Category | Op Ed

Morbid sensationalism: Hollywood’s hottest trend

Published on November 3, 2009 by James Swift

A few days ago, I was snaking my way through the electronics section of a retailer when I was taken aback by the dulcimer tones of Billy Idol. I spotted a gaggle of children drumming and strumming away on the store’s display version of one of those Guitar Hero games.

There, in all of his post-mortem splendor, was an eerily realistic virtual facsimile of Kurt Cobain, soullessly spouting the lyrics of Wild Cherry and Duran Duran like a wormy ventriloquist dummy; in another game in the series, players have the ability to likewise puppeteer a Jimi Hendrix avatar.

Alas, this is the way we treat the dead in America; we view them not with a sense of respectful passing, but with a tinge of morbid fascination.

In that, perhaps it is somewhat fitting that the new Michael Jackson documentary was released on Halloween weekend, as I, for one, cannot recall a mainstream Hollywood offering as singularly ghoulish in recent memory. “This Is It” is a film that preys upon our most maudlin and puerile senses, a testament to the drawing power of our collective morbidity.

The atmosphere of the audience at my screening was interchangeable with that of a crowd viewing a “Saw” film. As filmgoers, we are corralled into the gallows, and we know that for the paled, emaciated puppet on the screen, there is no reprieve.

We know the man on screen is dead. Sure, he may be jumping around and gleaming underneath the wattage of the limelight, but in the back of our minds, we are envisioning a corpse, a deceased being strung up on marionette strings. Perhaps the most unsettling notion to ponder is that the film studio marketed the film as such; in the end, this is not so much a cinematic celebration as it is a sort of emotional pornography.

Americans have a very strange attitude toward death; for some reason, the greater collective equate one’s exit of the mortal coil as something of a censuring agent, a sort of public opinion blockade, if you will. It’s amazing, is it not, how the totality of one’s efforts and doings, specifically the negatives, are seemingly eradicated post-mortem in the public spectrum?

That’s the way we see it, anyway. A lot of cultures revere their dead; the Egyptians, the Japanese and the Indians are renowned for their veneration of the befallen. In death, the affected circle does not mourn the squandered potentiality for life as much as they mourn the passing of a certain influence on the concomitant chronology. The star of the funeral isn’t the man in the box, as much as it is the progression of time. To those cultures, death is the ultimate reminder of life’s forward movement.

And then, there is our culture, a brash, faux Spartan composition that is secretly mortified of its own demise. That fear of our own passing consumes us, it eats us alive, we turn our heads and pretend it is a non-factor, and when it does assail us? We act as if such an occurrence is a fluke, a misstep, a mistake in the natural order of things.

We don’t celebrate the lives of individuals in this country. Rather, we view their respective death through the eyes of a curious bystander, perhaps wondering what it would feel like to poke the body with a stick. That man in the coffin could never be us. It simply couldn’t, because as Americans, we expect to live forever.

That’s the rub with immortality: it doesn’t begin until you’re already dead.