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.

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