe grieving visitors. The even, undisturbed grassy field of the lawn park does not allow for creative memorials, yet the historical cemeteries that draw tourists typically include a variety of evocative gravesites.

Cemeteries

As cities and towns reinvent themselves as tourist attractions, cemeteries, with their inherent historical value, are an obvious draw for heritage tourism sites. Yet the cultural role of the cemetery is complex and varied. While it can be a place of daytime serenity and reflection for some visitors, the cemetery at night has long been characterized culturally as a site of fear and gloom. Whether one visits the cemetery on a ghost tour or with a small group of friends, there is some pleasure to be gained from the daring adventure of being in a foreboding, or perhaps forbidden, place at night. Popular culture has leveraged this fear through frightening stories set in the cemeteries of folklore, fiction, and film. For many, the proximity to the dead is enough of a discomfort to make the cemetery an unpleasant place. Some are uncomfortable with the idea of being surrounded by corpses, while others avoid the cemetery to avoid confronting the inevitability of their own death.

Cultural perspectives on the cemetery are as diverse as culture itself, and the relationships individuals have with cemeteries are influenced by an array of factors such as religious beliefs and upbringing, attitudes toward death, and personal experience. Children who grow up having family photographs made on Daffodil Sunday at Cleveland’s Lake View cemetery, for example, will have their attitude shaped by participating in an enjoyable outdoor celebration at the cemetery. Many others only pass through the cemetery gates in a state of grief, attending the funeral of a loved one and hesitating to visit the gravesite on subsequent occasions because the memory associated with that place seems irreconcilably sad.

While discomfort with the cemetery is more common than not, this was not always the case. Two acts of separation mark the changing cultural outlook toward the cemetery: the removal of the dying and the dead from the home and the relocation of the dead to the outskirts of the city. In his work on heterotopias, Michel Foucault (1986) marks the shift in attitude toward the cemetery as one that accompanies a geographical shift: the relocation of cemeteries outside of the city, which became common practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century, separated the living from the dead. Foucault describes the cemetery as a paradoxical “other space.” Deeply connected to familial and cultural life “since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery,” it is also detached from the processes of everyday life and physically removed on the landscape (p. 25). Establishing new cemeteries on the outskirts of the city was part of urban growth in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s and marked a significant shift in burial practices. In her extensive study of cemetery history, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, Blanche Linden-Ward (1989) describes burial reform at that time as “only one of many ways in which urbanites attempted to improve their surroundings” (p. 149); enhancing the conditions of graveyards was part of the overall growth and transformation of urban life. The overcrowded graveyard as the source of a pungent stench stemming from the decay of corpses buried there certainly contributed to the sense of the cemetery as a fearful place, even after more sanitary and pleasant facilities were built. Rather than being a place to mourn, the graveyard was a place to avoid.

Mount Auburn Cemetery was established in 1831 to stem controversy over burial practices in Boston. It was the first of the so-called “rural cemeteries,” and it marks a shift in the lexicon from “graveyard” to “cemetery,” denoting “the Greek word for ‘sleeping chamber’ because they were considered temporary resting places during the wait for Judgment Day.” Located in neighboring Cambridge, the cemetery was well removed from the urban center of Boston at the time of its founding. Mount Auburn served as the model for many other new cemeteries throughout the country. The rural cemetery is designed to combine the aesthetics of the natural environment with neatly-planned and organized plots, resulting in a garden-like setting. As such, the cemetery began to take on new purposes. Stanley French (1974) explains that in the rural cemetery “the plenitude and beauties of nature combined with art would convert the graveyard from a shunned place of horror into an enchanting place of succor and instruction” (pp. 46–47). As an “enchanting place,” the rural cemetery also became leisure space, a location for strolling along shaded paths and picnicking, before the development of city parks allowed citizens to escape the noise and chaos of city life. Cemeteries provided the primary space available for enjoying the outdoors in an urban context. Similarly, the monuments and artworks located in rural cemeteries offered the public access to art before museums were established. Nonetheless, those who saw the cemetery as a sacred place were irritated by visitors who came only to enjoy it for strolling and relaxation. These conflicts have been revived as Hollywood Forever and other cemeteries host cultural events.

The rural cemetery design led to a new kind of overcrowding—the overwhelming number of trees, shrubs, and monuments created visual clutter as well as high maintenance costs for mowing and upkeep. The cemeteries also faced overcrowding from visitors. Historian David Sloane notes that the rural cemeteries were early tourist attractions for casual visitors and guided tours, creating noise and obstruction for mourners. Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, the second such cemetery to be developed, saw as many as 140,000 visitors in 1860. In response to the concern about congestion, landscape architect Adolphe Strauch created the first lawn park cemetery in 1855 at Spring Grove in Cincinnati, minimizing the landscape elements and prohibiting fencing of individual gravesites. The result is a more placid environment, focused on uniformity and cleanliness rather than a lush natural setting. Hollywood Forever’s official directory (2006) describes the cemetery as a lawn park: “spacious, simple, pastoral landscapes would be complemented by elegant monuments and markers, combining art and nature in a beautiful park-like setting” (p. 2). Where public parks began to take over some of the greenspace functions of cemeteries at the turn of the last century, now Hollywood Forever is drawing people to the paths and gardens on the grounds. Visitors stroll through the cemetery and are welcome to do so.

The cemetery is a temporal refuge as well. Entering this isolated space can function as an escape from the crisis time of the present into a variety of pasts that can be rendered as more romantic, more idealized, or simpler than life is now. This kind of nostalgia is, as geographer Karen Till (2005) posits, “often motivated by a desire to replace apprehension about change in the present and future through the pleasures of remembering a known place in the past” (p. 57). Cemeteries are locations outside of place and time, and frequent visitors develop a strong sense of place that creates feelings of familiarity and comfort. It may seem paradoxical that a place where one goes to grieve, or may choose to avoid because of the grief associated with it, can be a place of comfort. Spending time tending to the grave of a loved one is a way of spending time with memories of that person, opening oneself to the pleasure of remembering that may be mingled with a profound sense of loss. Through that commingling, however, healing and a sense of acceptance about the inevitability of loss and death are possible.

Cemeteries and Commemoration

History finds a home in cemeteries that are visited as sites of commemoration. Arlington National Cemetery, for example, claims four million visitors a year, as individuals and families travel to Washington to perform acts of personal and cultural memory. Whether to watch the ritual changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns, to pay respect at the gravesite of John F. Kennedy, marked by an eternal flame, or to honor a family member or loved one interred at Arlington, the gravesite pilgrimage is not an uncommon cultural event. Yet these pilgrimages do not always involve national pride—as the visits to Marilyn Monroe’s grave in Los Angeles or to Elvis Presley’s burial site at Graceland indicate, fandom is also a common drive to commemoration. As the final resting place of celebrities and notable public figures such as silent film star Rudolph Valentino, actor Mel Blanc, best known for voicing Bugs Bunny, and Estelle Getty of Golden Girls fame, Hollywood Forever Cemetery has long served as a tourist attraction and a site of public memory. Valentino’s gravesite in the Cathedral Mausoleum exemplifies both the ritual and performative nature of commemoration. Since his untimely death in 1926, fans, film stars, and friends have made an annual pilgrimage for Valentino’s memorial service at Hollywood Forever. This tradition continued even when the cemetery suffered from neglect in the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake,² when broken tombstones, shattered stained glass windows, and lack of upkeep drew the cemetery closer to its eventual bankruptcy. In that bleak setting, mourning was perhaps a more prominent feeling than celebration for Valentino’s life and career. Yet such mourning would be tinged with nostalgia not only for the actor, but also for the long history of memorial services in his honor and the touch of glamour that once accompanied them. Going to the cemetery to remember Valentino, and to remember the glamour of the silent film era, enables visitors to participate in an act of cultural memory defined by coming together to commemorate the past. Individuals who participate in acts of memory collectively are marking an event as significant. Commemoration becomes an event in itself.

No monument or memorial can represent the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Locating Cultural Memory
• 2 From Gardens to Gloom, Toward Grandeur
• 3 The Celebrity Cemetery
• 4 On the Mausoleum Wall
• 5 Skeletons, Marigolds, and Sugar Skulls
• 6 Conclusion: Expanding the Scope
• Index