Chapter 6

Abstract

Film has proved to be a perfect vehicle for the dead to further their influence and expand their reach to modern audiences from beyond the grave. Cinema offers another opportunity for the post-mortem canonisation that creates an idealised icon, re-invented and re-imagined for the big screen. The audience is interacting with this recapitulation of the singers, as produced to perpetuate interest and draw in ticket sales. This character comes to replace the rocker in popular memory, as the real and the virtual become intertwined in meaning, ‘… real life … becoming indistinguishable from the movies’ (Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1972: 12)).