As someone who doesn't really keep up with the Kardashians so to speak, it's very rare that a celebrity death makes an impact on me personally. I don't subscribe to the idea of mourning for somebody whom I never met just because they managed to get themselves famous. But every once in a while, a celebrity comes along who has such an impact on me that their death leaves a hole in my life as if they were a close friend or a family member.
The first time that I experienced this was when Steve McNair was killed on the Fourth of July, 2009. McNair, the longtime quarterback for the Houston Oilers/Tennessee Titans, was my childhood hero. I grew up watching him play on Sunday afternoons alongside other idols like Eddie George, Frank Wychek and Derrick Mason, and I watched with agony as McNair and his team came one yard away from potentially winning the 2000 Super Bowl. When I came home from work one day to learn that my hero had been shot and killed by his alleged mistress in a shocking murder-suicide, I wept for the first time for a celebrity. I think that a fair bit of innocence dies the day that a person loses his childhood idol, and for it to happen so tragically and suddenly was certainly a big shock to me.
The second time that a celebrity's death evoked an emotional response from me was when Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer in Fall 2011. No, I didn't worship Jobs as a God for creating my laptop, MP3 player or cell phone, but I find him fascinating and had recently started watching videos on the Internet of various interviews and speeches he had given throughout his career, particularly after he had been diagnosed with cancer. His commencement speech given at Stanford University in 2005 was one of the most inspiring pieces of rhetoric I had ever heard, and when it was suddenly announced on October 5, 2011 that he had lost his fight with cancer at the age of 56, it occurred to me just how great a man the world had lost. Yes, he did give us all of these great gadgets and changed every one of our lives with his technological achievements, but beyond that he was an intelligent, ambitious and inspirational person, and his untimely death left the world without anybody to fill his shoes.
Similar, certainly, was my reaction to the death of Roger Ebert, who passed away last week at age 70 after a long and public fight with various cancers. Ebert was, without a doubt, the greatest film critic who ever lived, but after watching the live stream of the memorial program held in his honour in Chicago tonight, it's obvious to me that he was so much more than that. Seeing so many people from different walks of life share what Ebert meant to them personally as well as professionally, it became obvious that we, speaking not just as an aspiring filmmaker but as a person, have lost a great man; indeed, maybe one of the greatest men.
Lately, while seeing and reading the various tributes that have popped up all over the place following Ebert's death, I've been thinking about fate, destiny and whether or not each one of us has been put on this Earth for a definite amount of time to accomplish certain things. I don't mean any of this in a particularly religious or spiritual sense, but more in the sense in which the theme is pondered in Martin Scorsese's Hugo: Maybe each one of us is a cog in some giant machine, and the machine needs each of us to work. But what about when the machine no longer has use for us? After all, Roger Ebert didn't live a particularly long life; 70 is a relatively young age to die in this day and age. And yet in those 70 years, Ebert accomplished so much and impacted so many lives that the "machine" got more use out of him in that time than it could ever hope of getting out of most people in 100, 500 or 1000 years. After becoming ill in 2006, Ebert came back from the brink of death several times, and each time he came back with more and more energy and enthusiasm, influencing countless people with some of the best writing of his entire career. I feel like maybe he knew that each time life handed him a setback, he and his wife Chaz refused to throw in the towel because they just knew that he still had more to contribute to society. When the cancer returned shortly before his death, Chaz has said that Roger told her, "I'm tired. It's time to let me go." Maybe he knew, then, that the world had squeezed all that it could out of him, that he had given all that he had to give. Indeed, a mere two days before his death, Ebert embarked on a self-imposed "leave of presence", a sort of semi-retirement. Never, in all of his illnesses and setbacks, had Ebert ever made such a proclamation. Perhaps he just knew that it was finally time to go.
As a "cinephile" and aspiring independent filmmaker, Ebert's influence certainly isn't lost on me. Before the dawn of the digital age and YouTube and $500 film editing software, he was one of the only champions of independent film in the industry, and indeed some of the most influential filmmakers of the past four decades own their careers to his reviews. Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher... the list goes on and on and on. Thanks to Ebert, African-American, Asian-American, Latin-American and LGBT filmmakers were able to get their voices heard in an industry that otherwise wouldn't give them the light of day. It's because of Ebert that amateur writers and directors such as myself are able to do what we do. Independent cinema in general owes much of its existence to Roger Ebert; surely he's every bit as much to thank for the underground film movement as Robert Redford is for founding Sundance. If Ebert believed that a film was important and needed to be seen, he did every he could to make sure that it got seen, regardless of who made it or what is was about. And for that, he will always be one of my personal heroes.
But Roger Ebert is an influence to me beyond the realm of film, as well. He was just the type of man that everybody should strive to become: gentle, loving, compassionate, fair. His relationship with his wife Chaz seems to be exactly what I've always pictured true love to be like: two people who couldn't be more different sharing their lives together because they love each unconditionally with all of their hearts. Watching them throughout Roger's illness has been such an inspiration to me, and I feel nothing but pure sympathy for Chaz as she begins her new life without him. I've never been an advocate of the "star-crossed lovers" and "one soulmate" ideals, but if two people were ever meant to be together, it was Roger and Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert. Everybody should be so lucky to experience love like that, and it gives me hope that somebody I will, too.
And none of that is even mentioning the strength and tenacity that Ebert exhibited in the face of illness and death. His love of life became more apparent every time he nearly lost it, and his writing has been nothing less than inspired these past few years. Using Facebook and Twitter as his main outlets, Ebert had become less a film critic and more a friend to his readers, myself included. I took joy in reading his blogs and sharing links that he had posted on Facebook, and it was almost like he was one of my "normal" friends, somebody that I had known for years sharing and writing content that spoke to me not as a cinephile or as a filmmaker, but as a human being. Despite losing his speech and becoming severely disabled, Ebert wrote with such zest and enthusiasm that it was impossible not to be inspired by him.
It really does go to show that just because one loses the ability to speak doesn't mean that he loses his voice.
