On David Bowie, Alan Rickman, and the Immortality of Artists

On Monday, January 11, the word went out that David Bowie had passed away from cancer at the age of 69. On Thursday, January 14, it was revealed that Alan Rickman had suffered the same fate. Within hours of their deaths, the news and social media were filled with conversation about these men. Statements were made by their family and friends commemorating them, while thousands of people who never knew them personally expressed sadness at their passing. By now, it's almost become a familiar script, one we've all seen before with the passings of people like Christopher Lee, and Leonard Nimoy, and Robin Williams.

It's not every time a famous person dies that they are commemorated in this way, with a near-universal expression of regret, respect, and memory. The ones that do almost always seem to have one thing in common: in some respect, they are all artists. These are not shallow celebrities of the kind American pop culture gets roundly criticized for elevating and glorifying, but people of talent, people who garnered the respect of their peers and the admiration of their audience, who had influence on their fields. People who, to the ones they inspired, genuinely mattered.

And maybe that's why people mourn the passing of Bowie and Rickman so openly. They never knew us, but we knew them. Such is the relationship between artist and audience: in putting their art out into the world, the artist becomes part of the lives of people that they will never meet. In listening to a David Bowie album or watching an Alan Rickman film, we absorbed pieces of them into ourselves, and, over time, the pieces of artists we absorb become pieces of us. Through their art, we can be influenced just as much by people we have never met as by people we have known intimately our whole lives. Would I be who I am without absorbing the influence of Philip Pullman, or Peter Jackson, or U2? No.

And in this, the beauty in the tragedy can be found, that even after the human life of an artist ends, their work and influence survives, and takes new life. In the theatricality of David Bowie, Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga took inspiration, interpreting his influence in radically different directions that will inspire yet more artists. In Alan Rickman's performances, actors will continue to find elements that they will incorporate into their own work. And the cycle of inspiration and creation will continue, as every artist leaves in their wake a world of influence and inspiration to be inherited by new artists, to take on new forms. In this sense, every artist is an immortal.