Celebrity Grief and the “Glee Cast Curse”
What we do when it just doesn’t make sense
Glee’s “The Quarterback” (S5E3) depicts the Glee Club mourning the recent death of Finn Hudson. Preceding the fictional death of Finn was the real death of his actor, Cory Monteith.
I remember reading about Cory’s death after it happened. I was at my grandma’s house, and I saw the headline on Yahoo News. He looked so young in the picture, and even though I hadn’t seen a single episode of the show, my stomach dropped. Without knowing any details, a 10 year old Emma grieved a little over a tragic, unexpected death.
11 years after reading that headline, as I’m rewatching the show, “The Quarterback” is still a very striking expression of this outpouring of grief that I unknowingly partcipated in. The episode itself is a tribute to the character, with most of the cast reuniting and dedicated a week of song towards the late Finn Hudson.
Watching it, I got the sense that it was more than the characters grieving a fictional death. The writers were grieving too, inserting memories that we built with Finn over the last 4 years of the show. A quote of his was put on a plaque, and they lamented all the things that Finn Hudson would never be able to do.
I know more about Finn Hudson than I do Cory Monteith. When it comes to Cory, I haven't done the work to dig up remnants of his life on the internet to get to know him better. In comparison, I know a bunch about Finn Hudson, his strengths, weaknesses, and history. If not for the fact that Finn isn’t real, I would have more reason to grieve him.
“The Quarterback” blurs the lines between truth and fiction. We are expressing real grief over a fictional character and the man who played him. Cory’s real fiancee, Lea Michele, performs a song for Finn and their fictional relationship. After the episode, Lea Michele ended up getting a tattoo saying “Finn” to memorialize the character and keep him with her. Note, she didn’t get a “Cory” tattoo, instead, picking the character that he played.
All of this is enough to send me spinning in a post-truth “what even is real” daze. The way that we are experiencing grief through and about fiction gives me so much for my brain to chew on that I almost don’t want to go into the curse.
Forgive me more being ominous. Let me explain.
Three years after Glee’s series finale airs, Mark Salling dies. He played Noah Puckerman, another major character. He committed suicide at the age of 35 while awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.
In 2020, two years after Salling’s death, another star of Glee is found dead. Naya Rivera, who played Santana Lopez, died at the age of 33. It appeared to be an accident, and her body was discovered on the 7 year anniversary of Monteith’s death.
Three unnatural deaths of young people, especially when they were all major players in the show, caught the attention of the Glee fanbase and stirred a rumor of a curse. Three in a string like that couldn’t just be a coincidence, right?
Then, the backlash: Stop claiming that there is some curse! It’s disrespectful to the families that just went through such a huge, real loss. There’s nothing about Glee that would have incurred some supernatural wrath that must play out in the tragic deaths of its actors. That’s crazy!
Personally, I don’t mess with curses. Do I believe in them? No. Would I risk being cursed? Hell no! For the Glee Cast Curse, my stance in the discourse has been one of avoidance. My days of “no comment” are over.
The string of deaths could probably be most reasonably attributed to the fact that they are all part of an ensemble of young people who became famous pretty much overnight. The cast of near-nobodies that made up the Glee Club were subjected to the incredibly turbulent process of 15 minutes of fame. They were all introduced to high-risk lifestyles, assuming that they weren’t living one previously. What happened to Cory, Mark, and Naya was shocking, but not impossible in context.
I think that the invention of a curse was a half-baked attempt to make sense out of the volume of tragedy that comes with these losses. We want there to be a pattern to what is happening, and when the audience only knows the actors in the context of The Show, we can link their deaths to the show in our head. In fact, we can let the knowledge of what happens recontextualize the show in the first place. We can turn it into a conspiracy, and use Glee’s accidental predictive powers as proof.
Is it surprising that an audience grapples with the death of a celebrity by returning to fiction? We don’t know these actors, but we know their constructed personas. Most people feel significantly closer to the construction, because we have access to it in a way that we can’t have for celebrities.
How do we grieve people we never met, even if their work impacted us? The person we “knew” was semi-fiction, with answers and appearances influenced by media teams and agents. Their performance was edited, or their song was mediated through a record company.
Despite the fact that the output of the celebrity is constructed, and we don’t know them personally, they can still have impacts on us that make their loss unbearable. Maybe they starred in your favorite movie, or you used their interviews as inspiration. Our connections with famous people can be one-sided but still life-changing. We align our self-images with the art that we consume so often that the feeling of loss when they’re gone is (dare I say it?) real. These deaths are also usually complete surprises, as we aren’t close enough to the life of the passed that we can spot warning signs or prepare ourselves for that news headline.
The impotence of the audience to understand our own grief makes the experience more miserable. As much as I can miss Cory Monteith/Finn Hudson, some of my sadness over his passing comes from my own confusion. Who do I actually miss? Who did I know? What is real?
When another Glee Cast Member dies, which my biology textbook assures me is inevitable (something about “death and taxes”, I don’t know, I was skimming), this will begin again. The curse will be brought up, then debated, and then put to bed when the grief has calmed. Lord knows what mourning technology will be developed by then.
When it happens, I won’t be participating in curse jokes, even though I empathize with the people who will. That is how some people will organize these tragedies in their head. Instead of seeing a clear cause-and-effect, I look at all this and see a mess. I don’t think there is sense or organization to what happened with any of them. It’s complicated, and I’ll probably spend years tooling out how we ought to respond when a famous person that we know-but-do-we-actually(?) dies.