Did we all play a part in Whitney's death?

Whatever may have ended the life of singer Whitney Houston, the public bear some of the responsibility for passively watching her decline over the years.

In the same way as people slow down to gawk at car crashes as they pass by, there is a morbid fascination with celebrity. It isn’t about wanting to be rich and famous and possibly talented like them. It’s about wanting to feel better about ourselves when they fail.

Nobody wanted Whitney Houston to have a drugs problem, nor did they want her dead. But the fascination with her struggles — perpetuated by the media and fed by people reading the stories — was just another example of our complex relationship with celebrity.

You could question whether her friends and family did enough to stop the domestic abuse by then husband Bobby Brown, or her self-abuse through addictive substances. If the public truly loved Whitney, as they profess to have loved her once her death was announced, could they not have pleaded with her to get help?

We wanted to watch her star explode and diminish, all while saying, “Oh I hope she sorts herself out,” and “Remember how amazing her voice was?” Surely, even in an age of saturated media coverage of celebrities and social media opinions, we should still feel uncomfortable at someone suffering. And Whitney suffered.

In a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, and summarised by the New York Times _,_ Whitney described the relationship with Bobby Brown.

‘I think somewhere inside, something happens to a man when a woman has that much control or has that much fame,’ Ms. Houston said.

Ms. Houston described a relationship with Mr. Brown that was tempestuous, to say the least. Once, she said, he spat in her face.

Another time she hit him on the head so hard with a telephone receiver that he fell down bleeding, just as their daughter entered the room.

Ms. Houston attributed her drug abuse to her passion for her husband. ‘He was my drug,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do anything without him. I wasn’t getting high by myself. It was me and him together, and we were partners, and that’s what my high was — him. He and I being together, and whatever we did, we did it together. No matter what, we did it together.’

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We can be so hypocritical about celebrities. Americans will watch talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres in droves, but then protest when a major store chooses her for marketing purposes — because she’s gay .

We like to put celebrities in boxes — spaces in which they can be contained, such as their music, or TV, or film — but then peer inside the box and expect to know everything about the person. When it suits us, we put the box on the shelf and wag our fingers disapprovingly.

There are plenty of celebrities who don’t seem to realise they are role models, British footballers in particular, it seems sometimes. Occasionally they act out for the cameras; sometimes they just get caught being human. Having to be perfect constantly for the public can’t be easy. We demand absolute perfection. . . and we demand flaws so we don’t feel so, well, average.

Whitney Houston had an amazing voice, and one that will live on well beyond her, perhaps, artificially shortened life. You can celebrate that, but not at the expense of learning from the mistakes we made in facilitating her decline through public spectacle.

There’s plenty of celebrities who don’t do or say anything controversial and we enjoy their music or acting or creativity. But we really like the ones who are rebels, the ones who misbehave and are caught misbehaving, and the ones who make our own troubles seem trivial.

A friend refers to some of those day-to-day issues as “first-world problems”, the sort of mini crises that when framed alongside starvation or extreme poverty, look miniscule. So many of us have first-world access to technology for instant communication that we can, and do, direct at celebrities. Even if some stars have thick skin, we might occasionally consider whether we should offer moral support when they need it, or turn away when they need privacy.

Being a celebrity doesn’t make you less human. Whitney Houston had all the highs and lows of a normal person, but just that little bit more exceptional, in life, and death.