Death, Lives and Videotapes
Friday, August 8, 2008 at 5:48AM
Death, Lives and Video
Streams
Professor Kevin D. O’Neill
University of Redlands
Redlands. California
Running Head: Death Lives
Kevin O’Neill is a Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Redlands who has
published and presented papers
on representations of death from
ancient Greece to 21st century America. He has also written about,
and participated in, experimental higher education and interdisciplinary
studies and done work in adult education.
Kevin O’Neill
6200 Del Valle Drive
Los Angeles CA 90048
323-841-5171
koneill41@mac.com
Death,
Lives and Video Streams
Abstract
This paper discusses two topics.
First, it presents an analysis of the canonical funerary corpse prepared by
morticians and discusses how this corpse serves two functions. It tames death
by reappropriating the corpse for culture, and it serves as a focus for two
kinds of memories: the individual/psychological and the essential/Platonic. But
since the mortuary corpse has limits -- it can only help us to remember and
offers no information about the afterlife. American culture has supplemented
both this corpse and traditional religious accounts with many new forms of
immortality, one of which is the second topic of this paper. One of the most
interesting is that offered by the Cassity brothers at their Forever
cemeteries. There one can ‘live’ on forever in a professionally produced filmed
biography that is always available as streaming online video. This new option
offers a needed supplement to the memory-bound corpse because the newly
immortal filmed individual has the possibility for a post mortem career as a
video entity.
In the long run,
metaphysics does itself no good
in scorning its own
physics.
(Debray, 2001)
The American corpse has
a fixed look and a stable identity. It is an icon created by the funeral
industry with the complicity of a public that wants its dead to assume a
canonical, consoling form. This iconic corpse appears timeless and at peace. It
rests without moving in its perfectly fitted casket. It lies face up, hands
folded on the lower abdomen. Catholic corpses often have rosary beads twined
around their fingers. Protestants sometimes “hold” Bibles. Each corpse is
dressed up. Its hair is meticulously combed and its face carefully composed.
The eyes are sealed shut, the cheeks built out with special lifts, the lips
sewn closed, the rictus
of death flattened into a noncommittal line. The face is tilted up slightly so
the skin of the neck does not wrinkle or gather, and inside the casket there is
a slight elevation up and to the right so that the corpse presents itself more
clearly, not sunk too far into the plush fabric that lines the casket. The corpse’s face is made up using
special cosmetics. The casket is open so that the corpse’s legs below the waist
are not visible.
If the casket is closed everyone present
knows how it would look were the casket open. We know that the corpse is
dressed in a suit or dress [or however deemed appropriate] and is embalmed and
properly arranged. Were we to open the casket we would see the expected object
looking its expected way.
Increasing numbers of Americans are being cremated. But even the corpses
that disappear into the furnace,
even those whose only “appearance” is at a
memorial service still pass under the control of professional morticians. The
standard funeral, and the mortuary corpse displayed in its casket, remain the
type and this “specter” haunts every memorial service. (Habenstein and Lamers,
1990, Laderman, 2003).
This iconic corpse preparation is a response to a
fundamental fact that is a challenge: human beings die, and when they die they
leave behind corpses. Aries (1980), argues that death presents a challenge to
human culture. Death is a “natural kind” (Quine, 1969.) This means that the dead body occurs
without reference to cultural encoding. Death happens whether we want it to or
not, and we are compelled to provide am meaning for it. It erupts into ordered life and takes
whomever it “chooses”, whenever it chooses. Because of this transgressive and
disruptive quality, death has to be tamed. Death is wild. (Aries, 1980). And this is a
major source of the impulse to create civilizations, city walls and laws. Death
must be contained, its lack of meaning remade into significance. Taming death
takes many forms. One form is the honorific regard most cultures give to
corpses. The American funerary corpse represents such an investment in social
order.
I will
accomplish two things in this essay. First, I offer an analysis of the taming
of death the iconic American corpse accomplishes. Second, I note its limitations
and present an analysis of a “supplement”, the video corpse, which compensates
for the iconic corpse’s shortcomings in a way that replaces or supplement
traditional religious narratives. This re-imagining of the afterlife of the
dead exploits the representational techniques offered by film, sound recording,
and the Internet, but does so in a way that keeps the corpse under the control
of funeral professionals and builds a conceptual and emotional bridge between
the mortuary corpse and its cinematic iter
ations.
The
Tamed Corpse: Icon of Memory
Is the
sword of biological death so sharp
That
there is no lingering association between corpse and a
person?
(Harrison, 2003,
p. 143)
Corpses
earn respect because on one hand they are so “short-lived” and at the same time
represent a terrible challenge and unsolvable metaphysical conundrum. In the
western tradition, when corpses disappear into the ground or vault, they take
with them some of our deepest hopes and unanswered questions. The person, now
dead, was just conscious, like us. It possessed agency, intention, motives,
memory, the capacity to respond, the ability to help or harm. It is often the
corpse of someone we loved. Now it seems to have none of its former
characteristics. And yet it still looks like the person who it just was
Yet, almost immediately
(Nuland, 2000), we know that this is not our beloved but a dead body. The
question is – where did all this –
the agency, intention, responsiveness, the indefinable something more, -- go ? Is there a
place where we can look for it and have a hope of finding it? Or is it just
lost? Does it, like the attunement of Simmias’ lyre (Plato, trans. 1999), dissipate when death comes? And if it is lost then are we lost as well?
The agonizing difficulty
here is that the only site that we know to look for whatever is lost is the body from which whatever it is, is lost . Western religious traditions
would have us look to another world, but that world is frustratingly invisible,
and we are left with nothing but the dead body. But that body is the last place where we can hope to find
what is lost. It is what it is because whatever made it a person has departed
or dissipated, and is deconstructing itself according to well-known physical
principles. This unaltered dead body epitomizes Nature’s wildness. It is no
longer an expression of anything that belongs to human culture and human
expectation. Martin Heidegger (1962) captured this frustration when he wrote,
that an individual’s death represents the “impossibility of possibility”. (p.307).
A dead person, the corpse, no longer has possibilities. In a culture in which a
person’s possibilities count for everything, Heidegger’s characterization
captures our problem: what looks
like a person, is not any sort of person at all, but the mere
appearance of one.
What do we do with this
disappointing thing that looks exactly like who the person just was and
which can do nothing that persons
do? We can reclaim the body for culture, and soften the
terrible loss we feel, by making it into what it is not, by “remastering” it as
an image of what it cannot be, the once living person. This is what the
American funeral industry largely exists to do: to create “memory pictures”
(Laderman, 2003 ) of the once living in the form of the mortuary corpse.
Transforming the dead body
into an apparently stable and timeless mortuary corpse temporarily tames death by reclaiming the corpse from its
otherness, in which it is subject to the laws of decay, and turning it into a
site for memories and even future expectations.
This transformation
requires a major cultural intervention. The corpse has to be remade from a
natural object into a cultural object. It has to be turned from itself into an image of itself. But this image is not exactly
of itself as corpse, but of the person, that the corpse no longer is. This is
possible because, as Harrison (2003) says the corpse retains some ontological
“residue” of the once living person
Making the corpse cultural entails, in standard American
funeral practice, that it be embalmed, This treatment insures that even after
the corpse is committed to the earth Nature cannot soon take over immediately
because the dressed up body in its steel or wood casket, inserted into a
concrete vault is temporarily impermeable to natural processes. It is as if, in
defiance of the reality that the dead body represents, we insert, into the
earth an indigestible cultural object that still looks like the person and the cultural agent
that it can no longer be. “We” go into the ground as defiant repudiations of
the reality of decay.
This mortuary corpse,
prepared as a performance piece by the funeral director is intended to accomplish this ontological sleight
of hand by serving as a site for memory of two kinds. First, the prepared
corpse, which is remade to look as much as possible like the living individual
reminds us of the particularities of the dead person’s life. A corpse that
looks “just like” Helen implicitly contests the corpse’s natural tendency to
look less and less like Helen as time goes on. It offers a culturally
controlled “portrait” or stable image of Helen inscribed directly on Helen’s
recalcitrant body. We can then use this fixed image of Helen as she was in life
to do what the unreconstructed corpse forbade us to do. We can “find” Helen in
the site from which she has departed. The mortician’s arts have paradoxically
returned the “living” Helen from her lostness, made her available, not as
literal presence, but
as image. Morticians
cannot bring back the dead. They are not necromancers. But they can reimagine, or literally re-image the dead on the surface of bodies. In doing this they allow us, who
loved or cared for Helen, to know her again as a living presence, at least in
image and memory.
What we see and remember is a psychological portrait, a representation of Helen in
her individuality and privacy. We remember quirky things about Helen, and
things she and we did together. In this sense, Helen-as-corpse is like a
snapshot, a fragile and fragmented memento mori whose private particularity, whose
existential singleness, is here touchingly invoked.
In this sense, the American
mortuary corpse honors and ritualizes the modern, secular subject (Foltyn, 1996)
the very person whose death so many pundits (e.g., Mitford, 1963; Heinz, 1999) have
dismissed as an empty commercialized show. On this level the corpse produced by
the funeral industry seems to “work”. Evidence for this is the fact that this
corpse has persisted past the criticisms leveled at it from Mitford’s attack to
those of the death awareness movement. (Webb, 1997; Kubler-Ross, 1969)
On a second level the
funerary corpse provokes a different mode of memory that addresses the metaphysical question of where the
person in the corpse, the ‘ghost in the machine’ (Ryle, 1949) “goes.” The
funerary corpse, in its putative changelessness, is meant to reveal something
more than the historical individual, namely that person as invisible,
the essential
person of whom the body, while
living, was merely an envelope.
It reminds us that the embalmed body bodies forth the inner and mysterious
invisibility of the Soul that Plato introduced into Western consciousness and
that have never left our cultural imaginary.
Just as post mortem
photography in the 19th century was touted as a revelation of the
true inner person – an idea that Nathaniel Hawthorne used in The House of
the Seven Gables (Hawthorne,
1851)- so the funerary arts purport to manufacture a corpse that mysteriously
unmasks who Helen really
was (Laderman, 2003; Laderman,1998). Whatever it is that “passed” or “departed”
still lingers with the corpse and can be gestured toward, by the right
embalming job, which draws this hidden essence out of the body’s recesses and
makes it visible, just as the soul was visible in the live Helen.
The great virtue and also
the inherent metaphysical limitation of the funerary art is that it captures
this Platonic identity, the hidden core of a person, as well as the historical
individual whom that soul enlivened, but does so only in the register of memory. It allows those left behind to re-call
(call back, re-invoke)
the Soul that is now departed, and to re-member (or re-assemble) it, but nothing about the mortuary arts
has power to help that Soul toward
its new life, or to connect the living with that still-living Essence. The
representation of the soul remains
a representation. Morticians practice a metaphysics of absence, or, of provisional, representational
presence, not one of
presence. There is always already a Derridean slippage (Derrida, 1974) between
the looks of a corpse
and the absent essence to which that look purports to refer.
When Americans shared a
religious metanarrative (Lyotard, 1979), the Platonic essence represented by
the embalmed corpse had a secure Christian path plotted out after death. But as
Americans moved away from this shared vision, narratives about what happened to
the invisible Soul proliferated. In
this shift in belief, the secular nature of the embalmed corpse was a hidden
strength, because as representation of inner soul it was neutral as to either
the continued existence or particular religious provenance of what was
represented. Americans create and sustain their own versions of the soul, and
the mortuary corpse does not by itself tell us any single story about the
soul’s future fate. (Heinz, 1999; Barol, 2000).
In the USA, there are
several post-Christian answers to the limitations of the mortuary corpse:
mediumship, crionics, New Age ceremonies, borrowings from Eastern religions,
gay and feminist ceremonies and rituals that draw on Native American beliefs.
(Webb, 1999) There is a Christian
response to the corpse – the Rapture , which promises that the bodies of
believers will be taken directly to Heaven without suffering death.
(LaHaye, 1999)
Each of these answers
addresses, the questions: what was lost and where did it go? How do we contact
whatever left, and what relationship can we have to it? Each answer corrects
the failure of the mortuary corpse to offer anything more than a site for
memories, and each does so by postulating a distinctive post mortem “career”
for the dead.
The Virtual Dead
One new option is what I
call ”virtual immortality” a new narrative about the fate of the soul that is a
direct extension of the mortuary arts. This new version of the corpse and of immortality is still controlled,
to some extent, by morticians and offers a virtual immortality that is in some ways
entirely new and in other ways a reference to both film history and much
earlier traditions of post mortem photography.
The Cassity
brothers, Brent and Tyler, purchased Hollywood Memorial Park in 1998 for
$375,000. The 60-acre cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, which
contains within its walls the small Jewish cemetery, Beth Olam, was originally
opened in 1899 and is Hollywood's oldest burial ground. For a time it was the
preferred site for Hollywood “royalty”, containing the grave sites and
mausoleums of such luminaries as Rudolph Valentino, Peter Lorre, W.D. Griffith
and Jayne Mansfield, among many others. In later years it became the site of burial for the immigrant
populations of its East Hollywood neighborhood – Armenians, Russians and
various Latin American groups. It was solely owned for many years by the
controversial Jules Roth, from whom the State of California purchased/took over
the then-derelict cemetery in the mid-1990s. Roth had looted the cemetery's
endowment and when ownership was transferred the site was making more money
from disinterments than from new burials (Lyons, 1998; Spindler; 1998; Cloud,
2000; McIlwain, 2005). The Cassity brothers were allowed to buy the place
because they pledged to invest several millions of dollars in improving and
maintaining the property (Lyons, 1998 Spindler, 1998, Kramer, 1999; Barol, 2004;
Resting Place, n.d.).
The brothers, from a Missouri family that had
owned funeral homes and cemeteries for two generations, came to the business of
reviving Hollywood Memorial with definite ideas. Tyler Cassity, who directly
manages Hollywood Forever, the new name for the cemetery, holds a degree in English literature
from Columbia University and dreamed of becoming a novelist. This interest in
creating narratives is reflected in the cemetery's online self-description:
We believe
it’s time cemeteries offered more than a name and date etched in stone. That's why Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a
"Library of Lives" with thousands of interactive Life Stories made from film
clips, photos, and written and spoken words.
We
believe everyone has a life story that deserves to be shared and preserved for
future generations.
Our professional
LifeStory specialists are dedicated to helping you gather photos and film
clips, audio recordings and documents, all captured and stored permanently in
our unique Life Story Theaters. (Cassity,
n.d.)
As one navigates the
Forevernetwork.com site, of which the Hollywood Forever site is a part, one
finds examples of these LifeStories, which include, as the blurb above
indicates, film clips, photographs, family trees and music as well as audio.
These
LifeStories are only the most elaborate and best produced of a welter of
memorial sites online. Companies such as Legacy.com, Memory-of.com, Mem.com,
Last Memories.com and PartingWishes.com all offer low cost space to set up
memorial web sites. The companies not only offer locations, but also provide
simple software so that people with little computer savvy can set up and
maintain such sites. These companies compete with millions of individual
memorial sites, which are in turn parts of larger Web Rings, such as the United
States Marine Corps Webring and the God Bless America Webring. (Howington,
n.d.) There are also several sites, such as the Memorial of Love Webring,
dedicated exclusively to ongoing memorials to and discussions of those who died
in the 9/11 attacks. (loveatchristmas, n.d.)
These sites have provisions for leaving
email messages for the dead and for the bereaved family and friends; some are
linked to chat rooms and message boards and strangers often visit memorial
websites and leave encouraging messages. New film and photos and text can be
added at will. As a Washington Post
article relates, people keep adding new material so that these sites take on a
life, or afterlife, of their own (Noguchi, 2006).
This theme of a "second life",
or of virtual immortality, is more powerful at Hollywood Forever because their
post mortem offerings go well beyond the relatively haphazard assemblages of
sounds and images that characterize most memorial websites. As McIlwain
writes, the Forever cemeteries
were created to “bring eternal stardom to the masses”, by “trump(ing) Andy
Warhol’s promise of fifteen minutes with an opportunity for fame that will
linger in perpetuity.” (McIlwain, 2005, p. 198) Each Forever cemetery has its
own studio on the grounds of the cemetery. This is a separate enterprise called
Forever Studios, and, as various commentators note, especially in Hollywood
there is no shortage of well-trained and underemployed film editors, sound
specialists, and producers to help craft coherent "second life"
narratives for the dead. (Forever Studios, n.d.; Alm, 1999; Barol, 2004;
McIlwain, 2005) As the prose on
the website says, the Forever "Biographers" work with friends and
family to create LifeStories from "photos, spoken descriptions, text,
video clips, old film reels, awards or other memorabilia." (Cassity, n.d.)
All this information is transferred to digital format and put first onto hard
disks and CD-ROMS or DVDs, then online.
This can be a sophisticated process: film
reels and video clips as well as photographs, whether film or digital, sound
recordings and written text are all integrated into a single digitally mastered
streaming video in which old photographs and film clips are edited, enhanced
and cropped as necessary, and in which grainy sound is purified. People who
purchase the high-end Platinum package will receive professionally conducted
and shot interviews hosted and produced by the Forever Biographers, as well as
the services of a Forever editor, and the taping of a remembrance party for the
deceased, or for the person who will someday be deceased. (Forever Studios,
n.d.; Hampel,1998 ; Cloud, 2000).
One can watch sample videos and see that
the deceased are not simply memorialized after the fact. The Platinum level
LifeStories typically contain first person videos of the deceased talking
reflectively, from beyond death, about their lives, and inviting their loved
ones to come over when they are ready to join them in the afterlife. Such
videos are shot as scripted interviews. Technicians from Hollywood Forever serve
as sound and film experts and the cemetery provides an interviewer, as well as
scene dressers. People make the videos before they die, sometimes years before
the event when they are pain free and entirely coherent.
Such self-presentations are integrated
into biographical “documentaries” that have been compared to televised A&E
biographies (Forever LifeStories, n.d.; Cloud, 2000), and include photographs,
sound bites from children and friends, bits of video, text, and pictures.
Every LifeStory is "preserved as a
permanent part of the Forever Memorial Archive." "maintained by the
Forever Endowment Care Fund." (Forever LifeStories, n.d.) These
LifeStories “live” on optical drives and the Worldwide Web. Like the embalmed corpse -- or even
better than the embalmed corpse -- they are "preserved" as a permanent
part of a public record available on line. The dead have become effectively ‘immortal’
(Alm, 1999; Cloud, 2000, Barol, 2004; McIlwain, 2005) not purely on the
Internet, but anchored to their earthly “homes” in real cemeteries where real
corpses, the familiar mortuary corpses, along with the equally familiar urns
filled with ashes, serve as stable referent and necessary ground for this new immortality.
McIlwain, (2005) argues that the physical space of the cemetery will become
increasingly irrelevant as visual immortality becomes more widespread and
sophisticated. He may be right but for the moment the Cassitys have produced an
integrated “system” of immortalities in which grave sites and virtual images
coexist and inter-depend, just as “real” funeral services and their streaming
online counterparts exist side by side.
The most modest as well as the most
elaborate of the LifeStories are always playing at the "Forever
Theaters", which are both virtual theaters found on the website and also
"real" theaters spotted around the grounds of the Forever cemeteries.
One writer describes them as looking like ATM machines. (Seay, 1998) They are touch screen
computer outlets that permit visitors to access videos of any of the dead interred at a Forever
cemetery anywhere in the country. This author has tried them at Hollywood Forever and can
attest that they are eminently user-friendly.
The Cassity brothers have branched out from creating post mortem
streaming video of the dead, offering immortality to the living as well. The Studios will track a child through
his or her education, recording voice and video each year from kindergarten to
college.(Forever On Campus, n.d.) They create no cost video packages that can
be sent overseas to loved ones serving in combat zones (Forever Veteran Stories
n .d.) They have even initiated a
program at the University of Missouri, of which Brent Cassity is a graduate, to memorialize alumni For a price (Mizzou
Alumni Association News, 2004).
All this pre-mortem footage can be
tastefully integrated into a post mortem LifeStory at the proper time. Tracking
one's whole life in video, from cradle to grave, and doing so self-consciously,
will create much better and more coherent material for the post mortem
biography than could possibly be generated from random digital photos and jerky
minicam sweeps. And if Forever professionals either make or direct the making
of the images, so much the better.
Here we get a
glimpse of a new sense of life, one lived as a kind of performance in order for
it to look good on film., a life lived as a series of "photo ops", rather than as a
series of spontaneous events. Here we approach Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal: “real” life
will be that which appears on video, and the best life will be that lived over
and over on the Moebius strip of a streaming video loop. (Baudrillard, 1988).
Shades of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return! (Nietzsche, 1999 , Sontag, 1977) McIlwain
suggests that such visual recreations of the dead become “one of the best
examples of Baudrillard’s simulacrum” (McIlwain, 2005, p. 221), that “intensifies
our emotional attachment “ to these dead, and even (McIlwain, 2005, p. 223)
provide “more satisfying form(s) of representation of death and dying than
religious dogma.”
The reappropriation of the dead into biopics and
photomontages rescues them from the immobility and transience of the funeral
scene, and frees their memories from the undependable confines of the
individual mourner’s consciousness. No matter how well laid out the corpse
might be all that will be left is the internal memory, or, in rare instances, a
photograph of the corpse. In the Cassity biopics, the images are all
externalized and objectified, and arranged in consequential sequences that
overwrite the memories of those left behind and replace them with undying
representations of the “real” dead person. The dead return to life in a virtual
sense and live or relive a new life in their biographical films. (McIlwain,
2005)
A
more powerful and subtler redemption is also going on in the production of the
biopic. Individuals remembered in snapshots and home movies are inevitably
surrounded with that sense of isolation and melancholy that both Roland Barthes
(1982) and Susan Sontag (1977) find in all photographs. Photographs are intensely private and intensely
ephemeral. Few artifacts suggest the contingency of an individual life in the
way that photographs do. They reek of loss and impermanence. All the concrete
details of fashion, hairstyle, cars, and the ways in which people hold
themselves, refer to a specific time and place and to nothing else save the
fact that this time and place are irretrievably lost.
One reason why individual photographs
are so poignant and heartbreaking is that they occur in no context other than
their sweet Otherness. What is missing is a meta-narrative, the sense of the
photo as one moment in a stream of other moments that, taken together, make up
a consequential narrative.
Photographs ordered in a series that tell a story lose much of their
poignancy because now we see where this or that isolated scene is leading, we
understand that this moment is not self-contained. And this [what?]is precisely
what happens in the Cassity brothers’ biopics.
An individual life, which might really be a series of discontinuous
images that taken together do not add up to a compelling story, is assimilated
to the strong narrative convention of the biographical film. Such films, like
life, have an internal order – a
beginning, middle and end. Making a film of a life presupposes that that life
had a story in it that was worth filming, just as a 19th century oil
portrait presupposed that its subject had a presence worth painting.
The relocation of the
dead from the grave and urn to the Internet, as moving images, opens possibilities
that the Cassitys have not yet exploited. As McIlwain writes, these visual “documents” are “always
available for interaction not only among living people but among generations
throughout time.” (McIlwain, 2005, 245) According to Mr. Bill Obrock, a Forever
employee, the dead will soon be able to be remastered as holograms and might
some day engage in “live” conversations with the living, giving responses
consistent with their in-life personalities. (Seay, 1999) There is even
discussion of depositing samples of DNA at the Forever sites (Seay, 1999) so
that people, or their descendants have the option to produce clones in the
future.
These possibilities
raise questions about the identity of the dead. With virtual memory in the form of biopics, “the common stories of ordinary people”
get “inject(ed) … into the historical record.” (McIlwain, 2005, p. 212) But who
lives on in the biopic? Do the dead become quasi-fictional characters whose
identities are produced by the editorial “spin” they or their loved ones put on
their biographies? Obituaries already do this. How much more powerful is it
when actual images and film clips are edited to produce the effect? And if the
dead become characters in biopics do they then develop new virtual identities
as characters in such online events? Further, do these new manufactured
identities, which are crafted from
the raw material of film and recording and photograph, then effectively replace inconsistent, fading and fragmentary
memory? Are the Cassitys creating a new “species”, the changeless, fictionally
produced dead with whom we the living can interact, thereby changing both their
identities, and ours?
If all that I wrote
comes true, won’t the dead, to use media theorist Thomas de Zengotita’s
provocative term, be mediated
beings, creations of the media but who assume “lives” of their own on-screen,
lives for which new chapters can be written as they interact with the living
and “star” in post mortem SIMS games?
Mightn’t the edited biopics, and the simulated afterlives, be even
better than the real lives, so that, fulfilling a Western Christian hope, the
afterlife really will be better than earthly life, but in ways
no Christian Father ever dreamed (de Zengotita, 2005)?
Conclusion
The video dead supplement the mortuary corpse, while
“critiquing” it. These dead supplement
it by using it as a point de départ
that they both require and get beyond. Without the iconic mortuary corpse to
represent both individual memories and a timeless soul, virtual versions of the
corpse, the ForeverStories, would not be shaped to produce life narratives that
represent the Platonic self, or to build these narratives from the individual fragments
of sound and image that everyone in our culture leaves behind. Even though they
can be traced back to the mortuary corpse , the virtual dead journey to places
the iconic mortuary dead can never go. As McIlwain writes (McIlwain, 2005, p.
204) new “technologies … reshape our whole perspective of reality, (they)
create and dynamically alter the boundaries within which we can operate.”
Thus, in an age of
virtual representation, in which McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the
message, who are the real dead? In a consumer culture blessed with
technology and personal freedom, death, and the corpse, are always troped, available
to be reworked into a new shape that will always attempt to cover over death’s
irresistible and ultimately undeniable wildness.
References
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About Forever Forever Studios
Forever Cemeteries Retrieved January 12,
2007 from
http://www.forevercemeteries.com/AboutForever.htm.
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