The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Communications VISUALIZING THE CHAOTIC BODY IN POPULAR CULTURE A Dissertation in Mass Communications by Shannon A. Kahle Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2010 The dissertation of Shannon A. Kahle was reviewed and approved* by the following: Matthew P. McAllister Professor of Communications Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Dennis K. Davis Professor of Communications Matthew Jordan Assistant Professor of Communications Stephen H. Browne Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences John S. Nichols Professor of Communications Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ii ABSTRACT The proliferation of traumatized bodies on screen is matched by the proliferation of body studies in the humanities and social sciences. The interest in the body has exploded among a number of fields of study and is a staple in visual culture. What is happening in contemporary representation and spectatorship of pain and ‘ruined bodies’? What is the relationship of contemporary visuality, the ruined body, and the social? Finally, what is the mode of selfhood deployed in contemporary visual culture and how is it related to other discursive-institutional realms of practice? In this dissertation I consider three fictional visual texts that elucidate particular institutional realms within which the body is centrally figured; these texts are the medical drama House M.D., the first three films of the horror series Saw, which draws heavily on religious discourse and iconography, and the forensic investigation drama Bones. The purpose is to consider the ways in which these texts represent the practices of each realm as well as the visualization of the body itself and the model of the self and the social deployed in each. I am proposing that these texts are not just symptomatic of cultural concerns, but that they help to articulate and constitute these concerns by incorporating and articulating them with other regimes of knowledge and representation. Moreover, as the literature on visual media, science, and culture has shown, the visual conventions developed and deployed in one arena of inquiry are rarely, if ever, unaffected by developments in other arenas of knowledge and culture nor do they remain in in the ‘originating’ realm of practice but become quickly entangled in or create new nodes with other institutional-discursive realms. I conclude in the final chapter by arguing that the use of open bodies in contemporary visual culture -- a characteristic of all three analyzed texts and others -- can be read through the notion of the grotesque body, and I will discuss the ways in which each text’s treatment of the grotesque body reflects broader socio-cultural shifts. I also consider some of the themes that emerge across the texts, which I suggest, are symptomatic of broader cultural concerns. Each text privileges the body as a means of knowing the other and cultivates an attitude of awe toward iii an authority figure who is a master of reading the body and its visual artifacts. I argue that this privileging of the body in popular culture is one cultural manifestation of an emerging challenge to dialogic and confessional practices in other realms. I then consider the implications of this for our notions of subjectivity by placing the challenge to confession alongside the implications of another conceptual recuperation in the texts studied here, that of the indexical property of the image. Bringing together two trends documented by a number of scholars, I suggest that visual mediation of the body may soon become a dominant means of understanding the self and others and speculate on some of the implications of this for contemporary modes of self making, the possibility for communication and cooperation, the limits of surveillance practices, and the nature of evidence in several (legal, medical, interpersonal) settings. Iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures................................................................................................................vi Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................vii Chapter One: Opening the Body....................................................................................1 Chapter Two: The Open Body: Its Symbolism and History .......................................19 Chapter Three: House M.D., the Body in Pain, and Spectacular Hermeneutics...........44 Chapter Four: The Saw films and Public Anatomy Theaters… ...................................88 Chapter Five: The Forensic Imagination in Bones ......................................................137 Chapter Six: Conclusion: The Mediated Self or Becoming Real(ly) Transparent ......188 References....................................................................................................................208 Endnotes.......................................................................................................................217 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Gunther Von Hagens with one of his plastinated corpses…..…………………. 1 Figure 2: Michelangelo’s David: classical closed body…………………………..………25 Figure 3 and 4 : Image of carnivalesque grotesque bodies……………………..…………25 Figure 5: Rembrandt’s The Public Anatomy of Dr. Tulp…………………...….………...32 Figures 6 and 7: Self-dissecting men from Valverdes anatomy text……………..….…..101 Figure 8: Detail from Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment………………………..…….105 Figure 9: Apollo, Marsyas, and the Judgment of Midas………………………………...107 Figure 10: The Rack device from Saw III……………………………………………….117 Figure 11: Still from Saw IV……………………………………………..…………..…..117 Figure 12: Form of Christian martyrdom………………….…………………………..…117 Figure 13: Valverde’s self –dissecting men…………………..…………………………118 Figures 14: Jigsaw’s self-dissecting subject………………………….....……………...118 Figures 15 and 16: Promotional posters for Saw VI……………………..……………... ….119 Figure 16: A promotional poster for Saw V………………………………………..……129 Figure 17: Dr. Brennan examines a body that has been cooked for hours……………...149 Figure 18: From “The Man in the Cell”………………………………………………....150 Figure 19: The Angelator in action………………………….………………………..…153 Figure 20: “Cinderella in the Cardboard”………………………….……..………….…154 Figure 21: No ‘body’ apparent ………………..………………………….…….. …….154 Figure 22: Each body is “cleaned” and the bones are then laid out in anatomical order……………………………………………………………………………………..158 Figure 23:In Bones the bones of the dead and the keen observational skills of Dr. Brennan are what often crack the case. ………………………………………………………..... 160 Figure 24: Bins of bones line the walls…………………………….…….…………...…161 Figure 25: Cover of 1884 issue of the American Phrenological Journal….……….……183 Figure 26: A Time magazine cover from January 2007…………………………..…….183 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to all of those who have talked with me and shared classes with me during the Ph.D. process. Thanks to Dr. Matt McAllister for his thoughtful feedback and helpful suggestions throughout this project. Thanks to Dr. Matt Jordan, Dr. Dennis Davis, and Dr. Stephen Browne for thoughtful feedback at various stages of this project. Thanks as well to Erika Polson and Doug Tewksbury for brainstorming sessions and general encouragement and support. Many, many thanks to my spouse, Corry, for his patience and encouragement. To those listed here and to the many others too numerous to name, I truly appreciate the time taken by each of you to encourage me and share your knowledge with me. vii Gunther Von Hagens with one of his plastinated corpses Chapter One: Opening the Body In 2002 BBC’s Channel 4 broadcast a public autopsy performed by Gunter Von Hagens, the man behind the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg and the globe-traveling show of plastinated corpses called BodyWorlds (Carvajal, 2004). Two years later Channel 4 began a regular series called Anatomy for Beginners, which broadcast the dissection of human cadavers in a German lecture theater. The accompanying website for Channel 4 describes the episodes as “Lessons” and links to the dissections of the various bodily systems. Around the same time as it began broadcasting Anatomy for Beginners, the British channel also began advertising for a donor for its newest show, at first titled Dust to Dust, which would broadcast the decomposition of donor’s body after death (Hoggart, 2005). I begin with these examples because they encapsulate in distinct but not totally 1 dissimilar ways the key concerns to be examined in this dissertation: historical understandings of the body, in particular the traumatized body, the visual mediation of the traumatized body, and the sociopolitical implications of particular understandings of the body. The existence and popularity of televised autopsies are not isolated examples. The U.S. has picked up a number of reality TV shows that have originated overseas and has created its own original televisual offerings that centrally feature the wounded or degraded body, whether it is through the graphic depiction of torture in television and film (Alias, 24, Hostel, Hostel II, the Saw films, Grindhouse, Wolf Creek, Captivity), through the reality TV games of pseudo-torture and bodily humiliation (Wipeout, Fear Factor, MXC, Survivor), through dramas focusing on body trauma (the CSI series, Bones, House M.D, E.R, Grey’s Anatomy) or through cable networks true-crime shows (Xtreme Forensics,