Death in the 21st Century

W. Scott Poole

Foreword: The Faces of Death (John Alan Schwartz, 1978)

Sometime in 1988, a teen me huddled with a large group that contained a few friends, a lot of acquaintances and one or two people who bullied me. We watched a VHS marathon that included Wes Craven’s 1977 The Hills Have Eyes and the very recently released Predator.

This night passed at the height of that golden age of home video during which the much-desired VCR gifted us the shocking ability to watch flicks that once had just been rumours on the wind. I recall that my high school crush was present. But it’s a serious toss-up whether I was there for her or for the great white whale of Wes Craven’s early work. I knew the man who frankensteined Fred Kruger from cultural nightmares once made a notorious atomic age cannibal film that I’d been too young to see. All apologies to my long-lost crush, but I’m pretty sure I showed up for the irradiated flesh-eaters.

One of my more transgressive friends brought along another tape that night: one that many in our small rural community believed to be nothing more than an urban legend. Called Faces of Death, the film carried a notorious reputation for supposedly showing actual human and animal death in traffic accidents, executions and purported cannibalism. It’s ill-smelling reputation connected it to urban legends of ‘the snuff film’ that circulated since at least 1969. We know now that some of the more outlandish moments of sudden mortality are simply not-so-great SFX work.

I remember little about it because I watched under ten minutes and went home, abandoning my crush, a giant tub of popcorn and movie night, fleeing ingloriously before the pale rider and his many faces.

Why? My introduction to the macabre came early with a morbid sensibility from some of the horrific aspects of my childhood religion that entwined in strange ways with love for Universal Studio’s monsters and their own unique faces of death-gruesome Frankenstein in his ersatz body of decay and the savagery of the Wolfman who tore and rent with seemingly no purpose. John Carpenter’s Halloween held me in thrall, and in an upcoming summer I would watch it repeatedly, using my video store clerk privileges to keep it permanently, and rather criminally, on reserve for myself. My love for Wes Craven’s nightmares brought me out that night to a scary hang-out with the popular kids, which in itself was a real leap into the social abyss for a not-so-popular kid already displaying the reclusive tendencies that have grown over time.

So why pull the nose up at Faces of Death?

There’s sense in which the many brilliant thinkers you’ll meet in this volume are seeking their own answers to similar questions. In various ways, each deals with how we represent death in art … film, anime, graphic novels, literary fiction and video/PC games. The authors examine fantasies and nightmares about death through constructions of contagion, the death dealing politics of contemporary fascism and our collective suicide pact to create catastrophic climate change. Despite a diversity of purpose, there’s an implicit set of questions that runs through the collection. Why do we need these representations? Why does, as the variety you see here suggests (Harry Potter to The Autopsy of Jane Doe to Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic), mass culture need the faces of death? Another way to ask this: why would entertainment flirt so wantonly with what the Book of Job eloquently calls ‘the King of Terrors?’

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The skeletal remains of Neanderthals are, with little exception, scored and scarred, a savage archive of a brief lifetime of brutalities. These are the fragmented bones of hunters who crept up close to their prey, for whom getting dinner meant hand-to-hand combat with a prospective meal trying to make you a meal, one of nature’s last fair fights. Anthropologists tend to agree that this daily reality pushed humans towards crafting the spear, arrow and sling, to imagine the possibilities of murder at a distance.¹

The benefits of killing your meat out of range of tooth and claw are obvious and increased the human lifespan in practical ways that went beyond increased caloric intake. You could deliver death without consequence. You could keep your own death at bay while you slaughtered other things that lived.

Perhaps these human ancestors’ increasingly lethal habits gave them time to contemplate the meaning of their brief span. The small purchase that they held on to life allowed for time to ponder on graves and gifts. Considering the meaning of the dead, and their own death, led to ceremonial burial, which joined the rites of child delivery as the oldest human activity that counts as religion.

Illogic; maybe what Freud described many millennia later as our ‘death instinct’ took us to strange places 10,000 years ago. The building of permanent settlements meant growing food. But it also meant defending what you had grown. In what would become one of the most haunting paradoxes of human history, the ability to sustain life joined warm fingers with an icy skeletal hand, a cruel brother to progress that brought death. Agriculture allowed humans to build worlds where we could live. It also strengthened the hand of those who yearned to rule, allowing them to conscript soldiers and slaves to wall up and defend these worlds, to harness technology to our death instinct as well as to wage war on an increasingly large scale.

In her meditation on the means, ends and vocabulary of death-dealing in warfare, Elaine Scarry notes that ‘reciprocal injury’ is the meaning of war as it actually occurs. This is the poisonous seed of war, not the straightforward political goals of ruling classes or the grand strategies of command structures. Of course, the trip line for combat folds together a variety of causes, both in terms of historical causation and propaganda. But that’s not Scarry’s concern. She follows Clausewitz’s argument that, once war begins, armies simply become tools to cause ‘general damage’ and to ‘increase the enemy’s suffering’. To what end? At the point of the bayonet, Clausewitz admits, the manufacture of death becomes self-justifying – a surprisingly nihilistic admission for the pragmatist best known for calling war a ‘continuation of policy by other means’.²

Clausewitz, who died in 1831, could likely not imagine the lengths to which warfare would go to ‘increase the enemies suffering’. The armies of the earth gathered to harvest death on an unimaginable scale less than a 100 years later

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The twentieth century did not begin on 1 January 1900. Its real birthday was 23 August 1914, the Battle of Mons. The battle’s casualties are insignificant by the standards of the Great War while being catastrophic in relation to the smaller European conflicts since the Napoleonic age. A few days after Mons, Germany annihilated a 30,000-member Russian force at Tannenberg in East Prussia (now Poland).

The months that followed saw the building of intricate rat holes stretching for hundreds of miles across Europe, an earthen tribute paid to combat tech that worked an equation of death that was incalculable and unsolvable. Machine guns delivered carnage at close to 400 rounds per minute. Bodies waded into the steel tempest, running, crawling, gibbering with war fever or complete insanity, across a landscape tangled with barbed wire, wounded by shells and rotting with corpses. Human beings died by the millions … choked, fragmented and filleted by these terrible weapons.

This is only one resonant image of a conflict that took the lives of nearly 40 million combatants and bystanders. Hundreds of thousands died in Germany from the British naval blockade, many simply starving to death by 1917–18. Half a million civilians died in sub-Saharan Africa, caught in the crossfire of guerrilla wars waged by the British and the Germans in their colonial possessions. Across North Africa and the Middle East, the conflict drew in troops from as far away as India to die by the hundreds of thousands. The influenza strain that emerged in an American training camp late in the war swarmed like rats in the trenches of 1918, the contagion spreading across battlefields and brought home by returning soldiers while eventually killing 50 million people across the globe.

What the many fronts of the global catastrophe all have in common is the phenomenon of industrialised death, the mass production of corpses made possible by new human technologies.

These facts coinciding have made the past 100 years of human history a poignant paradox. Advances in the field of medicine and a variety of life-saving techniques have not kept up with the ability of human beings to annihilate one another. The Great War introduced sanitary regimens for wounds that could go septic, medical logistics that allowed for quicker treatment and the earliest efforts at restorative facio-dental surgery for people utterly mutilated by shots or shells. Yet the weapons the world’s army wielded still produced more dead bodies than ever imagined in human experience.

Humanity’s paradoxical death waltz continued long after 1918. Life expectancy grew across much of the globe into the twentieth century even as nation-states created arsenals capable of executing a mass extinction event. The United States, particularly during the 1950s, late 1960s and early 1980s, contemplated and planned for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

In 2022, Europe joined east Asia as the region with the longest life expectancies on the planet, even after the wasting Covid pandemic. And yet, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine employed Iskandr ballistic missiles that strike civilian and military targets at 500 kilometres with an explosive force, if not a radiation yield, similar to the first atomic weapons. Thermobaric bombs (so-called vacuum bombs) ignite a supersonic sound wave fuelled by their ability to literally siphon oxygen from the surrounding air. At the time of writing, one month into the conflict, there are 13,500 known dead on the Ukrainian side alone with perhaps 3,000 of those being civilians.³

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A meditation on mass murder of modern warfare could be read as a sleight of hand, an avoidance of the reality that one can die while on a walk in the park as well as on a battlefield. Perhaps rather than policy by a different means, war is simply death performed more brutally than we would hope.

Biological and neurological death comes to human beings, in the nursery, on a highway or in peaceful sleep. ‘Man is mortal’, writes Mikhail Bulgakov, ‘sometimes suddenly so’.

Then again, perhaps, this is why war so outrages the psyche as much as it injures the body? War, what Thomas Mann called ‘the coward’s escape from the problems of peace’, dissolves our individual experiences and the vast cultural histories that fuel them into wild desecrations of the human body. War outrages us, and properly so, because in it the universal quality of inevitable death doffs its hat to the power of weapons that destroy human tissue, ending the life of millions while leaving millions more in a realm of social death, besieged by trauma, clawed at by memories of violence. Even if we see our biological deaths as a process not so different from the cycle of decay that yields a surge of new life, we still revolt, hopefully in a political fashion, against states and their ruling classes seeking to turn us into compost with lethal violence and maximum suffering.

Death’s ride with war, plague and famine has sometimes been a strangely saccharine confection that is neither morbid nor political. There’s a tremendous amount of writing in ‘death studies’ that either laments or laughs at the idea of ‘the good death’. This concept has received the most attention in relation to Victorian Britain but has analogues in the nineteenth-century United States and the birth of the pastoral cemetery or central Europe and the often-elaborate mourning societies of Berlin and Vienna.

Collectivised death, and how it has been guaranteed and legitimised by the national state, does make a mockery of the good death. War memorials such as France’s Douaumont are simply mass graves; they are less the resting place of the ‘unknown deadline and more literally a dump for the unidentifiable body parts that are the toxic waste of industrialized war’.

This is perhaps why contemporaries have replaced the ‘good death’ with ‘the clean death’. For example, it’s extraordinary how the human skull and variations of it, like the sutured and iron bolted cranium of Frankenstein’s monster, became icons of the last century. Long a part of religious imagery, whether hovering on Puritan gravestones or appearing as mise en scène for thousands of portraits of and altars for the saints, the skull has held an esteemed place in Christian cosmology. The twentieth century ripped the whitened skull from this context and made it a stark reminder of death’s inevitability – a symbol of blunt fact. The death’s heads of expressionist art and film, the skulls on the set of a 100 horror hosts, the sugar skulls North Americans have appropriated from dia de los Muertos as well as the skulls that hang in classrooms for American children’s Halloween might suggest a death-obsessed culture or, given their bizarrely light-hearted context, even a society that has come to accept death as part of the biological reality of the natural world.

Or perhaps this image has become a way to commodify the experience of death, to offer throwaway images of a clean death if the good death has become unattainable. Georges Bataille suggests that when ‘the bones are bare and white they are not intolerable to as the putrefying flesh’. In fact, Bataille believes that ‘whitened bones’ act as ‘a veil of decency and solemnity over death that makes it bearable’.⁴

This collection looks unflinchingly at the masks that death wears in mass culture. The scholars have taken the idea of necropolitics, how death insinuates itself into our social arrangements as much as our psyches and discovered in mass culture places where the ‘veil of decency’ disappears. In our time of collective death that tries to hide in tropes of a clean death, fantasy and nightmare that are screened, scripted or gamed offer spaces of unexpected clarity.

In 400 BC, Sophocles completed and premiered Oedipus at Colonus, the story of the death of the tragic hero that had for so long haunted the dramatist. Victim of war, betrayal, the fates and, now and again, his own hubris, the blind king takes the emerging hero Theseus with him to witness his death in solitude, hiding his grave even from his closest kin.