THE CHATTER
Celebrity death pools are beyond morbid, but contestants feel no sense of shame
What would you bet that Olivia Newton-John will die this year? Perhaps more to the point: why would you bet that Olivia Newton-John will die this year?
Many people, it seems, have divined a future in which the beloved singer-songwriter doesn’t make it to the end of 2019, and have taken to the internet to wager on their macabre prophecy. Newton-John currently hovers near the top of several celebrity death pools — those seething haunts of morbid predictions, conducted annually online by a cabal of anonymous grim-reaper bookies around the disreputable margins of the web.
What sort of odds are they giving these days? It isn’t looking too good for poor Olivia. Now granted, she only turned 70 this past September. Her uncle, the German scientist Gustav Born, made it to a robust 96. But then she does have breast cancer, and a tumour on her spine, and was featured on the cover of the National Enquirer a couple of weeks ago under a headline which advertised the “shocking last photos” of Newton-John as she “goes home to die.” So you can see why the ghoulish punters are betting on death. Or can you?
The whole enterprise has the stench of putrid indelicacy, of an insensitivity to human life that’s blatantly distasteful — yet it is exactly this air of disgrace that makes the game appealing. The knock-on-wood taboo of suggesting that a living person isn’t long for this world takes lightly the wafer-thin tenuousness of our own lives, a brash affront to a fate that demands we treat it very seriously. No mere patsies to fickle fortune are we, those of us who dare to laugh off this mortal coil. It is as though by making a game of death we can somehow ward off the bone-deep terror it might otherwise inspire. So who’s seemingly poised to bite it over the next twelve months? Which senile nonagenarian news anchor or soapopera actress hanging by a thread is doomed to shuffle off this time? Somebody’s got to die. Just not me.
The death pool itself may be traced back much further even than modern ideas of celebrity. As long as people have gambled on sport, they have gambled on outcomes and results, of long-shots and chance turnabouts, that are the stuff not simply of victory and loss, but life and death. How much of a difference you perceive there to be between betting on the survival of a Roman swordsman in gladiatorial combat and wagering that Dick van Dyke won’t live to see his 95th birthday is a matter of discretion. We do our gambling, like we do most things, online today, and the internet has a well-remarked tendency to amplify our baser impulses. When the whole world looks to us like a raging Colosseum, even famous people going about their everyday business can start to resemble a spectator sport. Anyway, who can resist the allure of such an extreme form of prognostication?
One of the leading lights of the celebrity death pool industry is The DeathList, an annual forecast of noteworthy terminations that has been running now for more than 30 years. “The original idea was conceived in a bar at the Mandela Bar (as it then was) at Warwick University in December 1986 following the news of Cary Grant’s demise,” explains the unnamed authors of an archived record of the inaugural list. “A large team of DeathList novices came up with a list of 31 celebrities. The list produced just one success, however over the years the art of DeathList selection has been transformed into a science.”
The nature of this transformation they do not go on to clarify — although there does seem to have been a definite improvement in their calculations. Last year, they correctly predicted a dozen deaths, including Stephen Hawking, Stan Lee and George Bush Sr. In 2017, they guessed 17, a new record for the site, thanks in part to Gord Downie, Hugh Hefner and Jerry Lewis. “Years of promise were realized when the list smashed the previous record,” they beamed. “Has the DeathList forum become such a powerful resource now that we could see the record surpassed again?”
In the 1988 film The Dead Pool, Clint Eastwood, reprising his role as surly San Francisco police detective Harry Callahan, investigates a series of murders whose victims are a rockstar, a movie producer, and a critic — all names found on a high-stakes death pool list compiled by the man who soon becomes the case’s prime suspect. So influential has this trope become, apparently, that one of the more popular online celebrity death pools actually stipulates in its rules that any player who “kills or otherwise contributes to the death of any celebrity” is disqualified.
“It’s just a game, people,” the instructions are hasty to remind participants. Probably the armchair obituarists who tend to speculate on this kind of thing aren’t planning to hit the jackpot by planning real-life hits; safe to say these auguries are innocent fun. But The Dead Pool did touch on an aspect of the celebrity death pool that is fundamental to its attraction, even if Dirty Harry needn’t be called in to thwart the racket. The movie understood that it’s fame that keeps the bettors and their unknowing marks at a crucial remove.
Of course, not even the most die-hard Death Pool competitors really do wish death on the celebrities they’ve earmarked for extinction — except maybe the eager doubling down on Donald Trump as a 2019 wild card. But there is a reason Little Richard, Larry King and Tina Turner are the names fated for their end rather than, say, your aging aunt or the old fellow in accounting you heard coughing a lot before the holidays. The fact is, fame seems to insulate people from our empathy a little bit, in the way that exalts and modifies them, turns them from paltry flesh and blood into something hyper-real and therefore immortal.
We might very much like and admire Bob Barker, or Doris Day or Barbara Walters, to choose three strong contenders for 2019. But their eminence pushes them into an imaginary space where the ordinary rules of decorum and decency no longer apply — where we feel no guilt or shame speculating about how and when they’ll kick the bucket, as we would never do with our friends or peers. It may never be courteous, betting on death in this manner. But where entertainers are concerned, we can’t help but feel there’s only entertainment at stake.