Dead Famous and Dead Sexy: Popular Culture, Forensics, and the Rise of the Corpse

Mortality, Vol. 13, No. 2, May 2008

Dead famous and dead sexy: Popular culture, forensics, and the rise of the corpse

JACQUE LYNN FOLTYN Department of Social Sciences, National University, La Jolla, CA, USA

ABSTRACT This paper examines the rise of the real and simulated cadaver of scientiﬁc and forensic investigation in popular culture and the cultural meanings of that ascent. While it spotlights the celebrity corpse, it explores the obscure one too, for modern media constructions have transformed both into infotainment commodities. In societies oversaturated with images of sex, death is the new sex, the corpse the new body to be voyeuristically explored. Gorer’s essay, The pornography of death (1955) is updated with a discussion of three kinds of dead body porn, including corpse porn. Other themes examined include: the continuity and discontinuity between actual corpses and their facsimiles, how images of corpses ﬁgure with other representations of the body, cultural ambivalence about the corpse, the banality of death, the search for immortality, and how the corpse as a social construction challenges Western cultural taboos and practices surrounding the dead body.

KEYWORDS: death; corpse; cadaver; the body; forensics; DNA; pornography; sex; popular culture; celebrity; fame; immortality; simulated reality

Death should dazzle when you stare at it (Quattrocchi & Harvolk, 1987).

Elvis Lives? Well, enough to give you goose-bumps! (Beagley, 2007).

Introduction From Saw and Hostel to The Passion of the Christ and Sweeney Todd, the corpse is the star of the show. In Six Feet Under, the living and the dead occupy the same social space, a funeral home. Corpse Bride was a critical and commercial hit and Desperate Housewives is narrated by a dead woman. In The Ghost Whisperer and Dead Like Me, the deceased help the living solve riddles about their demises. The survivor-horror video games/ﬁlms Alone in the Dark, Silent Hill, and Dead Rising offer chillingly realistic images of corpses. In the April 2007 Vanity Fair, Annie Leibowitz photographed cast members of The Sopranos made-up to look like stiffs.

Correspondence: Jacque Lynn Foltyn, PhD, Department of Social Sciences, College of Letters and Sciences, National University, 11255 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. Tel: 8586428469. E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online) Ó 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13576270801954468 154 J. L. Foltyn

Beyond these facsimiles, consider the real bodies of the dead. Family Plots features corpses as main characters at a mortuary. In 2004, the UK’s Science Museum, in conjunction with UK Channel 4, proposed Dust to Dust, the ultimate corpse show, documenting the decomposition of a human body. Hard news is laden with stories about the corpses of war, terror, natural disasters, murder, and crematoria and hospital scandals. I have been studying representations of death since 1993, and while deliberation about death is nothing new, in the last several years I have noticed something that is: the corpse count has gone up. Researchers studying television violence have found that the depictions of dead bodies on prime time more than doubled between 2004 and 2005 (Walsh, 2005; Winter, 2005). The homicide rate in dramas has been steadily climbing, with violent death, not illness, the leading cause of death (McIlwain, 2005). Death and dying themes have risen sharply not simply because of the proliferation of crime shows but as subjects for soap operas and medical dramas, where they doubled in the 1980s and tripled in the 1990s, in comparison to death in the general population (McIlwain, 2005, p. 58). Beyond this fascination with the grim reaper and the underbelly of crime, and the sheer numbers of dead bodies leaping off the pages of true-crime books, websites, and the screens of cinema and television, a particular kind of image of the corpse is propagating like locusts across media land, the grisly cadaver of scientiﬁc and forensic investigation, which is the focus of this paper.

Forensics and autopsy spectacles From CSI: Crime Scene Investigation to Cold Case, Bones, and NCIS, the macabre cadaver is pop culture’s new star. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner, autopsies corpses to catch killers and has made novelist Patricia Cornwall America’s best selling crime writer. Consider the names of the ‘‘death metal’’ bands Autopsy, Carcass, and Human Remains. Ponder the visage of death metal performer Marilyn Manson, who affects a corpse-like look and acted in ‘‘Autopsy,’’ a music video in which his ‘‘head’’ is sawed open. On Actual Autopsy, Forensics Files, and Dr. G: Medical Examiner, real medical examiners autopsy real human cadavers. For those who believe that extraterrestrials exist, crash on earth, and leave corpses for medical examiners to dissect, there is the documentary, Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction. International news was made in September 2007, when a Venezuelan man ‘‘came to’’ during an autopsy in the morgue (Winter, 2007). It took me 0.04 seconds to Google 12,400,000 autopsy websites.1 Amazon sells autopsy books and DVDs, and eBay sells body bags. Surf the web and you will ﬁnd mummies and real and fake corpses for sale; one can even specify the degree of composition desired. Toy stores sell CSI kits for kids, and fans peruse elaborate websites. In 2002, the anatomist Gunther von Hagens ﬂouted 170 years of English law by publicly dissecting a human cadaver; he charged admission and the event was televised (Holden, 2002). Traversing the globe with von Hagens’ ‘‘plastinates,’’ Body Worlds has made the skinless, glass-eyed ‘‘inorganic organisms’’ (Hirschauer, Dead famous and dead sexy 155

2006, p. 36) superstars. Part human tissue, part simulation, as of late 2007, 20 million people had attended Body Worlds (Press releases, 2007). With the caption, ‘‘Warning: May Contain Images that are Objectionable to Some Viewers,’’ ABCNews.com posted photos of ‘‘Paris Hilton Autopsy,’’ a clay sculpture by Daniel Edwards, featuring a naked ‘Hilton’ with her body cavity carved open (Paris Hilton autopsy, 2007). In January 2008, a judge sentenced actress Lindsay Lohan to morgue duty as punishment for drunk-driving (Lindsay Lohan’s new job, 2008). Whether flesh, fantasy, or some hybridized version of the two, this is the corpse’s cultural moment. To paraphrase Vesalius, the sixteenth century anatomist, we have taken the dead out of their graves and put them back in society. The question is why and why now? To explore the rise of the cadaver in modern media and the cultural meanings of that ascent, I will spotlight the celebrity corpse but the obscure one too, for whether household name or anonymous entity, real body or Hollywood manufactured illusion, the dead body has been transformed into an infotainment commodity. I am interested in the continuity and discontinuity between real corpses and their facsimiles, the mix of realities and unrealities that Haraway (1985) saw as challenging the boundaries between social reality and optical illusion, the physical and the non-physical, the human being and machine, and hence life and death. Cybernetic steering mechanisms allow immediate access to images of dead bodies, and the ways in which we are manipulating them are collapsing distinctions between what Baudrillard (1983) called the signifier and the signified. We are creating corpse facts and fictions to revive, re-imagine, and ‘‘play’’ with the dead, and in doing so are experiencing some simulated corpses as real and some real corpses as simulated. One way to play with the dead is to sexualize corpse imagery. Clearly, we are of two minds about the dead body, using and discarding it, displaying and secreting it, exposing and disguising it, revering and defiling it, viewing it as a site of amusement and solemnity and as sacred and profane. Attracted and repulsed by it, we have imbued the dead body with the tension of paradox, making it extraordinary and banal, wild and tame, useful and useless, beautiful through restorative arts and hideous in its natural state (Foltyn, 1996), a powerful threat to the living and a powerless entity, needing protection (Sappol, 2002). For each myth, discourse, statement, or behavior we construct about the dead body, we create a counter one to balance it, for oppositions allow us to experience various aspects of the corpse which may help us discharge some of the anxiety we have about death, in a secular time when such anxiety could be on the rise.2 The rise of the corpse in popular culture challenges Western taboos and practices surrounding the dead body, even as it exploits those taboos for profit. Ambivalence about the corpse is responsible for post-disaster and 9/11 voyeurism and the polarizing discourse about Body Worlds, which is debated as a ghoulish sideshow or legitimate science exhibit (Rager & Rinsdorf, 2001, cited in Hirschauer, 2006). It is responsible for the popularity of CSI, but the camera cutting away when autopsy photos are shown in an actual televised courtroom. It is behind the public indignation when images surfaced of the dead victims of 156 J. L. Foltyn

Hurricane Katrina and the South East Asia Tsunami, and the emergence of TVBoss.org, an ad for which a scolding mother orders a bloody corpse to stay away from her children. Uncertainty about the corpse’s status draws us to sensational images of the dead famous, but makes us feel dirty or guilty for looking. The muddled interdiction and fascination that death and, I argue, the corpse, holds for us demands an attitude of ‘‘both-and’’ rather than ‘‘either-or’’ (Bowker, 1993).

Dead famous: the celebrity corpse in the infotainment era ‘‘I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,’’ vamped Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. The years 2006 and 2007 were extraordinary years for the camera ready and unready famous with problematic demises as their corpses, not merely their deaths, became objects of rabid media attention. Whether newly dead or long dead, their corpses were transformed into sources of evidence by medical examiners and forensics experts armed with electron microscopes, DNA sequencers, and CT scanners. In the cases I discuss below, the information of hard news conflated with the speculation of soft, as infotainment storytelling strategies turned their mortal remains into voyeuristic spectacles for a greedy public enamored not only with celebrity lives but with forensic science. The rise of blogs as information and rumor sources for corpse news added to the frenzy surrounding these deaths, contributing to their status as media ‘‘events’’ and ‘‘leading stories.’’ While celebrities die all of the time of natural causes or by accident, it is not everyday that their deaths become subjects of forensic inquiry. ‘‘Vivisected’’ for public amusement while alive, when dead, their bodies may be dissected to uncover secrets, which are presented to a public baying for information about celebrity lives and deaths. ‘‘The answers are always in the body,’’ declares an early promotion for the NBC series Crossing Jordan. The cadaver has become a forensic tool (Timmermans, 2006), and forensic scientists argue that its physical evidence is factual, cannot be wrong, and is not absent because human witnesses are (Thornton, 1997). Since a fascination with the bodies of the famous is part of celebrity culture, it is natural that people should crave a last look—or a new kind of look—at their dead bodies. Once published, these forensic images enter visual culture. In some sense, the famous are unreal, spectral-like presences that we turn on and off with the flick of a switch, just as we do the performances of television actors. Whether in entertainment, sports, politics, or culture enterprises, they are ‘‘intimate strangers,’’ who shape nearly every arena of modern consumer societies (Schickel, 1985). Their looks, style, and performances contour conversations, memories, politics, and their spectators’ sense of individual and community identity (Blake, 2002). For all of these reasons, celebrity lives and deaths are points of reference and are intertexted in personal history, history, popular culture, and art. Known to most individuals only through magazines, television, and film, celebrities are mourned when they die by people for whom they have become a part of their lives. Spectators of modern media constructions are Dead famous and dead sexy 157 accustomed to raising dead celebrities as digitally preserved acts; in this way, the dead famous can be said to haunt us. It was therefore inevitable that news about the extraordinary or puzzling deaths of the famous should blur in the public imagination with the deaths explored on forensics crime dramas; after all, Hollywood stars frequently portray Hollywood stars as crime victims in fictionalized dramas. Law & Order promotes itself with the slogan, ‘‘ripped from the headlines,’’ and the boundary between crime news and crime entertainment has become hazier with the rise of reality crime shows (Dowler, Fleming, & Muzzatti, 2006). Research published in law and sociology journals acknowledges the ‘‘CSI Effect’’ on the perceptions of juries and the public; certainly, that effect affects the way a celebrity death is experienced by the public, too.

Saddam Hussein: live from Baghdad On December 30, 2006, the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging before an audience of hundreds. Soon after, an audience of hundreds of millions viewed official and pirated photos of his camera-unready corpse, swinging from a rope, and then lying on the floor, neck noosed, grotesquely broken. DNA was collected from his corpse to prove that the man arrested on December 14, 2003, groveling beside a dirt pit where he had been hiding near Tikrit, was the man hung on December 30, 2006, in Baghdad. In early January 2007, I heard my teenaged nephews yelling in the study of their parents’ home, ‘‘Whoa! Did you see that?’’ They had downloaded video of Saddam’s execution from YouTube, taken by cell phones and available almost immediately on the Internet. As of today, January 11, 2008, there are 29 YouTube videos of Hussein’s execution. The triumph of YouTube (and reality TV) proves that there is a public appetite for the real thing; what was supposed to be a private execution was turned into the most witnessed execution in history. For those in the West, it was the rebirth of public execution which had disappeared, over time, with the birth of the prison, as the bi-power of the modern state found new ways to discipline the body to punish it (Foucault, 1979). The days of vigilante justice and public lynching are long past; so is the fascination with the controversial 1968 photo General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon, taken during the Tet Offensive. While capital punishment today is outlawed, thought morally reprehensible, or takes place behind closed doors, cell phones and cyberspace have made Saddam’s execution into an eternally public event, and for some reinstated the carnival-like atmosphere of legal and extra-judicial public executions. Technology, used resourcefully, usurped the state’s bio-power and returned public execution to the masses. The killing of Saddam will no doubt figure in the next installment of the notorious, often banned, film series The Faces of Death. The films of actual people and animals being killed have achieved cult status, confirming that there is an audience for real butchery that public moralists fear. The film Untraceable (2008) tapped into the audience-within-an-audience for this kind of carnage with a plot 158 J. L. Foltyn about a killer who executes his victims for an online audience. The Roman emperors understood this blood lust and built arenas throughout the empire to entertain their subjects with the spectacle of slaughter. Blurring the lines between illusion and reality, entertainment and news, and the living and the dead, is the YouTube ‘‘favorite,’’ New Saddam Hussein Video (videocaststudios production). My 16-year-old nephew emailed it to me, calling it ‘‘a joke of what happened.’’ In the 19-second video, presented as a CNN Headline story about a ‘‘new’’ Saddam video that ‘‘popped up on a Baathist web site,’’ the post-execution ‘‘corpse’’ of Hussein is wheeled on a gurney down a hallway, covered by a white sheet. ‘‘Voices from the crowd urge a camera man to take a quick picture and leave,’’ a ‘‘reporter’’ informs us. The sheet is lifted; Saddam sits up, looks around and screams, as do all those around him. Over 100,000 YouTube users had watched the dictator ‘‘rise’’ from the dead by January 12, 2008, ‘‘obliterating the truth,’’ as Baudrillard (1983) would put it, along the way. Internet websites are loaded with simulated images of ‘‘Saddam’’ rising from the dead, hanging from his testicles, sitting with Satan, giving a Nazi salute, and getting a makeover by the gay foursome from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Posthumously, Saddam has found a life. The simulacrum is the message and the message is ‘‘real’’ (Baudrillard, 1983).

James Brown: the last dance On the day Saddam died, the camera-ready corpse of James Brown, the legendary R & B singer, ‘‘performed’’ in an open casket funeral show. For the ‘‘godfather of soul,’’ this was a last road trip, complete with a funeral parade, horse drawn glass carriage, and changes of costume at concert locations in Georgia, South Carolina, and New York. As Brown’s corpse lay statue-like in a gold cofﬁn on the stage of the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New York, he could no longer do his trademark splits, but his embalmed corpse lay center stage, a spotlight upon it, accompanied by videos playing on digital screens of the ‘‘living’’ Brown singing and dancing; the performance was televised. The corpse Brown and the virtual Brown were accompanied by live back up singers and dancers. Forensic pathology ﬁgured in Brown’s death, not to establish a cause of death (congestive heart failure on Christmas Day 2006), but to provide evidence for those contesting the terms of his irrevocable trust, i.e., his recognized children, people purporting to be his children, and his last partner. As legal disputes and charges of fraud, bigamy, and other criminal activity erupted among this distinctive cast of characters, Brown’s corpse lay unburied for 10 weeks, kept in a temperature-controlled room at his estate. DNA was collected from his cadaver to help solve the mystery of how many children Brown had fathered, a procedure he apparently requested before he died. After a judge appointed an administrator to oversee the trust, Brown’s body was buried on March 10, 2007, in his eldest daughter’s backyard. The family will exhume his corpse and move it to Brown’s estate for reburial, after they turn it into an Elvis-like Graceland. (Deal reached, 2007). Dead famous and dead sexy 159

Anna Nicole Smith: battles for the body and DNA As the corpse of James Brown lay unburied, another star died, albeit a B-list one. Nevertheless, the media frenzy surrounding her dead body remains unparalled, resulting not only in extensive media coverage but an editorial in the Journal of Popular Culture, claiming that the ‘‘bearded lady’’ of circus fame had risen (Hoppenstand, 2007). For weeks in the early winter of 2007, the camera-unready corpse of Anna Nicole Smith, Playboy model, Marilyn Monroe wannabe, reality TV star, widow of ancient oil magnate billionaire J. Howard Marshall, grieving mother of a dead 20-year-old son, and mother of an infant daughter, lay moldering in a Florida medical examiner’s refrigerator and required 24 hour ‘‘protection.’’ From what and from whom did her cadaver need protection? According to the Broward County Medical Examiner’s office, from the souvenir or thrill seeker who might want a piece of her body, and from the prying lenses of paparazzi and others eager to make a buck from a defining last portrait. Such an image could sell for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars to the tabloid enterprises that were daily growing richer off the public demand for sensational news about Smith’s death and corpse. Forensic science had a star role in the Smith saga, to establish a cause of death (accidental overdose of prescription drugs, complicated by a massive infection), and to put to rest alternative theories such as suicide, illegal drug overdose, plastic surgery complications, and murder (Officials, 2007). As Smith’s unembalmed corpse lay in the morgue, various court actions were proposed, ordered, blocked, and finally implemented to collect DNA from her cadaver and from the living body of her infant daughter Dannielynn, to establish Smith’s maternity. Smith’s corpse and its decomposition became a vicariously experienced anatomical exhibit, as news about its condition was released at regular briefings held by Joshua Perper, the medical examiner assigned to the case. Reporters hounded Perper for information about Smith’s body, asking whether it was presentable, rotting, had been viewed by family members, and so on, and Perper had the unenviable task of answering these questions in a dignified manner, assuring the public that Smith’s corpse was still lovely-looking but rapidly deteriorating. The inquiry into the biological identity of the father of Smith’s infant was the next installment of the forensics mystery. Several men came forward, and DNA analysis was necessary to provide scientific proof of paternity and to ascertain legal interest in the Smith estate. Besides the battles for DNA to establish parentage, there were brawls for Smith’s body, played out in the media. The fight for the body delayed burial longer; Smith’s desire to be interred next to her son in the Bahamas was finally honored on March 2, 2007. After her pink themed funeral and graveside service, which were photographed exclusively for People magazine and televised exclusively on Entertainment Tonight, Smith ‘‘walked’’ the red carpet one last time in a custom-beaded gown and a tiara with the help of pallbearers (Last respects, 2007). Her burial site was provided a guard. An attempt by Smith’s mother to have her daughter’s body exhumed and shipped to Texas for burial, was rejected. 160 J. L. Foltyn

A month after her February 8, 2007, death, The National Enquirer ran photographs of either the real or a photoshopped Anna Nicole Smith lying in a body bag at the morgue.3 In October 2007, infotainment news and blogs circulated a rumor that a photo of Smith, lying naked in bed with her face covered with vomit, had been offered for sale. As of this writing, there is one conﬁrmed last image and video of Smith dead, lying on a medical gurney, long blonde hair streaming about her, as paramedics attempt to revive her with CPR while sliding her into an emergency vehicle. Both video and photo are accessible through Google.

Princess Diana: cover girl Princess Diana’s death became a headline grabbing news story again in the past year, not simply because of the protracted UK-required Coroner’s Inquest into her death and the 10 year anniversary tributes to her memory, but because the Italian magazine Chi (July 2006) published autopsy drawings of her post-mortem body and a photograph of her dying in the back seat of the Mercedes, in which she was mortally injured. Although some of the images were first aired in the USA on an April 21, 2004 CBS 48 Hours special, they were new in the UK and denounced by the public, the princess’s sons, and the tabloid media as heartless publicity stunts to boost profits (Carson, 2006; Denial over Diana, 2007). Like the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith, the dying and dead body of Diana became an anatomical and autopsy exhibit. Later in the year, Dr. Frederic Maillez (2007), the off-duty French physician who ministered to the dying Diana before the official medical team arrived, provided a more comforting image of the dying princess (just as Dr. Perper did of the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith). He described her as looking elegant and beautiful, with an undamaged face, and as if she were sleeping. In the case of Diana, this narrative maintained the princess as an enduring icon of modern glamour, beauty, and sex appeal. More grotesquely, caricatures of the dead princess have appeared on websites as a smiling, decaying carcass or carved up autopsy subject. Because there is such obvious interest in the corpse of the dead princess, it is understandable why she is buried on an island at the ancestral home of her family. The Princess of Wales remains the world’s all time best selling cover girl (Brown, 2007) and the story of her death remains a staple of news and tabloid culture. Dead Diana is dynamic; ‘‘she’’ sells books, souvenirs, concert tickets (July 2007, Wembley Stadium ‘‘Concert for Diana’’) documentaries, films (The Queen, 2006), dolls, i.e., effigies of her likeness, and academic books (see, for example, Walter, 1999). In early 2008, the princess was still selling news as the Coroner’s Inquest rolled on and fresh descriptions of the dying princess and her corpse emerged, including what she was wearing when she died, down to the make of her shoes, belt, and the one earring found in the car. Testimony was given as to whether she was pregnant, in pain, conscious, unconscious, moaning, talking, silent, closed or open eyed, or flailing about as she lay dying. Dead famous and dead sexy 161

Princess Diana is arguably as famous in death as she was in life. Indeed, some celebrities become more famous after they die (e.g., Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe) and have cult-like followings that keep them visually intact and lucrative. The ‘‘lives’’ and images of dead celebrities at their youthful best are often more popular and proﬁtable than those of living luminaries (Foltyn, 1996). Protecting the dead celebrity’s ‘‘image’’ and keeping them ‘‘alive’’ has become a big business, for their likeness can be marketed and generate enormous revenues for their estates and heirs (Barge, 1995; Gibeaut 1999). Fights for the control of the images of Elvis Presley and Princess Diana are well documented, and they are ﬁguring in the recent deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and James Brown. This, in part, explains why control of the celebrity corpse and its burial location are so important. Tourists will pay to visit the homes and graves of the dead famous of a certain order. Elvis has his Graceland, Princess Diana has her Althorp (the Spencer family ancestral home), and soon James Brown will have his theme park. Biopics like Walk the Line (2005), which portrayed the life of Johnny Cash, play a role in resurrecting the fame of dead celebrities, and Princess Diana, Anna Nicole Smith, and Pope John Paul II have already been subjects of such treatments; a biopic of James Brown, to be directed by Spike Lee, is forthcoming.

Discovery docutainments In 2007, even the long dead bones of the famous were not allowed to rest in peace as what remained of their remains became cold case studies for Discovery docutainments, combining the resurrection strategies of the biopic with the pyrotechnics of forensic science. No less than Jesus and ancient Egypt’s Queen Hatshepset entered the human remains fray, with the airing of The Lost Tomb of Jesus (February 2007), produced by James Cameron of Titanic fame, and Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen (July 2007), Hatshepset, the beard-wearing pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty whose visage was erased from history in the fifteenth century B.C. In The Lost Tomb, forensic experts claimed they had identified the bones of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their child, through mitochondrial DNA found in the bones of the lost tomb and statistical analysis of the names on the ossuaries in which the bones were housed. Christians and eminent archaeologists alike mocked the findings as bad science but good TV. As for the Lost Queen, it had an additional forensic goal besides identification of a mummy: cause of death. Had the queen been murdered or did she die more prosaically, from cancer, diabetes, or sepsis created by rotten teeth? The findings: a positive identification of one mummy from a field of four through mitochondrial DNA extracted from a tooth. Death by liver cancer.

Benazir Bhutto: what no autopsy? As the year 2007 closed, the Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27 in Pakistan, during a political rally. After her body was released from the hospital, her simple wood casket was handed through a crowd, with a glass observation window above her face. Within a day, video 162 J. L. Foltyn footage of the assassination, complete with a gun and bomb detonation, aired, but there was debate about the cause of her death—from gunshot or head trauma from falling against her SUV after the blast. While Bhutto’s dead body was examined by medical professionals, and X-rays of her skull were released to the media, the fact that her husband would not allow an autopsy fueled conspiracy theories. We expect forensic inquiry into problematic deaths and the thwarting of an autopsy of Bhutto’s corpse proves how important forensic science has become in determining not only causes of death but in the shaping of social and political discourses.4 Like the JFK Zapruder tapes, shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the Bhutto tapes will live on. Like other corpses of the dead famous, hers will enter the realm of popular culture.

I chose the above cases because of their timeliness and because they highlight our culture’s obsession not only with the lives of the famous but with dissection, decay, and DNA. Forensic science as an important investigative tool came to the fore in each case; for legitimate reasons, to establish a cause and manner of death (all); to confirm or attempt to confirm personal identity (Hussein, Smith, Jesus et al., Hatshepset); to determine parentage (Brown, Smith, Jesus, Hatshepset); and to ascertain pregnancy (Diana). In the celebrity death, DNA emerges from the pack of possible evidence as a miraculous crime-solving substance; as in fictional forensics programs, it is the most desired kind of evidence (Turow, 2004). In The DNA Mystique, Nelkin and Lindee (1995) argue that DNA has become an icon in contemporary popular culture as science, medicine, and the law use genetic codes to establish identity, explain individual behaviors and, by implication, many aspects of human society. Court TV and live news coverage of high profile murder cases have played into our readiness to accept DNA evidence and forensic treatment of corpses as privileged and authoritative sources of not only knowledge but justice. For these reasons, in the realm of crime evidence, DNA is also widely regarded as more definitive than it actually is, thus the CSI Effect (Goodman-Delahunty & Tait, 2006). The infotainment coverage devoted to the corpses I have discussed created a series of overlapping media spectacles with sometimes preposterous narratives not only about DNA, but about the disfigured, decomposing, embalmed, dissected, disinterred, photographed, missing, and found remains of the newly famous, renowned, legendary, royal, semi-mythic, and possibly divine. Resurrected in photo and forensic labs, the results of which were splashed across all media, their cadavers attracted attention not only because of their fame but because their deaths could be framed as detective stories. As in any potboiler, there was a colorful cast of supporting characters: villains, dictators, unusual-looking coroners, fame-crazed judges and archaeologists, ex-lovers, friends and film directors, and monstrous family members. There were accusations of murder and humiliation in the moments leading to death. Infidelity, promiscuity, and transvestism play a part in some of the stories, as do hidden children, pregnancy, lovers, spouses, fiance´s, bigamy, and plastic surgery. Greed, fraud, and contested wills figure; so do grasps for power, vast sums of money, and political legacies. Dead famous and dead sexy 163

There were battles over genetic material and the post-mortem bodies themselves, and there was an audience for authorized photographs of their corpses, and for those illicitly obtained as well. Millions of people have gawked at whatever images are available of them dead, just as they have at the purloined ones of Elvis in his casket, and Marilyn Monroe and Tupac Shakur on the dissection table, each a click away on Google Images. There is a public appetite for secreted images of the dead; there is even a website called Top 10 Famous Corpses.5

Gerald Ford, Luciano Pavarotti, and Pope John Paul II When one contrasts the media interest in the above deaths and corpses with the recent deaths of US President Gerald Ford and the opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti, the differences are obvious. Ford died of natural causes, at 93 years old (December 26, 2006), and Pavarotti died of pancreatic cancer at 71 years old (September 6, 2007). Celebrations of their lives were televised and webcast in closed casket funeral and memorial services. Fini. Pope John Paul II died a year earlier than those in my sample, but a brief look at the coverage of his death and corpse is warranted. As with Ford and Pavarotti, there was no need for an autopsy: the pope died on April 2, 2005, of septic shock and irreversible cardio-circulatory collapse at 84 years old, after years of failing health. The telegenic ‘‘handsome’’ pope was a media star as well as a religious leader, who knew how to keep an audience rapt, even in death. In the dead pope show of Vatican City, his gray-faced remains were propped up on a pillow and displayed on a slant board in a televised and webcast Catholic ritual, harkening back to pre-modern days, a comment, perhaps, about the frailty of the body and strength of the soul that ﬁt the Pope’s spiritual message. For millions of the billion plus people who watched the dead pope extravaganza, the ritual was a mystical experience, no doubt. For others, the motivation was curiosity about the passing of an icon, an exotic mourning ritual, and, quite frankly, the spectacular image of his unembalmed corpse. John Paul II’s was the most viewed ‘‘fresh’’ corpse in history, and his funeral, history’s largest, complete with digital screens erected in Rome’s Circus Maximus (Gould, 2005).

Dead sexy: why death is the new sex Looking for explanations for all of this gawking at and hawking of real and virtual dead bodies, I turn to anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer’s essay, The pornography of death (1955).6 According to Gorer, popular culture filled a void created by twentieth century interdictions about death, as death exchanged positions with sex as the taboo subject. As Western societies became more liberated about sex and suffered from post-world war sorrow, they rejected death and some of its cultural practices: lengthy mourning, widow’s weeds, nineteenth century dissection displays (Sawa- day, 1996), and capital punishment (Foucault, 1979). Natural death, the corpse, and its composition became too horrific to contemplate as the death-denying culture took hold. The result? According to Gorer, a psychologically disturbed mass 164 J. L. Foltyn audience for unnatural, violent deaths as an entertainment genre, a genre he viewed as pornographic because of its brutality, exploitation, and distance from normal emotions like grief. He compared death porn to the pervasiveness of sex porn and prostitution in the Victorian era, a period when female sexual chastity and modesty were held at a premium among the middle classes. There is still much to value in Gorer’s argument. It anticipated Becker’s The denial of death (1973) and other influential works such as Kubler-Ross’ On death and dying (1969) and Mitford’s The American way of death (1963) that documented the American capacity for denying death.7 Far removed from many of our lives, natural death is sequestered in hospitals and old people’s homes, and is geographically isolated, as family and friends scatter across nations and continents (Walter, 1991). Death seems off in the distance, a ‘‘failure of a cure’’ (Aries, 1974). People may be shocked when someone they know dies, protesting the unfairness of such a fate rather than understanding death is part of the life cycle and not simply something that happens to celebrities. The fact is, many people living in North America and Western Europe today have never seen an actual dead person or witnessed a real death; they have only seen pop cultural representations of both. Not surprisingly, as death as an actual experience has declined, there has been an increase in mediated portrayals of it (Goldberg, 1998). These mediated portrayals, while not contributing to an obvious group denial of death, may contributetoitinamoresubtleway,by desensitizing and normalizing death through mass exposure to dead bodies. When Gorer wrote his essay, there were plenty of simulated images of dead bodies in popular culture but not many actual ones. (Access to real images of the dead was restricted, censored by medical, crime, and news professionals; photography of dead relatives that was common in the nineteenth century was out of vogue; Elvis, JFK, and Marilyn were still alive; and there was no Internet where anyone could post such images.) In the fictional worlds of television and film, the good and the bad were strangled, shot, and thrown off buildings; they were gamma rayed by space aliens, dragged into murky swamps by creatures from the black lagoon, and bitten to death by vampires. However, the camera did not linger over these deaths and the images themselves were tame. Bodies fell, the camera moved away, or if the camera focused on the dying or dead body at all, it was whole and appeared to be sleeping, not contorted in death agonies. My thoughts turn nostalgically to Quincy, ME, the 1976– 1983 medical examiner program. Exploration of the cadaver and its decomposition were not aims; it was given privacy, discreetly covered by a sheet on the gurney, with perhaps a big toe with an ID tag sticking out. I knew Quincy’s corpses were not real. Today’s fictive cadavers are imbued with verisimilitude in ways that would have shocked Gorer, were he living today. The new pornography of death is as grief-gutted as the old but dazzles the audience with its shocking corpses, flashy forensic science, and exotic causes of death that are far removed from most people’s experiences. There is an unreality as well as reality about corpse shows in which people die from asphyxiation in tar, stomachs burst from overeating, accidental decapitation, being sucked into a tree shredder, or being eaten alive by insects. Even if the viewer learns something about death, dying, decay, and dissection, this is death at its most ghastly, and that is precisely Dead famous and dead sexy 165 the point of the twenty-first century pornography of death, even when warmth and wit are written into the characterizations of the forensics experts.

The eroticized corpse Recently, a theology professor told me about Anatomy, a film chronicling the misadventures of demented doctors who dissect sexy young lovelies and view corpse parts as art works. Yes, death is the new sex and never more so than now, when death has not merely supplanted sex as a cultural taboo, as Gorer wrote, but merged with it. Granted, erotic corpse imagery is nothing new. ‘‘My first nude was the erotic body of the dead Christ,’’ a philosopher friend of mine once observed. Artists have long made the dead look sexy (e.g., Greek flower myths, Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, Millais’ Ophelia, Pabst’s Lulu, Minghella’s The English Patient) (Foltyn, 1996), and some of the attributes of beauty (stillness, calm, repose) are attributes of death (Bronfen, 1992). Fashion magazines feature striking, eroticized tableaux of ‘‘cadavers’’ modeling clothing in what I term ‘‘corpse chic.’’ Kissed, a Canadian film about a female necrophiliac had respectable reviews. Capturing the link between eros and death, the French use the expression la petit mort, the little death, to describe orgasm. There is a website devoted to this imagery: beautifulagony.com. The connection of fertility with cycles of sex, death, and rebirth is the most widespread of all ritual associations (Napier, 1986), and it makes sense that sex and death would mix in our imaginative minds in art and popular culture (Foltyn, 1996). Freud (1952) speculated that death and sex share a ‘‘hidden identity.’’ There is a fascination with death images and storylines that can be attributed to primal desires and, though they are frequently glamorized, they evoke fear and disgust as well (Khan-Harris, 2006). Lacan (1992) argued that eros and beauty guide us to our own deaths, presenting death as a ‘‘dazzling sight’’ (p. 62). Because the cosmetized face of a dead person can appear more beautiful in death than in life, it, too, may be viewed as erotic. In a world in which physical attractiveness is held in high esteem and viewed as a product to be sold in personal and professional forums, how we look in death is also increasingly important (Foltyn, 1996), and no more so than for publicly erotic people like James Brown, Anna Nicole Smith, and Princess Diana. Their looks were an extremely important aspect of each of their public lives (as they were for Benazir Bhutto and Saddam Hussein) and, as discussed, people were curious about how they looked dead. The sexualized corpse can be both contradiction and fetish, and death imagery can be connected with other passive states such as sleep and sickness (Bronfen, 1992; Dijkstra, 1983). Anna Nicole Smith’s death story is framed by mental and physical illness and by beauty; she was discovered dead, while ‘‘sleeping.’’ The Princess Diana death story is structured as Sleeping Beauty, the fairy tale princess. James Brown appeared to be sleeping in the casket in which he was displayed, and like Sleeping Beauty, was kissed by a prince, Michael Jackson, a prince of pop.8 While the deaths of sexy celebrities capture the public imagination, so too have the crime sagas of beauties like Nicole Brown Simpson, Laci Peterson, JonBenet 166 J. L. Foltyn

Ramsey, Natalie Holloway, and Madeleine McCann, proving that any story about the murder or presumed murder of a young, pretty, white female can make an instant celebrity of a previously unknown person. The ‘‘beautiful female murder victim’’ has been a popular cultural motif since the early republic in the USA (Cohen, 1997) and forensic science provides new ways to explore these crimes, which are often sex murders. In ﬁction, the beautiful female is the lead victim of sexually motivated crimes on Law & Order (Britto, Hughes, Saltzman, & Stroh, 2007). As Burfoot and Lord (2006) argue in Killing women: The visual culture of gender and violence, there is no surfeit of stories in contemporary culture about dead women.

Corpse porn Still, there can be no doubt that some sex charged images of dead bodies move beyond the erotic into the pornographic in ways more subtle than a snuff film. As taboos about both sex and death have relaxed in contemporary Western culture, and pornography has been increasingly destigmatized in modern liberal culture since the successes of Deep Throat and I am Curious, Yellow, there’s been a growing conflation of the two once forbidden bodies, the sex porn body and the dead porn body. If the unmourned, unnatural, violent death identified by Gorer is one kind of pornography of death; and the appalling corpse as an entertainment figure I have discussed another, a third kind of dead body porn has emerged in contemporary mainstream culture that combines the aforementioned two and sexualizes them (Foltyn, 2006). Hence the decomposing, mutilated, gorgeous victims of unnatural, violent deaths from kinky sexual practices that now appear regularly in forensic crime dramas and appear lifted from the pages of Sex crimes (Holmes & Holmes, 2002). Designed to highlight the body’s sexuality as well as its decomposition, corpse porn, as I call it, transforms the dead body in theatrical ways, while titillating the audience with information about sexual sadism and inclinations such as autoerotic asphyxiation and foot fetishism. Consider the below scenarios.

Medium (2006): a beautiful young woman dies from shock, tied to a chair, after her face is sliced into a grotesque mask by a psychopath.

CSI (2006): a man is forced to watch his wife be tortured, raped, and killed, and then is murdered.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2006): a dead woman falls from a jet wheel well, where she had been stuffed post-mortem. Held captive as a sex slave, she had been forced to participate in boxing matches with a man, who is sexually aroused by beating women to death; he, in turn, is watched by another man who is aroused by watching the struggle. A female detective lifts the sheet covering the woman’s body and remarks that her labia are pierced.

Medium (2008): a toddler is killed with rat poison and made to look like a doll; his killer dances, drops his pants, and presumably masturbates to his trophy. Dead famous and dead sexy 167

While the word pornography is bandied about loosely these days, not all images of corpses portrayed on forensics crime dramas are objects of debased sexuality, and while definitions of what is obscene are culturally and historically relative, I contend that the word remains appropriate for the above examples. In a culture where graphic violence and cadaver and sex porn imagery is being mainstreamed, the corpse has become pop culture’s latest porn star, the new body voyeuristically explored (Foltyn, 2005). No longer perused merely by specialized audiences of intentionally transgressive exploitation splatter, ‘‘torture porn,’’ or ‘‘gorno’’ movies, which revel in graphic violence and sex imagery, corpse porn has become a convention of television and popular film. Corpse porn and sex porn have much in common. Both exploit the nude, young, and beautiful, not the clothed, old, diseased, and ugly. Both rely on the close-up, the exploration of every nook and cranny of the body, which is prodded, poked, penetrated, and presented as an outrageous sight. Both luxuriate in body fluids. Socially appropriate emotion is absent from both. Love from sex porn. Grief, reflection, and discussion of the preciousness of life from corpse porn, which also divorces the dead body from spiritual or other moral lessons such as compassion. In the fiction worlds of CSI and its clones, the sexualized corpse is a stock character as is the murdering sexual sadist, who as in life is arguably the most hated and feared of villains. The forensics teams of crime dramas are usually sexy men and women, who invite our eyes to linger on them as well as the passive beautiful, or once beautiful, dead bodies lying mute on morgue slabs waiting for the medical examiner to open them up. While gazing at the bodies, forensic experts and detectives discuss penile implants, missing nipples, S & M lash marks, tattoos, and intimate piercings. In the realm of real dissection displays, it is worth noting that autopsy has been framed as a kind of rape (Sappol, 2002), and curiosity about such procedures as a kind of necrophilia (discussed in Hirschauer, 2006). The corpse porn star just as the sex porn star is most often a female, not only because of the long discussed patriarchal oppression of woman and the control of mass media by men but because of woman’s closer association with birth, sex, death, depravity, and dirt (Beauvoir, 1974; Douglas, 1966). However, as some of the above examples illustrate, neither is woman’s exclusive iconographic domain. Still, stereotypical constructions of femininity continue to mark women as victims and men as criminals; and in following with this formula, corpse porn killers are usually men. While female killers are frequent characters on crime dramas, they are motivated by greed, revenge, and jealousy (Cecil, 2007), rather than murderous lust or sexual sadism. As with gorno and sex porn, corpse porn moves easily into camp, especially in its American versions, with their kitschy plot lines, bantering detectives and coroners, and double-entendres. Representative is the January 1, 2008, episode of NCIS. The male victim has three fianceés (and is therefore an unsympathetic victim) and according to a member of the forensics team collecting semen from his clothing, has had a ‘‘party in his pants.’’ ‘‘Hi, I’m Dick,’’ she says, to describe the victim’s 168 J. L. Foltyn active sex life. The cast of detectives and forensics experts creates a sexually charged atmosphere in the lab as well as in the field, where they make lascivious comments to each other. ‘‘I’m not blowing you again,’’ says a female team member to a male co-worker. This brings me back to the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith, who was turned into a soft porn sex object even in death, when infotainment enterprises published salacious stories about the size of her breast implants and speculated about whether they had recently been replaced and whether Smith had undergone liposuction. It took the Broward County medical examiner’s report to quiet the rumors. Breast augmentation surgery had been ‘‘remote’’; there was ‘‘no definitive evidence of liposuction scars’’ (Perper, 2007, p. 8). Nevertheless, other details of Smith’s body appeared in the autopsy report that the media glommed on to: a ‘‘healed caesarian scar,’’ and a left buttock abscess, the site of a bacterial infection that was a contributory cause of her death (Perper, 2007, p. 17). While Smith’s body was embargoed in the morgue, I remember a colleague wondering aloud whether Anna Nicole had a Brazilian bikini wax. In the weeks after her death there were blogs with names like ‘‘fantasies never die,’’ in which contributors discussed whether it was acceptable to masturbate to images of Smith, frolicking with herself in a bathtub, now that she was dead.9 As a corpse, Smith had no veto power and hence no rights, which made the aforementioned protection of her body important.

Why and why now There are a number of historical trends responsible for the changing status of the corpse in popular culture, and the explanations offered below are by no means meant to exhaust the possibilities. Clearly, novelty and the drive for ratings tied to advertising revenues are part of the answer. The popularity of the forensic pathology novels of Patricia Cornwall, which have occupied bestseller lists since the early 1990s, inﬂuenced the development of reality and ﬁctional television series about medical examiners and forensic teams. Discovery’s The New Detectives appeared in 1996, and CSI on CBS in 2000, which in turn spurred more programming about the corpse as the star witness. To appeal to audiences attracted by forensics as a science and a form of justice, long running crime series like Law & Order have added medical examiners and autopsies. Court TV, the true crime book genre and crime news, which is central to the production of news, have also transformed violent crime into a product to be sold (Dowler et al., 2006), as have bestselling books by celebrity medical examiners. While there has probably always been an underground audience for grisly images of the real and simulated corpse, as a contemporary popular phenomenon they are relatively new, reviving the past ‘‘glory’’ of the pre-modern gruesome corpse, which church and political leaders displayed to teach moral and political lessons, before modern moral sensibilities, the medicalization of death, and the prison and funeral industry hid it away (Aries, 1974; Bynum, 1995; Foucault, Dead famous and dead sexy 169

1979). Entertainment today is moving the boundaries between socially and sexually acceptable contact between the living and the dead. Today, the mainstreaming of porn sells dark fantasies about death, sex, and violence not only in torture films and hard-core porn Internet sites, but in television series, fashion, advertising, and art. Since sex today sells everything from celebrity to food, why not use it to sell death, too? Forget prudery, corpse porn jazzes sex up, holds our attention, making both the banality of sex and the banality of death new. Bataille (1988) said it well when he declared death an ‘‘ecstasy of consumption,’’ fit to stand by sex and eating. Besides selling death and sex as news, infotainment, and entertainment, the body has other commercial uses in mass culture. Reality TV sells stories about dwarves, supermodels, and the deformed; and programs about body manipulation through drugs, plastic surgery, makeovers, anorexia, morbid obesity, weight loss, tattoos, body piercings, and body building. Decomposing and dissected corpses are newer displays of the dynamic body being sold. Medical dramas like House and Gray’s Anatomy feature unusual causes of disease and death, explore them graphically, and are counterparts to the forensics drama. The dead and the live body are being recoded, desacralized, and transacted in numerous other ways outside the scope of this paper by those who view it as a worldly commodity to exploit. Cross-culturally, dead bodies are transformed into the cultural body, aesthetically displaying a group’s common values, customs, social roles and social relations (Brain, 1979). There is a mass market for morbid images of the real and simulated dead and this tells us much about who we are as a people. In this vein, the de facto argument that we live in a death denying culture is more mantra than fact; rather, death has been more hidden than denied (Burt, 2003; Walter, 1991). Millions of Baby Boomers are now facing their first intimations of old age and hence mortality, and one reason ‘‘death has gone pop’’ is because a market has emerged to examine the hidden experience of death and to return death to the community (McIlwain, 2005). This may explain the arrival on bestseller lists of not only true crime, forensics novels, and memoirs by medical examiners but Mary Roach’s Stiff: The curious lives of human cadavers (2003); Sherwin Nuland’s How we die: Reflections on life’s final chapter (1996); and Joan Didion’s The year of magical thinking (2005).10 The public fascination with celebrity corpses is another way to collectively stare death in the face, as people talk about the famed one’s demise and ponder the inevitability of even the talented and beautiful dying young and ending up food for worms or fuel for the crematorium. The quasi-religious rituals surrounding the death of Princess Diana (and earlier, of Rudolph Valentino, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Ronald Reagan, and, in late January 2008, of actor Heath Ledger), the tearful testimonials about the virtue of the deceased, the televised funeral coverage, and shrines at the place of dwelling or death, are all aspects of a communal mourning and canonization of the dead famous as familiar to us by now as images of their body-bagged corpses being loaded into emergency vehicles and reports about them dying nude and encircled by pills (e.g., Ledger, 170 J. L. Foltyn

Smith, Monroe). In postmodern western secular societies, we may have Halloween but we don’t have a Day of the Dead. The Ars moriendi, the ‘‘art of dying’’ instructions, common in the European Middle Ages, has been largely lost, except in the hospice movement. Perhaps shared grief about the passing of celebrities and fascination with their corpses are ways for everyday people to better familiarize themselves with death and the dead human body.

Collective memory, DNA, and immortality The foundation of Western religions and of Western philosophy stems from the contemplation of death, the problem of mind and body, and body and soul, and what happens after we die. The popularity of speaking-to-the-dead television programming can be traced to this concern. In secular societies, where uncertainty about what happens after we die is apparent, the fear of death is managed, to a degree, by extending control over the corpse through dissection (Foucault, 1975). Perhaps the intensity of our hunger for scientiﬁc truth and certainty regarding the causes of death explored in forensics television and the mysteries of the demises of the dead famous, is related to our continued trepidation about death, a fear that arguably has increased as secularism pushes aside traditional religious convictions about the afterlife. Whereas before medical and forensic science there was mostly doubt and indeterminacy regarding problematic deaths, science offers more certainty. DNA has an emerging important function in individual and science worshiping societies where there is collective anxiety about what happens to personal identity after death. Nelkin and Lindee (1995) argue that one reason DNA has emerged as a pop cultural icon is because it in some sense has replaced the soul and become a sacred entity, a way to explore immortality. Von Hagens promises his corpse donors that he will preserve their individual DNA as a form of immortality and memorializing individual identity (Hirschauer, 2006). Cryogenic labs deep freeze the bodies or heads of their once living clients with the hope of reanimating them in the future or cloning them through their DNA. In this sense, the corpses of scientiﬁc and forensic inquiry may also be operating as signs of faith, hope, and certainty, in an uncertain world, as we search for immortality.

Notes [1] Autopsy websites: On November 12, 2007. [2] My inspiration is Lakoff and Scherr’s 1983 Metaphors we live by and the structuralist thought of Claude Levy-Straus. [3] According to the New York Post March 3, 2007, Braden Keil. [4] In the political as well as pop cultural realm, the body politic continues to hold power in the guise of the corpse. See Verdery, 1999. [5] Top 10 Famous Corpses: Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, Mussolini, Nicolae Ceausescu, Mao Tse-Tung, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Lenin, Hermann Goering. [6] Some of the ideas in this section have appeared in Foltyn, 2005, and Foltyn, 2006. [7] But as with Gorer, would have to be substantially rewritten to resonate with audiences today. [8] As far as we know, he didn’t wake up. Dead famous and dead sexy 171

[9] For example, A.V. Blog, Savage Love Extra (2007, March 14). Fantasies never die. Retrieved August 18, 2007, from http://www.avclub.com/content/savagelove/annanicole [10] The same can be said of illness.

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Biographical Note Jacque Lynn Foltyn is Chair of the Department of Social Sciences, National University. Her scholarly work focuses on human beauty and representations of death and her cultural critiques are published in a variety of forums.