Death on Display: Reifying Stardom through Hollywood’s Dark Tourism

Abstract

n his 2001 book Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars’ Final Homes travel writer Mark Masek reports that 350 visitors pay their respects at Marilyn Monroe’s grave each day (187). This is noteworthy not only because Monroe died in 1962—before many visitors were born—but also because the tiny cemetery in which she is interred, Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park, is tucked behind high-rise office buildings next to a multiplex theater off busy Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. One must set out to locate Westwood; visiting the cemetery is a deliberate act, and for many it is a pilgrimage. Monroe is one of a handful of iconic stars who, long after their deaths, continue to gain new fans and remain powerful cultural commodities. Her image adorns posters, T-shirts, magnets, coffee mugs, shot glasses, and scores of items sold in gift shops lining Hollywood Boulevard. Pierce Brothers Westwood welcomes those who wish to pay their respects to the celebrities buried there, and the cemetery is one of the stops on tour guide Brian Sapir’s Haunted Hollywood tour. Sapir brings his clients to the cemetery because it is reputedly haunted, yet it is also a star-studded landscape where visitors can reminisce about film and television stars they admire, standing just a mere six feet from their mortal remains. Sapir is among a handful of tour guides participating in the commodification of death sites and burial sites of the famous in Los Angeles for the sake of entertainment, education, and profit. In their seminal 2000 text Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster John Lennon and Malcolm Foley exclude cemetery tourism from the growing trend of turning sites of death and disaster into tourist destinations. Lennon and Foley define dark tourism as a postmodern phenomenon in which sites of catastrophe become commodities of spectacle, in part as a mirror of our mediated experience of disaster. Categorizing the Death on Display: