Life After Death

On August 25, 2001, a late summer night with only the slightest chill hinting at the impending autumn, one of the brightest lights in contemporary entertainment burned out in a tragic accident that saddened millions. Aaliyah Haughton, known to most simply as Aaliyah, was on her way back to the United States from shooting a music video in the Bahamas, when the small plane she was riding in crashed, instantly killing her and everyone aboard...

Right before her death, Aaliyah had just finished filming her role in Warner Bros.’ newest feature film, The Queen of the Damned. Based on the novel of the same name by contemporary vampire fiction doyenne Anne Rice, Queen is the second Rice novel to be given the cinematic treatment, the first being 1994’s Interview with the Vampire.

The posthumous release of an artist’s work is an inherently thorny enterprise. It is a tradition that began with Virgil, the Roman poet par excellence, who took ill before he could finish his masterpiece, the Aeneid, and on his deathbed consigned it to flames so that it would not be published without his finishing touches. Western civilization has Augustus to thank for saving the Aeneid from this fiery fate. Countermanding Virgil’s request, he had the poem edited and published against the dead poet’s wishes. The emperor’s motives, however, were less than pure; although he undoubtedly had a sense of the Aeneid’s unsurpassable greatness, the poem also served Augustus on a more practical level by extolling, at least on a superficial level, the greatness of imperial Rome—the Rome that Augustus personified.

In our own day, the posthumous release of art is often much more venal and often equally selfish. What Augustus wanted was power, fame and immortality; by having the Aeneid published he achieved or helped himself to achieve, all three. What people want today is money and often there is plenty to be made when the artist dies before his or her work is released. A good example—and there are many—is Jimi Hendrix. As we all know, Hendrix had already achieved demi-god status among in the burgeoning rock and roll scene of the late ’60s when he suffocated on his own vomit in 1969. Hendrix hasn’t been alive for over 30 years, although some fans may take solace in the notion that he lives on proverbially in the incalculable influence of his work on all subsequent rock guitarists. It seems, however, every time one visits a record store, there is a new “Greatest Hits” or “live” compilation, perhaps with one or two unreleased tracks that will justify the $17 to Hendrix fanatics, of whom there are many. One gets the feeling that the man himself would roll in his grave if he knew what was being released under his name.

The issues raised by Aaliyah’s death and the release of The Queen of the Damned are, thankfully, far more intriguing than mere self-glorification (Augustus) or venality (whoever is behind the 500 posthumous Hendrix albums). For one thing, there is the infinitely dark, even brutal, irony engendered by the fact that Aaliyah plays the title role: the queen of the damned. If, a la Coleridge, we suspend our disbelief a moment (as viewers of Queen must do) and assume the existence of those quaintly dichotomous extra-somatic resting-places Heaven and Hell, then it seems that only the iciest of souls, the most immune to charm, grace and beauty, could imagine Aaliyah anywhere but in the former. And yet her parting shot to her fans, to viewers of The Queen of the Damned is as a dark vampire queen—as hellish a creature as one could imagine.

Aaliyah’s role in Queen also derives great intrigue from some of Anne Rice’s earlier work. As one might expect from a genre that has as its protagonists denizens of an eternally undead demimonde, vampire literature seems to be linked almost inextricably to conscious and unconscious reflections on mortality and immortality. Such is indeed the case in Interview with the Vampire in which Louis, the vampire being interviewed, expresses deep ambiguity about his eternal unlife. On the one hand, Louis laments the loneliness and drudgery of eternal existence, talking of “languishing in a day-to-day suffering” and the “desolate home of my damned soul.” And yet, many readers find in Louis a creature that despises mortals and mortality, and also enjoys his dominance and supremacy over them.

This ambiguity towards death and immortality follows a well-established literary precedent. And this tradition, considered collectively, can help illuminate the elemental cloudiness necessarily pervading any attempt to come to grips with the meaning of someone like Aaliyah’s early demise. On the surface, there is palpable horror and profound sadness at any death of a young person with so much potential. Sometimes, though, if we are honest with ourselves, we may have the fortitude to resist the seemingly inevitable inertia ushering us towards unqualified despair. A.E. Housman found such a vision in his timeless “To an Athlete Dying Young,” when he bids a deceased youth farewell with the heartening words, “Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honours out / Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.” By claiming Aaliyah after a mere 22 years on earth, death may have won a small victory. Ironically, though, by asserting itself overzealously and taking Aaliyah when her talent and popularity were at a zenith, it may very well have surrendered her to its archenemy and eternal competitor immortality.