Gene Hackman, Conspiracy Theories, and the Celebrity Death Industrial Complex

The death of Gene Hackman, one of his generation’s most acclaimed actors, elicited much sadness and commemoration from his fans. He was a two-time Oscar winner whose performances could be truly iconic and someone whose influence can be felt in the generations of performers who followed in his footsteps. The memorials, however, were tinged with darkness as the circumstances surrounding his passing became all the murkier.

Hackman’s body was found at the same time as that of his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, and one of their pets. Authorities initially ruled out foul play, but investigators quickly reversed that statement. Their deaths were labeled ‘suspicious’ and led to an investigation. At a press conference held last Friday, investigators announced that Arakawa had died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, passing a week before Hackman. It is thought that due to his advanced Alzheimer’s disease, Hackman may not have realized that she had died.

It’s a bleak ending to their lives, one we wouldn’t wish on anyone. The tragedy of the moment was made all the worse by a potent combination of wall-to-wall media speculation and the inescapable furor of conspiracy theory. At a time of intense and government-endorsed misinformation, it was all too easy for people to assume not only the worst but the most frantic and suspicious of diagnoses to Hackman and Arakawa’s deaths. The vaccine deniers came out in full force, as did the QAnon losers who think everything is part of a Hollywood cabal of malice. Reasonable ideas like carbon monoxide poisoning gave way to claims of outright murder. Jeffrey Epstein’s name was, of course, invoked. So many people, including those who should know better, fell head-first into the rabbit hole. Many of them are still there. Indeed, the conclusions of the investigation have only further fuelled their fires.

There is something about a famous person dying that brings out the absolute worst in many of us. Sometimes, it leaves us desperate to atone for mistakes past, and ‘don’t speak ill of the dead’ becomes a cloak that disallows us from examining painful truths. It inspires a blame game or a slew of other games wherein the deceased and their closest friends and family are merely players for our amusement. Anything goes, both in what you can talk about and how you can acquire the necessary knowledge.

So, that means you can expect to see photographs of corpses, recordings of deeply painful 911 calls, and coverage of autopsies and funerals in ghoulish detail. No price is too high to get your hands on this deeply private information. Last year, we saw this in full force as TMZ broke the headlines of the death of Liam Payne many hours before his own family received the news, and did so by publishing a barrage of images of his dead body. Wolfgang Van Halen called out the site for allegedly paying off a nurse to tell them about the passing of his father Eddie (it took 20 minutes following his death for the site to publish the story.) It’s common knowledge how TMZ and many other tabloids bribe medical and law officials to get such details, regardless of its illegality.

In 2009, the British reality TV star Jade Goody died of cervical cancer. A tabloid staple who made most of her money from tell-all stories to glossy magazines, it wasn’t a surprise when OK! published a memorial issue of Goody’s life. That they did so before she’d actually passed was a little too on-the-nose representation of the media’s vulturous tendencies. Their special issue on the death of Michael Jackson used a grainy photo of him dying in the ambulance on the front page. ‘The last photos!’ the cover proudly declared.

It’s not hard to find pictures of dead bodies, and with those who are deemed newsworthy for whatever reason, such images are published with shocking convenience. The easy availability of something like pictures of River Phoenix’s corpse (taken by a photographer who broke into the funeral home where his body was being kept) only further highlights how well-worn this practice is. Even the most expected and mundane of deaths can be spun into a sinister tale for a grotty TV special or YouTube special. I hesitate to say we are desensitized to death through such practices since the obscene nature of such exploitation will always pack a punch, but we are certainly more apathetic about the ultimate cost. With dead celebrities, it’s our right to demand everything.

With someone like Gene Hackman, a beloved and respected actor with decades of work to his name and a relatively scandal-free existence, the curious circumstances of his death felt like an invitation to many to indulge in the worst excesses of the true-crime industrial complex. We’re a naturally curious species and we seek to find answers for everything, but we’re also prone to searching, maybe even hoping, for solutions far more exciting and dangerous than the mundane realities of the situation. The most predatory conspiracy theories are born from this desire to find a colourful, almost cinematic answer to a question whose truths we’re not ready to confront. For many, there’s something more comforting in imagining a sinister scheme behind the death of a 95-year-old man rather than the sad nightmare of someone losing their spouse to a tragic illness and then being alone in their final moments.

My instinct is to ask how we’d all feel if our loved ones were subjected to the giddy dissections that Hackman and Arakawa underwent, but nobody is truly exempt from this circus. A lot of families have suffered from conspiracies that treated death like the missing piece in an unsolvable puzzle, from the parents of school shooting victims to those who lost family and friends to COVID. There are plenty of headlines to be mined from this everyday pain, and a lot of money to be made by the same grifters milking Hackman’s death. The thing about conspiracies is that they need to be kept endlessly fuelled. Stop feeding the beast for one moment and it will crumble.

Death comes for us all. Perhaps the only truly relatable thing about celebrities is that their ending is the same as ours. No amount of reasoning or panic or fever dreams can change that, but it doesn’t stop us from trying. Celebrity deaths feel like the conduit for us to confront that fear but they’re also the springboard for us to deny it to wilder levels than, say, dealing with the passing of our loved ones. Making a celebrity’s death something outlandish or even fun distances us from a familiar, all-encompassing pain. Well, it won’t happen to us, not like that, right?