Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture 3031407326, 9783031407321

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Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture Edited by Sharon Coleclough Bethan Michael-Fox Renske Visser

Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture

Sharon Coleclough Bethan Michael-Fox  •  Renske Visser Editors

Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture

Editors Sharon Coleclough Staffordshire University Stoke-on-Trent, UK

Bethan Michael-Fox The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Renske Visser Independent Scholar Helsinki, Finland

ISBN 978-3-031-40731-4    ISBN 978-3-031-40732-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Andrey Danilovich/ Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Foreword

When I was approached by the editors to contribute to their book Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture my first thought was, ‘so what is so difficult about the dead?’ My second thought was, well of course the dead are difficult, they are not accessible via established qualitative research methodologies such as interviews or focus groups. Instead, the dead must be studied from different approaches. They need to be examined through their impact upon the living and how the living interact with, or even avoid, the dead. Consequently, the dead are difficult, but so is death itself. Mortality is difficult to face as an individual through personal experience but also as a researcher and teacher of under- and postgraduates. It is also an area of research that needs a greater focus on the neglected relationship death shares with media and culture. I first published an article about the consumption of the criminal dead (drawing on some folklore about corpse medicine and historical cases of executed criminal body parts being kept as souvenirs which I uncovered during my PhD research) back in 2010. This article became the lynchpin in my career tipping me from criminology into the realm of death studies. I have remained fascinated and committed to working as a sociological-­ criminologist at the intersection of death and culture ever since. Unlike many death scholars who approach the study of death from an applied perspective by focusing on end-of-life care, rituals and disposal of the dead, and grieving for the dead, I have considered mortality from a cultural and visual representation position. This has left me, at times, feeling

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somewhat isolated. Much like criminologist Nicola Rafter, who declared that her visually driven research left her feeling ‘strange and out of step, maybe not a true scholar’ (2014, 133) until visual criminology became a recognised sub-field in criminology. As such it is always an exciting moment to encounter researchers and writing that engages with issues that are closely aligned to my career’s passion for the visual, the cultural and most importantly, focused on mortality. Death, dying and the dead are incredibly complex and are intimately interwoven with societally held, yet always changing, cultural beliefs. As such the study of death is likewise complex and inherently multidisciplinary. Death scholars come from a multiplicity of backgrounds including but not limited to sociology, medicine, history, art, film studies, anthropology, social policy, psychology as well as from the death industry itself. However, what is clear from the huge body of research that engages with the topic of mortality is that it is dominated by the practicalities of death. There is a significant focus, and rightly so, on end-of-life care, ritual surrounding the dead and the practicalities of disposing of and memorialising the dead. There is a smaller but growing plethora of work focused on the relationship between death and culture, and this book pivoting on the concept of ‘difficult dead’ is a vital contribution to this body of research. Research that concentrates on death and culture enables new perspectives on mortality to develop. It also, and most crucially, provokes researchers to gather innovative and creative datasets. I, myself, have examined the posthumous afterlives of the high-profile dead after being somewhat disturbed by holograms of dead musicians performing to live audiences (Penfold-Mounce 2020). To overcome the difficulty of accessing the celebrity dead and their financial records led me to drawing on a secondary dataset provided by Forbes magazine. The colloquially named ‘Dead Rich List’ but formally named ‘The Highest Paid Dead Celebrity list’ has been published annually each October since 2001. It provides insight into how lucrative it can be to labour after death particularly if you are a man and a singer-songwriter in life. Notably posthumous careers for women after death are less financially successful and heavily gendered in terms of labour such as advertising perfume and chocolate. Exploring death through culture has significant potential to reveal and challenge deeply embedded social inequalities. Approaching mortality through cultural source materials also provides a space in which the thanatological imagination (Penfold-Mounce, 2019)

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can be inspired. This death-focused imagination is not limited to academic researchers but can be stimulated in students and members of the public alike. The consumption of cultural artefacts, particularly popular culture forms, acts as a thanatological imagination catalyst enabling death, the dead and dying to be brought front and centre to global consumers. I have argued that it is through a lens of popular culture such as television, film and comic books that consumers can experience ‘morbid spaces’ (space and how it is moved through, lived within and consumed and where mortality boundaries are crossed and reinforced) and ‘morbid sensibilities’ (how consumers become open to deliberating mortality) (Penfold-Mounce, 2018). It is within ‘morbid spaces’ such as movies about the Undead that ‘morbid sensibilities’ can be ignited and become a vehicle for consumers to consider mortality issues. These morbid spaces are safe due to their fictional and populist nature and relatively without consequences (barring the possibility of nightmares!). It is encounters with death and the dead in fictional mediated ‘morbid spaces’ via murder victims, zombies and vampires, ghouls and ghosts that consumers can face down mortality. It is into the swirling, visually driven multidisciplinary realm of mortality research that this book seeks to shed light upon the difficult relationship shared between death, media, and culture. Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture encapsulates the growing momentum building in the research community about death, dying and the dead from a cultural perspective. It draws together a sweeping range of international scholars who explore in its myriad forms what the ‘difficult dead’ might mean in the context of media and culture. The focus on ‘difficult’ cultural representations of death, dying and the dead from across different media forms including but not limited to TV, film, online, print, literature and theatre is a distinctive offering to the field. As a result Difficult Dead is meeting a need, and most importantly an appetite, for research exploring not simply the mediation and cultural spaces of ‘difficult dead’ but also ‘difficult’ death and dying. Drawing together work focused on the ‘difficult dead’ reveals more than just the difficulty of dying processes, or of transitioning from life into death or even about how the living face the difficulty of loss. This text, through its focus on death and the dead as ‘difficult’, seeks to provide critical insights into how we see, confront, scrutinise, challenge and report

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about death. It reflects just how difficult death can be through the lens of different media forms and international perspectives. It is an essential contribution to death studies and showcases the vibrant contributions of multidisciplinary scholars to the under-explored relationship between death, media and culture. University of York York, UK November 2022

Ruth Penfold-Mounce

References Penfold-Mounce, R. (2010) Consuming criminal corpses: Fascination with the dead criminal body, Mortality, 15(3): 250–265. Penfold-Mounce, R. (2018) Death, The Dead and Popular Culture. UK: Emerald Publishing Limited. Penfold-Mounce, R. (2019) ‘Celebrity deaths and the thanatological imagination’ in A. Teodorescu and M. Hviid Jacobsen (eds.) Death in Contemporary Popular Culture, UK: Routledge, pp. 51–64. Penfold-Mounce, R. (2020) Value, Bodily Capital, and Gender Inequality after Death, Sociological Research Online, 25(3): 490–506. Rafter, N. (2014) ‘Introduction to special issue on visual culture and the iconography of crime and punishment’, Theoretical Criminology, 18(2): 127–133.

Contents

1 Introduction  to Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture  1 Bethan Michael-Fox, Sharon Coleclough, and Renske Visser 2 “To  Show the Problem Inside and Out”: Representations of Mental Illness and Suicide in Eric Steel’s The Bridge 23 Brennan Thomas 3 Twenty-First-Century  Digital Snuff: The Circulation of Images and Videos of Real Death Online 37 Mark McKenna 4 Streaming  Death: Terrorist Violence, Post-­death Data and the Digital Afterlife of Difficult Death 53 Anu A. Harju and Jukka Huhtamäki 5 ‘Death.  Carnage. Chaos’: Mortality and Mountaineering On-screen, and on the Roof of the World 69 Matthew Spokes

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6 Bodies  on the Battlefield: Death and Combat in Band of Brothers 85 Ketlyn Mara Rosa 7 Representing  Fatal Violence in AMC’s The Walking Dead: The Role of Legitimation, Graphicness and Explicitness 99 Lauren O’Mahony, Melissa Merchant, and Simon Order 8 How  Are Normative Deaths Celebrated, Reinforced, or Disrupted in Children’s Media? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Coco and Soul115 Zhaoxi Zheng and Rebecca E. Olson 9 Hashtag  Feminism: Challenging Rape and Femicide in South Africa133 Adelina Mbinjama 10 ‘A  Prison for the Dead’: Hart Island and Spatial Histories of Marginalization149 Fiona L. Kenney 11 Hamnet  Shakespeare: A Difficult Dead Celebrity Child161 Edel Semple 12 ‘There  Is Nothing like a Dead Man to Demand Existence’ (Antonin Artaud)175 Mischa Twitchin 13 Difficult  Deaths and Awkward Agendas: How Mainstream News Media Negotiate Coverage of Politically Dissonant Victims189 Rhian Waller and Ato Erzan-Essien 14 Dissected,  Torn, and Exposed: The Death and Remains of the Jack the Ripper Victims in The Illustrated Police News203 Rosie Binfield-Smith

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15 Photographing  Death to Save Photojournalism: Mafia Homicides in Letizia Battaglia’s ‘Archive of Blood’219 Francesco Buscemi 16 Economies  of Mortalities: Ageism and Disposability During the Covid-19 Pandemic235 Natalie Pitimson 17 Reflecting  Grief During a Pandemic: Online UK Newspapers’ Reportage and Researchers’ Experiences249 Erica Borgstrom, Ryann Sowden, and Lucy E. Selman 18 Conclusion  to Difficult Death, Dying, and the Dead in Media and Culture265 Sharon Coleclough, Bethan Michael-Fox, and Renske Visser Index277

Notes on Contributors

Rosie Binfield-Smith  is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at York St John University.  Her research focuses on representations of criminal justice in the mass media, historical archival methods, visual criminology, and death. Her first book The Spectacle of Criminal Justice: Mass Media and the Criminal Trial  was published in 2022 and explores the visibility of murder cases, justice spaces, and emotion in the mass media. Erica Borgstrom  is Senior Lecturer in Medical Anthropology and Endof-Life Care at The Open University, where she leads Open Thanatology. Her research juxtaposes everyday experiences of end-of-life care and death with wider societal, practice and policy discourses. Francesco  Buscemi  teaches media history and media writing at the Catholic University of Milan. He holds a PhD from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and worked at the universities of Stirling, Bournemouth, Como and Venice. He specialises in cultural history, food and the media. In 2012 Francesco was awarded the Santander Grant Fund for a research on Nazi propaganda photos and drawings relating to meat. His most recent book is Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: Political History of Italian Food TV. Sharon  Coleclough  completed her PhD in Cinematic Performance at the University of Salford in 2014.  Senior Lecturer in Games Technical Design at Staffordshire University, her wider work combines the theory and practice of moving image and audio production, exploring the ways in which meaning is created through the technical application of craft and xiii

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storytelling. Recently she has focussed upon the use of horror and fantasy as reflections of sociological and philosophical concepts in mainstream culture. Ato Erzan-Essien  is a senior lecturer at the University of Chester. His research interests include journalism education, professionalism, law and ethics. Publications and papers include ‘The Angry Tutor: Learning the love the student who simply isn’t that bothered or couldn’t care less’, ‘Back to Reality: The practical approach to teaching regulation and ethics to first year undergraduates’ and ‘More than a cliché? Futureproofing meaningful notions of professionalism in journalism learning and teaching’. Anu  A.  Harju  is a senior researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on violent death and the media with special focus on politics of remembering. Latest publications include ‘#hellobrother needs to trend’: Methodological reflections on the digital and emotional afterlife of mediated violence, International Review of Sociology with J. Huhtamäki. She is the guest editor of a Special Issue on Encounters Between Violence and Media and International Journal of Communication with Noora Kotilainen. Jukka Huhtamäki  is a senior research fellow at the Research Group for Information and Knowledge Management NOVI at Tampere University. He draws from data science and network analysis to study the societal effects of platforms and develops computational methodology for applications in collaborative, multidisciplinary research on hybrid media and organising. He is a former board member of the Rajapinta association and a co-author of the book Hybrid Media Events (2018) with Johanna Sumiala, Katja Valaskivi, and Minttu Tikka. Fiona L. Kenney  is an architectural researcher focusing on the intersections between architecture, care, and ethics. Her ongoing doctoral research at the McGill University School of Architecture in Montreal, Canada, examines spatial expressions of care with a focus on palliative care environments. Fiona holds a Master of Design Studies in History and Philosophy of Design from Harvard University. Her work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Friends of the CAMH Archives, and McGill University. Adelina Mbinjama  is a lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa

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(SA). Her teaching and research interests are in social media-communications, cyber-ethics, black feminism and representation of women in the media. Being the recipient of the National Research Foundation’s Thuthuka grant and a former recipient of the prestigious Trent Lott Leadership Scholarship enabled her to address SA’s Truth Reconciliation Commission in SA, the USA and the UK. Mark McKenna  is an associate professor and director of the Centre for Research in the Digital Entertainment and Media Industries at Staffordshire University. Mark has published widely on horror cinema. He is the author of Nasty Business: The Marketing and Distribution of the Video Nasties (2020) and Snuff (2023), and is co-editor of the Routledge collection Horror Franchise Cinema (2021), and co-­author of the report ‘Silicon Stoke: Developing Film, TV and Other Content Production in North Staffordshire’. Melissa  Merchant  PhD, SFHEA, is Academic Chair of English and Creative Arts at Murdoch University. Her most recent research has been divided between popular culture representations and Shakespeare adaptations. Her articles have been published in  Journal of Intercultural Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Seventeenth Century, Outskirts, and  M/C Journal. She has also published a chapter in  The Routledge Companion to Disability and the Media (2020). Bethan Michael-Fox  is the assistant editor for the journal Mortality and co-­founder and co-host of The Death Studies Podcast. She teaches at the Open University, is a visiting research fellow at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society and is the social media manager for the open-­access online journal Revenant. She has co-edited a special issue of the journal Revenant entitled ‘Death and the Screen and published widely on representations of death’. Lauren O’Mahony  PhD, FHEA, is Senior Lecturer in Communications at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Her research focusses on Australian women’s literature as well as media analysis, media audiences, and creativity. Her research has been published in  The Journal of Intercultural Studies, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Popular Romance Studies,  Communication Research and Practice, and  Text  Journal as well as the edited books  The Routledge Research

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Companion to Popular Romance Fiction  (2021) and Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman (2022). Rebecca E. Olson  is Associate Professor of Sociology, Bachelor of Social Science Program Director, and Director of SocioHealthLab at the University of Queensland. Using innovative qualitative methods, her research intersects the sociologies of health and emotions offering practical insights into caregiving and interprofessional practice in cancer, pain, and palliative care settings. She has over 50 publications in high-quality international outlets. Emotions in Late Modernity is her book with Patulny, Bellocchi, Khorana, McKenzie, and Petrie (2019). Simon  Order  MSc, PhD, is an adjunct senior lecturer at Murdoch University who specialises in two connected fields: First, radio studies, which includes radio production, community media, Australian community radio, and radio public policy; and second, music technology studies, which includes user-interface usability, student creativity in sound production studies, and music technology in teaching and learning. More recently, his research has become more diverse with work focusing on post-apocalyptic television studies and universal design for online learning events and social mobility in Australia. Ruth Penfold-Mounce  is a senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of York, UK. Her background in Sociology is united with an interest in crime and deviance, death studies, and popular culture and celebrity. Ruth established the Death and Culture Network (DaCNet) at York and is an editor for the Death and Culture Book Series. Natalie Pitimson  gained her PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick and is a lecturer in the social sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on interpersonal experiences of ageing, dying and grief. She has published work on bereavement in the workplace, student experiences of death education and older women’s experiences in the arts. Her current projects include shifts in end of life rituals after Covid and experiences of private proximal grief following high profile deaths. Ketlyn  Mara  Rosa  holds an IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Film Studies Department, Trinity College Dublin, on urban conflicts cinema in Northern Ireland and Brazil. She also holds a Doctoral Degree from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. Her research

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emphasis is on war cinema as she has worked with a variety of conflicts ranging from visual representations of WWII, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and currently, late twentieth-century urban warfare in Northern Ireland and Brazil. Lucy E. Selman  is Associate Professor in Palliative and End-of-Life Care at the University of Bristol, where she co-leads the Palliative and End-ofLife Care Research Group. Her wide-ranging research includes attention to treatment decision-­making, bereavement, public health approaches to palliative care, and the development and evaluation of complex interventions. She is also the founding director of Good Grief Festival. Edel  Semple  is a lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is co-editor of Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen (forthcoming, Arden Bloomsbury), Staged Normality in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave 2019), Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave 2013), and a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies on European women in drama (2017). Her research and recent publications focus on gender in Shakespearean drama and in Shakespeare adaptations on film, TV, and the stage. Ryann  Sowden  is a research assistant in the Palliative and End-of-Life Care Research Group at the University of Bristol and a speech and language  therapist. Her research interests include communication between clinicians  and  patients, health service development, global development and communication disability. Matthew Spokes  is Associate Dean for Social Sciences at York St John University. His research explores the connections between death, spatial theory and interactive entertainment, with a particular focus on video games. His recent book (2020)—Gaming and the Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear and Death in Contemporary Video Games—uses the concept of the sublime to reframe representations of death and dying as both praxis (in the context of ‘play’) and an affective absolute (through Deleuze). Brennan  Thomas  is Associate Professor of English at Saint Francis University, where she directs the university’s writing centre and teaches courses in composition, fiction writing, and Disney film studies. Her recent scholarship is featured in the edited collections  Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King  (2020),  Surveilling America on

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Screen: Discourses on the Nostalgic Lens  (2021), and  Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Mischa  Twitchin  is a senior lecturer in the Theatre and Performance Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has contributed chapters to several collected volumes and articles for journals such as Memory Studies and Performance Research (an issue of which, ‘On Animism’, 24.6, he also co-edited). His first book, The Theatre of Death— The Uncanny in Mimesis: Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg and an Iconology of the Actor, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Renske  Visser  is a medical anthropologist interested in ageing, dying, and death. She completed her PhD on homemaking in later life with the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. She is the co-host of The Death Studies Podcast and owner of the blog Dead Good Reading (deadgoodreading.com). Rhian Waller  is an independent scholar and holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. Her previous publications include ‘Postcolonial pictures: examining the Penguin edition book covers of Paul Theroux’s travel writing through a visual social semiotic lens’ in Mobile Culture Studies and ‘Stigma: the representation of anorexia nervosa in UK newspaper Twitter feeds’ in the Journal of Mental Health. She has several chapters forthcoming in books about ecofeminism, fantasy literature and journalism. She writes poetry and fiction in her spare time. Zhaoxi Zheng  is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland who researches the sociologies of early childhood and death and dying. Using art-based, material-­oriented, critical, and creative post-qualitative methodologies, Zhaoxi’s work centres around young children’s everyday encounters with death and dying and methodological innovations in childhood studies through the critical lens of new materialism: written and published in poetic, playful, and non-traditional academic styles.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture Bethan Michael-Fox, Sharon Coleclough, and Renske Visser

We circulated the call for chapters for this book in February 2021. With over a hundred abstracts submitted, we were spoilt for choice. As we engrossed ourselves in them, we were faced with challenging decisions. We were also assured that the broad topic of difficult death, dying and the dead in media and culture was an engaging one that had garnered widespread interest. We were delighted, but not surprised—after all, who has not had their ‘thanatological imagination’ (Penfold-Mounce 2019) sparked by a media text or cultural phenomenon, turned to books to help

B. Michael-Fox (*) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Coleclough Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Visser Independent Scholar, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_1

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make sense of experiences of loss, been prompted to reflect on their mortality as they scroll social media, or found themselves experiencing difficult thoughts and feelings whilst processing media reportage of violent death? This inter- and multidisciplinary collection examines a range of representations of and engagement with difficult death, dying and the dead across different media and cultural forms including film documentary and drama, television series, children’s media, social media content, reportage and journalism, literature and more broadly in physical and metaphorical cultural spaces. The collection examines some of the difficulties and challenges of representing death, dying and the dead whilst also exploring difficult and challenging representations of these subjects as important objects of analysis in themselves. Nearly two years after we began the project and as we submit the manuscript at the beginning of 2023, media coverage of death and suffering is focused on the Turkey-Syria earthquake and the war in Ukraine. Given its place as an inevitable part of life, death and its attendant difficulties are always on the agenda in some form. As this book is published, and at whatever point in time you are reading it, you will no doubt be able to immediately offer examples of the mediated deaths that surround you now. Yet the role of highly complex, divergent and evolving media and cultures in informing, shaping, negotiating and conveying experiences of death and dying is, whilst consistently an unavoidable part of human life, also highly dynamic. How death is mediated in culture is subject to change. As media evolve, new opportunities emerge through which to become aware of and negotiate death, dying and the dead, and their difficulties. One broad example of this can be seen in how the expansion of global media and the simultaneous expansion of the global population have led to the creation of what Rojek (2016, 5) calls ‘statistical apparitions’. These are mediated signifiers of the billions of people on the planet right now who we have never met, do not know and are unlikely to ever encounter, and who we become aware of only through media representations. As Waller and Ezran-Essien point out in their chapter in this very collection, journalism has consistently by custom and necessity tended to focus on disaster and death. Consequently, the existence of ‘statistical apparitions’ are made all the more haunting, because encounters with them are consistently framed by tragedy, loss, violence and ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ dying— with very ‘difficult death’. This difficulty is further compounded by the multitude of inequalities that inform whether or not a person’s death is likely to go noticed or unnoticed on the global stage, to be veiled within

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a numerical figure representing a colossal number of individual casualties, or to be amplified as a ‘spectacular death’ (Jacobsen 2016) in global media due to royal or celebrity status, or as a consequence of infamy. In the conclusion to this collection, we will reflect more on some difficult deaths that have garnered significant media attention. Now, as social media become de rigueur for so many, for any death to go entirely unremarked in some form of media seems an increasing unlikelihood. We (the editors of this collection) and you (its reader) may come to form part of an amorphous ‘statistical apparition’ for someone else, somewhere else, one day. However, as Self (2013) points out, for those of us living ‘it’s always the others who die’. It is with this in mind that this edited collection explores what we term ‘difficult death’ through a wide range of examples, exploring a diversity of texts and contexts in media and culture within which the concepts of ‘difficult death’, dying and the dead are negotiated by the living.

What Is ‘Difficult Death’? The inspiration for this edited collection came in part from conversations between the editorial team prompted by the US television drama series Billions (2016–present), starring Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti. Premised on the life of a hedge fund manager, the series charts financial crimes, dramatises the life of the 1% and offers insights into the world of a highly competitive social elite. In episode four of season three, entitled ‘Hell of a Ride’, character Mike ‘Wags’ Wagner is seeking to purchase a $350,000 burial plot in Manhattan, New York. Troubled to discover that someone else covets the same spot, Wags must scheme to get what he wants. At the episode’s close, he has been successful. It is nightfall, and he kneels over the burial plot in the dark with his boss and friend Bobby ‘Axe’ Axelrod. The two are discussing mortality, triggered in part by the purchase of the burial plot and in part by the recent death of minor character Craig Heidecker, a thirty-three-year-old aerospace development billionaire who has died in a failed rocket launch. Their discussion goes as follows: Bobby ‘Axe’ Axelrod: Fuck. Thirty-three. Too soon. Mike ‘Wags’ Wagner: No. Dying in your thirties is ‘tragic.’ As is forties. Sympathy dissipates from there. Fifties is ‘such a shame.’ Sixties is ‘too soon.’ Bobby ‘Axe’ Axelrod: Seventies… ‘a good run.’ Mike ‘Wags’ Wagner: And eighties is ‘a life well lived.’ Nineties? Bobby ‘Axe’ Axelrod: That’s a fuckin’ hell of a ride.

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Wags then lays down on the grass covering his newly purchased burial plot, his arms crossed behind his head as he looks upward wistfully. Sammy Davis Jr’s Mr Bojangles plays in the background. What this example offers is a glimpse into a wide range of cultural ideas about death, and what is deemed to make it more or less difficult. Age, here, is the key differentiator in what takes a death from being framed as a tragic loss to it being understood as the sad, but inevitable, close of a long and adventure-filled life. Whilst many would not challenge the idea that the death of a younger person is more tragic than the death of an older person, within academic fields such as death studies, and within the critical academic disciplines that inform it, it is important to challenge ‘common sense’ knowledge, and to gently question the assumptions that underlie it. Is a younger death inevitably more difficult than an older one? Is a longer life inherently better than a shorter one? What might the consequences of assumptions like these be for people at different stages in their life course? Vignettes from popular culture like this brief scene in Billions can serve to reflect cultural ideas about death and its difficulties. They can also prompt opportunities for contemplation, critical reflection and rumination on the presence of death, dying and the dead in audiences’ own lives and social worlds, mediating the ways in which death can be interpreted as difficult to differing degrees. As such, media and cultural texts can be understood to offer a rich entryway into examining how the concepts of death and dying, and indeed the dead themselves, can be constructed as difficult. As our discussions proliferated about this televisual example, they began to spread to and encompass a wide range of other examples of media and cultural engagement with death, dying and the dead, and what they might indicate about their difficulty. Whilst many would argue that death is inherently difficult, given the irretrievable loss it represents, others have sought to challenge the notion that death is always difficult—positioning death instead as ‘normal’, ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’. The Death Positive Movement and medical professionals such as Mannix (2018) have been instrumental in this in recent years, reaching broad audiences with public facing calls to normalise the ‘natural’ processes of death and dying. However, as stated above, a key aim across many of the academic disciplines informing this collection is to challenge common-sense assumptions. Borgstrom and MacArtney (2023) have emphasised that whilst the ‘everyday use’ of terms like ‘ordinary’ and

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‘normal’ when discussing dying ‘can be useful to distinguish between the types of deaths witnessed by clinicians’, it is also important to reflect on how such usage could be problematic, questioning what is meant by ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’, whose definitions of this are most valued, as well as who has access to such deaths, and indeed the ways in which they might intersect with complex layers of privilege and notions of personal choice. Wilde (2023) is undertaking much needed research into The Death Positive Movement, offering critical engagement with its framing of death, and exploring the views and experiences of death professionals in relation to it. It is also important to acknowledge that even if a death is accepted as ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’, it may well at the same time be difficult. The importance of acknowledging what death perhaps always is— complex, like so much of human experience—is emphasised throughout this collection. Zheng and Olson offer insight into this in their analysis of children’s media, in which they argue that such media often reinforce children’s exclusion from death despite growing evidence of their capacity to understand complex phenomena. Similarly, Semple’s examination of cultural imaginings of Hamnet (the only son of William Shakespeare) provides a useful vehicle through which to explore the nexus between issues of child death, parental grief and the social role of art, highlighting once more how the personal and social can collide within and around cultural texts. So, what is difficult death, especially in the context of media and culture? In this collection the term ‘difficult death’ is used loosely. It includes representations of death, dying and the dead that are especially troubling or challenging, such as depictions of real deaths on screen, as well as categories of death that might be deemed especially difficult, such as suicides, murders and child deaths—deaths that are often understood as untimely and unnatural (whilst recognising that, like natural and normal, these terms need to be understood as historically and culturally dependent and in need of unpacking in their individual contexts). Throughout this collection, difficult death is often shown to be difficult as a consequence of the same complex and corrosive social inequalities that make life difficult. Difficult death is often difficult because it occurs at the nexus of myriad forms of social inequality that function as mechanisms of systemic marginalisation in life and in death—inequalities relating to gender, sexuality, ‘race’, class and economic privilege, age and more. Yet the term is also a contingent one, and what constitutes a difficult death will be culturally and socially relative, as well as dependent on a series of individual factors

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including life experiences and expectations. The examples drawn on in this collection include the highly recent as well as the more historical. There are many questions over the importance of recency to making death difficult, and fears often arise about the risk of time diminishing the cultural memory of atrocities. Media can function in several ways to seek to prevent such cultural forgetting and might serve as a form of what Wheatley (2023) calls ‘death education’ in their capacity to teach new generations about past traumas—see, for example, Rosa’s work in Chap. 6 of this collection on WWII miniseries Band of Brothers (2001). What ties the chapters in this collection together, despite their disparate disciplinary positionings, the range of media and the differing time periods they cover, is a concern with how media and culture play a role in shaping, communicating, framing and articulating death, dying and the dead as and at their most difficult. As Sumiala (2022, 58) has pointed out, ‘“bad death” is more likely to become a public event in hybrid media’. However, she also emphasises that what constitutes a bad death is, of course, socially constructed by people. Consequently, it is important to be attendant to the ways in which such deaths are imbricated in power structures both before and after they become mediatised in culture. That is exactly what the chapters in this collection seek to do as they navigate the many political and social complexities and inequalities—or, what might be deemed the difficulties—of death, dying and the dead in media and culture.

Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture One of the difficulties engaged with throughout this collection relates to relationships between media, cultures and personal experiences. For example, in the context of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, whilst entire populations were directly experiencing its many consequences and the complex losses it brought about at a very personal level, they were simultaneously faced with intense media coverage of its impact upon others—no doubt an overwhelming experience for many, and one explored in this collection by Borgstrom, Sowden and Selman, who reflect on grief during the pandemic. Through an analysis of UK newspaper reporting combined with reflections on their own experiences of conducting the research, Borgstrom, Sowden and Selman explore how the personal, professional and political intermix. Their chapter helps to articulate one of the challenges of mediated death and of the place of death in culture by emphasising how the personal is always at play. Our personal perspectives,

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emotions and life histories inform how we interpret and experience the world around us, shaping and framing how death is encountered. As such, whilst mediated death is often positioned as separate from real death, it is rarely so simple, and these categories overlap at many junctures. Some of the tensions and complexities of assuming a clear and distinct boundary between personal experiences of death and what is often assumed to be more distanced mediated ones are exemplified in the following example. In February 2023, Rob Wilson (2018) reported for the BBC on the striking experience of Moti Dereje, an Ethiopian university student who, in 2018, logged onto Facebook expecting to see the usual updates from family and friends. Instead, he was faced with the image of his father’s dead body, learning only in that instance of his father’s death. Dereje’s retelling of his experience informs readers of the political unrest in Ethiopia and of work being undertaken to seek to moderate media platforms to take down harmful images. However, his story also emphasises the complexity of death in a hypermediated world, where what might be deemed to be a distanced experience of death, a shocking image of an unknown victim on a social media feed, becomes for one individual a harrowing, traumatic experience of discovering their own parent’s death. Dereje’s example also serves as a pertinent reminder that all those who make up the ‘statistical apparitions’ (2016, 5) Rojek identifies as pervading mediated culture, discussed earlier in this introduction, are individuals with loved ones—this is in part, of course, what makes unknown victims so haunting. An awareness of so many others and their suffering, even when so innumerable in mediated, reported form as to be difficult to identify as individuals, can function as a reminder of the vulnerability and mortality of our own loved ones, and of ourselves. They can also prompt difficult considerations of whose lives and deaths matter most to us, and whose do not. As Waytz (2016) has discussed, empathy is a finite resource, and as such it is not uncommon to experience ‘compassion fatigue’ in the context of a highly mediated culture saturated with death, dying and the dead. In this collection, both Harju and Huhtamäki’s chapter on the streaming of terrorist violence and post-death data, and McKenna’s chapter on twenty-first-century digital snuff, examine the ethical complexities of chance or intentional encounters with violence and death online. Gibson (2007) has examined from a different perspective how the boundaries between real and imagined can be blurred in relation to death, exploring the case on September 11, 2001. This date is intentionally referred to in this highly specific way here. This is to highlight and

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emphasise the erasure of other traumatic events that have taken place on September 11 historically, which is perpetuated across so much of the media and cultural landscape through use of the idiom 9/11. As Loach (2012)  makes clear in his contribution to the collection of short films 11’09’2001 September 11, the death of Salvadore Allende on September 11, 1973, is one example. Here, it is possible to see how difficult it can be to engage with the sensitive subject matter of death in media and culture, sometimes unknowingly perpetuating troubling meanings through language choice. An increasingly recognised and accepted example is the shift in describing suicide in media and culture, with a proliferation of guidance available to encourage a rejection of the word commit, with its problematic connotations of crime and sin, in favour of more neutral terminology. Here, the experience of those bereaved by suicide in particular informs the shift. Returning to Gibson (2007, 419), it is possible to see how ‘the fictional’ can underscore ‘the real’ in media and cultural texts, as when planes crashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, a fictional trope from many Hollywood blockbusters of New  York under attack became a reality. As technologies have shifted and developed, smart phones, social media, and the notion of the ‘deep fake’ make new connections between the real and the unreal, and those who encounter death online must question the veracity of what is presented as real. At the same time, the fictional can function to create spaces through which to negotiate the real. After so many witnessed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, some have questioned whether it is ethical or appropriate to continue to watch this violent death. The footage can be understood to constitute an example of what Price (2020) has referred to as ‘essentially snuff films with African-American protagonists’. The team behind US television series For Life (2020–2021), a social-realist series dedicated to examining the plight of incarcerated people in the United States, decided to weave in a plotline in their second season that dealt directly with the Black Lives Matter movement and with the death of Floyd. As Essebo (2022, 555) has stated, stories have the ‘potential to influence, even change, events, including practices, beliefs, and materialities, through processes of sense-making and creating shared convictions and desires’. This is another way in which real and imagined death, dying and the dead can become entwined, as fictionalised stories negotiate lived experience with the aim of bringing about change. It is not only realist texts that can mediate real death, or inform understandings of death, dying and the dead. For

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example, as Luckhurst (2016) has argued, the representation of the living dead in zombie horror can be read as a form of social realism with its own necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), wherein hordes of the undead can be read as metaphors for the victims of capitalism, for workers deemed disposable in profit driven cultures. Coleclough (2022, 2023) and Michael-Fox (2020) have both explored how representations of the undead in popular culture can serve to create spaces, akin to the morbid spaces referred to in the foreword to this collection by Penfold-Mounce, in which audiences can negotiate their own views about and experiences of death, loss and mortality. Consequently, the divisions between what is real and what is imagined blur. Yet whilst, as Clarke (2006, 154) notes, ‘in the absence of personal experience’ people might ‘rely on various media, among other things, for information, attitudes, beliefs and feelings about death and its meanings,’ they do not necessarily make death any less difficult when it does impact them personally. Gibson (2007, 423) points out that whilst audiences might be inundated with images of death and dying on screen, ‘the narratives and images which have shaped and informed an individual consciousness do not necessarily prepare for witnessing death and experiencing grief’. There are also ‘difficult’ ways in which media texts might inform culture, and understandings and expectations around death and dying. Questioning why assisted dying laws have passed in some of the United States in the past decade, and not earlier, Norwood (2018, 462) has suggested that television portrayals have been harmful in turning ‘the most unlikely forms of death into daily routine’. Norwood (2018, 470) argues that television medical dramas have led many, when experiencing dying and death in their own lives, to anticipate ‘technologically driven, medically intervening extremes’. Elsewhere, Caswell (2019) has explored how depictions of dying alone in a popular British soap opera can both reflect and inform ideas about what constitutes ‘good’ experiences of death and dying. What is clear is that the connections between death, dying and the dead and media and culture are myriad and complex—with even those that are seemingly straightforward posing the potential to challenge common sense assumptions. As you explore this collection, we hope that you encounter some ideas and examples that offer you fresh insights into how death, dying and the dead and media and culture intersect in potentially difficult ways.

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The Challenges of Engaging with Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture One challenge in putting this collection together has been how to define and delineate media and culture and their myriad potential meanings. This is especially difficult in an inter- and multidisciplinary context, where the terms ‘media’ and ‘culture’ will have a vast array of different meanings. Our main concern has been with examining difficult death, dying and the dead in media and cultural texts (e.g., an analysis by Zheng and Olson of Disney films in Chap. 8), mediated cultural spaces (e.g., in Mbinjama’s exploration of social media and documentary responses to femicide in South Africa in Chap. 9) and cultural spaces that have been highly mediated (e.g., Spokes’ work on Mt Everest in Chap. 5). Whilst the chapters in this collection take different approaches that rely on varying definitions of media and culture, what all of the chapters show is that culture is not a static concept, nor are perceptions of death and dying within contexts where media are forever evolving. Media are the forms through which a culture is shared and negotiated, and the myriad ways in which death can be difficult in the mediated cultural contexts examined in this collection are revealing of a wide range of different attitudes toward death, dying and the dead, difficult or otherwise. Within and beyond death studies, there has been criticism of research that has described the deathways of ‘other’ cultures in sometimes stereotypical ways, adding to problematic perceptions of communities. One strength of mediated depictions of death such as documentary films, novels or television series is that they can transcend specific social groups and be experienced by audiences globally, having the potential to share different, and arguably more authentic, meanings and understandings from a range of cultural contexts. As Penfold-Mounce points out in the foreword to this collection, ‘exploring death through culture has significant potential to reveal and challenge deeply embedded social inequalities’. Through your engagement with this book, we hope you can come across cultural and media texts that are new to you, or that you might see familiar texts in new ways, offering you opportunities to reflect on media and culture and their engagement with death, dying and the dead. A second challenge has been how to do justice to the differences between death, dying and the dead. These are ill-defined terms within death studies, and they often overlap, as they do in most of the chapters offered here. Few of the chapters focus specifically on the process of dying,

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and arguably if there remains an element of death which is denied, ignored or goes untalked about in many cultural contexts, it is the process of dying. In recent years media and cultural texts have played a central role in bringing the process of dying to the broader public in the context of the UK, from memoirs including Jenny Diski’s In Gratitude (2016) and Deborah James’ How to Live When You Could Be Dead (2022), to social media accounts such as that of Clair Fisher’s Dying Well project (2020), and Steven Eastwood’s documentary Island (2018), all of which chart in written and/or visual form experiences of dying. Research into, for example, the gender politics of such difficult, powerful and highly meaningful engagement with dying would be very worthwhile, and we regret there has not been space for this here. The overlap between difficult death and the difficult dead become especially clear in some chapters, for example, in Spokes’ analysis of difficult death and dead bodies in the context of Mt. Everest, where the presence of the dead body remains. In many others, the way the dead are constructed in media and the politics of these representations are of central concern. In selecting a range of chapters that contend with difficult death, dying and the dead, we have not offered an exhaustive response to their mediation in culture. Instead, we offer a curated selection of responses that we hope inspire more thought, discussion and analysis of how death, dying and the dead can be difficult in a breadth of media and cultural contexts. We also seek to demonstrate through these chapters and the analysis undertaken in them the importance of ensuring death studies includes as wide a range of disciplines and perspectives as possible, to help account for contemporary and historical complexities and contradictions surrounding death, dying and the dead. Media and cultural studies are vitally important areas of research within death studies, as they enable better understandings of how death, dying and the dead are framed, negotiated, experienced and shaped in different contexts. The third challenge we have faced is that of writing sensitively about death in mediated forms. This main challenge here relates to the above-­ discussed permeable boundaries between the fictional or imagined and the real, which are never straightforward but perhaps always have the potential to produce complex and powerful feelings. With the sensitive subject matter of death at the fore, there is always the risk of activating a feeling that the topic is not being treated with sufficient care, or that its potential to be highly emotive has being undermined. It is not uncommon to come across the view the media can only offer what Mannix (2018, 1) calls

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‘sensationalised yet simultaneously trivialised versions of dying and death’. Whilst we acknowledge that media can certainly offer such versions of death, dying and the dead for audiences’ consumption, we argue that media engagement with death, dying and the dead has as much capacity to be serious, thought-provoking, foundational and formative as any other aspect of culture. In an article about parental loss as a consequence of violent crime and mourning through horror, Orbey (2016) has written about how horror movies provided the author with ‘an outlet for empathy’, and a depiction of ‘worlds in which the unthinkable is valid’. Orbey’s (2016) article demonstrates the importance of not diminishing the potentially vital role of media in informing people’s responses to death and emphasises the need to recognise that audiences react to and consume media texts in different and sometimes surprising ways. Moreover, whilst popular documentary, horror films, soap operas, cartoons, novels and social media content might all offer a range of engagement with death, dying and the dead that can be deemed trivial, serious, meaningful or any number of other things, it is essential to analyse this engagement if we are to learn from it how people understand and experience death, dying and the dead in media and culture. For example, as Binfield-Smith shows in her chapter in this collection on the Jack the Ripper victims in The Illustrated Police News, media in myriad forms can play a role in the further victimisation of those who have died as a consequence of violent crime—as such, any media that does arguably sensationalise and trivialise death, dying and the dead is equally as in need of analysis as media that arguably don’t, in order that such processes can come to be understood and challenged. Attempting to articulate the experience conveyed by audio-visual media into the written word itself poses a challenge. Those reading may not be familiar with the texts under discussion, and in particular in relation to some of the likely more disturbing content discussed in this book it may not be desirable, ethical or appropriate to encourage others to engage with that content directly (again, recognising that what is disturbing is, whilst often based on culturally shared understandings, potentially also deeply personally informed and subjective). We have given thought to the potential impact upon a reader who may have a real-world connection to the manner of death being discussed or analysed, have sought to ensure sensitive use of language throughout, and have provided below both some suggestions for self-care for you as a reader, and a brief summary of each chapter so that you might get a sense before delving in of what to expect,

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making decisions for yourself about what to engage with and when. Perhaps especially in the context of difficult death, researcher wellbeing matters, and whilst there is a growing body of literature addressing researcher wellbeing in terms of death studies (Borgstrom and Ellis 2020; Visser 2017) there is little that focuses on researchers who are not working directly with people, but instead with contemporary or historical textual sources.

Structure of the Book What we have sought to offer in this collection is a breadth of diverse disciplinary and international perspectives about the concept of ‘difficult death’, allowing a plethora of different ways of seeing to emerge. We have eschewed the convention of placing chapters into sections in terms of themes or loose disciplinary categorisations, acknowledging that whilst useful in some ways, such groupings are also often artificial and inevitably partial. Whilst the chapters tend to move from predominantly visual sources (documentary, livestreaming, film and television) to the predominantly literary (novels and literary texts) before moving onto the realm of journalism and reportage, there are many themes that cut across and through the different chapters, and many of the examples of media and cultural texts and phenomena engaged with here are multimodal, bringing together images, words and sounds to convey complex messages. Some of the themes explored in this book are discussed above, and others are examined further in the conclusion. However, you will no doubt be able to identify more, bringing to the reading of this text your own experiences and expertise. Ultimately, you are encouraged to read this book however you like, moving through the chapters or choosing for yourself where to begin, and where to go next. Below you will find a brief summary of each chapter. As the content of this book is likely to be emotive and at times disturbing, we encourage you to practise self-care as you engage with it, and to balance the reading of it with a range of activities that you find help you to process difficult and challenging content. For us, such activities include fresh air, walking, journaling and time with friends. You may also wish to take the time to listen to a podcast episode featuring discussion by the editors and the chapter authors, which you will find available on The Death Studies Podcast. The podcast features on all major podcasting platforms, or can be accessed via www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com.

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As noted above, the early chapters in this book focus on predominantly visual media texts, ranging from documentary to drama, and including online video content. Chapter 2, by Brennan Thomas, examines the documentary film The Bridge, directed and produced by Eric Steel. The controversial 2006 documentary focuses on the lives and deaths of six suicide victims who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. The film was shot over a twelve-month period and includes footage of each victim’s death. The Bridge has been criticised for the decision to both film and then release this footage and has also been imbricated in a rise in suicides involving the bridge after the film was released. Thomas examines Steel’s response to these criticisms and provides an accessible introduction to the film and the key debates surrounding it. The chapter considers the extent to which The Bridge can be legitimised as a genuine attempt at bringing about change and as an analysis of suicide, and the extent to which it can be seen to reduce suicide to spectacle. Chapter 3 provides readers with an introduction into the world of what Mark McKenna calls ‘twenty-first century digital snuff,’ providing a definition and brief history of the ‘snuff’ genre and investigating the circulation of images  and videos of ‘real’ death online. Like Thomas’ chapter, an examination of ‘real’ death on screen is what is at stake here. McKenna charts the evolution of the ‘snuff’ film from marginal media myth to digital reality and considers the murder of Jun Lin by the ‘cannibal killer’ Luka Magnotta, which has been shared online. McKenna examines why, having garnered hundreds of thousands of views, a film like this might have found a viewership, connecting this to the context of the attention economy. McKenna considers the extent to which this video adheres to the FBI definition of ‘snuff’ and reflects on what it can tell us about shifting ideas about celebrity, fame and the increasing value of ‘views’ over monetary reward in the context of twenty-first-century media and culture. Chapter 4, by Anu A. Harju and Jukka Huhtamäki, is also concerned with the filming of ‘real’ death and with deeply disturbing online content, this time in the context of the live-streaming of the 2019 Christchurch massacre. The chapter examines the digital afterlife of violent death and pays attention to the difficult complexities of death as filmed through the vantage point of a killer, where the perpetrator’s gaze forms a central part of the legacy of these victims’ deaths. Harju and Huhtamäki define the notion of digital afterlife, positioning this as a phenomenon with two distinct dimensions—that of data afterlife (the socio-technical dimension) and data as afterlife (the affective dimension). The role this data plays in

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shaping the memory and remembering of the dead is a central focus of the chapter, which explores how mediated, violent death represents ‘difficult death’ from multiple perspectives. Specifically, the chapter examines the role of data in the construction of digital afterlife and difficult memory, its role in hierarchies of grievability of public death, and its function in mediated remembering and affective relatedness—whilst some watching these violent and difficult deaths will stand with the victims, others will watch as a way of enacting their alignment with the perpetrators. In all three of these chapters, central questions about the ethics of watching violent and difficult deaths on screen emerge, as do questions about what the recording and replaying of death does to and for the living—to those grieving, remembering, witnessing, and seeking to bring about change. In Chap. 5 Matthew  Spokes uses extreme mountaineering on Mt. Everest as a case study for exploring how death, dying and dead bodies in particular become ‘difficult’ in the context of leisure. Focusing on film and journalistic accounts, he examines how the difficult dead as they are encountered on Mt. Everest—left behind frozen markers for living climbers to see—challenge binary distinctions, how they relate to gender and economic privilege, and how they function to produce a quite literal ‘provocative morbid space’ (Penfold-Mounce 2019). Whilst Spokes’ chapter constitutes engagement with a visual text, he also brings in a wide range of other cultural and media sources and demonstrates how Mt. Everest functions as a symbolic physical space and metaphorical imaginary imbued with human meanings about mortality. The challenge of climbing Mt. Everest is a difficult one, and for those who die a difficult death there, retrieving their bodies often poses a far too difficult task—those bodies then become imbued with a wide-ranging array of complicated, difficult meanings, explored in Spokes’ chapter. Like Spokes, Ketlyn Mara Rosa examines difficult dead bodies in Chap. 6, which is focused on death and combat in the WWII miniseries Band of Brothers (2001). Rosa’s chapter focuses on the cinematic analysis of two violent sequences from selected episodes and demonstrates how the hurt and dying bodies of the soldiers shape the series’ narrative as their ultraviolent portrayals reverberate into traumatic events, disclosing a less idealised portrayal of WWII than is often found elsewhere. Rosa argues that this series and its portrayals of difficult death ultimately imprint a revisionist view of the honourable and heroic ‘good war’ within a broader cultural context. Rosa demonstrates how nostalgic feelings in relation to the representation of the ‘greatest generation’ are depicted in unusual ways as

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heroism, a national trademark of the conflict, gives way to feelings of dread and uneasiness. The unglamorous side of war and death is portrayed in the miniseries, which reminds viewers of the very difficult deaths experienced by those who are the victims of war on all sides of conflict. The representation of fatal violence is again the focus in Chap. 7, in which Lauren  O’Mahony, Melissa  Merchant and Simon  Order examine the role of legitimation, graphicness and explicitness in representing child death in particular in the television series The Walking Dead (2010–2022). Drawing on existing approaches to screen violence, they explore how audiences are positioned by the narrative, considering how this might impact views, understandings, and even the enactment of violence. O’Mahony, Merchant and Order argue that violence leading to the death of child characters in the series tends to contain low levels of graphicness and explicitness, and is often combined with careful narrative justification or legitimation to explain the reasons for the death, suggesting that audiences at large might find child deaths especially difficult and in need of careful positioning in order to be deemed acceptable narratively. Moving from the representation of child deaths to the representation of death for child audiences, Zhaoxi Zheng and Rebecca E. Olson, in Chap. 8, examine how normative deaths are celebrated, reinforced and disrupted in children’s media. Specifically, they examine Disney-Pixar movies with a critical discourse analysis of the animated films Coco (2017) and Soul (2020). The chapter engages with debates about the developmental and educational value for young children of these productions and positions them as texts that function to simplify and discipline death, reinforcing its normative and biomedical construction whilst refusing to provide complex offerings of death for young audiences. The authors challenge scholarship that positions Disney-Pixar portrayals as offering realistic depictions of death with some biological accuracy, and instead they argue that these films provision of superficial and simplified understandings reinforces the shielding of young children from death’s emotional confrontation. In Chap. 9, Adelina Mbinjama uses both a documentary and the examples of social media hashtags and protests to examine the cultural negotiation of rape and femicide as ‘difficult death’ in South Africa. Exploring the #AmINext? Movement, specific cases of rape and femicide, cultural attitudes toward women in South Africa and the importance of Black Twitter as a cultural phenomenon, Mbinjama sets out the context of gendered violence in South Africa and demonstrates the growth and increasing visibility of cultural resistance to violence against women that can be

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witnessed in the country. Mbinjama provides insight into difficult death’s intersectionality, and reflects on the roles of media and culture in both perpetuating the difficulty of death and in supporting communities to process difficult death and take action around it.  As our definition of ‘difficult death’ above emphasises, death is often made especially difficult when it occurs at the nexus of myriad forms of social inequality and functions as a mechanism of broader and systemic marginalisation. In Chap. 10, Fiona L. Kenney examines Hart Island as a cultural and geographical space that enables and reinforces processes of marginalisation. Situated off the shore of New York City, Hart Island is a mile long. It has served, Kenney tells us, as the site of numerous interventionist projects since the mid-nineteenth century. The chapter explains how the island’s varied public use history has always primarily revolved around the containment and disposal of society’s most marginalised, both in life and in death—having functioned as a quarantine station and a psychiatric hospital. Kenney explores the spatial, political and economic entwining of burial and imprisonment on the island, arguing that its specific landscape has lent itself to weaponisation. Kenney shows how culturally informed geographical landscapes can become implicated in necropolitical processes surrounding death, illness and marginalisation. In Chap. 11, Edel Semple returns us to the theme of child death, and explores the idea of literary legacies. Semple’s chapter focuses on Hamnet Shakespeare as a difficult dead celebrity child. As Semple explains, in historical biography and literary criticism Hamnet was guaranteed celebrity status as the only son of William Shakespeare and also by association because his name is similar to the world’s most famous play: Hamlet. The chapter explores a series of creative responses imagining Hamnet, who died aged eleven. Semple argues that whilst each of the cultural manifestations examined is unique, all of the works under analysis reveal that Hamnet provides a useful nexus between the issues of child death, parental grief, and the social role of art. The texts all, Semple argues, depict Hamnet’s death as difficult; grant him a voice and agency in his life and afterlife; and use Shakespeare’s body of work to suggest that art can aid in understanding and coping with loss. This chapter shows that the preponderance of difficult death in media and culture can be understood as an attempt to make sense of and work through or process difficult experiences at both a personal and cultural level. Chapter 12, by Mischa Twitchin, explores the work of Antonin Artaud as it offers insights into the idea of difficult death. Artaud’s work is

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described not only as literary but as profoundly cultural, and Twitchin draws on a breadth of research and ideas to elaborate on how Artaud conceived of death at a personal and cultural level, seeing society as a means for some to profit from the living death of others. This chapter emphasises the highly political connections between death and capitalism and will be an engaging read for anyone interesting in the cultural politics of death. Chapter 13, by Rhian  Waller and Ato  Ezran-Ettien is also explicitly concerned with the politics of death, examining from the perspective of journalism studies cases where tensions arise in the reportage of high-­ profile death where the deceased’s histories and political identities conflict with those of the publication. The chapter, entitled ‘Difficult Deaths and Awkward Agendas: How Mainstream News Media Negotiate Coverage of Politically Dissonant Victims’, examines instances of this tension in the UK. Specifically, the killings of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 and Conservative MP David Amess in 2021. The chapter shows how journalists frame and negotiate aspects of these figures whose views and careers present either alignment with or a departure from the bipartisan politics of the case study publications, the Daily Mail and The Guardian, identifying negotiation techniques including minimisation and assimilation. In Chap. 14, Rosie Binfield-Smith examines the media treatment of the five victims of Jack the Ripper, namely Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Through a discourse and visual analysis of The Illustrated Police News, this chapter puts the victims’ bodies at its core and explores the challenging ways in which, after death, their ‘difficult’ remains were illustrated. Taking a visual criminological approach and using archival data, the chapter argues that the characterisation of the women in The Illustrated Police News is representative of the disposability and objectification of marginalised bodies during the nineteenth century, and of how after death the women’s violated bodies became objects for consumption and moral scrutiny by a public gaze, relegating them and their identities into a state of silence. This chapter is an excellent example of how the analysis of media within death studies can shed light on social injustices and help to rethink difficult deaths in news ways. Francesco  Buscemi, in Chap. 15, examines the photojournalism of Letizia Battaglia, an internationally renowned Sicilian photographer who acquired popularity in the 1980s for her reportage on Palermo’s mafia

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homicides of criminals, judges, police officers and journalists. Theoretically, the chapter draws on remediation theory, on Barthes’ link between photography and death and the distinction between studium and punctum. Methodologically, the chapter applies social semiotic analysis to Battaglia’s photos of mafia homicides. Buscemi explores how photojournalists responded to the development of television and how its representations of death differ from televisual representations, arguing that Battaglia remediated TV’s language, showing what television could not represent: death. In Chap. 16, Natalie  Pitimson focuses on the rhetoric of the disposability of older people that emerged within the UK’s public discourse around mortality expectations during the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic. A common theme in news coverage from the outset, Pitimson points out, was that the majority of deaths from the virus were occurring in older people and therefore younger people need not be so alarmed. The chapter explores connections between state and media responses to Covid-19, theories of ageism and differing applications of Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, which suggests that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power to dictate who may live and who may die. This chapter brings us back to the point in the vignette that in part inspired this collection, discussed at the beginning of this introduction—what role does age play when considering how difficult a death is, and how problematic can this become when positioning some people as more valuable than others? In Chap. 17, the penultimate chapter of this book, Erica Borgstrom, Ryann Sowden and Lucy E. Selman also consider the Covid-19 pandemic, this time reflecting both on UK newspapers’ reportage and researchers’ experiences. The chapter’s focus is two-fold. Firstly, the authors’ describe their document analysis of articles from the top seven most-read UK online newspapers published in spring 2020 that focused on death, bereavement and grief from Covid-19 and briefly summarise their findings, which have been reported more extensively elsewhere. Secondly, they reflect on the challenges of and techniques for researching a current and evolving situation from an interdisciplinary perspective. In doing so, they explore the challenges for researchers of engaging with media depictions of difficult death, and we hope their chapter provides you with much to think about in terms of your own experience. Chapter 18 is the conclusion to the book, written by us, the editors. In it, we reflect on some of the key themes raised throughout this collection,

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and we draw together some of the potential connections between chapters, drawing conclusions about the role and place of difficult death, dying and the dead in media and culture.

References Band of Brothers. Prod. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Home Box Office, 2001. 10hr. DVD. Billions. Created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Showtime. 2016-present. Television Series. Borgstrom, Erica and John I MacArtney. 2023. Reflections on ‘Ordinary Dying’ and the Queen. Marie Curie Blog, published 12 January 2023. https://www. mariecurie.org.uk/blog/ordinary-­dying-­queen-­elizabeth/357885 Borgstrom, Erica and Julie Ellis. 2020. Internalising ‘Sensitivity’: Vulnerability, Reflexivity and Death Research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1857972. Caswell, Glenys. 2019. A Stark and Lonely Death’: Representations of Dying Alone in Popular Culture. In Death in Contemporary Popular Culture, ed. Adriana Teodorescu and Michael Hviid Jacobsen, 38–50. London: Routledge. Clarke, Juanne Nancarrow. 2006. Death under Control: The Portrayal of Death in Mass Print English Language Magazines in Canada. Omega, 2005–2006 52 (2): 153–167. Coco. Directed by Lee Unkrich. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2017. Animated Film. Coleclough, Sharon. 2022. It’s a Question of Degrees: Morality, Justice, and Revenge in Telefantasy. Revenant Journal. December 2022. https://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/its-­a -­q uestion-­o f-­d egrees-­m orality-­j ustice-­ and-­revenge-­in-­telefantasy/. Coleclough, Sharon. 2023. ‘If We Could Just Talk to the Creature - The Cognizant Zombie in TV Fiction.’ In Simon Bacon (ed.) Faith and the Zombie 241–253. MacFarland: North Caroline. Diski, Jenny. 2016. In Gratitude. London: Bloomsbury. Essebo, Maja. 2022. Storying COVID-19: Fear, Digitalisation, and the Transformational Potential of Storytelling. Sustainability Science 17: 555–564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-­021-­01031-­9. Fisher, Clair. 2020. @DyingWell_UK. https://twitter.com/DyingWell_UK For Life. Created by Hank Steinberg. ABC. 2020–2021. Television Series. Gibson, Margaret. 2007. Death and Mourning in Technologically Mediated Culture. Health Sociology Review 16 (5): 415–424. https://doi.org/10.5172/ hesr.2007.16.5.415. Island. Directed by Steven Eastwood. Hakawati. 2018. Feature Film.

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Jacobsen, Michael Hviid. 2016. ‘Spectacular Death’  – Proposing a New Fifth Phase to Philippe Ariès’s Admirable History of Death. Humanities 5: 19. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020019. James, Deborah. 2022. How to Live When You Could Be Dead. London: Vermillion. Loach, Ken. 2012. United Kingdom. In 11′09’2001 – September 11. CIH Shorts, 2012. Short Film. Luckhurst, Roger. 2016. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books. Mannix, Kathryn. 2018. With the End in Mind: How to Live and Die Well. London: William Collins. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Transl. L. Meintjes. Public Culture 15:1: 11–40. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-­15-­1-­11 Michael-Fox, Bethan. 2020. Dead Chatty: The Rise of the Articulate Undead in Popular Culture. In Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead, ed. M. Coward-­ Gibbs. Bingley: Emerald. Norwood, Francis. 2018. The New Normal: Mediated Death and Assisted Dying in the United States. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, ed. Antonius C.G.M. Robben. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Orbey, Eren. 2016. Mourning Through Horror Movies. The New  Yorker, 22 November. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-­turner/mourning-­ through-­horror-­movies Penfold-Mounce, Ruth. 2019. Celebrity Deaths and the Thanatological Imagination. In Death in Contemporary Popular Culture, ed. A.  Teodorescu and M. Hviid Jacobsen, 51–64. London: Routledge. Price, Melanye. 2020. Please Stop Showing the Video of George Floyd’s Death. The New York Times. 3 June. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/george-­floyd-­video-­social-­media.html Rojek, Chris. 2016. Presumed Intimacy: Parasocial Interaction in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Self, Will. 2013. It’s Always the Others Who Die. A Point of View, BBC Radio 4, December 8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k2gr3 Soul. Directed by Pete Docter. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2020. Animated Film. Sumiala, Johanna. 2022. Mediated Death. Cambridge, England and Medford: Polity Press. The Walking Dead. Developed by Frank Darabont. AMC Studios. 2010 – present. Television Series. Visser, Renske. 2017. “Doing Death”: Reflecting on the Researcher’s Subjectivity and Emotions. Death Studies 41 (1): 6–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07481187.2016.1257877. Wheatley, Helen. 2023. Interview on The Death Studies Podcast Hosted by Bethan Michael-Fox, and Renske Visser, Published 1 March 2023. www. thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.22189924

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Wilde, Anna. 2023. Voices from the Death Positive Movement. Inmediares, Posted 27 February. https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/voices-­death­positive-­movement Waytz, Adam. 2016. The Limits of Empathy. Harvard Business Review. https:// hbr.org/2016/01/the-­limits-­of-­empathy Wilson, Rob. 2023. Ethiopia’s Online Horrors: ‘I Saw My Father’s Dead Body on Facebook’, posted 11 February. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­africa-­ 64518964

CHAPTER 2

“To Show the Problem Inside and Out”: Representations of Mental Illness and Suicide in Eric Steel’s The Bridge Brennan Thomas

While driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on her way to work one sunny morning in May 2004, San Raphael resident Susan Ginwalla noticed a man standing on the bridge’s walkway railing, fully erect, his back to the ocean. At first, Ginwalla believed the man intended to bungee jump from the bridge before remembering that such activity is illegal. Then, as she neared the man, he suddenly fell backward off the railing and disappeared—no bungee cord, no safety net. Ginwalla wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined what she had just seen: A man had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, plummeting over two hundred feet to his death. Ginwalla drove a few more seconds in stunned silence. “I almost felt like I wanted to start crying,” she recalls, “because I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I might be one of the last people that ever see this person alive’” (Steel 2006).

B. Thomas (*) Saint Francis University, Loretto, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_2

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Ginwalla notified authorities of what she had witnessed. When she later spoke with a responding highway patrol officer, she asked him whether bridge suicides happen often. The officer simply smiled and replied, “It happens all the time” (Steel 2006). Ginwalla’s eyewitness account is one of several featured in the 2006 documentary The Bridge, which focuses on the lives and deaths of six suicide victims who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. Shot over a twelve-month period, the documentary presents the unadulterated footage of each victim’s final seconds, filmed from the distant shoreline by director/producer Eric Steel and his crew. While praised by some critics as visually “impressive” (Holden 2006) and “affecting in unexpected ways” (LaSalle 2006), The Bridge has been decried by others as a “scenic snuff film” (Phillips 2006) that needlessly publicizes the already “very public” deaths of these six individuals (Rabin 2006). Steel’s documentary has even been attributed to the rise in bridge jumps following its theatrical release. In a subsequent interview with ABC News, Dr. Madelyn Gould, a professor of epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia University, stated that the film romanticizes suicide as “mysterious, as appealing, and as inevitable” (Bridge of Death 2008), which may explain its alleged Werther effect—a notable increase in suicides following a widely publicized (actual or fictional) suicide event (Siebers 1993, 15)—on viewers. For his part, Steel has defended his documentary, arguing that, far from inspiring copycat suicides, The Bridge exposes how easily suicidal individuals climb over the four-foot guardrail and how quickly their deaths are forgotten by passing motorists and pedestrians. One sequence from Steel’s film features a long-distance shot of the bridge whose bucolic tranquility is broken only briefly by a small but clearly visible splash from the far shore. “Within minutes [of a person’s death],” Steel recounts, “it’s like nothing ever happened” (Bridge of Death 2008). Steel also has discussed the difficulties of anticipating suicides, as outward signs of moroseness or grief are not always present. He therefore intended the film to raise awareness about the need for more effective methods to dissuade jumpers, as well as to rejuvenate efforts to secure the bridge via physical barriers. “What I set out to do,” explains Steel, “is to show the problem inside and out, to open up a dialogue about mental illness, suicide prevention, and despair” (Feinstein 2006). Is The Bridge a catalyst for awareness and change, or does it merely reduce suicide to spectacle? In addition to reconciling these and other opposing perspectives, this chapter examines Steel’s portrayal of the Golden Gate Bridge as a suicidal cluster site whose

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victims seem drawn to its beauty, simplicity, public profile, and high fatality rate. This chapter also acknowledges the filmmaker’s efforts to humanize each suicide victim by re-envisioning the bridge as a contact zone between the individual’s struggle for peace and the broader social systems that may have failed this person. Before addressing these points, I will provide additional information about the film’s inception and development. According to a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose, Steel was inspired to investigate the Golden Gate Bridge’s high suicide rate after reading the 2003 New Yorker article “Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.” Written by long-time staff writer Tad Friend, “Jumpers” presents the grisly details of what happens to bridge jumpers’ bodies, from vertebrate shattering on impact to eyes and cheeks being consumed by crabs (2003). Friend reports alarming statistics of the sheer volume of jumpers over the bridge’s history, the first being a World War I veteran who jumped three months after bridge construction was completed in 1937. Since then, approximately twenty people have jumped each year (Jones 2009, 51), although Friend speculates that “[t]he actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide” (2003). At the time of the article’s publication in 2003, nearly 1300 people had taken their lives at Golden Gate, marking the bridge as “the world’s leading suicide location” (Friend 2003). By April 2017, that number had risen to over 1500 (Golden Gate Bridge 2017), and by 2019, nearly 1700 (Bergeron 2019). Only 2% of all jumpers survive the 220-foot fall (Chahl 2009, 120; Jones 2009, 51), and among their sparse ranks, at least one individual jumped a second time and perished (Bateson 2012, 101–102). Steel has surmised from Friend’s and others’ reports that the bridge must indeed be a walkway of human misery. “[T]hese moments,” he speculates, “the length of time it would take you to walk from one spot to the other was, you know, perhaps the darkest corner of the human mind” (Full Transcript 2007). Steel set up two film crews on the north and south shores of San Francisco Bay to film the bridge continuously for the entirety of 2004. During those twelve months, twenty-four people jumped, twenty-three of whom died (Harvey 2006, 77). Steel’s crew captured nearly every jump, eight of which are shown in the film—some from a distance as an anonymous splash, others with frightening proximity, their flailing bodies tracked all the way to the water. Steel and his film crew watched for any signs of

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loitering or other signifying behaviors, such as dropping a cell phone and leaving it on the ground, and immediately notified bridge authorities if the individual seemed like a potential jumper (Petrakis 2006, 50). Steel later claimed that six suicides were prevented by his crew’s intervention (Bridge over Troubled Waters 2006), although, as John Petrakis notes in his review for The Christian Century, Steel and his crew “obviously knew that the police wouldn’t be able to get to all of them in time, which makes for some awfully dramatic—if morally dubious—footage of people hurtling to their death” (2006, 50). One jumper filmed by Steel’s crew was observed by several independent sources walking across the bridge from south to north for over ninety minutes before ending his own life. When confronted about the amount of time spent filming this man without notifying authorities, Steel claimed that the man’s behavior did not present any suicidal indicators. “He did what most, most tourists do on the bridge,” Steel stated, adding that the man didn’t appear distressed. “He, he just looked very free” (Bridge of Death 2008). Still, Steel’s crew wasn’t unprepared for the sudden change in the man’s behavior. The final seconds of his fall were recorded by at least two different cameras, with footage from opposing angles included in the documentary’s final cut. Another controversial aspect of The Bridge concerns Steel’s post-­ production process. When Steel contacted the victims’ families and friends for interviews, he did not initially inform them that he had footage of their loved ones’ final seconds or that he intended to incorporate their interviews into his documentary (Bridge of Death 2008). Steel instead screened the film for each decedent’s surviving family members and friends months after filming had been completed, later stating that they were accepting of his work (Feinstein 2006). Steel also was not entirely forthcoming with his objective to film jumpers when he set up his crews along the bridge’s opposing shores. In his review for the BJPsych Bulletin, Pavan Chahl reports that Steel did not inform park authorities of his intentions to film jumpers (2009, 120), giving the impression instead that he wanted to document the park’s natural beauty (Feinstein 2006). Steel himself has admitted on several occasions that filming and subsequently watching these deaths on screen has been extraordinarily disturbing for him. In an interview for ABC’s 20/20, Steel stated that “the first time I saw someone die was incredibly painful,” adding that “even now when I watch it in the theaters, or if I watch it on a small screen, it still affects me deeply” (Bridge of Death 2008). In some respects, his own reactions mirror those of critics who have dismissed The Bridge as

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“immoral” and “ghastly” (Bridge of Death 2008). The chair of one major film festival that refused to screen The Bridge described it as “voyeuristic, nothing more” (Feinstein 2006). Andrew Pulver of the Guardian condemned Steel’s methods of filming jumpers as “thoroughly despicable” (2007, 8). In response to such criticism, Steel has argued that his documentary’s subject—suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge—is the issue here, not his filming methods. His documentary not only defines the bridge as a suicidal cluster site but repeatedly demonstrates why this is so: publicity and simplicity. “Here there was actual footage,” Steel points out, “indisputable evidence that people were climbing over the rail, as easy as could be, and ending their life at a national monument, a place that we treasure. And I think that’s very scary to people” (Bridge of Death 2008). Critics who side with Steel have praised his efforts to underscore the implausible ease with which jumpers traverse the low guardrail. Barbara Vancheri of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contends that, far from “a cheap snuff film,” the film avoids vulgarizing or romanticizing suicide, instead demonstrating repeatedly the need for physical suicide barriers (2007, W24). Other critics applaud Steel’s efforts to humanize bridge victims by interviewing those they left behind—surviving parents, siblings, close friends, even strangers who happened to be nearby when victims jumped— all of whom appeared mentally jarred by their proximity to death (Kaufman 2007, 24). The majority of family interviewees expressed pain and confusion while reminiscing on happier times spent with their loved ones when they were alive. The grieving parents of one young man who had traveled all the way from Virginia to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge recalled how enamored their son had been by the bridge’s structure during their family trip to San Francisco the previous year. His mother showed several pictures of her son standing on the shore, the bridge looming ominously in the background. There is no hint from this young man’s casual demeanor that he is standing in front of what would become the site of his death less than a year later. Other interviews feature photographs of victims as eager, smiling children or confident young adults. One striking photograph is of a victim in her early twenties being warmly embraced by her mother; she appears vibrant, fit, and healthy. The last image of her alive, jumping from the bridge in front of a family with two small children, shows a shapeless and disheveled middle-aged woman swaddled in a puffy gray overcoat. The childhood photograph of another victim shows a school-aged boy smiling broadly beside his mother. Less than three decades later, this boy, now a

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man dressed in black and sporting a mane of long black hair, would be witnessed by passing motorists falling backwards off the bridge as described in the chapter’s opening. The stark contrast between these early markers of budding life and the images of its untimely end may impel viewers to wonder what went wrong, but Steel’s film never gives an explicit answer. Interviewees are often shown sifting through deceased loved ones’ belongings or sharing memories of conversations, promises, and threats, struggling in vain to find those absolute signs that would point to the victim’s fate and wondering what they might have done to prevent it. These interviews, notes reviewer Anthony Kaufman, offer a “sensitive examination of human anguish, interspersing stories of survivors, friends, and family members who have experienced this most sorrowful of killers” (2007, 24). A common element described by nearly every victim’s friends or family members is the individual’s desperation to find love—specifically, romantic love. All six victims were between the ages of 21 and 65, and most were either attempting to find or save long-term partnerships. In each case, however, whatever they sought seemed to fail to live up to their idealizations of what romance ought to be. Two male jumpers featured in the film were purportedly trying to find romance via the internet and had even moved to different regions of the country to start new lives with women they had met online. These relationships were short-lived, however, and both individuals returned home out of financial necessity. While Steel cannot give a definitive explanation for why these relationships didn’t last, unrealistic expectations and the victim’s methods for finding love are presented as likely culprits within the context of the film. One interviewee recalled chastising his deceased friend’s insistence on finding love online. Another interviewee described his friend’s perception of love as “a magical wonderland that would make all of his problems go away” (Steel 2006). These explanations are not colored with contempt or ridicule, though they do speak to the victim’s frustration and perceived lack of agency. What surviving friends and family tried to impress on these individuals— that love is not a cure-all and must happen naturally—could not be accepted by those dependent on love to save them. They continued using anonymous sites and other means to form romantic attachments that they ultimately found unsatisfying and/or unsustainable. One couple recalled how their deceased friend’s efforts to find romance in St. Louis had seemed like “a new beginning” for him and so he “had a lot riding on this relationship”; when the “reality wasn’t quite what was in his head,” he returned to California and jumped from the bridge (Steel 2006).

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Victims’ fixation on romance may have contributed to their decision to jump from the bridge rather than kill themselves through other means. Whether shrouded in fog or bathed in sunlight, the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most beautiful and iconic landmarks of the continental United States, attracting both light-hearted tourists and heavy-hearted souls. As Ryan Gilbey notes in his review for Sight & Sound, Steel presents the bridge as a mystical structure presiding over tide and town like an omniscient gatekeeper (2007, 48). A reviewer for the Irish Independent observes that the nearby Bay Bridge witnesses far fewer jumpers, likely because it has not been romanticized as a site of human despondency as the Golden Gate has (Bridge over Troubled Waters 2006, 1). Dennis Harvey notes in his review for Variety that nearly all victims leap from the side facing San Francisco, “underlining what one interviewee calls ‘the false, romantic promise’ of the beautiful structure” (2006, 77). Steel himself has acknowledged that there is “a strange romance to the place” (Full Transcript 2007). In addition to defining the bridge’s romantic lure through footage and interviews, Steel highlights potential reasons why those who ultimately choose to end their lives at this site do so. All six jumpers featured in the film had been diagnosed with mental health conditions, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. Several individuals had been living with their conditions for years, often exacerbated by additional losses such as the death of a mother or the difficulties of finding love. Steel does not examine their hardships through a medical lens. There are no psychiatric experts speaking about the causes and effects of such conditions or their connection to suicide. What Steel does instead is allow each victim’s loved ones to speak about how much this person struggled to find peace. One mother said that her son, who died by suicide after years of experiencing depression, believed that “his body was a prison, he felt trapped, and it was the only way he could be free” (Sen 2007, 372). The mother of another victim described her daughter’s suicide as “a relief” and insisted that she “is in a better place” (Steel 2006). These poignant accounts of how the victims and their families struggled with long-term challenges that seemed to frequently overwhelm them point to broader social issues that extend well beyond the scope of the documentary’s ostensible subject matter. Every time an anguished surviving friend or family member looks toward the camera, wondering what he or she might have done differently, viewers are left to wonder whether a single individual can do anything in the face of so much despair and confusion. As noted by Los Angeles

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Times film critic Kenneth Turan, “If there is a common thread among those interviewed … it is a feeling of futility and uselessness” (2006, E11). The victims, too, often struggled to find sufficient psychiatric and medical care. One interviewee featured in Steel’s documentary, Kevin Hines, who survived jumping from the bridge in 2000 at the age of 19, had lived with bipolar disorder and severe depression for years before attempting to end his life. Shown in the film as a handsome young man in his early twenties, Hines relays to the camera very candidly that it was only after his survived suicide attempt that his life turned around—very slowly at first. At the time of his interview with Steel in 2004, Hines was still on a regimented schedule, getting up each morning at 8:00 a.m., taking prescribed medication, eating several meals throughout the day, taking more medication, and going to bed by 10:00 p.m. Both Hines and his father and primary caregiver saw this routine as stifling but necessary for getting Hines through the most difficult stages of his recovery. His father remained optimistic that Hines’ condition could be managed by maintaining this regimented lifestyle. Despite his family’s and medical team’s support, Hines continued to struggle with relapses well into his mid-twenties and often fought with his family and therapists to achieve normalcy and independence. Fortunately, he would make a full recovery physically and mentally, later becoming an author, filmmaker, and mental health advocate. Now a middle-aged man, Hines speaks to audiences about the struggles faced by those with mental illnesses and the need for compassion and empathy, urging audience members to recognize that they “can be a conduit for change” (Bergeron 2019). Hines was the fortunate beneficiary of involved family members, particularly his father, who aided in his recovery. For other victims, however, no such support is available, even from well-intentioned friends and neighbors, who are often ill-equipped to give their loved ones round-the-clock care. One jumper who had been clinically diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager had spent time in and out of treatment centers and halfway houses for much of her adult life. Her surviving sister, brother, and mother all seemed exhausted by her medical struggles and their inability to help her. In the film, they recalled how she disappeared for days or weeks at a time, mistook family pets for “devils,” and destroyed a clock that she believed was a “time bomb” (Steel 2006). Eventually, her family found her a community house where she lived without incident for some time, but her physical and mental health deteriorated beyond what they or their doctors could handle. Another interviewee, who had requested to be

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filmed in darkness so that her face could not be seen, admitted to giving her close friend suffering from depression the prescription-strength antidepressants she had been taking. According to the interviewee, her friend had been unable to procure any medications for himself because he had no health insurance. The interviewee had removed the pills from the bottle with her name and placed them in an envelope for her friend so that if he died prematurely, no evidence of her involvement would be found. Other jumpers lamented in letters left for their loved ones how helpless they felt to improve their living situations. Several were indigent, some even homeless. Most felt unloved and unwanted. “I’m 50 years old,” the author of one such letter wrote. “I have no money…carreer [sic] … partner … home” (Steel 2006). These listed items speak to major gaps in the person’s life that amplified feelings of hopelessness and self-loathing; the letter concludes with the words, “I hate me! I am a loser!” (Steel 2006). Several bridge-jump survivors have attributed similar feelings to lost jobs, failed relationships, bankruptcy, and other hardships that seemed unfixable to them (Bateson 2012, 111–112). Even when friends and family members repeatedly offered them emotional and financial support, such individuals often were unwilling to burden others with their problems. The bridge, which has no barrier preventing jumpers from climbing over the guardrail, might seem like the last failure in a long line of support systems that failed to prevent victims’ suicides. Time and again, jumpers are shown easily lifting themselves over the railing, sometimes standing on the chord (the bridge’s outer beam) before finally letting go. The only force preventing their deaths is human force: from themselves, if they choose to climb back over, or from others who catch would-be jumpers and drag them back over, as one Pittsburgh firefighter did for an anonymous woman about to jump in the film (Steel 2006). But the bridge has its own pulling force. One jump survivor (not featured in the film) claimed that he had learned about the bridge’s high mortality rate from a website (Fox 2007). Others chose to jump from the bridge because of its recognizability and access (Steel 2006). According to John Bateson in his book The Final Leap, “The symbolic association of the bridge with beauty and death was cited by every survivor [interviewed in one study]. So was the bridge’s easy access” (2012, 105). It is the bridge’s mystique that critics allege Steel romanticizes in his film, to the point of having inspired copycat suicides in the months following its release. The Golden Gate Bridge Highway’s then-CEO and General Manager Celia Kupersmith reported a rise in suicide attempts after The

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Bridge was shown at several film festivals (Bridge of Death 2008). In May 2006, mere weeks after its debut at the San Francisco Film Festival, four deaths and eleven jump attempts were reported by bridge authorities (Fox 2007), a significantly higher number than the usual monthly average. A 2013 case involving the death of a high school student revealed that the student had watched the film’s trailer numerous times before jumping from the bridge (Pogash 2014). Steel has defended his film against accusations of its alleged Werther effect, arguing that the decision to jump is never so simple. “Most suicides are the end product of a long struggle with mental illness,” he explains. “They’re not the end product of seeing images of people killing themselves” (Bridge of Death 2008). The film’s lone jump survivor, Kevin Hines, admits that his decision was fraught with uncertainty. He recalls that as he rode the bus to the bridge, he prayed someone would notice him crying. When no one did, even after he wept for forty minutes while standing on the bridge’s walkway, Hines threw himself headfirst off the railing, then immediately regretted his decision. “The second my hands left the bar, the railing,” he told interviewers, “I said, ‘I don’t want to die’” (Steel 2006). He forced himself into an upright position to improve his chances of surviving the fall, landing feet first and breaking the water surface with his boots. Hines’ jumper remorse is echoed in accounts from other rare survivors. Dr. Lanny Berman observes that jumpers perceive the Golden Gate Bridge as “a gateway to another place,” believing that “life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they’ll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver” (Friend 2003). But this transformative experience is anything but clean, simple, or peaceful. “People believe that you just hit the water,” Hines states, “and disappear into the abyss and then you die. But in reality, it’s painful and it lasts a long time” (Fox 2007). Hines might be referring not only to the physical trauma experienced by jumpers, but also to grieving families and friends left behind to make sense of their loved ones’ choices to die. The juxtaposition between these survivors’ long-lasting anguish and the images of jumpers maneuvering over the railing in a matter of seconds might likewise cause viewers to ponder how many suicides could be prevented if there were no bridge to jump from. “If somehow the Golden Gate Bridge did not exist,” Hollywood Correspondent film editor Gregg Kilday speculates, “would these deaths have happened elsewhere?” (2006, 10). Even Steel himself states, “To me, that’s unanswerable” (Kilday 2006, 10).

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What is answered in Steel’s film is whether the bridge should be physically secured. In his article for the British Medical Journal, Piyal Sen argues that The Bridge has raised awareness about the need for a suicide barrier more effectively than any rally could. According to Sen, in the months following the film’s debut, the authorities of the Golden Gate Bridge District “reluctantly agreed to commission a feasibility study” to determine when and how a barrier could be erected (2007, 372). In October 2008, fewer than three years after The Bridge’s release, the Bridge District Board “voted 14 to 1 to erect a suicide deterrent on the bridge” (Bateson 2012, 179). By April 2017, more than ten years after The Bridge’s release, these plans were finally coming to fruition. A safety net of stainless steel extending twenty feet out from either side twenty feet below the bridge was under construction, its scheduled completion date originally set for 2021 (Golden Gate Bridge 2017), although this date has since been pushed back due to construction delays. Of course, efforts to install a safety net have been rejected by opponents insisting that the bridge’s integrity as a treasured national landmark would be jeopardized with the addition of a suicide barrier. Bateson points out that “two of the primary arguments against a suicide barrier—that it will cost too much and that it will ruin the view—were the same arguments that were raised seventy years earlier when people objected to building the bridge itself” (2012, 77). Fortunately, Bateson adds, these arguments have since been usurped by public sentiment that the preservation of human life is worth any cost (2012, 77–78). Skeptics of a barrier’s utility also have questioned whether individuals determined to end their own lives wouldn’t simply do so using other means (Caulkins 2015, 49). Yet research studies on suicidal behavior and planning suggest otherwise. According to a 1975 study of six individuals who survived their attempted jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge, all six survivors “possessed suicide plans involving only the Golden Gate Bridge” (Redman 2018, 98). More recent studies have shown that because jumping from the bridge publicly exposes the individual’s mental anguish, almost all jump survivors have not reattempted suicide using any method (Caulkins 2015, 49). A 2013 study conducted by suicide expert Jane Pirkis found that barriers erected at other suicidal cluster sites “reduced suicides by jumping at the sites by about 85 percent” (Gross 2013). Kevin Hines’ frank declarations of his own regrets in The Bridge underscore his and other jumpers’ desire to live. His survival was largely a matter of luck, as he narrowly avoided severing his spinal cord and drowning due to paralysis (Bergeron 2019); his shared

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experience sheds light on the motives of less fortunate jumpers whose final thoughts can never be known. How many of them might have wanted to live like Hines but simply weren’t lucky enough? How many might have been dissuaded from attempting suicide at all if some sort of safety net or other barrier were installed to prevent them from jumping? These questions are never explicitly raised in the film, but rather obliquely treated to maintain the film’s focus on concerns of public mental health and health care. Still, argues Bateson, if nothing else, what Steel has accomplished with his documentary is to galvanize movements to secure the bridge that had struggled to make progress since the 1950s: “The movie probably did more to bring bridge suicides out of the shadows than anything else” (2012, 19). More broadly speaking, the film speaks to the need for compassion for those who feel there is no recourse to resolve their pain other than to end their lives. In a 2020 interview with Tom Ue, Steel describes the production of The Bridge as one of the most instructive, pivotal experiences of his filmmaking career. Although he initially cast himself in the role of passive observer as he began filming at Golden Gate Park, Steel soon recognized his personal connections to the pain experienced by those compelled to jump: “I knew on a much deeper level that the questions at the heart of The Bridge [italics added]—about despair and suffering, about caring and human nature—were the ones that I wrestled with in my own head every day” (Ue 2020, 246). Steel’s focus on the various manifestations of the pain of life, from failed relationships and financial hardships to declining mental and physical health, morally grounds the film. Steel emphasizes the need for those dealing with less pain to understand and empathize with those suffering through far greater pain. In doing so, he humanizes the act of suicide and those who undertake it. Their final seconds are no longer shrouded in fog, but reimagined in all the faces of the people they left behind, wondering what else they might have done and what else they and we, the viewers, can do to prevent such tragedy in the future.

References Bateson, John. 2012. The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bergeron, Ryan. 2019. He Jumped Off the Golden Gate Bridge and Survived. Now, He’s Seeing His Wish for a Safety Net Come True. CNN, August 12. https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/health/turning-­points-­kevin-­hines-­ golden-­gate-­bridge-­suicide-­survivor/. Accessed 15 June 2021.

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Bridge of Death. 2008. ABC News, August 25. https://abcnews.go.com/2020/ story?id=2592841&page=1. Accessed 10 Jan 2021. Bridge over Troubled Waters. 2006. Irish Independent, November 11: 1 Caulkins, Chris G. 2015. Bridge over Troubled Discourse: The Influence of the Golden Gate Bridge on Community Discourse and Suicide. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research 7: 47–56. https://doi.org/10.1108/ JACPR-­03-­2014-­0115. Chahl, Pavan. 2009. Reviews: The Bridge. BJPsych Bulletin 33: 120. https://doi. org/10.1192/pb.bp.108.023275. Feinstein, Howard. 2006. Get Your Suicides Here, Folks. The Guardian, June 22. Fox, Killian. 2007. Death in America. New Statesman 136: 40–41. Friend, Tad. 2003. Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge. The New Yorker, October 5. Full Transcript: Eric Steel. 2007. The Charlie Rose Show, January 4. https://charlierose.com/videos/11149. Accessed 10 Oct 2021. Gilbey, Ryan. 2007. The Bridge. Sight & Sound 17: 48. Golden Gate Bridge Suicide Barriers Going Up After 1,500 Deaths. 2017. CBS News, April 14. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/golden-­gate-­bridge-­ suicide-­barriers-­going-­up-­after-­1500-­deaths/. Accessed 23 Dec 2020. Gross, Liza. 2013. Don’t Jump! A Simple Fix to the Golden Gate Bridge Would Save Hundreds of Lives. Slate, October 15. Harvey, Dennis. 2006. The Bridge. Variety 402: 77. Holden, Stephen. 2006. That Beautiful but Deadly San Francisco Span. New York Times, October 27. Jones, Therese. 2009. Film Reviews: The Bridge. The American Journal of Bioethics 9: 51–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160902766104. Kaufman, Anthony. 2007. The Bridge. Utne, July/August: 24. Kilday, Gregg. 2006. ‘Bridge’ Sheds Light on Those Who Cross Over. Hollywood Reporter, October 27–29: 10. LaSalle, Mick. 2006. ‘Bridge’ Suicides Hard to Watch or Forget. SF Gate, October 27. Petrakis, John. 2006. Bridge of Despair. The Christian Century 123: 50. Phillips, Michael. 2006. From Gender Bending to Belgian ‘Deliverance.’ Chicago Tribune, October 27. Pogash, Carol. 2014. Suicides Mounting, Golden Gate Looks to Add a Safety Net. The New York Times, March 26. Pulver, Andrew. 2007. Other Releases: The Bridge. The Guardian, February 16: 8. Rabin, Nathan. 2006. The Bridge. AV Club, October 26. Redman, Samuel J. 2018. Have You Ever Been on the Bridge? It Has a Heartbeat: Oral Histories of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge, 1933–1989. Oral History 46: 91–101.

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Sen, Piyal. 2007. A Bridge over Troubled Waters. British Medical Journal 334: 372. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39114.462674.59. Siebers, Tobin. 1993. The Werther Effect: The Esthetics of Suicide. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 26: 15–34. Steel, Eric. 2006. The Bridge. IFC Films. Turan, Kenneth. 2006. Gate to a Sad Phenomenon. Los Angeles Times, October 27: E11. Ue, Tom. 2020. Reading David, and David’s Reading: Eric Steel on David Bezmozgis’ ‘Minyan’ and Minyan. Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 10: 243–250. https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00031_7. Vancheri, Barbara. 2007. Powerful Documentary Examines Bridge Suicides. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 11: W24.

CHAPTER 3

Twenty-First-Century Digital Snuff: The Circulation of Images and Videos of Real Death Online Mark McKenna

The myth of the snuff movie has been a cinematic spectre that has haunted successive generations of moviegoers since it first came to prominence in the mid-1970s. It became the catalyst that galvanised the feminist movement (see McKenna 2022), and while most were quick to concede that it was unlikely that a snuff movie actually existed, the possibility that one might have proven to be impossible to dispel. Snuff has, quite rightly, been referred to as ‘the ultimate obscenity’, though, at the time of writing, it remains a speculative fiction that has been likened to the Holy Grail; ‘much talked about, long sought after, but never found’ (Barry 2006). That is not to say that footage of death and murder has not been captured on camera. Indeed, since the earliest days of cinema, film has captured the best and worst humanity has to offer—the footage of the holocaust is perhaps the most obvious example of our capacity for torture and murder.

M. McKenna (*) Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_3

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However, as difficult and as harrowing as these images are, they fail to conform to the established definition of what constitutes a snuff movie, a definition that was developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the 1970s. In the winter of 1975, reports began appearing in the New York Post suggesting that films were arriving in the United States from South America that contained footage of real murder. These reports triggered an investigation by the FBI into the existence of what were increasingly being called ‘snuff movies’. However, when faced with the sheer volume of films that contain footage of death and murder, both real and dramatised, the FBI was forced to develop a workable framework with a precise definition to help them negotiate what was at that time almost nine decades of film. For a film to conform to that definition, firstly, someone must die on camera; this can be a film or a sequential series of images, but it must capture someone alive at the beginning of the sequence and dead at the end. This is the cornerstone of the snuff myth and, for many the world over, has become the only criterion necessary to argue for the existence of the snuff movie. However, if we were to accept this as the only criterion for inclusion then at any footage of the dead and dying could conceivably qualify as a snuff movie, from newsreel footage of accidents, to footage executions or the Nazi death camps. To help negotiate this, the FBI added two further criteria to its definition: suggesting that, secondly, the material must have been produced with the intention of sexually arousing its audience; and lastly, that the film’s distribution must be commercially motivated (Barry 2006). These additional criteria put the motivation to kill, be aroused by that killing, and then profit from the sale of the film that is produced at the heart of the snuff myth, and they have complicated the idea of the snuff movie sufficiently that since the definition was first coined almost fifty years ago, not one single example of the snuff movie has ever been found. However, the media landscape has changed irrevocably during this period, and with it, ideas of economics, distribution, and engagement have all impacted how we understand the concept of snuff. This chapter will explore these shifts in relation to the tragic murder of Jun Lin, a student from Wuhan who was studying in Montreal, Canada, when he was murdered and dismembered by the cannibal killer Luka Magnotta. It will consider the origins and perceived aesthetic of the snuff movie and how this aesthetic sits in stark contrast to the contemporary media landscape and the reality of images and videos of death that are shared online. It will explore the marketplace that exists for such imagery and consider

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what the sharing of 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick, the video of the murder of Jun Lin, can tell us about the changing nature of economics, distribution, and engagement in the twenty-first century and how these shifts may have facilitated the production of what is arguably the first snuff movie.

The Etymology, Origins and Aesthetic of Snuff The etymological origins of Snuff come from the Victorian phrase ‘to snuff out’, the literal extinguishing of a flame, which, when applied to human life, was used to describe the act of killing (Jackson 2016, 1–19). However, the first reference to snuff movies comes from Ed Sanders’ 1971 book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. Sanders had interviewed a series of people peripherally associated with ‘the Manson Family’ and following a succession of leading questions, one of his respondents eventually ‘volunteered’ the information that a film that featured ‘brutality’ (the name he gave to snuff movies), had been produced by ‘The Family’. According to this account, ‘The Family’ had documented a satanic ritual in which the participants wore black hoods and assembled around the already dead body of a naked and decapitated girl (1972, 186). When pressed, the interviewee later admitted that they had never actually seen the film and that they had only ever heard about it. Nevertheless, and despite this incredible lack of evidence and Sanders’ own questionable interview technique, he presents this as evidence of the existence of snuff movies based largely upon circumstantial evidence. ‘The Family’ had access to cameras and habitually filmed themselves with three Super 8 mm cameras. They were even rumoured to have stolen a 35 mm production quality movie camera from an NBC television network van, suggesting that they also had access to production quality equipment (Sanders 1972, 185), and they certainly documented their lives in home movies, many of which survive and form the basis of the recent Fox documentary Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes (2018). However, while there is an abundance of footage of ‘The family’, in over fifty years, no footage has ever surfaced of ‘The Family’ killing anyone on camera. It is not clear how much Sanders’ account contributed to the popular belief in the myth of the snuff movie. There were certainly unfounded rumours that insist that the murder of Sharon Tate and her four friends was filmed—a perspective no doubt exacerbated by the horrific crime scene photos that made their way into the popular press. However, while

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‘The Manson Family’ themselves would only play a peripheral role in advancing the myth of the snuff movie, their crimes would serve as inspiration for another film that would be pivotal in popularising the myth; producer Allan Shackleton’s exploitation quickie Snuff (1976). The exploitation film is a cheaply made film that capitalises or ‘exploits’ contemporary cultural anxieties as a means of generating publicity and garnering public attention. Early examples of this include the cautionary tales of the 1930s and 1940s, films that were presented as ostensibly educational, warning of the dangers of premarital sex or the use of recreational drugs, but were largely produced primarily for the purposes of titillation. Exploitation is often simply a hook to get the audience into the theatre, whether its sex or violence, or often just an outrageous idea, as with Snuff. Shackleton was a savvy New  York film distributor who had made his name releasing soft-core pornography and erotica but felt that the market was about to collapse under considerable pressure from the feminist movement. He saw an opportunity to take his business in a different direction when in 1975, Dick Brass, a reporter for the New York Post, ran an article that speculated on the existence of snuff movies. This influential article would trigger an investigation from the FBI, with Brass suggesting that films that revelled in real murder were entering the U.S. from Argentina (Brass 1975, 3, 15). The investigation would ultimately reveal that Snuff was little more than an urban legend, but Shackleton saw an opportunity and shrewdly capitalised on the sensationalist headlines, releasing the film Snuff shortly thereafter. What he presented as Snuff was in reality a long-­ forgotten exploitation film originally entitled The Slaughter that was produced and directed by husband-and-wife exploitation team Michael and Roberta Findlay in 1971. It is ironic, given the debt the snuff myth owes to ‘the Mason Family’, that The Slaughter had been made to capitalise on the notoriety of ‘The Family’ produced at the height of the court case that saw Charles Manson convicted of first-degree murder. The film features an (apparently) charismatic cult leader, Satán (pronounced Sah-tan), the head of the all-girl gang of bikers, clearly modelled on Manson, and blends a countercultural aesthetic borrowed liberally from Easy Rider (1969) with characters clearly inspired by ‘The Manson Family’. The film failed to find an audience and consequently sat on the shelf, gathering dust for four years. Some sources suggest that The Slaughter received a limited theatrical release (Stine 1999, 31), while others insist that the film was never seen theatrically (Kerekes 2016). What is certain is that the film was rarely seen until Shackleton saw an opportunity to dust off the forgotten film and add

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a bloody, if unconvincing, conclusion that meant the film would never be forgotten again. Just as The Slaughter is reaching its stilted conclusion, the scene shifts to another camera, and we realise that the sequence we have been watching is part of a film and we are on a film set. In the foreground, we see a figure that is presumably the director, a camera operator, a light operator, a boom operator, and a script supervisor, alongside other crew milling around. In the background, we can see the object of their attention, the scene that we have just been watching with two actresses dressed to approximate the characters from the finale to The Slaughter. While unconvincing, what follows without question did more to popularise the snuff myth than a hundred articles speculating on its existence. One of the crew approaches one of the actresses, and they begin kissing. She is initially concerned that the rest of the crew is watching, but he reassures her that they will soon be gone. She closes her eyes and doesn’t see the crew gather around and continue filming her. When she does eventually open her eyes, she becomes panicked and tries to stop the man who is now forcing himself upon her. The crew hold her down as he cuts into her shoulder with a large knife. He takes some plyers and cuts off the tip of her ring finger. She pleads for mercy, but he doesn’t listen and instead reaches for an electric saw and cuts her hand off at the wrist before stabbing her in the stomach and disembowelling her—holding her intestines high above his head and screaming maniacally. None of this is particularly well executed. The blood is just a little too red to be convincing, the performances are laughable, and the prosthetic hand flattens and buckles under the pressure of his grip as he attempts to cut off the finger. When he cuts off her hand and cuts into her stomach, it is clear that she is partially suspended in the bed below (a technique most popularly seen in Friday the 13th, four years later). However, what makes this sequence so effective is that as he disembowels her, the screen simply goes blank and just as we hear the last of the film reel rattle through the shutter, we hear a voice say, ‘shit! We ran out of film, shit’. Someone asks, ‘did you get it? Did you get it all?’. ‘Yeah, we got it’. That is how the film ends. There is no conventional closing narrative, and there are no end credits. There is no attempt to burden the film with the constraints of traditional narrative cinema. Instead, the audience is caught off guard and left wondering if the sequence that they have just witnessed was actually real. Of course, it wasn’t, and while the special effects are woefully unconvincing, and something which was commented on at the time (see Richard

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Eder’s comments below), however, the abrupt conclusion was undeniably effective, though the effect of this was not instantaneous. Following poorly attended test screenings in Wichita with marginally better responses in Indianapolis and Las Vegas, the film opened in New  York’s National Theatre to an entirely different reaction. It grossed $66,456  in its first week in New York and quickly became a focal point for the radical feminist movement and the newly formed Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), led by Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin, a long-time activist, convinced her friends and mentors to join her on the picket line of the theatre on a nightly vigil (Brownmiller 1999, 292). However, unbeknownst to WAVAW, Dworkin’s picketers were encouraged into action by Shackleton’s own picketers, planted outside the theatre to drum up publicity. They were also accompanied by an unlikely and (probably) unwanted ally in the adult film industry, who picketed the film, feeling that it was doing irreparable damage to the reputation of their businesses. Veteran pornographic producer David F.  Friedman recalls that even before the production of Snuff: In the 1970s, a guy who was head of the Campaign for Decency in Literature (which became the Campaign for Decency Through the Law—CDL) was making one of his regular speeches on pornography when he suddenly came up with the allegation that the X-rated industry was torturing and killing performers on camera. (Friedman cited in Hebditch and Anning 1988, 336–7)

It is likely that this allegation was the source of the entire snuff myth, though, almost fifty years after the fact, difficult if not impossible to prove. By the time the protests were taking place outside of the National Theatre, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. The combined weight of the Women Against Violence Against Women movement, the pornography industry, and Shackleton’s plants meant that Snuff was impossible to ignore. So much so that Shackleton himself became the focus of much of this ire. Manhattan’s District Attorney, Robert M.  Morgenthau, received a series of complaints and then a petition that sought to bring a criminal prosecution against Shackleton, but after a month-long trial, Morgenthau determined that film was ‘nothing more than conventional trick photography’ and that this was ‘evident to anyone who sees the movie’ (Eder 1976, 13). While many got caught up in the hysteria, New York Times journalist Richard Eder shrewdly suggested that ‘everything

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about the film is suspect: the contents, the promotion and possibly even some of the protest that is conducted each evening outside the box office’ (ibid.). In the years since Andrea Dworkin remained steadfastly committed to her belief in the existence of snuff movies, and in her 1981 book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, she maintained that ‘in 1975 in the United States, organised crime reportedly sold “snuff” films to private collectors of pornography. In these films, women actually were maimed, sliced into pieces, fucked, and killed’, and crucially, that these ‘crimes were photographed and tape-recorded by the murderer, who played them back for pleasure’ (1981, 71). However, despite her insistence, the snuff films that she spoke about have never been found, and there is no evidence to suggest that they ever existed, outside of the fevered imagination of the head of the Campaign for Decency Through the Law, or indeed, the ballyhoo hucksterism of Allan Shackleton and what is perhaps the most successful marketing campaign in the history of cinema—popularising the concept of the snuff movie to point where the myth is now part of everyday culture. The pervasiveness of the concept has also led to an imagined aesthetic of what a snuff movie might look like, and this imagined aesthetic typically trades on ideas first presented in Snuff, but also in many of the films that came after that capitalised on the idea of the snuff movie. This can be seen all the way from the comparatively mainstream Hardcore (1979, dir. Paul Schrader) or 8mm (1999, dir. Joel Schumacher) to the ostensibly cult Faces of Death (1978, dir. John Alan Schwartz) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980, Ruggero Deodato), and the unquestionably niche, Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood (1985, dir. Hideshi Hino) and August Underground’s Mordum (2003, dir. Fred Vogel et al.). It is an aesthetic that capitalises on amateurish production values that serve to disguise often limited production budgets behind flickering cine reel footage or the rolling degraded aesthetic of a home video that has been duplicated too many times. Indeed, outside of Hardcore and 8mm, which both feature recognisable stars (George C. Scott and Nick Cage, respectively), the rest of the films detailed above were all the subject of an investigation under the mistaken belief that they featured footage of actual murder. Significantly, Hardcore, 8mm and Cannibal Holocaust all employ a film-­ within-­film device in which the protagonist views footage of murder via an 8 mm projector. Similarly, Faces of Death employs a Cinéma Verité styling that purports to be documentary footage and Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of

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Flesh and Blood and August Underground’s Mordum both employ a shot-­ on-­video aesthetic that works to amplify that perception and reinforce an aesthetic that has come to typify the imagined aesthetic of the snuff movie.

Understanding the Circulation of Digital Murder While the imagined aesthetic of snuff has been irrevocably tied to analogue technology and an aesthetic common to twentieth-century media, in reality, and in the twenty-first century and the age of participatory media, the aesthetic of snuff is far more likely to be a high-definition digital presentation circulated via ‘Tube’ sites. The tragic murder of Jun Lin by the cannibal killer Luka Magnotta is one such case that, as I will argue, forces us to confront the changing media economy, which has begun to erode the founding tenets of the FBI’s definition of what might constitute a snuff movie. However, in order to fully understand how and why the murder of Jun Lin was produced, we need first to understand the marketplace that exists for material of this kind. Images and videos of real death proliferate online and have done since the earliest days of the internet. Sue Tait has argued that digital technologies have transformed our access to documentary imagery of the dead and dying to such a large degree that ‘the carnage that cinema imagined in the twentieth century is available online “for real” in the twenty-first’ (2009, 334). While there are a variety of websites that might host images and videos of real death online, undoubtedly, the most extreme of this material can be accessed via ‘Shock Sites’. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, developing the first web browser in 1991. By 1994, the use of the Web became increasingly popular and the first ‘Shock Sites’ emerged shortly thereafter. Often presented in the press as ‘snuff sites’, in their simplest form, ‘Shock Sites’ are websites that host content, either still images or video, that is intended to be offensive and/or disturbing to its viewers. This material is often pornographic, scatological, racist, sexist, homophobic or graphically violent in nature, though, depending on the focus of the website, much of this is presented as darkly offensive humour. Susanna Paasonen has observed that imagery of this kind is designed to appeal to ‘the affective registers of amusement and disgust’ (2017, 3), citing images such as Goatse (1999); a now-infamous photo in which a naked man bent double stretches his anus open wide with both hands, Tubgirl (2001); an image routinely cited as one of the most disturbing on the internet, in which a young Japanese woman is lying in the bath with her

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legs in the air as she squirts an explosive orange enema from her anus onto her own face, and Lemon Party (2002), in which three naked elderly men are engaged in an orgy, the first fellates the second while he kisses the third man. These images form a core part of a meme culture that has all but disappeared but that was largely reliant on bait-and-switch pranks and of which ‘Rickrolling’ is arguably the most well-known example. Where ‘Rickrolling’ involves posting a hyperlink to a supposedly relevant topic, which then redirects the viewer to the music video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, these bait-and-switch pranks redirect to the extreme imagery listed above, amongst others. As Paasonen notes, while this emphasis does not preclude a sexual response, it is important to understand that this is not the primary motivation for sharing images and videos of this kind and in this context. While the examples cited are here essentially pornographic, it is the same emphasis on ‘amusement and disgust’ that motivates the sharing of the violent material that is showcased on ‘Shock Sites’. Where press rhetoric regularly attributes engagement with this kind of material as a deviant and sexually motivated activity, Paasonen argues that this is perhaps better understood as a largely gendered homosocial activity in which men perform their disgust and humour in their ability to tolerate difficult and challenging imagery (2017, 3). Indeed, while it might be tempting to imagine these websites existing in some darkened recess of the internet, in reality, ‘Shock Sites’ like Bestgore.com, Ogrish.com and Rotton.com were regularly advertised in alternative ‘lads’ mag’ Bizarre, giving them mainstream reach, if not mainstream appeal. This cultural context is important because it is the same tradition of ‘amusement and disgust’ that informs what is arguably the most notorious viral video, 2 Girls 1 Cup. This is the name given to a 2007 fetish video that focussed on coprophagia, and that featured two women defecating into a cup and then taking turns to consume the excrement before then vomiting into each other’s mouths. While not directly related to death, 2 Girls 1 Cup inspired a pseudo genre of viral videos that culminate in the murder of Jun Lin. 2 Girls 1 Finger, 8 Girls No Cup, 1 Guy 1 Jar, 1 Guy 1 Screwdriver, 3 Orangutans 1 Blender, 1 Girl 1 Cake, and 3 Guys 1 Hammer are all notable examples, but while many of the videos were believed to have been faked, including the notorious 2 Girls 1 Cup, 3 Guys 1 Hammer was not. The film captured in gory detail the brutal murder of Sergei Yatzenko, a Ukrainian national who was murdered on July 12, 2007. He

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was later revealed to be the victim of the serial killers Viktor Sayenko, Igor Suprunyuk and Alexander Hanzha, a group whom the press dubbed the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs. At the time of their arrest, the trio were responsible for twenty-one murders, having started by torturing and killing animals before progressing to women, children and elderly men. They filmed the bloody murder of Yatzenko as they bludgeoned him to death with a hammer but only came to international prominence when the footage, entitled 3 Guys 1 Hammer, was leaked to ‘Shock Sites’ online. Many speculated that the video was produced to satiate the desires of a deviant collector of snuff movies and was therefore both commercially and sexually motivated, thereby meeting all of the criteria of a snuff movie. However, these claims were quickly dismissed by regional security chief Ivan Stupak who argued that there was categorically no evidence to support this belief (Leontyeva 2007). Nevertheless, the video circulated freely posted to Ogrish.com and theYNC.com on December 4, 2008, and by December 25, it had been viewed over half a million times, clearly demonstrating the popularity of these websites and the market that exists for extreme imagery online.

Understanding the Production of Digital Murder While the previous section attempted to map the market and, to some degree, understand the desire that exists to engage with images and videos of real death online, none of these examples meets the precise criteria laid out by the FBI in the mid-1970s. Even 3 Guys 1 Hammer and the brutal murder of Sergei Yatzenko, while often reported as evidence of the existence of the snuff movie, fail to conform to key aspects of a definition first put forward some five decades ago. While someone dying on camera is, of course, the cornerstone of the snuff myth, this is only one of the criteria that must be met in order to qualify as a snuff movie. The material must also have been produced with the intention of sexually arousing its audience; and the film’s distribution must be commercially motivated. It is without question because of these additional criteria that a snuff movie has never been found and instead remains a persistent and compelling urban legend. However, and as stated from the outset, the changing nature of economics, distribution, and engagement in the twenty-first century has impacted irrevocably on the media landscape, and this, in turn, has impacted on how we might understand the snuff movie. Using the murder of Jun Lin by Luka Magnotta, this penultimate section will explore

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Magnotta’s motivations, considering how traditional notions of commerce may not be sufficient as a means of measuring the ways in which he benefitted from his crimes, forcing us to rethink the established definition of the snuff movie. Like many killers before him: Ian Brady, Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert DeSalvo (the ‘Boston Strangler’), David Berkowitz (the ‘Son of Sam’), and the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, Luka Magnotta began by killing animals. In December of 2010, Magnotta filmed himself putting two kittens into a clear plastic bag. He sealed the bag and, using a vacuum cleaner, sucked the air out of the bag, suffocating the kittens as he sang Christmas carols. He then uploaded the video to YouTube and, following the naming convention detailed above, named it 1 Boy 2 Kittens. The video enraged the internet, and although it was quickly removed, a community of horrified viewers came together as a group and mobilised in their search to ‘Find the Vacuum Kitten Killer’. Rather than shy away from the attention, Magnotta actively embraced it, interacting with various members of the group through ‘sock puppet’ avatars on social media. This continued for exactly one year when, on December 2, 2011, he uploaded two further videos: Python Christmas, in which he fed a live kitten to a python to the tune of ‘Little Drummer Boy’, and Bath Time LOL, in which he duct-­ taped a kitten to a stick and drowned it in the bathtub. As the group began to home in on Magnotta, they were in disbelief at what they found. Hundreds of articles, images and videos presented him not as a suspicious figure who could be linked to the killing of animals but instead presented him as a globe-trotting model. There were articles that linked him to Michael Jackson and Madonna; there were rumours that he had dated the infamous Canadian murderess Karla Homolka (Jenson 2014, online); and speculation about whether he and River Phoenix were cousins. There were even articles that claimed that he had been arrested trying to gain entry to Area 51, alongside hundreds of fan pages and posts that celebrated this model and would-be TV star. It would later be revealed that Magnotta himself was the source of it all. He maintained multiple identities across the internet, with over seventy Facebook profiles and twenty personal websites. Journalist Alan Parker observed that Magnotta had used these identities ‘to sing his own praises, attack his enemies and send up clouds of misinformation to disguise his online activities’ (Parker 2012: online). British tabloid newspaper The Sun attempted to engage with Magnotta, but after some interaction, received an email from him that read ‘I have to disappear for a while, you know… until people quit

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bothering me… but next time you hear from me it will be in a movie I am producing, that will have some humans in it, not just pussies :)’. On May 25, 2012, he uploaded an eleven-minute video to the ‘Shock Sites’ TheYNC and Best Gore. Entitled 1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick and filmed in a darkened room, the clip shows the figure of a naked man (later revealed to be Jun Lin) tied to a bed. Jun Lin is stabbed repeatedly, with Magnotta plunging the icepick (later revealed to be a screwdriver) into his body over and over. He cuts his throat, then decapitates the corpse before cutting off his legs and hand and guiding the severed hand across his crotch before sodomising the bloodied torso. He then carves the flesh from the victim’s buttocks and invites a puppy to eat from the bloodied stumps of his legs. The corpse is then sodomised with a bottle before the film closes with a series of snapshots of what are presumably Magnotta’s favourite moments from the mutilation and murder. As with the previous videos, Magnotta revelled in the attention, relishing the pseudo-celebrity status that his films had garnered him. When he was finally apprehended, he was caught in an internet café, searching for himself.

Murder in an Attention Economy In a conventional sense, the murder of Jun Lin by Luka Magnotta does not meet the strict criteria set out by the FBI. Firstly, we can only assume that it was not produced with the intention of sexually arousing its audience, although given that the film features sodomy and masturbation, it is difficult to know what Magnotta’s intentions were in that regard. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of undermining any sense of the film as a legitimate snuff movie, is the fact that the film was shared freely across the internet with no money changing hands. However, while Magnotta’s decision to share the film online was not commercially motivated, that does not mean that he did not benefit from the circulation of the film; it only means that those benefits cannot be measured in strictly monetary terms as money was not his primary motivation. Writing in 1997, Michael H.  Goldhaber argued that since we are increasingly living our lives online, rubrics established under ‘the information age’ were no longer fit for purpose and that we needed to adapt to an era in which attention was our most valuable commodity. Goldhaber argued that ‘the attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions—stars vs fans—and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based

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economy it bids fair to replace’ (1997: online). Magnotta imagined himself every bit the star, and the wealth that he sought was not material wealth; it was celebrity. He wanted to be famous. The failed model craved fame and attention, something which is evident from the narrative that is constructed across his seventy Facebook profiles and twenty personal websites. In the context of the videos, 1 Boy 2 Kittens, Python Christmas, Bath Time LOL, and most tragically, 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick, Magnotta imagined himself as the star, a role which he eagerly performed across all online spaces. In 2008, Theresa Senft suggested that we were witnessing the emergence the microcelebrity and observed that these constructed personalities were capitalising on a ‘new style of online performance that involves people “amping up” their popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs and social networking sites’ (2008, 25). A simple Google search for Magnotta returns over 1,500,000 results, with many of these websites dedicated to exploring Magnotta’s motivations in forensic detail. These pages document all aspects of his life in an attempt to understand why he committed these terrible crimes, and in the wake of a recent Netflix documentary, Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer (2019), a film that focussed explicitly on the crimes of Magnotta, it is likely that websites like these will keep appearing. In short, Magnotta has our attention, and because of that, he has benefitted from the attention economy. Whether we choose to accept the tragic murder of Jun Lin as evidence of the fabled snuff movie is largely dependent upon whether we accept that, to some, celebrity now has a value that far exceeds material wealth. In an economy that competes for our attention, the murder of Jun Lin has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It has made producers of its consumers and from those who would document their performatively visceral reactions to material of this kind, and it has made a celebrity of its star satisfying his desire for fame at any cost. Nevertheless, in the strictest terms, 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick still does not fulfil the criteria of the snuff movie as defined by the FBI; while it does feature the horrific murder, rape, and dismemberment of Jun Lin, it was clearly not produced with the intention of sexually arousing its audience, though of course. Similarly, the film’s distribution was not commercially motivated though it is undeniable that Magnotta has ‘profited’ from the circulation of the film and while this cannot be measured in strict financial terms it does reveal much about our changing relationship with celebrity culture. In Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (2005), David Schmid considers the intersection between stardom and violence in contemporary America by

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tracing the emergence of the celebrity serial killer. Here Schmid suggests that the hegemonic definitions of fame tend to present it as an inherently positive phenomenon in which fame is achieved by the talented on a meritorious basis. However, Schmid argues that ‘the iconic status of serial killers in contemporary American culture’ provides ‘compelling evidence of the collapse in the difference between fame and notoriety’, going on to suggest that all too often ‘today the famous are often the visible, rather than the talented’ (2005, 297). Magnotta is now not only visible, but he is also famous and his fame is evidence of the collapse of the distinctions highlighted by Schmid and is evidence of the cultural shift that has taken place since the FBI first began searching for the mythical snuff movie. The FBI’s is a definition appropriate to an analogue era, but it understandably failed to predict or account for the nuances of digital technology or indeed the cultures that these platforms would facilitate. However, if we accept that Magnotta profited from this alternative economy and we accept that there are those who would be sexually excited from the video that he shared, then 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick could be the first example of a legitimate snuff movie, and not the imagined aesthetic of flickering 8 mm film reels but instead twenty-first-century digital snuff shared openly on the web.

References Barry, Evy. 2006. ‘Does Snuff Exist?’, The Dark Side of Porn. London: Lion Television. Brass, Dick. 1975. Snuff Porn? The Actress Is Actually Killed. New York Post 3: 15. Brownmiller, Susan. 1999. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New  York: Dial Press. Dworkin, Andrea. 1981. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. London: The Women’s Press Ltd. Eder, Richard. 1976. ‘Snuff’ Is Pure Poison. New York Times, March 7th. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/07/archives/snuff-­is-­pure-­poison-­ poison-­snuff.html. Last accessed 21 June 2019. Goldhaber, M. 1997. The Attention Economy and the Net. First Monday 2 (4). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/ 440. Accessed 27 Oct 2019. Hebditch, Dick, and Nick Anning. 1988. Porn Gold: Inside the Pornography Business. London: Faber & Faber. Jackson, Neil. 2016. Introduction: Shot, Cut and Slaughtered. In Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media, ed. Neil Jackson, Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker, and Thomas Joseph Watson, 1–19. London: Bloomsbury.

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Jenson, Bill. 2014. Animal Instinct: How Cat-Loving Sleuths Found an Accused Killer Sadist. RollingStone.com. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/ culture/culture-­n ews/animal-­i nstinct-­h ow-­c at-­l oving-­s leuths-­f ound-­a n-­ accused-­killer-­sadist-­111273/. Last accessed 21 Oct 2019. Kerekes, David. 2016. Killing for Culture: From Edison to Isis: A New History of Death on Film. Headpress. ISBN 9781909394353. Leontyeva, Anna. 2007. Why “Dnipro maniacs” Were Killed: Main Versions. Ukraine.segodnya.ua. Available at: https://ukraine.segodnya.ua/ukraine/ p o c h e m u -­u b i v a l i -­d n e p r o v c k i e -­m a n j a k i -­h l a v n y e -­v e r c i i -­6 4 7 6 9 . html#gallery9787. Last accessed 1 Mar 2022. McKenna, Mark. 2022. Snuff. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Paasonen, Susanna. 2017. Time to Celebrate the Most Disgusting Video Online. Porn Studies 4 (4): 463–467. Parker, Alan. 2012. Are You Luka Rocco Magnotta’s Facebook friend?. Macleans. ca. Available at: https://www.macleans.ca/politics/are-­you-­luka-­magnottas-­ facebook-­friend/. Last accessed 21 Oct 2019. Sanders, Ed. 1972. The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. London: Panther. Schmid, David. 2005. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Senft, Theresa. 2008. Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Stine, Scott Aaron. 1999. The Snuff Film: The Making of an Urban Legend. Skeptical Inquirer 23 (3). Tait, Sue. 2009. Visualising Technologies and the Ethics and Aesthetics of Screening Death. Science as Culture 18 (3): 333–353. https://doi. org/10.1080/09505430903123016.

CHAPTER 4

Streaming Death: Terrorist Violence, Post-­death Data and the Digital Afterlife of Difficult Death Anu A. Harju

and Jukka Huhtamäki

Introduction Digital media technologies have brought death and dying into the realm of the everyday. From YouTube suicides and selfie deaths (du Preez 2018; Grebe 2016) to mediated school shootings (Eckstein 2020) and live-­ streamed massacres on Facebook, digital media are increasingly implicated in mediated practices of death, dying and remembering (see Sumiala 2021). At the same time, social media users are increasingly exposed to the

A. A. Harju (*) Media and Communication Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] J. Huhtamäki Information and Knowledge Management, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_4

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possibility of encountering death on their devices, becoming relationally implicated in the digital afterlife of the deceased. This chapter explores digital afterlife in the context of terrorist violence, focussing in particular on post-death data and the implications it has on the digital afterlife of those killed, and the ways in which data affords affective relatedness in digital spaces following death. In March 2019, 51 people were killed in the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand. The perpetrator live-streamed the deadly attack and the footage quickly went viral. The viewers watched the massacre through a first-person shooter (FPS) perspective familiar from FPS games, as the footage showed people being killed through the vantage point of the killer. The camera angle positioned the viewers as witnesses to the dying moments of the victims, inviting them to share the view and the ideological stance of the perpetrator. Showing real death in such a way contributes to a particular digital afterlife of the victims, where the perpetrator’s gaze contributes to and remains in the digital artefact’s affective layers. Showing real death and dying is not common even in documentaries; as images of death tend to be images taken after death, death is typically shown by showing the dead rather than the moment of dying. Thus, any recording of dying witnesses the departure of life, capturing the transition from being alive to being dead, showing the moment life ends in death. When, on rare occasion, real death and dying is shown, the most common setting is the deathbed (Malkowski 2017; West 2018). With non-natural and violent, or what might in the context of this book be termed ‘difficult death’, the scene of death is less structured and much more unpredictable. In Christchurch, the scene of death was the mosque during Friday prayers. Through the networked digital platforms and the mode of virality, the massacre turned into spectacular death (Jacobsen 2020; see also Morse 2020), showcasing how ‘the temporality of liveness is fused with the reality of horror as a mode of entertainment for the masses’ (Ibrahim 2020, 812). As violent death attracts more attention than other kinds of death, scenes of unnatural death (Stratton 2020) have become more prevalent on social media. The footage of the Christchurch massacre is an example of post-death data, delineated by Harju and Huhtamäki (2021) as different from posthumous data. This is data that emerges after (and usually because of) death, and is often specifically created for the networked digital media for reach and affective resonance. In addition to the live footage, the

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Christchurch attack generated a host of other post-death digital artefacts, like solidarity symbols commemorating the victims (Harju 2019) and expressions of solidarity to the bereaved and the whole Muslim community. All this data contributes to the digital afterlife of the victims and the affective layers of their memory. Research on the socio-political and socio-cultural impacts of digital afterlife is still lacking (Mason-Robbie and Savin-Baden 2020, 20); here, we argue that the socio-technical aspect of digital afterlife likewise remains under-researched and warrants critical examination. Drawing on the theoretical framework on affective arrangements (Slaby et al. 2019) premised on relationality and affective resonance (Mühlhoff 2015, 2019), this conceptual chapter sets out to further theorise the notion of digital afterlife from the perspective of data. Data is here approached as a socio-technical construct with material properties and affective tendencies. The technical dimension of data provides the materiality that allows, for example, interlinkage among artefacts, but also the social dimension, that is, the affective engagement with digital artefacts that again enable various social practices. We thus view digital afterlife as a relational configuration that is affective in nature. Empirically grounded in the Christchurch mosque attacks (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021), the chapter argues for foregrounding data in the affective practices entailed in and productive of digital afterlife, its consumption and production, that we argue arise from data materiality. The chapter also raises questions about the affective and ideological layers of digital afterlife that may have negative effects both in terms of the memory and privacy of the deceased.

What Is Digital Afterlife? Death is a fundamental human experience (Bauman 1992) and material artefacts (including digital) play an important role in ritualised practices of remembering; they carry memories and allow the relationship to continue after death (Christensen and Sandvik 2015) and mediate the presence of the deceased (see Mathijssen 2018). With digital media, death-related ritual practices are also transforming. In death, people leave behind vast amount of data and digital material (digital photos, online documents, personal messages, chats, etc.) but also digital traces online (social media posts, comments, profiles, etc.). Recent discussions of digital afterlife have sought to explore the meaning(s) and significance of such data and digital

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material for the bereaved and the role of media and technology in death-­ related rituals and social processes (e.g., Hjorth 2021). While digital afterlife as ‘the continuation of an active or passive digital presence after death’ (Savin-Baden and Mason-Robbie 2020, 12) is broad enough to include many perspectives, with its focus on the living (often the bereaved), it excludes the deceased and any consideration of (difficult) memory, legacy or dignity as these are embedded in digital afterlife, not to mention privacy of the deceased (see Buitelaar 2017). Yet another approach to digital afterlife foregrounds symbolic immortality (Bassett 2018; see also Nowaczyk-Basińska 2019), premised on extending one’s own presence by digital means, usually on one’s own terms while still alive. However, all these approaches invariably imply data produced during life, comprising material from everyday activities and communication with friends and family relating to the life lived by the deceased. Such pre-­ death, or posthumous, data and digital artefacts have proven beneficial in the managing of grief (e.g., Hjorth and Cumiskey 2018). While technology and posthumous digital artefacts offer possibilities for continuing bonds (Klass et  al. 1996), it has also been argued that rather than the technology, it is the capacity of the bereaved to harness the memories anchored in these artefacts that facilitate the continuation of the relationship with the deceased (O’Connor 2020). Technology is not new to death practices. Thanatechnology (Sofka 1997) refers to technology as a resource for coping with death and grief; more recently, Sofka (2020) also recognises how the actions of the living shape digital afterlife, how ‘online communities of bereavement become a significant component of the deceased’s digital afterlife and have an impact on the grief of those who knew them’. This chapter argues that in addition to online communities—including global communities of unknown mourners—the digital artefacts themselves, the data constituting them, contribute to digital afterlife in many ways. Not only does post-death data of violent death shape the grief of the bereaved by (re)mediating traumatic memory, it also feeds into how the dead are remembered and how they are seen, and in this way contribute to digital afterlife in potentially adverse ways. Data, then, is not problem free. Turning attention to all the data people leave behind, critical thanatechnology research (Özdemir et al. 2021) highlights privacy issues and the right to nonparticipation of the deceased, calling for more critical governance of thanatechnologies. Considering how data becomes edited over time and (re)appears in different contexts

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and platforms, the long-term impact digital afterlife can have on the deceased needs critical attention, not to mention the more far-reaching and enduring socio-political and socio-cultural implications of the possible negative aspects of digital afterlife. As to date, while increasing attention is given to social media platforms as hosts of digital afterlife or as repositories of posthumous data, not much consideration has been given to how data figures in digital afterlife, in processes of remembering and in the constitution of (post-mortem) memory, not to mention data’s role in enabling affective relatedness which is at the heart of digital afterlife. Thus, to better explore and conceptualise digital afterlife, the chapter offers an analytical framework where the two co-constitutive dimensions of digital afterlife, the socio-technical and the affective, are articulated in terms of data: with the concepts data afterlife and data as afterlife (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021), the chapter provokes questions regarding the relationality of technology, people and social practices in the context of mediated death.

The Christchurch Mosque Attacks This chapter is empirically informed by a multi-method study of the Christchurch mosque attacks (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021). Combined with a digital media ethnography of Twitter, computational methods were used for (tweet) data collection, analysis and data visualisation. Data visualisations served as ways of organising the empirical material and as means of analysis, enhancing the ethnographic inquiry. The computationally collected dataset consists of 12 million tweets collected over a six-month period from March to September 2019 using a range of search terms, for example, christchurchmosqueattack, christchurchshooting, JeSuisChristchurch, PrayForChristchurch, NewZealandShooting, NewZealandTerroristAttack, NewZealandStrong, JeSuisHuman and HelloBrother (search terms collect tweets containing the term even when not used as a hashtag). A smaller, more manageable dataset of 43,659 tweets from 30,842 different Twitter users was compiled with the search term hellobrother. The phrase ‘hello brother’ and the subsequent #hellobrother originate from the live footage where the first victim is seen greeting the perpetrator. Many of the tweets in the hellobrother dataset featured the footage, either as a link to social media or news media sites (showing clips of the

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video as part of their reporting) or as still images, some more harrowing than others. The dataset also contained commemorative messages, often accompanied by artistic illustrations and solidarity symbols typical of mediated remembering after terrorist violence, highlighting different affective dimensions of the event (see e.g., Harju 2019). As one of the research outputs, we developed what we call Tweetboard (see Harju and Huhtamäki 2021, 321–327, for details), an interactive and ‘live’ data visualisation tool that includes the embedded images and video links in the dataset tweets. Tweetboard offers a novel tool for examining the empirical material: by resurrecting the tweets in the dataset ‘live’ on Twitter (by fetching them via the Twitter API), Tweetboard offers a unique view to the dataset and allows a more detailed analysis of social life unfolding on Twitter as it maps conversation threads and makes affective flows visible. With a temporal, chronological view, Tweetboard also shows changes in affect as more time passes since the attack, whereas with the popularity view, it shows which contents have gained more traction. In addition, when, on occasion, data death (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021, 325) has occurred through tweet deletion, suspension or removal, Tweetboard nevertheless shows the collected tweets, but in a textual (rather than ‘live’) format. In this way, focussing on post-death data marked with hellobrother allowed us to trace and follow the data flows (Markham and Gammelby 2018) around this topic, making visible the relational affect (Slaby et al. 2019) flowing at the site of data as well as what kind of affects these were. Affect is at the heart of mediated social practices and in the context of digital afterlife, it is data and its materiality that makes these possible. The multi-method approach used  offered novel avenues for the empirical examination of digital afterlife. In particular, it allowed investigating in more detail cross-platform relationality characteristic of digital afterlife of mediated death where the diverse affective flows among different digital artefacts, platforms and actors both disseminate and fragment digital afterlife. This approach allowed new ways of thinking about data in the context of mediated death, specifically, its materiality and constitutive role in digital afterlife.

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Rethinking Digital Afterlife Through Data: Digital Afterlife as a Configuration of the Socio-­technological and the Affective For analytical purposes, there is a need to delineate post-death data as different from posthumous data. Unlike posthumous data, which is often self-generated (by the deceased, including social media posts, selfies, messages, etc.) or produced with their permission or knowing presence (e.g., photos they appear in), post-death data is other-generated in the sense that it is produced by bystanders and witnesses as well as the networked mourners after death. On occasion, like in the Christchurch mosque attacks, post-death data is produced by the perpetrator. Post-death data is distinctly marked both discursively and affectively with the event or fact of death, actual or impending, and thus one of the defining features of this kind of data is what Richardson (2018) calls radical absence, that is, when the data speaks to that which is lost. Lives that no longer exist. From its creation, post-death data is marked with undertones of loss and discontinuity of life. In the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attacks, the collaborative performative grieving (Papailias 2016) played an intrinsic part in the production of the mediated emotional landscape of the post-terror moment, materially manifest in the proliferation of digital artefacts. Some of the digital artefacts contained scenes of dying or images of sites of death, variously framed by those sharing the content. Delving into the empirical material it became evident that the same content resonates on different affective and ideological levels with different audiences where some stand with the victims, some with the perpetrator. Data itself, then, while carrying meaning, even witnessing power, cannot be said to have a fixed meaning; the meaning and interpretation resides with the reader/viewer. This points us to problematise the role of data in digital afterlife, not only for the fluidity of its meanings and the affective configurations it enables, but also as regards to its fragility rooted in its materiality. For these reasons, it is vital we centre data (in this chapter, post-death data in particular) in examinations of digital afterlife and critically assess what digital afterlife can mean not only for the departed, or those grieving, but for society and humanity more widely and what implications there might be that are anchored in the materiality and affective potential of data.

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Data Afterlife: The Socio-technical Dimension of Digital Afterlife Digital afterlife is, on the one hand, composed of data, and on the other hand, of affective relationality that the materiality of data makes possible. Understanding data as a socio-technical construct helps seeing data as having material properties that allow data to enter social and affective configurations and practices. However, in its material and technical constitution, data itself has an afterlife, data afterlife (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021); it is what happens to data after its creation, pertaining to its possible continued existence as well as its potential manipulation, corruption and disappearance. Like all material things, data is fragile and prone to damage and decay, putting continuity at risk. Data is thus subject to similar forces as other material things (Pink et al. 2016). This is an important point to note, given how most conceptualisations of digital afterlife are premised on the notion of continuity; data, then, has a lifespan and a lifecycle. As data lends itself to alteration and circulation, it has the potential for permanence through replication, modification and archiving, which poses its own challenges for digital afterlife, for example, regarding agency and privacy of the deceased. Similarly, the continued mediated presence of the deceased (Cumiskey and Hjorth 2017) can be a cause of great distress when data resurfaces traumatic memory in unexpected contexts (e.g., images of the dead in memes; see Papailias 2019). In the context of violent death, the continued circulation of death not only constitutes a repeat injury to the bereaved, but it also has direct consequences for the digital afterlife of the deceased with accumulation of diverse and often negative meanings and purposes. In this way, the networked audience injects into and interrupts digital afterlife; it no longer only concerns data accumulated during a person’s life, and it no longer remains in the hands of the bereaved. The continued circulation of the dead in the networked digital media environment and the virality of post-death data, like of the Christchurch massacre, shows how data actively shapes the representation of the death event, how the dead are remembered and who bears witness to the publicly available dying moments. The 17-minute video of the mosque attacks was extensively shared on different platforms, taken up by different actors for very different reasons. In addition to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the video was shared on message boards regularly used by white supremacists, like 4chan and 8chan (Zelenkauskaite et al. 2020).

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Data afterlife, then, is heavily implicated in memory-making, for example how post-death data is viewed or for what purposes it is archived, modified or shared. Here, we might also think of post-death data in the context of police brutality in the US and how the archives of post-death data—the deceased’s digital afterlife—might be premised on an ideological standing of very different value orientations. Violence itself might be explicitly driven by an ideological agenda; as post-death data, the Christchurch footage, for example, unavoidably contributes to the archives and a particular memory of the far-right section of population (Stenmann Baun 2021). The mediated massacre with its numerous renditions, clips or screenshots of the video, continued to circulate despite continued official efforts and platform attempts to remove the digital artefact. Different formats were used to circumvent moderation (Hrehorová 2019) and the recording was still online six months after the attack, perhaps longer. Furthermore, the recording remains potentially indefinitely on individual hard drives having been downloaded and saved in the hours and days after the attack. Such iterative and expansive processes of data modification and circulation expose the ways in which post-death data injects digital afterlife with layers of meaning rooted in the event of death instead of the life lived by the deceased. Decay and destruction of data, then, is perhaps more distressing in the context of posthumous data, where such a loss is likely to be devastating as the bereaved are keen to preserve and archive a select digital afterlife of the deceased; however, when examined in the context of post-death data, fragility of data can be viewed from a different perspective and it can, on occasion, offer relief. This is because post-death data includes data (e.g., images, audio recordings, video footage, screenshots, etc.) of harmful and tragic content, of scenes of death and moments of dying, often falling outside the preferred way of remembering. In death, it is common to represent those passed as they were when alive, with life. With post-death data, selection is not possible and digital afterlife is thus beyond control and curation. A similar point is made by Özdemir et al. (2021, 405), who state that ‘thanatechnologies influence data (im)mortality, for example, through the social media accounts of the living dead [that] continue to produce sociotechnical artifacts that may be different than the original narrative, personality, and experiences of the deceased’. This gestures towards the importance of including data in the critical examination of digital afterlife.

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The notion of data afterlife, in particular, exposes the fragility of digital afterlife but also how, in the digital terrain, the dead are still vulnerable (see also Stokes 2021). Data as Afterlife: The Affective Dimension of Digital Afterlife Data provides the materiality essential for the realisation of relational affect (Slaby et al. 2019) in digital spaces. Data as afterlife concerns the dimensions of the affective and the social, that is, the human connection and the relational engagement with data and the meaning(s) embedded in it. Memory and memorialisation are at the core of the affective dimension of digital afterlife as people engage in ritual practices of remembering. Here, in the context of mediated remembering, data figures in affording affective relationality (Mühlhoff 2015); yet, data also figures in socio-political hierarchies of vulnerability and grievability (see Morse 2018), contributing also to frames of (in)visibility. In this way, data has the capacity to intervene in digital afterlife and shape hierarchies of victimhood and who we mourn. Death-related digital artefacts, like artefacts of remembering, are often discussed in terms of the positive outcomes they have for the bereaved. Digital media have the capacity to reanimate and enliven the deceased (Cumiskey and Hjorth 2017) and afford a sense of co-presence; however, what happens when data captures, archives and replays the moment of dying and traumatic memory instead of reanimating the dead as ‘still alive’? Thus, contrary to media that reanimates the dead ‘as alive’, post-­ death data of dying moments is characterised by radical absence (Richardson 2018). This is where we see most clearly the meaning of data as afterlife as it enters the social domain of death-related affective practices, and how it is analytically different from data afterlife. It is in these relational configurations that post-death data appear as essential components in the mediated social practices that add to and constitute digital afterlife; data acts as the ‘material propping’, the necessary conduit, for relational affect to unfold (Slaby et al. 2019, 10). The cross-­ platform relationality of data and digital artefacts (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021) allows for networked affect of different kinds: in the case of violent death, solidarity is not the only mode of attachment as the affective disposition of individuals differs. Together with affective affordances (Slaby et al. 2019), the affective potentialities embedded in post-death data are productive of the various affective relationalities that unfold (see

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Richardson and Schankweiler 2020) that define different enclaves; where some affective configurations arise from solidarity, others rejoice at the violent death of the Other and embrace the ideology underpinning the killings. The Christchurch footage circulated widely. Even those condemning the act of violence participated in sharing the video; although these shares were framed by expressions of moral judgement, they nevertheless contributed to the artefact’s virality and shaped the digital afterlife of the victims. Papailias (2016, 452) notes how in the networked digital media contexts, ‘the dead are productive: they become the grounds for the emergence of new social networks, media forms, and affective experiences’, being productive of different publics. These different publics can be explained by looking at the relational configurations where the type of the affect characterising the configuration determines what kind of relational configuration it is; not all constitute communities of mourners. We see how data as afterlife has implications for the socio-political aspect of death and politics of remembering with data providing the material conduit for affects and ideologies, contributing to shaping who and how we mourn. The Christchurch footage was eventually removed, but it is not uncommon for scenes of dying and clips of unnatural, often violent death to remain online. For example, video testimonials of violent death resulting from police brutality against Black citizens in the US, and used as a mode of ‘dark sousveillance’ (Browne 2015) that witness, document and show the dying moments of the victims—and which emerged to combat racialised (state) surveillance and violence—are not hard to find. The recording of the killing of George Floyd in 2020 at the hands of the police is just one of many. From the perspective of digital afterlife, and particularly data as afterlife, one question is whether recordings and archives of violent death, despite on occasion serving as evidentiary documentation, contribute to making certain death and certain scenes of dying less unexpected, perhaps even normalising them, and whether post-death data of violent death contributes to representing some, usually the marginalised and non-normative bodies, as objects of violence (see Sutherland 2017; Ibrahim 2020) rather than subjects with human rights and agency.

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Discussion and Conclusions The emerging forms of collective practices of digital media witnessing (Papailias 2016; Richardson and Schankweiler 2020) and connective mourning not only call for closer examination of forms and modes of witnessing but emphasise the increasing need to critically examine the very constitution of that which is being witnessed. As discussed throughout the chapter, media shapes both the possibilities and practices of remembering. Through circulation and (re)mediation of death, both traditional media and social media are implicated in the construction of contemporary memory (Garde-Hansen 2011; Neiger et al. 2011) and frames of (in)visibility of victimhood, as well as being integral in the construction of mediated solidarity. The media are thus significant also in terms of politics of remembering. In this vein, this chapter has examined how data, in both its permanence and simultaneous fragility, participates in shaping who and how we remember while bringing up the potential adverse effects of digital afterlife for the deceased that include post-mortem identity, legacy as well as privacy. With a view on digital afterlife and focus on post-death data, the present chapter has examined the entanglement of death, data and digital media to further theorise the concept of digital afterlife as well as problematise the role of data in its constitution. To capture the constitutive role of data in digital afterlife (and what this means discursively, archive-­ historically, affectively, ideologically as well as temporally), this chapter has elaborated on digital afterlife as being composed of the co-constitutive dimensions of data afterlife and data as afterlife as first proposed by Harju and Huhtamäki (2021). This analytical move allows us to approach digital afterlife as a relational arrangement (Slaby et al. 2019) where the affective emerges from the relational engagement with data and digital artefacts as well as the networked community sharing similar affective positioning. As a relational arrangement, digital afterlife is fluid by definition and never stable; rather, it is under constant change and redefinition as data, a constitutive part of digital afterlife, affords different identification points for different publics. What this means is that while the post-death data artefacts range from commemorative symbols to images of mass murder, they all have the capacity for affording different relational orientations that come with differing ideological and affective underpinnings. Live footage of carnage is, among different publics, viewed and engaged with differently. Relationality

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thus offers a helpful lens to looking at digital afterlife and highlights the problematic character of digital afterlife: as the affective attachment varies from publics to publics, digital afterlife is never constant. The reading and understanding of the affective and ideological layers of post-death data ultimately reside with the reader/viewer. The socio-technical constitution of data underlines the impermanence and fragility of digital afterlife as well as its unpredictable and unstable character; this chapter has, furthermore, more explicitly emphasised the importance of including relationality, materiality and affect as integral to digital afterlife. Images of the final moments have long-lasting consequences for both the bereaved and the deceased by mediating traumatic memory and keeping it ‘alive’ through the materialisation of memory. Although the socio-technical conceptualisation of digital afterlife was in this chapter examined through very specific post-death digital artefacts relating to the Christchurch mosque attacks, the same technological and affective entanglements apply in other contexts. As Özdemir et al. (2021) note, ‘[d]igital footprints are mutable, not invariably accurate, and thus, may compromise the wishes of dying persons and risk the dignity of the dead’. Indeed, mediated violent death represents difficult death from multiple perspectives: the role of data and its materiality in the construction of digital afterlife (Harju and Huhtamäki 2021) and difficult memory; the socio-political dimension of mediated death and shows of solidarity (Harju 2019) as well as hierarchies of grievability (Morse 2018) of public death; and, finally, the problematics of collective remembering and affective relatedness in digital spaces where post-death data resonates with diverse audiences, some standing with the victims, some with the perpetrator.

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Mathijssen, B. 2018. Transforming Bonds: Ritualising Post-Mortem Relationships in The Netherlands. Mortality 23 (3): 215–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13576275.2017.1364228. Morse, T. 2018. The Construction of Grievable Death: Toward an Analytical Framework for the Study of Mediatized Death. European Journal of Cultural Studies 21 (2): 242–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549416656858. ———. 2020. Now Trending: #Massacre. On the Ethical Challenges of Spreading Spectacular Terrorism on New Media. In The age of spectacular death, ed. M.H. Jacobsen, 126–143. Routledge. Mühlhoff, R. 2015. Affective Resonance and Social Interaction. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (4): 1001–1019. ———. 2019. Affective Resonance. In Affective Societies  – Key Concepts, ed. J. Slaby and C. von Scheve. Routledge. Neiger, M.O., E.  Meyers, and N.  Zandberg, eds. 2011. On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Palgrave. Nowaczyk-Basińska, K. 2019. Immortality as a Network of Relationships. Experience of Building a Posthumous Avatar on the Lifenaut Platform. Studia Humanistyczne AGH. 18: 23–43. https://doi.org/10.7494/ human.2019.18.3.23. O’Connor, M. 2020. Posthumous Digital Material: Does It ‘Live On’ in Survivors’ Accounts of Their Dead? In Digital Afterlife: Death Matters in a Digital Age, ed. V. Mason-Robbie and M. Savin-Baden, 39–56. CRC Press. Özdemir, V., S. Springer, A. Yıldırım, Ş. Biçer, A. Kendirci, S. Şardaş, H. Kılıç, N. Hekim, T. Kunej, K.Y. Arga, K. Dzobo, W. Wang, M. Geanta, A. Brand, and M. Bayram. 2021. Thanatechnology and the Living Dead: New Concepts in Digital Transformation and Human-Computer Interaction. Omics: A Journal of Integrative Biology 25 (7): 401–407. https://doi.org/10.1089/ omi.2021.0100. Papailias, P. 2016. Witnessing in the Age of the Database: Viral Memorials, Affective Publics, and the Assemblage of Mourning. Memory Studies 9 (4): 437–454. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698015622058. ———. 2019. (Un)seeing Dead Refugee Bodies: Mourning Memes, Spectropolitics, and the Haunting of Europe. Media, Culture & Society 41 (8): 1048–1068. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718756178. Pink, S., E.  Ardevol, and D.  Lanzeni. 2016. Digital Materiality: Configuring a Field of Anthropology/Design? In Digital Materialities: Anthropology and Design, ed. S. Pink, E. Ardevol, and D. Lanzeni, 1–26. Bloomsbury. Richardson, M. 2018. Radical Absence: Encountering Traumatic Affect in Digitally Mediated Disappearance. Cultural Studies 32 (1): 63–80. Richardson, M., and K. Schankweiler. 2020. Introduction: Affective Witnessing as Theory and Practice. Parallax 26 (3): 235–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13534645.2021.1883301.

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CHAPTER 5

‘Death. Carnage. Chaos’: Mortality and Mountaineering On-screen, and on the Roof of the World Matthew Spokes

The last pre-pandemic Everest climbing season was a busy one. For starters, Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation issued a record 381 permits for expeditions to Everest1 (Hindustan Times 2021). 2019 also saw Nirmal Purja’s—a Nepalese climber known globally following his Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible (Jones 2021)—photograph of the snaking queue from the South Summit to the peak go viral

1  ‘Everest’ is the Anglicized name for the peak initially categorized as ‘Peak XV’ by Sir George Everest, and is the common name used in this chapter. However, it is important to recognize that the peak, and the massif of peaks of which it is part—including Nuptse and Lhotse—is Chomolungma in Tibet (‘Goddess Mother of the Word’) and Sagarmatha in Nepal (‘Goddess of the Sky’).

M. Spokes (*) York St John University, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_5

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with the film-maker Elia Saikaly, who was climbing Everest when the photograph was taken, describing the climb on Instagram as follows: Death. Carnage. Chaos. Lineups. Dead bodies on the route and in tents at camp 4. People who I tried to turn back who ended up dying. People being dragged down. Walking over bodies. Everything you read in the sensational headlines all played out on our summit night.

Since Elizabeth Hawley established the Himalayan Database (https:// www.himalayandatabase.com/)—which draws on multiple data sources stretching back to 1905 to chart the number of fatalities in the region— four out of five of the deadliest years on record have been in the last decade. This includes 22 deaths in 2015 following the Nepalese earthquake, and 11 who died in 2019 including those summiting around the same time as Purja and Saikaly. With the exception of the publicity around 2019 generated by Purja’s photo, the fatalities of 1996 (the fifth ‘most deadly’ year on Everest with 12 deaths)—in which experienced guides like Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, along with climbers from the United States, Japan and India, died over a handful of days in mid-May—are perhaps those that have left the most indelible mark on the public’s imagination. The events of that year have been told in non-fiction bestsellers from clients on the climb (Krakauer 2011) as well as guides (Boukreev and DeWalt 1997), alongside documentaries (Storm over Everest: MacGillvray and Breashears 1998) and even a Hollywood blockbuster starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Josh Brolin, Everest (Kormákur 2015). In this chapter, I want to use the 1996 disaster as an example through which the concept of the ‘difficult dead’ (Spokes et al. 2018) can be further developed so as to explore the often-binary distinctions associated with mountaineering (for example, physical/mental; risk/reward; life/ death). The concept of the ‘difficult dead’ was adapted from ‘difficult heritage’ (Macdonald 2010), which sought to understand how different types of spaces facilitate ‘a past that is recognised as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity’ (ibid., 1): Nuremberg is used as a case study to explore how stories about the past are challenged through controversy over meaning, identity and ownership. Building on this groundwork, we detailed how the dead, in the context of memorialization and scale, antagonize a straightforward reading of spatial use: we included a variety of spaces from the small (Tyburn gallows,

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York) to the large (Neumarkt, Dresden) to explore the dead in context. In each case, using Lefebvre’s spatial triad (see Spokes et al. 2018, 32–37), we unpacked how situating the dead—made ‘difficult’ in the sense that their status as victims of State-led execution, serial killers or war sits outside of normative associations with mortality—disrupt linear narratives that are told about these locations. For example, Tyburn in York is now primarily somewhere traversed by school children and dog walkers, but the presence of the dead, through specific forms of memorialization at the site, make the space difficult to fully recapture: it doesn’t, for instance, feature on any promotional material for ‘ghost’ or ‘death’ tours that predominate the tourist trade in York (ibid., 60–65). Here then, Everest and the dead bodies that litter the mountain will be used as examples to further expand and stress-test this previously established theoretical framework, augmenting it with complementary concepts such as ‘provocative’ morbid space (see Penfold-Mounce 2018). Summiting mountains in the Himalaya can be a deadly leisure activity, the uppermost area above 8000 m being commonly known by climbers2 as the ‘death zone’ given the lack of oxygen and atmospheric pressure, and the effect this has on the human body. This type of mountaineering can be thought of as a threshold activity, the difficult dead antagonizing and challenging ideas around physical, emotional and moral strength.

Binary Distinctions and Risk: Climbing and Dying on Everest As the highest peak on Earth, Everest has long held the attention of the general public and the mountaineering community. It is one of only 14 mountains more than 8000 metres above sea level, and the physical isolation of the space, the challenge it represents, and the ability to fight against the odds to summit, means it is perennially popular. Trekkers and climbers may include those on walking tours to base camp through to climbers who have forked out up to $160,000 (Arnette 2021) to spend several months working towards summiting (acclimatizing to the altitude can take many weeks). The climbing industry has had many years to develop routes and itineraries to aid in summiting, and as of start of the 2021 season

2  When it comes to Everest as a case study, this chapter will interchangeably use the terms ‘climbing’, ‘climber’ and ‘mountaineering’.

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somewhere in the region of 10,000 climbers have made it to the roof of the world (ibid.). The counterpoint to all this success is the relatively high mortality rate. Everest does not have the highest rate for mountains above 8000  m— Annapurna I has something in the region of 32%, and K2 hovers around 1 in 4—but estimates vary: somewhere between 4% and 10% appears to be the case, putting Everest around 10th out of 148,000 m-plus mountains. However, as Windsor et al. (2009, 316) argue, ‘obtaining a meaningful and accurate picture of mortality in mountains is not a straightforward task’. Climbing very tall mountains is nonetheless risky. Mountains are ‘inherently dangerous [combining] falling barometric pressure, temperature and humidity, together with increases in solar radiation and wind speed’ (ibid.), so climbing them requires a synergy between the skill of the climber, the support of their team, the quality of their equipment, the correct conditions and acclimatization, and, to an extent, luck. The high mortality rate is indicative of how one of these factors being out of sync can result in disaster. With the knowledge of just how dangerous Everest is, you might question why people choose to climb it: this is where a distinction between perceived and actual risk becomes important. Cater (2006, 321) identifies ‘perceived risk’ as highly qualitative in nature, influenced by preconceived ideas and the experiential where ‘although participants are safe in this knowledge of an outcome, there is no knowledge as to what the experience might feel like’ [original emphasis]: perceived risk operates in a subjective realm, influenced by factors ranging from reassurance from professional guides (Pomfret 2011) to the emotional reaction of tourists in unfamiliar environments (see Lepp and Gibson 2008). ‘Actual risk’ Cater (2006, 322) describes as a ‘numerical estimation of the likelihood of an event’, and the potential for disparity between the two is something that Mu and Nepal (2016) found in their interviews with 30 Everest climbers. Their interviews took place in the aftermath of 16 Sherpas dying in an avalanche in 2014, and climbers’ reflections demonstrated how their perceptions of risk differed from actual risk in a number of ways. Those who had not experienced high-altitude illness (HAI), which can result in death through high-altitude pulmonary oedema (HAPE) or high-altitude cerebral oedema (HACE) as a result of reduced levels of oxygen and increased barometric pressure, did not comprehend the actual risk because they had no experiential knowledge of it; similarly, whilst the avalanche was met

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with horror, the actual risk was deemed low because of the types of activities climbers perceived as risky. In contrast, the two trekkers, who had experienced a helicopter evacuation and had seen HAI, were both more aware of the actual risks involved. This binary distinction between risk types is influenced by external factors. Literature and pop culture representations of climbing Everest have arguably reduced the summit pursuit, and indeed climbing more widely, to binary distinctions in the cultural imagination. The 1996 disaster, and cultural responses from contemporaneous non-fiction, documentaries and blockbuster films, demonstrates how binaries are reinforced, and it is useful to consider these first to underpin how the dead body on the mountain troubles these delineations. In Mu and Nepal’s article, a majority of interviewees reflect on the ‘fearless’ and ‘heartbreaking’ deaths of visiting mountaineers (as opposed to Sherpas), with specific reference to Scott Fischer and Rob Hall who died in 1996. To offer a brief precis of the disaster, a number of compounding factors—bottlenecks on the route to the summit (though not as pronounced as Purja’s 2019 photo), delays caused by the absence of fixed lines on the south-east ridge before the Hillary Step, and a series of blizzards that hit the mountain across the 10th and 11th of May when climbers were descending—resulted in the deaths of eight climbers on the Nepalese South Summit route. These included four from the Adventure Consultants expedition—guides Rob Hall and Andrew Harris; clients Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba—and Scott Fischer, the expedition leader from Mountain Madness. Three members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police who were climbing from the Tibetan-Chinese Northeast Ridge route also died. Accounts of the disaster suggest that Harris and Hansen were presumed dead after falling during their descent, whereas other fatalities were the result of exposure. Guide error is another factor that arguably contributed, and has resulted in a long-running and acrimonious argument between Jon Krakauer, a journalist on the Adventure Consultants expedition, and G.  Weston DeWalt, an author who was not on the climb but constructed a narrative from Mountain Madness guide Anatoli Boukreev’s account. The ins-and-­ outs of the accusations are well documented in the respective books and do not need reproducing here: they do of course illustrate the relative nature of risk and the multitude of factors that influence a successful or unsuccessful outcome as well as impacting cultural narrative about Everest.

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These accounts also underscore the 2015 blockbuster film Everest, in which both Boukreev and Krakauer feature (played by actors). Krakauer’s (2011) account of the climb reflects risk in relation to the skills required to summit and the sometimes-negative impacts these can have. Krakauer (2011, 111) explains that ‘the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave an imminent danger as well’, suggesting that perceived risk and actual risk are frequently confused, largely because ‘above 26,000 feet, […] the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin’. This also highlights a binary distinction between physical and mental strength and weakness. Further binary distinctions can be seen in Krakauer’s (2011, 270) discussion of reward and danger, where danger is considered a necessary component of climbing: ‘without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diversions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier’. This understanding, where reward is co-dependent with risk, corresponds with Davidson’s (2012, 2015) work on narratives of danger and how these feed into the construction of identity with mountaineers: we see a binary between what he terms the ‘calculable and the incalculable’ when presented with risk and its outcomes, with mountaineers trying to chart a course between the two. Krakauer (2011, 270) knows that ‘climbing mountains [is] a high-risk pursuit’. Moreover, it represents ‘an activity that idealizes risk-taking’ and whilst support teams and equipment have undoubtedly improved since 1996, Everest remains an ‘extraordinarily dangerous undertaking’ with failure measured in terms of the number of corpses that remain on the mountain (Krakauer 2011, 275). Perceived and actual risk are present in a representational sense, in the 2015 film Everest (Kormákur 2015). In the first few minutes of the film, actual risk is exemplified by Jason Clarke (who plays Rob Hall in the film) commenting that ‘with all the sherpas [sic] and porters it’s going to be a squeeze up there’, and indeed there is a heated argument later in the film when one climbing group holds up the others, foreshadowing the now infamous 2019 photo. Spending too long in the ‘death zone’ is an actual risk, where HACE and HAPE are substantially increased, but being told this and actually experiencing the risk are necessarily binary at this stage. A seemingly throwaway comment by Boukreev later underscores the real concern, that competition between people is not productive because the

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only real competition is ‘between every person and this mountain. The last word always belongs to the mountain.’ Perceived risk is further reinforced through medicalized explanations throughout the film, underlining the threat posed by high-altitude climbing. Pre-climb, Hall explains that ‘once we get above the South Col [a windswept, snow-free area between the peak of Everest and Lhotse], our bodies will be literally dying, and I mean literally dying’. Later, around 20 minutes in, the team doctor uses a base camp briefing to do the same: again there is the separation between climbers being given the information, and the actuality of the risk involved. Her voice, listing the effects of hypoxia and brain swelling, is juxtaposed firstly with a climber coughing blood into the snow, and secondly with a camera shot of Scott Fischer’s team passing a frozen body on the mountain. This second example, in a representative sense, effectively conveys the difference between knowing the mountain can kill and experiencing the death of others first-hand in encounters with bodies, mirroring Krakauer earlier. This juxtaposition serves a further purpose: the film must tread a line between depicting risk and reward, and potentially sensationalizes the deaths of experienced mountain guides and tourists in the process so as to serve the narrative. Through this, simplistic binary distinctions between life and death, and success and failure, are reinforced for the audience. What we see in both the journalistic account and the film version are binary distinctions including physicality and mentality (because you have to be tough to climb a mountain); work3 and leisure (Sherpas employed by tour operators put themselves at risk by aiding visiting climbers); risk and reward; and life and death. These binaries connect to research with climbers about their own motivation which separates out mountaineering in these terms (see, e.g., Holland-Smith and Olivier 2013; Miller and Mair 2020) and links back to the binary distinction of risk seen in Cater’s work. However, these distinctions are complicated by the presence of the difficult dead on the mountain.

3  Ortner (1997) has been instrumental in demonstrating how prioritizing Western climbers ‘hard work’ feeds into orientalist assumptions about the vital role the Sherpa people play in managing the mountain: it is not simply about supporting foreign climbers to summit, but also clearing the mountain of rubbish (such as spend oxygen cannisters and, increasingly, food wrappers) and some of the bodies as well. This work is undertaken at immense personal risk (see Death Zone: Cleaning Mount Everest 2018).

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Provocative Space and the Difficult Dead on Everest Fourteen and a half minutes into Everest (Kormákur 2015) a caption appears on the screen: it says, ‘The Climbers’ Memorials, Thoka La, 16,000  ft’.4 Here, chiselled Hollywood A-listers pass a team of Sherpas heading down the mountain. They are carrying one of their team on their back. The Sherpa is taking supplementary oxygen, and exchanges glances with Josh Brolin’s character Beck Weathers.5 As they look at each other, the soundtrack drops away to leave just the Sherpas breathing and a single note held by an ethereal voice and violin. It’s certainly a dramatic moment, and one that exemplifies the in-­ between nature of perceived and actual risk—it is difficult to appreciate the risk until you directly experience it. This initial binary, and others, are bridged by future encounters with the dead on the mountain—inherently ‘difficult’ in a physical, locational sense. Once you have moved beyond the memorialized space of Thoka La and started ascending the mountain, the difficult dead in situ become a catalyst disrupting dichotomous experiences. What do I mean by ‘in situ’? The difficult dead body on the mountain exists in a ‘provocative’ morbid space (Penfold-Mounce 2018, 76–9). Penfold-Mounce discusses provocative morbid space in the context of the undead body, but developing this idea helps us to understand how the difficult dead can be provocative in a different context. Provocative morbid space is that which has direct consequences for the individual in terms of their engagement with death, rather than the more entertaining safe space of representation. It is described, in the context of the encounter with ‘the Undead’, as challenging selfhood by confronting the individual with uncomfortable issues such as consumerism and its impact(s). Climbing Everest can be considered along similar but adapted lines: it is a provocative space which confronts the individual—their physicality, their emotional engagement and their morality—through the encounter with the difficult dead body. First, in the context of physicality, Everest itself is provocative in terms of size, the weight of history it bears in a representational sense, and the  Thoka La is variously known as the Duhgla Pass and Chukla Lare.  In 1996, Weathers was twice left for dead on Everest before being rescued by one of the highest altitude helicopter rescues of all time: following his ordeal on Everest he subsequently lost his nose, a hand, fingers and parts of his feet to frostbite. 4 5

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physical requirements of the climb. The difficult dead are those who have succumbed to the actual risk of climbing the mountain. They exist in an interstitial realm, present as climbers on the mountain, and they are tangible, physical objects (entirely frozen through in many cases, and too dangerous to repatriate without putting rescue teams lives at risk). But they are also left behind as way-finders for other climbers (famously, Green Boots near the summit; or the bodies in the Rainbow Valley discussed later). Here the body disrupts binary distinctions by operating in multiple senses: their use-value in providing markers on the ascent; as a representation of danger and threat; as demonstrative of the collapse of the self in relation to the extreme physical demands of the location, and ultimately, as a person. Second, the difficult dead body elicits an emotional reaction (be it visceral, reflective, symbolic), arguably akin to the ways in which the mountain itself does: for instance, Everest is routinely described in literature and marketing materials for travel providers as inspiring ‘awe’ (see Leste 1983; Obert 2003; British Expedition Company 2022). If we take ‘awe’ as an example, it is typically related to a transcendent experience (see Spokes 2020). Awe can invoke ‘accomplishment; pride; and purpose’ or can inspire ‘anxiety; dread; and terror’ in equal measure (Hicks 2018, 260). On a conceptual level then, the encounter with the mountain and the bodies that populate its slopes exists in a liminal state that can incorporate a whole host of responses. Awe also has a quasi-religious aspect to it. The Khumbu area, and Everest itself, have immense spiritual significance for the Sherpas who live and work in the region (Nepal et  al. 2020), and accounts from visiting climbers often situate the mountain similarly despite not sharing the same belief system. For instance, in the account given by Klev Schoening and Neal Beidleman—recounted by Krakauer (2011, 249)—the death of a Sherpa killed by falling rocks was met with the question ‘what have we done to make this mountain so angry?’. This implicit personhood may further trouble simplistic distinctions. The sacred nature of the space and the dead who remain there is echoed in the interviews conducted by Mu and Nepal (2016). Climbers reflected on their connection with those killed on Everest at one stage removed, through the prism of the memorials—like the one at Thoka La—which some described as ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’ (Mu and Nepal 2016, 7). In the same way we can separate out perceived and actual risk, these memorials represent the perceived dead, a way of distancing the mountaineer from

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the difficult dead on the mountain who continue to act as a tangible reminder of actual risk. Everest is therefore not only provocative in a physical sense, but also in an emotional sense, inspiring awe in many guises through the dead body. Third, the body becomes difficult and provocative in how it challenges individual morality in a relational way. As previously highlighted, the heightened emotional and physical stress of ascending compounds decision-­making. In Krakaeur’s account, climbers are then presented with life-and-death scenarios where they have to protect their individual safety even if this means leaving other climbers to almost certain death. To illustrate, Stuart Hutchinson, who turned back 100 metres from the summit in 1996, recalls his choice to leave behind Yasuko Namba (along with Beck Weathers, who survived) in chilling detail. Thinking he had come across an already-dead body, he tried to clear the snow away, and chipped a three-inch piece of ice from Namba’s face. In doing so he realized she was still breathing, despite her hands being frozen solid and her skin having turned ‘the color [sic] of white porcelain. “It was terrible […] She was very near death. I didn’t know what to do”’ (Krakauer 2011, 247). All he could do was carry on, or suffer the same fate. A further example comes from the disputed story of the Japanese climbing team ascending the Northern route of Everest from Tibet. According to reports initially in the Financial Times, near the summit the team confronted climbers from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police who were in difficulty, and the Japanese team went around them; they were subsequently quoted as saying that ‘above 8000 metres is not a place where people can afford morality’ (Krakauer 2011, 241). These examples show that climbers are forced to choose between saving themselves and saving the lives of others. Understanding these choices in the context of limited mental functioning, and an assessment of how close to death the other climber may be, is bundled together with this. Here the difficult dead body exists both ad hoc and post hoc: there on the mountain, but also thought of again after-the-fact when the choice to leave someone behind is retrospectively justified, as seen in testimony of the Japanese team. These examples also show how the dead body is ‘difficult’ in relation to the mountain. Everest becomes a transitional, provocative space where life and death operate in a hinterland of physical and emotional stress. Given how far removed this experience is from the quotidian it is little wonder that accounts of climbing Everest are documentary and

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Hollywood-fodder, albeit in a reductive representational sense. Plainly put, the difficult dead are provocative because they function in a physical sense (as exemplars of the prospect of death on the mountain, and their physicality in the space they occupy), an emotional sense (both as a challenge to straightforward experiences of awe, and the separation between death as abstract/perceived and actual/tangible) and as a challenge to morality, both ad and post hoc.

The Intersectional Difficult Dead Whilst Everest is well known, it is not the deadliest mountain: instead, we might think of it as an exemplar of the difficult dead, in terms of the publicity that deaths on Everest receive in the media. Considered in these terms, we confront the binary of climbers and non-climbers, where experience meets representation. Differing narratives of dying on 8000 m+ peaks solidify particular ideas about mortality in relation to the physical, emotional and moral as well. To return to the opening gambit of this chapter, the 2019 queue photograph saw various media jump to highlight the horror of the experience of being confronted with the dead, despite this being an aspect of summiting that many climbers are familiar with. Whilst it is more complicated than simply arguing that one perspective is right, there is certainly a difference between the difficult dead experienced in situ compared to the dead as representation, and representations have the power to reify specific narratives that climbers themselves perhaps struggle to codify. The result of this is that stories are told in a way that accentuates some factors at the expense of others, particularly in relation to gender and economic privilege. This results in the difficult dead being subdivided depending on this status too. For example, the recent documentary The Last Mountain (Terill 2021) demonstrated how particular narratives can capture the public imagination if presented in a certain way. The story is told through the parallel narrative of the death of the climber Tom Ballard on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan in 2019, and the death of his mother Alison Hargreaves 25  years earlier who died descending K2 (both mountains have a higher fatality rate than Everest, but are perhaps less well known as they sit outside of the Khumbu region). Ballard’s story is framed through his social media commentary and the recollections of his sister and father, with clips showing his physical prowess and understanding of perceived and actual risk in different contexts. Conversely, we see how Hargreaves went from celebrated climber to posthumous castigation, with the media

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portraying her death on K2 as a selfish act, abandoning her children in favour of fame. Although the social media element is crucial here—Ballard, to an extent, is allowed to tell his own story—I found the narrative difference jarring in its depiction of two accomplished climbers and their untimely deaths. The gendered nature of the dead is something that I have not examined in depth in this short chapter, but one that is also vital in understanding the complexity of narratives and representations of the dead. In Everest (Kormákur 2015), women are routinely depicted as helpless bystanders (the camp team listening to radio comms from the climbers; Rob Hall’s pregnant wife back in New Zealand) or misguided in their attempts, rather than heroic (Yasuko Namba, who died on the South Col and features prominently in Krakauer’s book is largely a footnote in the film). Here, the female corpse on the mountain is doubly difficult. The implication is that climbing is about a certain type of strength, and that in stepping outside of these representational confines, female climbers are somehow lacking in terms of their womanhood, or in the case of Alison Hargreaves, their motherhood by leaving their children behind to pursue their climbing careers. Gendered stereotypes of other female climbers are persistent in other climbing narratives, further underscoring the problems of representation. Hannelore Schmatz—the first woman to die on the upper slopes of Everest—was left in a seated position where she had died of exposure and was routinely used as a way finder until her body was blown down the Kangshung Face: Arne Næss Jr. describes Schmatz’s body as ‘the sinister guard [who] follows me with her eyes as I pass by’ (Gammelgaard 1999). She left behind a son. Francys Arsentiev, who died in 1998, also lay undisturbed in the ‘Rainbow Valley’—so called because of the variety of different coats and flags adorning the dead—until her body was moved from view in 2007. Like Schmatz and Hargreaves, she left a family behind including her ten-year-old son Paul who found the constant photographs of his dead mother in situ difficult to bear (Dimuro 2018). As a way finder, she was nicknamed ‘Sleeping Beauty’, highlighting both the gendered nature of representation but also the ways in which the dead become depersonalized in this extreme environment. The other element I have not had space to examine is economic privilege, in that there is a clear divide between climbers and those who provide support to climbers. Sherpas are, in essence, a voiceless majority in many depictions of Everest, and one that Ortner (1997, 2001) has covered at

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length elsewhere. In the context of the confronting nature of the difficult dead, the country with by far the highest number of fatalities in the Himalaya is Nepal, reflecting the ways in which the climbing industry in this part of the world is so reliant on pushing Sherpa communities into incredibly dangerous and deadly work. The bodies left on Everest can be understood as problematizing our relationship with the dead, and the decisions that climbers make in a split-­ second whilst under immense physical and emotional pressure. This operates in tandem with the extant binary between those who take risks in climbing, and those of us who experience mountains vicariously through media: the latter can only understand the former at a stage removed and, as such, this engagement with the dead is perhaps less evocative. As Michelle Paver (2016, 107) writes ‘being on a mountain forces us to confront the vast, unsentient reality that’s always present behind our own busy little human world, which we tuck around ourselves like a counterpane, to keep out the cold. No wonder that when we trespass into the mountains, we create phantoms.’ The difficult dead on the mountain are there, both in situ and through representation, to continue to provoke and trouble us.

References Arnette, Alan. 2021. How Much Does It Cost to Climb Everest. https://www. climbing.com/news/how-­much-­does-­it-­cost-­to-­climb-­everest-­2021-­edition. Accessed 13 Oct 2021. Boukreev, Anatoli, and G.  Weston DeWalt. 1997. The Climb. London: St Martins Press. British Expedition Company. 2022. Everest Base Camp. https://www.britishexpeditionco.co.uk/everest-­base-­camp. Accessed 11 Nov 2021. Cater, Carl. 2006. Playing with Risk? Participant Perceptions of Risk and Management Implications in Adventure Tourism. Tourism Management 27 (2): 317–325. Davidson, Lee. 2012. The Calculable and the Incalculable: Narratives of Safety and Danger in the Mountains. Leisure Sciences 34 (4): 298–313. ———. 2015. The Narrative Construction of Self Through a Commitment to Mountaineering. In Mountaineering Tourism, ed. Ghazili Musa, James Higham, and Anna Thompson-Carr, 147–163. London: Routledge. Dimuro, G. 2018. The Finals Hours of Francys Arsentiev  – Mount Everest’s “Sleeping Beauty”. https://allthatsinteresting.com/francys-­arsentiev. Accessed 12 Nov 2021.

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Gammelgaard, Lene. 1999. Climbing High: A Woman’s Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy. London: Harper. Hicks, Jonathan. 2018. Exploring the Relationship Between Awe and Leisure: A Conceptual Argument. Journal of Leisure Research 49 (3–5): 258–276. Hindustan Times. 2021. Nepal Issues Record Number of Permits for Everest Expeditions Despite Covid-19. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-­ news/nepal-­issues-­record-­number-­of-­permits-­for-­everest-­expeditions-­despite-­ covid19-­101619335966208.html. Accessed 12 Oct 2021. Holland-Smith, David, and Steve Olivier. 2013. ‘You don’t understand us!’ An Inside Perspective on Adventure Climbing. Sport in Society 16 (9): 1091–1104. Jones, Torquil, director. 2021. 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, Netflix. Kormákur, Baltasar, director. 2015. Everest. Universal Pictures, DVD. Krakauer, John. 2011. Into Thin Air. London: Pan. Lepp, Andrew, and Heather Gibson. 2008. Sensation Seeking and Tourism: Tourist Role, Perception of Risk and Destination Choice. Tourism Management 29 (4): 740–750. Leste, James T. 1983. Wrestling with the Self on Mount Everest. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 23 (2): 31–41. Macdonald, Sharon. 2010. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Routledge. MacGillvray, Greg, and David Breashears, directors. 1998. Storm over Everest. PBS. Miller, Maggie C., and Heather Mair. 2020. Between Space and Place in Mountaineering: Navigating Risk, Death, and Power. Tourism Geographies 22 (2): 354–369. Mu, Yang, and Sanjay Nepal. 2016. High Mountain Adventure Tourism: Trekkers’ Perceptions of Risk and Death in Mt. Everest Region, Nepal. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research 21 (5): 500–511. Nepal, Sanjay, Mu Yang, and Po-Hsin Lai. 2020. The Beyul: Sherpa Perspectives on Landscapes Characteristics and Tourism Development in Khumbu (Everest), Nepal. In Religious Tourism and the Environment, ed. Kiran A.  Shinde and Daniel H. Olsen, 70–82. Wallingford: CABI. Obert, Paul M. 2003. One Last Peak. The Laryngoscope 113 (12): 2112–2115. Ortner, Sherry. 1997. Thick Resistance: Death and the Cultural Construction of Agency in Himalayan Mountaineering. Representations 59: 135–162. ———. 2001. Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Paver, Michelle. 2016. Thin Air. London: Orion. Penfold-Mounce, Ruth. 2018. Death, the Dead and Popular Culture. Emerald: Bingley. Pomfret, Gill. 2011. Package Mountaineer Tourists Holidaying in the French Alps: An Evaluation of Key Influences Encouraging Their Participation. Tourism Management 32 (3): 501–510.

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Robins, Daniel, and Rosie Smith. 2021. Hidden Labour in Funeral Directing: Providing Care to ‘difficult’ Dead Bodies. Mortality 26 (1): 100–111. Spokes, Matthew. 2020. Gaming and the Virtual Sublime. Emerald: Bingley. Spokes, Matthew, Jack Denham, and Benedikt Lehmann. 2018. Death, Memorialization and Deviant Spaces. Emerald: Bingley. Terill, Christopher, director. 2021. The Last Mountain. BBC. Windsor, Jeremy, Paul Firth, Mike Grocott, George Rodway, and Hugh Montgomery. 2009. Mountain Mortality: A Review of Deaths that Occur During Recreational Activities in the Mountains. Postgraduate medical journal 85 (1004): 316–321.

CHAPTER 6

Bodies on the Battlefield: Death and Combat in Band of Brothers Ketlyn Mara Rosa

The theme of death is hauntingly present in the war film genre as a constant reminder of a tangible possibility as well as the fragility of those exposed to violence in combat zones. The difficulty in representing death in war cinema, particularly regarding World War II (WWII) narratives, reveals how problematic it is to balance the emphasis on the overwhelming numbers of casualties during combat with magnified notions of heroism and sacrifice that lead to an understanding of the conflict as a generative, noble cause. The violation of the body on the battlefield and its feared deadly effects can be found, for instance, in the corporeal mutilation of World War I (WWI) trenches in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), the maddening environment of slaughter of the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now (1979) or the sense of complete annihilation of the WWII

This chapter is adapted from the author’s unpublished master’s dissertation. K. M. Rosa (*) Independent Scholar, São José, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_6

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D-Day landings in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Each movie brings a different perspective on the meaning of death and suffering during wartimes, crafting complex ways in which the national imaginary remembers and memorializes combat and loss. In such narratives, brotherhood has often been associated with a key element of survival in the context of war stories, an antidote for the crippling effects of death on the battlefield. The WWII miniseries Band of Brothers (BoB), produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks in 2001, is an example of a visual representation that deals with combat zones where the escalation of violence leads to the portrayal of intense images of embodied violation of the dying and dead, evoking specific symbolisms regarding the meaning of death on the battlefield that challenge the traditional approach of the genre. The depiction of the violent imagery of the hurt and dead body in the miniseries is shown in an unusual way as heroism and sacrifice, national trademarks of the conflict, are questioned and replaced by an atmosphere of dread and uneasiness. The theme of brotherhood, heavily present in war cinema, ultimately loses its appeal of flourishing unity in BoB to become a conduit of trauma in an environment that strips away the regularity of relationships and installs the reliance upon friendship as a burden and a survival mode. Despite the title of the series, the narrative provides a breakdown in the ideal of the fraternal codes of war. The unglamorous side of war and death is portrayed in the miniseries, categorizing the dead and violated bodies as both the perpetrators and receivers of violence. This chapter will focus on the cinematic analysis of selected scenes from the series in order to demonstrate how the injured and dying bodies of the soldiers affect the narrative and their violent portrayals reverberate into traumatic events, disclosing a less idealized representation of the WWII hence imprinting a revisionist view of the honorable and heroic ‘good war’. BoB is a miniseries of ten episodes based on the 1992 homonymous book by Stephen E. Ambrose, who interviewed and collected the memories of WWII veterans, and follows the story of the paratroopers of 101st Airborne, Easy Company, their comradeship and violent battlefield experiences since their assembly in the training camps in Georgia until the end of the war. The miniseries format with multiple episodes allows for a greater establishment of the relationship among the characters and an in-­ depth development of their personalities as death becomes a driving force that unites all episodes. A traumatic death or injury reverberates into following episodes, affecting characters’ personalities and life stories as well as demonstrating how the loss of lives during war is seen less like historical

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numbers and more in terms of the effects of tragedy in people’s memories. The majority of deaths portrayed in the miniseries is connected to male soldiers in line with the focus generally given by combat films that take place on the battlefield. Female characters are particularly absent from such war narratives, and when they are included, their roles as civilians and nurses are intrinsically attached to male characters which leads to a representation of female death pending toward an emotional component within their male counterparts’ narrative arcs. This is the case in BoB when in episode 6 entitled ‘Bastogne’ a female nurse (Rebecca Okot), listed in the credits as ‘Anna The Nurse’, is part of the narrative but solely interacts with Doc Roe (Shane Taylor) who visits the improvised hospital where she works. Her death during a bombardment is not graphically shown, only suggested and memorialized by Roe’s sorrowful reaction. Her violated body is kept off-screen in order to magnify the repercussion on the male character who then carries the burden of loss in the narrative. The editing of documentary footage from interviews of the veterans and dramatizations of war events enables BoB to place side by side the veterans’ real footage and their fictionalized younger versions. This juxtaposition expresses the ways in which BoB attempts to reconstruct the complex idea of war combat by offering a reflection on the diversity of formats and versions that can be used to represent history in film. The traditional chronological reenactment of the war events is juxtaposed with the documentary-­style intervention of the soldiers, creating a bridge between the past and the present and enhancing the notion that historical events from long ago have palpable and embodied effects on contemporary times. The veterans’ footage filled with heartfelt testimonies creates a personalized entry to the emotional world of those being portrayed on the screen and increases the chances of creating a bond of sympathy with the viewer who is constantly bombarded with combat situations that endanger the lives of the soldiers. Death is a lingering possibility and the sophisticated and intricate ways in which the relationships among the characters are refined by the violent events in the ten episodes, particularly in terms of crafting an atmosphere of doomed brotherhood, become essential to the expression of the injured and dead body as less heroic and more disillusioned. The miniseries emphasizes the display of graphic violation as soldiers are shown with their exposed wounds or missing limbs in close-­ ups that linger for a disquieting number of seconds. The camera hardly looks away from chaos; on the contrary, it pans and travels in the direction of the injured and dying soldier while also capturing the reactions of those

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around him. Violence is a reminder of loss, a stalemate in the pathway of life, a physical and psychological trauma hidden under the banner of decades of heroic remembrance.

Looking at Death on the Cinematic Battlefield The representation of death in cinema remains a pertinent point of discussion regarding the possibility of integrating elements of visual style and narrative arcs to obtain a depiction of violence that manifests a commitment to consequences instead of banality. For Asbjørn Grønstad, ‘the act of violence in the cinema is an event that […] pierces the viewer. In the sense that violence often punctures, or punctuates, the image […], it also seems to pierce the process of narration itself, marking it off as a special instance of signification’ (2008, 13). When violence is structured in the narrative as relevant meaning-making moments and depicted in its graphic form through stylistic choices, a ‘narrathanatographical film form’ (ibid., 83) is achieved. In this notion, ‘the styles of violence give the process of dying a spatial and temporal form; the narration of violence confers a sense of causality upon death in the figuration of moral meaning’ (ibid., 83). The combination of style and narrative leads to the depiction of the act of dying or being gravely injured as an event that carries a potential tool of navigation of the unfathomable event of death. The representation of violent deaths in films becomes a search to uncover a subterranean process, a disclosure of the inward and embodied process of non-existence that is depicted through corporeal violation and psychological reverberation. This mechanism that relies on cinematic style offers the possibility of integrating meaning to the act of dying, a continuum of death’s essence in the narrative by relying on consequences rather than triviality. Vivian Sobchack observes that ‘the moment of death can be prolonged cinematically (through editing, slow motion, extreme close-ups, etc.) so that we are made to see form and order where none seems to exist in real life’ (2000, 118). The very nature of the fictional narrative allows the realities of death to be expanded, where there are innumerous possibilities of detailed portrayals and outcomes. Sobchack highlights the process of arrangement of events and feelings concerning death in film by pointing out that ‘the movement of the human body toward nonbeing is underlined, emphasized, dramatized’ (ibid., 118). This foregrounds the idea that the visual portrayal of death is highly reliable on the notions of being and nonbeing, of visible movement and inertia. The inanimate body, deprived of its

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possibility of active interaction in society, now establishes contact in a different manner by producing meaning after loss, impacting with absence, and signifying a heroic or grotesque casualty in a post-death discussion of nationhood. The war film provides a platform for this kind of debate since the transient state of being and nonbeing is vital in its narratives that overflow with combat and the menace of death while the national imaginary regarding a particular conflict is shaped by notions of appreciation and disregard attached to the dead and injured. The portrayal of death and injury in the context of the battlefield has been vastly represented in film, opening spaces for debates concerning how wars are remembered and the role of the body in shaping historical outcomes in the national imaginary. Regarding the depiction of the battlefield and the soldierly body in the WWII, the immersion into the combat zones becomes a critical element of visualization. Debra Ramsay points out that ‘war plays a major role in the ongoing development of the American national identity, and media in turn plays a major role in shaping mnemonic structures of war’ (2015, 1). Earlier films demonstrate how the memory of the conflict has been generally crafted around ‘an ideological narrative that identifies World War II as America’s “good war”’ (ibid., 10). The Longest Day, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck in 1962, depicts combat as painless and bloodless, placing the dead and injured body into an abstract space of embodied denial. Produced during the constraints of violent images dictated by the Hollywood Production Code, the film resorts to what Stephen Prince calls the ‘clutch-and-fall’ technique in which ‘[…] rather than responding with pain or distress, […] the clutch-­ and-­fall victim falls into a trance, or seems to fall asleep, and then sinks gracefully and slowly out of frame’ (2003, 153). These sanitized representations of death and violation on the battlefield create a void of emotional and narrative engagement with the violent act while lacking consequences. The grandeur of the scale of American military power, the bloodless acts of heroism, and the star-studded cast contribute to the strengthening of the image of the WWII as a national accomplishment and a source of pride. Among the contemporary portrayals of the conflict, the element of graphic violence has become a distinguishable trait concerning the depiction of corporeal violation and death on the battlefield. The presence of what Prince calls ‘ultraviolence’ relies on the fact that visual techniques are employed to show injuries in the most explicit and detailed way (2000, 1). Ultraviolence is a phenomenon associated with the blood-soaked images

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of the early years after the censorship dissolution of the Code in the late 1960s. Films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969) are examples of this type of aesthetic where there is an emphasis on the idea […] that the human body is made of real flesh and blood; that arterial blood spurts, rather than drips demurely; that bullet wounds leave not trim little pinpricks but big, gaping holes; and in general, that violence has painful, unpretty, humanly destructive consequences. (Cook 1999, 677)

The ultraviolent representation of Second World War battlefields reaches its climax with Saving Private Ryan and the carnage of the D-Day landing sequence. A nightmarish catalogue of mutilations establishes the war zone as a territory of extreme corporeal violation where the probability of fatality is almost certain. According to Robert Burgoyne, the film departs from the traditional troupes of the war genre by introducing the Holocaust memory into the narrative and developing the ‘psychology of cowardice’ that steers away from patterns of heroism (2008, 50). Still, Saving Private Ryan presents a narrative structure that circles around the issue of mourning, as the opening and closing scenes in the graveyard foreground the memorialization of the conflict by presenting death as a symbol of regeneration, an act in the service of a noble cause. BoB, in its turn, carries the legacy of the war genre film in several aspects, particularly in terms of the more contemporary wave of movies, including the emphasis on graphic imagery of injury and death in connection to what Samuel Hynes calls ‘Battlefield Gothic’ (2001, 26). Hynes observes that this term is related to a war zone environment where the grotesque sights are plentiful and an eerie atmosphere takes over the senses. In the depiction of the dead and dying, it is not only the display of the embodied effects of violence that causes an estrangement concerning the in-between state of living and non-living but the reaction to these occurrences. As Hynes points out, it is ‘not the sight, but the horror’ (ibid., 68) that these moments provoke in the witnesses that constitute a Battlefield Gothic atmosphere. In BoB, the relevance of the soldiers’ traumatic reaction to corporeal violation greatly affects the relationships that are developed in the episodes, assigning an unusual role to the ties of brotherhood: the greater the bond among the soldiers, the more severe the disillusionment when facing death which leads to the breaking down of a safe space of communion and the obliteration of a zone of respite that would be provided by traditional war fraternity.

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The reactions to death and corporeal injury are firstly exemplified in the opening credits sequence that provides a combination of elements inherited from the war genre photography and film. The majestic song is nostalgic and mournful with a choir of voices that form a gateway to the images from a time that seems familiar, a summoning of a past war that is engraved in American historical memory as less ambiguous and suffused with a sacrificial and heroic nature. The montage of soldiers’ images is tinted sepia and gunmetal gray and includes superimposed stills, stills in sets and active film, all touched by the effects of time as tears, scratches and folds enhance their origin from the past. Although initially the traditional style of representing war may evoke the sentiment of nostalgia and memorialization, a closer look at the nature of the images selected for the opening discloses a Battlefield Gothic tone to the portrayal of war. Many of the close-ups of the main characters, when analyzed in relation to the narrative flow, are related to instances in the episodes when they are faced with enormous psychological strain due to directly witnessing scenes of death and corporeal violation suffered by others. This includes watching moments such as soldiers losing their limbs during a barrage, a group of German soldiers being ruthlessly shot down, a massive number of prisoners suffering starvation at a death camp, and one of the last scenes in the credits, looking at their fellow soldiers as the majority is about to face certain death by jumping on D-Day. Death hovers the opening credits and ‘unseen but always there’ (Hynes 2001, 70) essence suffuses the early moments of the episodes with a new interpretation of familiar pictures of the past, one that is bound to focus on the hidden horrors and the memories of the grotesque instead of the heroic outcomes. The juxtaposition of traditional traits of heroism and sacrifice present in the war film genre with the subsequent challenging of the cultural legacy of WWII is observed throughout the narrative of the miniseries. This duality is considered by Sarah Cole as her notions of enchanted and disenchanted violence speak of polarizing modes of understanding violation in society. Cole argues that ‘there is magic in death. But there is also emptiness and finality in death’ as violent moments can either be ‘fuel for generativity or the emblem of grotesque loss’ (2012, 39). The concept of enchanted violence relies on the ability ‘to provide beauty and imaginative release where there is brutality and suffering. Healing, enriching, creating memorable visual forms to capture terrible realities’ (ibid., 40). In this sense, there is a characteristic of regeneration in the act of death which will lead to a transformation, a renewal of some kind that avoids the look at the

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injured body in its visceral form. A polar opposite of this notion is the disenchanted violence that presents ‘the active stripping away of idealizing principles, an insistence that the violated body is not a magic site for the production of culture’ (ibid., 42). This type of violence relies on the disclosure of the physicality of the hurt body and leads to the conclusion that death has no transformative power, no silver lining of heroism to be built for generations to remember. BoB then taps into instances of enchantment of battlefield action that are typical of war films, only to disclose conclusive remarks of disenchanted violence. The following section will explore two major sequences in the miniseries that exemplify the challenging of the traditional portrayal of heroics in war.

Scars of War: The Reverberation of Death and Injury It is in the scenes of corporeal violation and death of the American soldiers in BoB that the notions of brotherhood and ‘good war’ are confronted with the grim display of embodied consequences of violence. Hynes observes that ‘in modern war most dying is grotesque’ (2001, 272) and highlights the undignified horror found on the battlefields. This kind of disenchanted horror that leaves little space for the creation of a national narrative of redemption or growth functions as a way to reevaluate the cultural legacy of war represented in films. By looking at the representation of the values of WWII in BoB, the violence enacted in the name of a good cause is not always seen as such as the narrative challenges the consequences of these actions. The miniseries acknowledges the heritage of remembrance and memorialization of the war by placing the veterans in a position of storytellers, but the disillusionment of the experience of combat speaks louder and causes a greater impression of loss. In Ambrose’s book, the real-life Major Richard Winters comments on the bonding experience during the traumatic moments of the war, ‘I’m not sure that anybody who lived through that one hasn’t carried with him, in some hidden ways, the scars. Perhaps that is the factor that helps keep Easy men bonded so unusually close together’ (2001, 221). Winters places pain as the connecting factor of comraderie, not a sense of duty to nation or collective sacrifice, but the trauma of experience. The process of witnessing death or injury is portrayed in the miniseries as a pivotal factor of

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disenchantment in a mechanism that transforms the characterization of brotherhood into traumatic triggers, a bonding forged on agonizing terms. In order to understand the narrative form of the miniseries, it is significant to notice the arrangement of the violent sequences in the general scheme of narration in BoB. Each violent instance is preceded and succeeded by other scenes that help emphasize the sense of loss and disruption caused by the violation, almost as an attempt to provide a more comprehensive format and sense of order for the processes involving the theme of death. Seymour Chatman explains the notion of connective logic of events in his approach of narrative hierarchy by introducing the concept of ‘kernels’ as major events in the narrative that advance ‘the plot by raising and satisfying questions [and] give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events’ (1980, 53). The minor plot events in the narrative are called ‘satellites’ and function as a complement to the kernels in terms of expanding meanings or, as Chatman calls, ‘the flesh of the skeleton’ (ibid., 54). The placement of kernels and satellites in the narrative helps in the comprehension of the symbolism of death and injury in the scenes of violation of BoB. The satellite events that are portrayed prior to the main images of violence are related to the building of friendships and characters that bond in seemingly unimportant ways but that will later enhance the feeling of loss and destruction caused by the violent circumstance. The same thing happens to the sequences that take place after the violent event. The disillusionment and pain shown in satellite scenes are the proof of the damage caused by brutal experiences shown in major kernel scenes. One of the most poignant scenes in the miniseries is portrayed in episode six entitled ‘Bastogne’ and demonstrates how the brotherly connection fostered during the previous episodes does not encourage a positive regenerative outcome when the act of violence is depicted in its disenchanting and grotesque form. The two main characters featured in the pivotal graphic sequence are Private Edward ‘Babe’ Heffron (Robin Laing) and Private John Julian (Marc Jordan). A few satellite scenes build the relationship between Babe and Julian. In the beginning of the episode, Babe and Julian are depicted sharing a foxhole under attack and Julian’s inexperience is highlighted by his startled attitude. Julian also privately mentions his virginity, highlighting his youth and placing his body as an untouched and immaculate artifact in an atmosphere of enchantment and innocence. These satellite moments help solidify the environment of brotherhood as well as foreground the traditional issue of the vulnerability and loss of young lives in wartime.

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The kernel scene starts with a reconnaissance patrol taking place deep in the forest with only the silhouettes of the soldiers that are discernible among the trees. The inexperienced Julian leaves his cover behind a pile of logs and walks into an exposed area. He gets hit in the neck and falls, lying vulnerable on the ground. In one of the most explicitly graphic images of the miniseries, a close-up of Julian’s face and neck displays the grave damage done to his body. Blood pours out of his mouth and also abundantly from the hole in his neck. His expression of suffering is by no means suppressed or glanced over, but highlighted in this sequence in order to focus on how the process of getting shot in a vital body part brings disturbing consequences to the victim and those around him. Julian’s damaged body hints at the corporeal fragility during wartime as the snow close to his head gets soaked in blood and he suffers on the ground. The theme of doomed brotherhood has its first evidence as Babe despairs after his inability to reach out and rescue Julian. A series of shot-­ reverse shots of Babe desperately yelling and Julian agonizing on the ground build up the tension to his rescue. Babe attempts to communicate a reassurance of rescue and his voice, more similar to a heartfelt lament, indicates the opposite of his words. The heroic rescue so traditionally found in war narratives is subtly contradicted by Babe’s farewell tone. The soldiers retreat without providing medical attention or rescuing Julian’s body. Later in the episode a satellite scene depicts the reverberation of Julian’s death on Babe who displays clear signs of sorrow in his behavior. When sitting in a foxhole with other soldiers, Babe’s post-traumatic state is enhanced by his denial of the idea mentioned by fellow soldiers that things will be fine. The attempt to soothe the pain, to find a hopeful prospect in the helplessness of the situation is abruptly cut by Babe’s refusal to find comfort. His attitude goes against ‘the general premise of war enchantment: that in the peculiar conditions of war, violent death is transformed into something positive, communal, perhaps even sacred’ (Cole 2012, 44). The graphic representation of Julian’s death enhances the sense of estrangement with corporeal violation and his fraternal bond with Babe leads to a feeling of burden which breaks away from the war’s cultural legacy of brotherhood as a foundational part of overcoming trauma. Hynes comments that in ordinary life, the dead are given ‘a decent burial, the formalities of grief, a monument’ but that war brings about an opposite scenario where ‘the dead were left where they fell […] unburied and unknown’ (2001, 69). Julian’s death evokes a somber ambiance of Battlefield Gothic as it relies on the fact that his hurt and dying body is left

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to its own devices, with no possibility of future embodied memorialization hence departing from the traditional portrayal of the deceased soldierly body and the processes of remembrance. The denial of death as a generative event is also perceived in a sequence of episode eight entitled ‘The Last Patrol’. The narrative of the episode centers around the task of capturing German prisoners and one of its main characters, Private Eugene Jackson (Andrew-Lee Potts), is introduced through the voice over of a more experienced soldier, Private David Webster (Eion Bailey), whose narration will impact the meaning of the violent events. Jackson’s physical appearance is a clear sign of his young age, but unlike Julian who signifies the values of youth, Jackson’s worn-­ out attitude demonstrates the corporeal and psychological toll of war, distancing itself from any composed and valiant portrayal of soldierly life in combat. A satellite scene depicts Jackson preparing to go on patrol and, as in a foreshadowing, he handles a hand grenade, the exact explosive that will later take his life. Death is an ominous presence not only through violent acts but the implicit presence of danger in the weapons that serve a dual purpose: protection and aggression. Jackson’s injury scene is portrayed in a disenchanted mode, as an error in tactics when the American soldiers enter a building to retrieve German prisoners. Jackson’s incident happens as he throws a hand grenade inside the building, immediately rushes in and is hit by the blast. Soon the shaky camera unveils his bloodied face. A head wound according to Prince ‘entails a serious violation of the victim’s dignity and integrity of self, especially when that violence carries the stigmata of visible wounding’ (2003, 157). Jackson’s wound highlights the undignified corporeal violation caused by his own explosive in an intermeshing of what Cole explains as the two fundamental characteristics of violence: ‘an agent of attack, precipitating the injury or violation; and a person or object on the receiving end of that attack, whose bodily surface is in some way overcome, hurt, trespassed or ruptured’ (2012, 20). He is the immediate originator and receiver of violence, in a process of disenchantment of combat that will only be magnified as his death is closely represented. The kernel scene starts when the soldiers carry Jackson to a basement to provide medical attention. The first image of Jackson’s wound shows the left side of his face badly damaged, and his left eye completely closed and covered by a viscous layer, turning his countenance into someone almost unrecognizable. Jackson’s agony can be perceived through his gagging sounds as well as his repetitive cries saying he does not wish to die.

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His last seconds of life are portrayed as an agonizing ending while he asphyxiates and contorts his body, the vitality and motion of his face slowly fading into a lifeless appearance. There is the possibility of a certain enchantment regarding the communal nature of the soldiers standing together in the moment of difficulty. Hannah Arendt observes that when soldiers are on the battlefield, death is ‘faced collectively and in action, [and] changes its countenance; now nothing seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity [since] our own death is accompanied by the potential immortality of the group we belong to’ (1970, 68). The feeling of belonging to a group and sacrificing one’s life for it or aiding in the accomplishment of the task for the greater good seems to soothe the lonely and harsh prospect of death at war. However, the reaction shots of the soldiers around Jackson who witness his rapid passing in such a traumatic manner, indicate otherwise. The Battlefield Gothic atmosphere relies on the depiction of the horror of watching the corporeal violation and death, accentuating the weight of brotherhood as an overwhelming factor in the overcoming of the trauma of violence. Webster’s subsequent comments solidify the disenchanted view of death as he says that Jackson’s family probably received a letter saying he died as a hero when he actually passed away in agony in a basement. Webster’s disheartened words juxtapose the traditional structure of a worthy death in the line of duty so commonly associated to a deceased soldier’s legacy with the grotesque version of death in its intimate details on the battlefield, the ‘hurt locker’ version that is rarely acknowledged. The identity of the soldier and his relationship with fraternal ties, in this case exposed in both corporeal and ideological ways, diverge from conventional WWII narratives and challenge the cultural legacy of the memory of death in combat by also addressing the remembrance of the injured body. BoB offers the representation of death on WWII battlefields through the distinct and piercing lens of disillusionment, providing a perception of suffering that presents the idea of brotherhood in a different way. The bond of war, a trope usually associated with constructive fraternity, is redesigned as a burdensome component, calling attention to alternative ways of representing the already established facet of heroism during the conflict. The cultural heritage of the WWII in BoB strongly relies on the imagery of the injured and dying body in the sense that death does not signify a transformation or regeneration but a full stop. The togetherness found in being a ‘band of brothers’ provides no relief for the harsh conditions of war and the individual moments of horror. Catherine Russell observes that

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the event of death might be at times considered ‘unrepresentable, unknowable, and invisible’ (1995, 18) due to its ephemeral nature. BoB fleshes out the hurt body with all its visceral details in an attempt to give form to the shapeless passing from the state of being to nonbeing, but most importantly, to reshape the meaning of traumatic loss regarding the established values of the WWII. The difficult death is the disenchanted one that sets itself free from the legacy of heroism to disclose a brutal and unforgiving process to those who suffer it as well as those who stand by. By disenchanting the act of death and focusing on its ultraviolent nature as well as its subsequent trauma, the miniseries breaks ground in assessing the legacy of violence and the role of corporeal violation in the conflict, challenging crystalized national notions of sacrifice and bravery on the WWII battlefield.

References All Quiet on the Western Front. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Universal Pictures, 1930. 2 hr., 7 min. DVD. Ambrose, Stephen E. 2001. Band of Brothers. New York: Simon & Schuster. Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Zoetrope Studios, 1979. 3 hr., 3 min. DVD. Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. Orlando: A Harvest/HBJ Book. Band of Brothers. Prod. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Home Box Office, 2001. 10 hr. DVD. Bonnie and Clyde. Dir. Arthur Penn. Warner Brothers, 1967. 1 hr., 46 min. DVD. Burgoyne, Robert. 2008. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Chatman, Seymour. 1980. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. New York: Cornell University Press. Cole, Sarah. 2012. At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, David A. 1999. Ballistic Balletics: Styles of Violent Representation in The Wild Bunch and After. In Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, ed. Stephen Prince, 130–154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grønstad, Asbjørn. 2008. Trans-figurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hynes, Samuel. 2001. The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Viking. Prince, Stephen. 2000. Screening Violence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2003. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality on Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Ramsay, Debra. 2015. American Media and the Memory of World War II. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Russell, Catherine. 1995. Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Saving Private Ryan. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Dreamworks Pictures, 1998. 2 hr., 49 min. Blu-ray Disc. Sobchack, Vivian. 2000. The Violent Dance: A Personal Memoir of Death in the Movies. In Screening Violence, ed. Stephen Prince, 110–124. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. The Longest Day. Prod. Darryl F. Zanuck. Twentieth Century Fox Film, 1962. 2 hr., 48 min. Blu-ray Disc. The Wild Bunch. Dir. Sam Peckinpah. Warner Brothers, 1969. 2 hr., 25  min. Blu-ray Disc.

CHAPTER 7

Representing Fatal Violence in AMC’s The Walking Dead: The Role of Legitimation, Graphicness and Explicitness Lauren O’Mahony, Melissa Merchant, and Simon Order

The Walking Dead (2010–2022), American Movie Classics’ (AMC) television adaption of comics written by Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore, has a reputation for extreme violence. Set in a modern-day zombie apocalypse in Georgia, United States, the story follows survivors of the collapse of civilisation. Led initially by Sheriff Rick Grimes, they suffer constant threats from flesh-eating zombies (known as ‘walkers’) and other human survivors while living a scavenging, nomadic life. The show often contains extreme violence and horror; although each episode has its own rating and each country has their own rating system, the episodes are generally for audiences aged over 15 years with some episodes restricted to viewers 18 years and over. An Internet Movie Database (IMDb) list (2018) of ‘Most violent TV series’, placed The Walking Dead (TWD) at number

L. O’Mahony (*) • M. Merchant • S. Order Murdoch University, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_7

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three after Game of Thrones and Spartacus, while comparable lists place TWD in the top ten most violent or gruesome television shows (Whatculture 2020; Jeffrey 2018; Martino n.d.). Such lists generally only briefly describe why shows like TWD are classified as violent or gruesome. More detailed and targeted academic research has sought to explain the show’s representation of violence (Linnemann et al. 2014; Garland et al. 2018; Gencarella 2016; Raymen 2018; O’Mahony et al. 2021). However, few studies have examined how the show’s representation of violence may position viewers, especially relating to vulnerable characters such as children. In evidencing how violence is represented in TWD, Riddle and Martins’ 2021 content analysis of screen violence offers some insights. In their analysis, TWD’s episode (Season 7, Episode 16) had the highest number of ‘PATs’, defined as ‘a violent interaction that occurs between a perpetrator (P) and a target (T) using a particular type of aggressive act (A)’ (Riddle and Martins 2021, 8). Riddle and Martins (2021, 8) applied Wilson et al.’s 1997 definition of violence as, ‘Any overt depiction of a credible threat of physical force or the actual use of such force intended to physically harm an animate being or group of beings’. TWD’s Season 7, episode 16 had 74 PATs (13), the highest number in Riddle and Martins’ television episode sample. For Riddle and Martins, a media text is ‘saturated’ with violence if it contains ‘9 or more PATS’ (2021, 13). Therefore, TWD episode they analysed was easily designated as saturated with violence. However, this episode is arguably less violent than many others, particularly compared to episodes where key characters, including child characters, die because of violence. Due to the post-apocalyptic, dog-eat-dog context, the frequency and degree of violence, often ending in death, is relatively consistent across episodes. TWD’s Episode 1 of Season 7, for example, has been described as possibly, ‘the most horrifying graphic and violent hour of television ever filmed’ (Sherlock 2019). In this episode, the main group of survivors is ambushed by a rival group, The Saviours. While all of Rick’s group of survivors, including children, are threatened with torture and death, the episode depicts the murders of two of his long-term group members, Abraham and Glenn. These murders contain high degrees of graphicness and explicitness; we unpack and apply these terms further below. Many viewers, including long-time fans, decried the extreme violence, promising never to watch the show again (Alexander 2016; Davies 2016; Lawler 2016). While the show generally contains extensive and serious violence,

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this chapter’s main focus is on violence leading to the death of child characters. Socially and culturally, the killing of a child is considered one of the most heinous crimes (Schwartz and Isser 2012). While many murders are depicted on screen, infants or children are rarely victims. Yet, TWD contains numerous examples of fatal adult-to-child and child-to-­child violence; however, this type of fatal violence is, as we argue, represented and contextualised within the narrative differently to fatal violence directed at adult characters. Our own viewing of TWD prompted us to ask how violence directed at children is represented and how the show positions viewers to interpret that extreme violence, especially accepting or rejecting such conduct in conjunction with the narrative context. At times, the narrative works carefully to justify and legitimise an aggressor’s conduct, thereby minimising the likelihood of audience rejection of the narrative and/or backlash against the show. We draw upon key analytical tools from Revilla et  al. (2021) and Riddle and Martins (2021) to explore the context of fatal violence, punishment for violent acts, consequences, seriousness, graphicness and explicitness as well as justification and legitimation, particularly relating to child characters. How audience members are positioned in relation to violence may impact their views or understanding of violence or even how they may model certain behaviours (Revilla et al. 2021; Riddle and Martins 2021). Overall, we argue that violence leading to the death of child characters on TWD tends to have low levels of graphicness and explicitness and is often combined with careful narrative justification or legitimation to explain the reasons for that death.

Television Violence, Audience Interpretation and Media Effects Many studies have investigated media violence, especially screen violence, using various approaches and methodologies. A primary concern relates to whether screen media is becoming more violent and, if it is, to what degree (Revilla et  al. 2021). Moreover, there is concern about the relationship between screen violence and vulnerable audiences, especially children, if exposure negatively impacts viewers. As Revilla et al. have argued, the link between screen violence and undesirable behaviour has been difficult to study and prove (2021, 5). Revilla et al. assert that ‘factors that determine behaviour may be more related to the type of violence broadcast, the way

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it is presented or contextualized, the identity of the subjects implicated, and the processes that construct violence as legitimate or illegitimate’ (Revilla et al. 2021, 5). How screen violence is represented is important to the wider discussion of likely and/or possible media effects. Therefore, an analytical approach focusing on ‘how’ such representations are constructed enables exploration of how audiences may be positioned by screen violence. Revilla et al. (2021) and Riddle and Martins (2021) offer specific analytical tools for studying screen violence; these tools are useful for analysing violence, especially fatal violence, on shows including TWD. We argue that representations of fatal violence contribute to the positioning of audience members, including their ultimate acceptance of the narrative and continued favourable view of the show. Revilla et al.’s (2021) quantitative content analysis of various genres on Spanish television focussed on four key variables and the interaction between them: the type of programme (format and genre), the type of ‘harm to the victim’, ‘consequences for the aggressor’ and ‘legitimation’ (12). They found that programme genre, type and narrative ‘configure how violence is constructed and presented to the audience’ (21). Physical harms dominated their sample; however, television had a higher percentage of ‘social harms’ than physical harms (14–15). The consequences of violence were counted in terms of positive, negative, mixed or no evident consequences. Notably, in action and suspense films, ‘the violence carried out by the “hero” is habitually narrated as justifiable and as having positive consequences’ (22). For the fourth variable, the legitimation of violent acts, the content analysis showed 41.9% as illegitimate, 36% as legitimate and 22.1% as ‘ambiguous or mixed’ (Revilla et al. 2021, 16). Within their study, Revilla et al. noted that physical violence comprised a ‘very diverse range of behaviours’, and ‘is situated closer to illegitimate violence than legitimate’ (18). They found that legitimate violence was more common in fictional texts. When linked to consequences, ‘violence with positive consequences for the aggressor is located closer to physical violence and films, while violence without any consequences is more closely associated with TV series/soaps and social violence’ (19). Traditionally, as Revilla et  al. (2021) point out, ‘justification’ is one concept applied to discuss violence in screen media (see also Potter and Tomasello 2003; Anderson et  al. 2003; Huesmann et  al. 2003). Justification and the reasoning behind certain actions have deep roots in philosophy. In ideal situations, an action or decision is justifiable if supported by ‘good reasons’. Justification is often associated with knowledge,

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whereby certain knowledge or information supports a belief or an action (see Losee 2014). However, just because an action or decision is justifiable, it does not automatically deem it ‘right’; sometimes faulty knowledge or incorrect information may prompt action. Likewise, as Revilla et al. point out, the justification for certain actions depends on a person’s perspective, ‘what might be acceptable for the aggressor might not be so for the victim, audiences and society in general’ (Revilla et al. 2021, 6). As such, Revilla et al. (2021) argue that ‘legitimation’ is a more useful way to explore screen violence than justification. ‘Legitimation’, they suggest, includes identifying violent acts as legitimate or illegitimate while considering the ‘narrative cues’, including genre, that signal whether violence can be considered legitimate. Like Revilla et al., we are interested in analysing ‘aspects of TV violence that could contribute to its acceptance or understanding’ (21). Below we focus on extreme violence leading to death, especially of child characters, in TWD in terms of legitimation and the consequences for the aggressor. We combine these analytical tools with those of a similar study by Riddle and Martins (2021). Riddle and Martins (2021) concentrated on the prevalence of violence on North American primetime television (2016–2017). Their research was prompted by wider social concerns that television was becoming more violent. Thus, they focussed on the ‘overall prevalence of violence’, ‘consequences; ‘seriousness’ and ‘graphicness and explicitness’ (Riddle and Martins 2021, 3–6). Consequences relate to the context ‘in which primetime violence is presented’ (Riddle and Martins 2021, 4) and whether violence is rewarded or punished. They considered the seriousness of violence, realism, the impact on victims, whether humour was used, and the weapons used for violence acts. In terms of realism, Riddle and Martins argue, ‘Media violence portrayed in a realistic context has resulted in higher levels of aggressive feelings and arousal when compared to unrealistic violence’ (Riddle and Martins 2021, 4–5 citing Barlett and Rodeheffer 2009). Moreover, audience members may more readily identify with realistic characters than unrealistic characters (Riddle and Martins 2021). Realism also relates to the impacts on victims including ‘pain and harm’. A significant aspect of their analysis involved the degree of graphic and explicit depictions of violence. Graphicness ‘typically refers to the amount of blood and gore present in a violent act’, while explicitness ‘refers to whether or not the violence is shown via close-up shots’ (Riddle and Martins 2021, 6). As Riddle and Martins explain, explicit and graphic depictions are ‘more likely than nongraphic, nonexplicit violence to draw

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viewer attention, trigger aggressive cognitions and increase arousal and negative emotional responses’ (Riddle and Martins 2021 6). To discuss extreme violence leading to death in TWD, especially of child characters, we apply key analytical tools from Riddle and Martins (2021): the context, consequences, seriousness and how ‘graphic and explicit’ those depictions are. These tools assist in considering how extreme violence directed at children in TWD may position audience members, especially why audience members may respond variably to different types of fatal violence.

The Walking Dead at Its Most Violent The first scene of Episode One, Season One sets up audience expectations about the context and treatment of characters, including the zombie foe. Rick encounters an abandoned child wandering the streets but quickly discovers she is a type of monster that poses a danger to him. Fearful, he shoots her in the forehead. This scene establishes the show’s genre as horror, impressing to audience members that this narrative world is dangerous; survival is at stake and monsters lurk everywhere. Such monsters, even in the form of a child, are dangerous; audience members are positioned to understand, if not accept, that these monsters need to be killed. Such violence is positioned as legitimate as it responds to a threat to the living. Moreover, the liminal status of zombies or ‘walkers’, hovering between life and death, means that killing them may be interpreted by some as benevolent or merciful. As Revilla et al. explain, ‘the normative system (law, ethics, and morals) of the social context is what acts to validate (legitimize) or reject (delegitimize) the object of legitimation. To put it simply, legitimizing violence means presenting it as an acceptable, normal, mundane, understandable, or even positive form of behaviour’ (2021, 7). As horror television, this scene positions viewers to expect that no character is safe from death. Characters may die as part of the story, however, how their death is depicted results from a series of creative and production decisions. Those decisions invariably influence how audience members are positioned. TWD’s Season 7 Episode 1 received a high level of critical opprobrium including accusations of ‘psychic evisceration’ (Jeffries 2016) and ‘torture porn’ (Peters 2017). Audience members voiced their reactions on social media platforms such as Twitter: ‘I’ve been a fan of @WalkingDead_AMC since the beginning but tonight’s episode was TOO violent, TOO gratuitous, TOO punishing. I’m out’ (cited in Alexander 2016) and ‘Good bye

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forever @WalkingDead_AMC.  That was disgusting. #TheWalkingDead didn’t just jump the shark it pulped it’ (cited in Lawler 2016). Audience responses were seemingly reflected in Nielsen ratings data; Season 7 Episode 1, in the 18–49 age group, had an 8.36 rating (17.029 million viewers), falling in Episode 2 to a 6.09 rating (12.455 million viewers) then hovering between a 4.71 and 5.72 rating (10.163 to 11.996 million viewers) for the remainder of the season (TV Series Finale 2017). The seemingly high levels of criticism and audience rejection appear invariably linked to the violent deaths of two main characters. Season 6, Episode 16, ‘The Last Day on Earth’ left audiences with a cliff hanger that was not neatly resolved in Season 7, Episode 1. Travelling in a vehicle convoy, Rick’s group is trapped, and all are forced onto their knees on the road by Negan’s ‘Saviours’; this is when Negan (arch villain of Seasons 7 and 8) is first introduced. Negan menacingly carries a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, telling the survivors he is going to ‘beat the holy hell outta one of you’, but that he ‘simply cannot decide’ who it will be. The episode’s final shot is from his victim’s viewpoint and seemingly their eyes looking at Negan swinging the bat down on their head. Because the shot is through the victim’s eyes, viewers are unclear on the identity of Negan’s target until Season 7, Episode 1. This episode reveals Negan bringing his bat down on the head of Abraham, one of Rick’s loyal group members. Negan kills Abraham with repeated blows of the bat; the audience is shown these blows and they are accompanied by the sound of the bat impacting flesh as the camera cuts between different characters’ reactions. The camera then shows Abraham’s body. As Negan continues hitting him, little is left of his head. Negan then swings the bat in a wide circle, covering Rick with blood. Daryl, another survivor, jumps up and punches Negan before being restrained. In retaliation, Negan strikes another character, Glenn, on top of his head, shown via a wide shot. Glenn raises himself from the ground, covered in blood, one eye bulging and trying to speak. Negan mocks him, telling him, ‘I just popped your skull so hard, your eyeball just popped out’ and then continues hitting Glenn. The camera again shows other characters’ reactions with the sound of Negan beating Glenn in the background. Throughout the scene, Negan justifies his actions: in essence, more people will die unless they submit to him and agree to share their supplies and weapons. Several elements of these two episodes may have led to audience members decrying the violence and, for some, refusing to watch the show from thereon. Firstly, Negan’s use of violence, even within a horror television

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show, is serious: two long-standing characters die as a result. Negan’s actions are not presented to the audience as legitimate but rather menacing, torturous, and excessive. However, while Negan’s actions are not presented as legitimate within the narrative, they appear to provide legitimation for Rick and his group to embark on a sustained period of retribution against Negan. Secondly, there are extreme levels of graphic and explicit violence in the scenes where Abraham and Glenn die. These scenes contain excessive blood and gore; they are explicit in the high number of close-up shots showing the bat making contact with the bodies of Abraham and Glenn and the use of close-up shots of Negan brandishing the weapon. Although screen Foley was not mentioned in the Revilla et al. or Riddle and Martins studies, we note that the inescapable sound of the bat impacting flesh increases the graphicness of these scenes. Moreover, Negan’s use of humour and attempts to mock his victims as they die is likely another element distasteful to many viewers, heightening the sense of fear, trepidation and discomfort during these scenes. Rick’s group are also vulnerable: they are outnumbered and unable to defend themselves. Initially Negan faces no negative consequences; rather, he benefits from these actions until many episodes later. Essentially, the visual and audio elements of these episodes appear to have positioned many viewers to reject the violence and view Negan’s actions as illegitimate and unjustifiable. This is a stark example of extreme violence leading to death in TWD that clearly positions viewers to be uncomfortable to the point that they decide to discontinue or delay watching the show. We now turn to other examples of fatal violence on the show, this time leading to the death of children. However, as we argue, the levels of graphicness and explicitness, as well as the extent to which the violence is justified and legitimised within the narrative, are noticeably different when it concerns the intentional death of child characters.

The Unnatural Deaths of Children in The Walking Dead: Careful Justification and Legitimation This section analyses key examples of child characters dying as the result of violence on TWD. Like the show’s ‘most violent episode’, we consider how violence leading to the deaths of children (specifically established child characters, Sophia Peletier, Lizzie and Mika Samuels and Carl Grimes) is legitimised within the narrative, including the reasons for the

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actions leading to death. We consider the representation of such deaths in terms of graphicness and explicitness and the consequences for the perpetrator. We argue that in some cases where children die unnaturally on TWD, the narrative attempts to position the violence as necessary for the context. Moreover, we argue that the violence is depicted using minimal graphicness and explicitness. By representing the death of child characters in this way, the show provides careful justification and legitimation that likely positions viewers to contemplate the complex issues behind the death, and ultimately accept the death as part of the narrative, apocalyptic context and horror genre. An early example of a child character who ultimately dies from gun violence is 12-year-old Sophia Peletier, daughter of Ed and Carol Peletier. In this case, the audience is positioned to interpret the violence as justified and legitimate. In Season 2, Episode 1, Sophia, goes missing following an attack by ‘walkers’ on a motorway. Rick Grimes initially rescues Sophia, hiding her in a creek bed while he draws the walkers away. Sophia is shown leaving her hiding spot; she then vanishes. Although the survivors continue searching for her from an isolated farm, Sophia is absent from the show until Season 2, Episode 7. She emerges from the barn as a walker after being trapped there with dozens of other walkers for some time. Sophia is the last walker to emerge from the barn, making her reveal more shocking. A point-of-view shot from the barn door transitions to a low shot of child’s shoes; using a vertical pan, the camera slowly moves upwards to reveal Sophia as a walker, growling and stumbling towards the survivors. Carol runs towards Sophia, crying and calling her name, but is stopped and held protectively by Daryl. The camera pans across the survivors as they witness the scene; Sophia is no longer a little girl lost but a zombie trapped between life and death. A medium shot of Rick suggests he initially assesses the situation, taking big gulps of air as a softness in his face transitions to a steely resolve and determination having decided what must be done. Rick moves towards Sophia and the camera, his face hard set and grave as he draws his police gun. Rick dominates the frame before the camera shifts behind Sophia’s shoulder, to a side view, over Rick’s shoulder behind the gun and then in front of the gun, from Sophia’s perspective. The focus is first on Rick’s face and then the focus is pulled, making the barrel of the gun sharp while blurring Rick’s face in the background. Sophia’s face is shown one last time before the camera cuts to a long shot from the side of Rick and Sophia as he shoots, then she slumps to the ground. A low angle from Sophia’s point of view to Rick’s face reveals his

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mixed emotions of determination and sorrow before the camera tilts and pans back from Rick towards the sky. The audience is positioned to accept Rick’s violent actions as appropriate for the context and situation. At this point in the show’s narrative, survivors (and viewers) have realised that the zombie/walker condition is incurable and irreversible; indeed, there is a sense that it is more humane to end the life of zombies, especially those who are ‘dead kindred’ (Bishop 2009), than allow them to languish between life and death. Such concerns contribute to how viewers are positioned to understand what happens when Sophia emerges from the barn as a walker. Viewers have already been primed to understand that ‘dead kindred’ need to be killed quickly and mercifully. The pans between characters show the survivors’ difficulty with and distress at Sophia’s condition and situation. Aside from Carol calling her daughter’s name, the scene is free from dialogue. The lack of discussion or debate implies a consensus amongst the survivors about the required actions; audience members are also positioned to accept this. The selection of shots, especially long and side shots, leads to low levels of graphicness and explicitness: the scene is without blood and gore. One of the most challenging episodes of TWD where a child character dies unnaturally from gun violence is ‘The Grove’ (Episode 14, Season 4). This episode is difficult and uncomfortable viewing because of the kinds of violence shown, and the justifications given for that violence. In the episode, Carol leads sisters Lizzie and Mika (aged about 12 and 10) to safety after the larger group is separated, along with Tyreese and the baby Judith. Carol has, by this point, become an adoptive mother to Lizzie and Mika. When they find an abandoned cabin in the woods, they decide to stay there for the time being. Lizzie, who has previously displayed signs of mental illness, becomes increasingly concerned about the walkers, believing they are still people and trying to ‘play’ with them. Her delusions culminate in her stabbing her sister Mika in an attempt to transform Mika into a walker. This violence occurs off-screen; Carol and Tyreese discover Mika’s body after the stabbing. Carol and Tyreese immediately realise they cannot keep themselves or baby Judith safe if Lizzie remains with them. Initially, Carol suggests she and Mika separate from Tyreese and Judith. Dialogue between Carol and Tyreese explores possible remedies to their situation: Carol: We can’t sleep with her and Judith under the same roof. Tyreese: You wouldn’t make it, not on your own.

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She can’t be around other people. Maybe we could try to help her, talk her back somehow. This is how she is. It was already there. I didn’t see it. How could you? I should have seen it. So maybe we go. Me and Judith. You won’t make it either. (Long pause) She can’t be around other people.

There is no available treatment for Lizzie. She also cannot be abandoned because she would likely die a violent death or become a walker herself. Thus, it is implied that Carol sees one option: to end Lizzie’s life. After making the decision, Carol leads Lizzie outside the cabin to pick wildflowers for Mika ‘to give her when she comes back’, as Tyreese watches from the cabin window. Lizzie asks if Carol is mad at her and Carol tells her, ‘I love you Lizzie and everything works out the way it’s supposed to’. Carol then tells Lizzie ‘To look at the flowers’ as she draws her gun. The camera shows a distressed Carol holding the gun by her side, raising it while holding back tears before cocking the gun and shooting. In the broadcast version, the scene cuts to Tyreese’s point of view out of the window to see Carol standing alone. Notably, the Blu-ray edition shows Lizzie falling to the ground seen from Tyreese’s perspective as the shooting happens. The episode’s audio commentary explores the construction of the scene. Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes, states, ‘the genius of the episode is the fact that it’s the most shocking thing possible to do’. Episode co-executive producer Denise Huth comments that ‘a lot of times our big tragic deaths are walkers, they get killed by a zombie … I think the power of the show is that it’s the zombie apocalypse but the worst moments are all human’. Like the death of Sophia Peletier, this scene contains little graphicness and explicitness; Lizzie’s shooting is not shown directly. Moreover, the episode is sombre with Carol clearly distressed and haunted by the events. Her trauma is evident in subsequent episodes. While difficult to watch, the episode mounts a strong argument for Carol’s decision and actions. The final example of the unnatural death of a child in TWD that draws attention to how difficult deaths are represented is that of Carl Grimes in Season 8. We conclude with this example because of the discourses about violence that swirl around Carl’s death and appear to reflect two competing discourses in the show: one that emphasises violence and protection at

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all costs while the other emphasises that real and fatal violence should be a last resort to resolve conflict. These two discourses often relate to arguments within the show that children, depending on age and circumstance, should be either protected or empowered to protect themselves. Carl was one of the show’s first child characters to use a firearm for protection and one of the first characters to suffer a near-fatal gunshot. During Season 8, Episode 8, the audience is positioned to ask, can our children do better than us? Can they be more compassionate? Can they be more altruistic? Carl explains: ‘We are fighting together for something more than just killing other people…finding some way forward, more than hope, that’s how it’s gotta be’. In Season 8, the conflict with Negan has been ongoing. In Episode 8, Negan’s group encircles Alexandria and is confronted by Carl while the other survivors escape. Carl tells Negan: ‘There are families in here, kids, my little sister…kill me, if there has to be punishment, kill me, I’m serious … if me dying for us, for you, for all those other kids, makes a difference, it’ll be worth it’. Shortly after escaping Alexandria, Carl is bitten by a walker. Although his death is not immediate, it is immanent; viewers and Carl are aware his death is coming. He uses his remaining time to write letters to his family and the other survivors, then spend time with Rick, Judith and Rick’s partner Michonne. He gives Judith his famous hat (originally Rick’s police hat) and says, ‘You can beat this world’. The symbolic gesture suggests that Judith is now ‘the law’. Carl’s death is not shown on screen. Rather, Carl endures his final moments before fatally shooting himself alone; the camera stays firmly outside on the porch with Rick and Michonne. His death, while difficult for viewers, is not shown explicitly or graphicly. The narrative justification and legitimation positions audience members to accept this development in the story.

Conclusion This chapter has asked why some acts of extreme violence on TWD, especially those that lead to the death of child characters, appear to be justified and legitimised within the narrative in different ways. The violent deaths of children appear to contain lower levels of graphicness and explicitness and are justified within the narrative more strongly than those of numerous adult characters. Arguably, as Revilla et al. have shown, genre plays a role as well as ‘how violence is constructed and presented to the audience’ (2021, 21). As we have noted, Negan’s actions in Episode 1, Season 7 were graphic and explicit; they also did not appear to have adequate levels

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of justification or legitimation to satisfy many viewers. Audience backlash and critical opprobrium may have been an intentional aim of the show producers (or likewise an accidental and unexpected outcome). However, comparatively in key examples where child characters die from violence, viewers are positioned generally to interpret such acts as proportionate and legitimate to the situation and circumstances. There are low levels of graphicness and explicitness in the scenes where violence leads to the death of Sophia, Lizzie and Carl; there is minimal blood or gore or the violence occurs off-screen altogether. Our paper has shown that how fatal violence is depicted, particularly in terms of justification, legitimation, graphicness and explicitness, will likely determine the degree to which viewers accept that violence within the context of the plot, narrative and genre.

References Alexander, Julia. 2016. Even Walking Dead Fans Are Slamming the Season 7 Premiere over Its Level of Violence: ‘I Seriously Felt Sick Watching This’. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/tv/2016/10/28/13438218/the-walkingdead-­season-­7-­premiere-­violence Anderson, Craig A., Leonard Berkowitz, Donnerstein Edward, L.  Rowell Huesmann, James D.  Johnson, Daniel Linz, Neil M.  Malamuth, and Ellen Wartella. 2003. The Influence of Media Violence on Youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4 (3): 81–110. Bartlett, Christopher P., and Christopher Rodeheffer. 2009. Effects of realism on extended violent and nonviolent video game play on aggressive thoughts, feelings, and physiological arousal. Aggressive Behavior 35 (3): 213–224. https:// doi.org/10.1002/ab.20279 Bishop, K. 2009. Dead Man Still Walking. Journal of Popular Film and Television 37 (1): 16–25. https://doi.org/10.3200/JPFT.37.1.16-­25. Davies, Gareth. 2016. ‘I Nearly Vomited’: Viewers Vow Never to Watch The Walking Dead Again After Branding Season 7 Opener ‘Disgusting’—And Some Even Post Video of Their Horrified Reaction. Daily Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­3872412/I-­nearly-­vomited-­UKviewers-­v ow-­n ever-­w atch-­Walking-­D ead-­b randing-­S eason-­7 -­o pener-­ disgusting.html Garland, Tammy S., Nickie Phillips, and Scott Vollum. 2016 2018. Gender Politics and The Walking Dead: Gendered Violence and the Reestablishment of Patriarchy. Feminist Criminology 13 (1), 59–86. Gencarella, Stephen Olbrys. 2016. Thunder Without Rain: Fascist Masculinity in AMC’s The Walking Dead. Horror Studies 7 (1): 125–146.

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Huesmann, L. Rowell, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, and Leonard D.  Eron Huesmann. 2003. Longitudinal Relations Between Children’s Exposure to TV Violence and Their Aggressive and Violent Behavior in Young Adulthood: 1977–1992. Developmental Psychology 39 (10): 201–221. IMDb. 2018 (Updated 29 Oct 2020). Most Violent TV Series. https://www. imdb.com/list/ls047994291/ Jeffrey, Morgan. (2018). 18 of the Most Violent TV Shows Ever, Ranked— Hannibal, Game of Thrones and Beyond. Digital Spy. https://www.digitalspy. com/tv/ustv/g25114/most-­violent-­tv-­shows/ Jeffries, Stuart. 2016. The Walking Dead Season Seven Premiere: The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ tv-­a nd-­r adio/2016/oct/24/the-­w alking-­d ead-­s eason-­s even-­p remierethe-­day-­will-­come-­when-­you-­wont-­be Lawler, Kelly. 2016. Has ‘The Walking Dead’ Finally Gone Too Far for Fans? USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/10/24/ walking-­dead-­season-­7-­premiere-­fan-­reaction/92669814/ Linnemann, Travis, Tyler Wall, and Edward Green. 2014. The Walking Dead and Killing State: Zombification and the Normalization of Police Violence. Theoretical Criminology 18 (4): 506–527. Losee, R.M. 2014. Information and Knowledge: Combining Justification, Truth and Belief. Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline 17: 75–93. Martino, Clayton. n.d. Top 10 Most Violent TV Shows. Watchmojo https:// watchmojo.com/video/id/14443 O’Mahony, Lauren, Melissa Merchant, and Simon Order. 2021. Necropolitics in a Post-apocalyptic Zombie Diaspora: The Case of AMC’s The Walking Dead. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 57 (1): 89–103. https://www.tandfonline. com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2020.1866265. Peters, Megan. 2017. The Walking Dead Fans Told FCC The Season 7 Premiere Left Them Traumatized and Sick Comicbook. https://comicbook.com/ thewalkingdead/news/the-­w alking-­d ead-­f ans-­t old-­f cc-­t he-­s eason-7premiere-­left-­them-­t/ Potter, W. James, and Tami K. Tomasello. 2003. Building Upon the Experimental Design in Media Violence Research: The Importance of Including Receiver Interpretations. Journal of Communication 53: 315–329. Raymen, Thomas. 2018. Living in the End Times Through Popular Culture: An Ultra-Realist Analysis of The Walking Dead as Popular Criminology. Crime, Media, Culture 14 (3): 429–447. Revilla, Juan Carolos, María Celeste Dávila, and Concepsión Fernández-Villanueva. 2021. ‘Not How Much, but How.’ Contextualizing the Presentation of Violence Broadcast on Television: Normativity and Narrative Genres. Communications 46 (1): 4–26.

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Riddle, Karyn, and Nicole Martins. 2021. A Content Analysis of American Primetime Television: A 20-Year Update of the National Television Violence Studies. Journal of Communication 72: 33–58. Schwartz, Lita Linzer, and Natalie K. Isser. 2012. Endangered Children: Homicide and Other Crimes. Electronic Resource. Boca Raton: CRC Press. Sherlock, Ben. 2019. 10 Bloodiest Episodes of the Walking Dead. https://screenrant.com/bloodiest-­episodes-­walking-­dead/ Whatculture. 2020. 10 Most Gruesome TV Shows of All Time. https://whatculture.com/tv/10-­most-­gruesome-­tv-­shows-­of-­all-­time?page=8 Wilson, Barbara J. et  al. 1997. National Television Violence Study, Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications

CHAPTER 8

How Are Normative Deaths Celebrated, Reinforced, or Disrupted in Children’s Media? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Coco and Soul Zhaoxi Zheng and Rebecca E. Olson

Introduction Often framed as hidden but not forbidden (Kearl and Harris 1982; Walter 1991), modern death has become a taboo to which certain groups have limited access, especially children (Paul 2019). With contemporary medicine safeguarding bodies from disease and ageing, humans have chained end-of-life to medical managements, imprisoning death to a private matter (Kellehear 2007). Although young children are not strangers to death in their everyday encounters with natural-social worlds (e.g., imaginary play), there is a tradition of shielding children from death. Within death studies and developmentalist scholarship, it has been argued that

Z. Zheng (*) • R. E. Olson School of Social Science, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_8

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portrayals of death in recent Disney-Pixar cinema may have transcended such traditions, offering a somewhat realistic entrance into the topic through portrayals of death with certain biological accuracy (Bridgewater et al. 2021; Tenzek and Nickels 2019). We disagree. In this chapter, we examine Coco (Lee  Unkrich  and Adrian  Molina 2017) and Soul (Pete Doctor 2020), which both engage directly with death. However, we show that these movies do so in culturally problematic ways, trivialising biological and emotional aspects of death and grief, and using temporal and embodied storytelling techniques to desensitise its presentation and ultimately discipline death. We argue such practices narratively control death, reinforcing a developmentalist assumption of children’s limited capacities to engage with death and dying. In the following paragraphs, we situate our analysis of Coco and Soul within scholarship on children’s understanding of death, especially developmentalist theories reflecting (post-)industrial biomedicalised conceptualisations of childhood, and scholarship which celebrates and critiques Disney’s portrayals of death. Drawing on Mbeme’s (2008, 12) post-­ structuralist call to investigate ‘how and under what practical conditions is the power… to expose to death exercised’, we follow the ‘new’ sociology of childhood: seeing and empowering children as competent social agents. Extending on previous content analyses, we examine the cinematic portrayals of death in Coco (2017) and Soul (2020), drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA) traditions of de-mystifying ideological assumptions within movies (Jørgensen & Philips 2002). Following the ‘new’ sociology of childhood which emphasises children’s capacities, we argue that, despite death being a prominent feature of their storylines, Coco and Soul discipline death, revealing and reinforcing traditions of sheltering children from death. Although artistic, dramatic, and imaginative engagement with death is culturally commonplace (Jacobsen 2019), such depictions provide superficial and simplified understandings, which work to shield young children from death’s emotional confrontation thus reinforcing their lesser social positioning. Children, Development and Death Characterised by a dramatic rise in life expectancy and decline in infant/childhood mortality rates in late industrial times, human’s rejection of bodily finitudes has become evident through material practices (medical and otherwise) (Harris 2005). Through violent metaphors and

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medical interventions, humans have initiated a discursive-material ‘war’ on death (Sontag 1978). Predicating children’s allegedly healthy(-ier) bodies and under-developed minds, dominant discourses exclude children from public imaginations of biologically intense, emotionally charged, and socially complex death/s (Bryant 2003). ‘Childhood’ is a developmental period between infancy and puberty (i.e., 2–10-year-old). ‘Children’, however, has never been a universal construct; its conceptualisation has changed with social, cultural, and historical shifts. Since industrial times, educational and legal practices have produced children’s needs for physical and intellectual development, transforming children into labourers-in-training and students-in-learning (Gittins 2001). These conceptualisations predicate children’s vulnerability based in bodily differences from adults. Subsequently, psychology has provided an influential theorisation of children’s ‘becoming’ mind: a universal (normative) developmental trajectory from infancy to adulthood (Piaget and Inhelder 1972). It correlates children’s age and developmental stages (i.e,  birth to 18–24 months, 2–7 years, 7–11 years, and adolescence to adulthood) with behavioural and cognitive functionalities (Huitt and Hummel 2003). As such, contemporary scholarship defines children as ‘work-in-progress’ adults who gain competency through chronological development (Stassen-Berger 2005). This conceptualisation consolidates a binary between children and adults (Jenkins 2014). It constructs children as incomplete ‘human becomings’, leading children’s expertise to be diminished and under-appreciated—an injustice we foreground through our analysis. This has implications for theorising children’s understanding of death. Post-WWII, childhood scholars examined understandings of death in children using a developmentalist approach. Deeming children’s abstract imaginations of death as ‘less’ than adults, Nagy (1948) first linked these understandings with children’s ‘under-development’. Contemporary scholarship continues this approach. Starting from biomedical assumptions about death, Speece and Brent (1984) scattered a ‘mature’ concept of death into subcomponents (i.e., irreversibility, universality, non-­ functionality, and causality) of children’s understanding at different developmental stages. When in discord with developmental expectations, children’s understandings of death are deemed immature and magical, warranting psycho-medical interventions (Fogarty 2019). These development-­ based assumptions are often reinforced by the

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often-­ simplified approaches adults employ when communicating with children on complex matters, such as death. Communicating Death with Children Despite overarching agreement, the messiness within the developmental scholarship requires highlighting. With individual differences and contradictions largely left unacknowledged, developmental theorisations struggle to quantify exactly ‘when’ children understand ‘how much’ of ‘which’ subcomponents of death (Kenyon 2001) since they rely on adult-centric assumptions that adults have ‘full’ understanding of death. The sweeping conclusion that all 4–12-year-old children can achieve a mature, adult-like understanding of death is dissonant. Whilst sometimes considering social, cultural, and experiential contexts around children and death, they are psychologised as ‘independent’ variables (Panagiotaki et al. 2015). Based on children’s allegedly ‘immature’ conceptualisations of death, psychological literature has dismissed their death conceptualisations as delusional and disposable—as part of children’s magical thinking (Subbotsky 2004). However, anthropological perspectives employ a relational understanding: emphasising the ‘ordinariness’ of magical thinking, and arguing that these ideas are valid considering their own creative values. Such cross-disciplinary incentives prompt reconsideration of children’s ‘magical thinking’ about death, adding competency, creativity, and agency (Subbotsky et al. 2010; Rosengren and French 2013). Contesting developmentalist discourses, this chapter adopts a ‘new’ sociology of childhood approach which recognises children as complete individuals, understands children and adults relationally, and highlights children’s agency (James and Prout 2003, Uprichard 2008). Considering young children as active agents who are competent participants in childhood matters, such scholarship positions childhood as a temporal-spatial experience where children develop with agency in the here-and-now (Uprichard 2008). Contemporary sociological research also problematises the lack of end-­ of-­life discussions with children in medical settings (van der Geest et al. 2015). Despite decades of calls from researchers, open discussion with children about end-of-life remains challenging (Kreicbergs et  al. 2021). Mostly guided by a benevolence that protects children from emotional confrontation, neither medical professionals nor parents/guardians volunteer death conversations with children (Menendez, Hernandez, and

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Rosengren 2020). When questioned about death by children, adults tend to provide euphemistic, superficial, and religious answers. Although recent evidence demonstrates children’s capacity in providing insights into topics traditionally considered ‘complex’ (e.g., relaxation—see Cooke et  al. 2020), this is rarely reflected in everyday child-adult communications. Mostly adopting simplistic approaches, adults avoid discussions about social issues (e.g., racial protests; Underhill 2018) and are instructed to shield children from media coverage of death and warfare (Montgomery 2008). Although honesty is recommended by specialists, everyday child-­ adult discussions about confronting events remain largely apolitical and power-evasive (Underhill 2018), based on developmentalist assumptions, and sugar-coated with fantasy and euphemism (Lovelace-Curtis and Curtis 2014). Disney’s Coco offers an example. Death in the Magical Kingdom Crossing the bridge of marigold petals, Miguel travels to the land of the dead to pursue his dream of becoming a musician. With heavy Mexican cultural references, the land of the dead features a series of spectacular portrayals, such as complex architectural structures, vibrant music, celebrations, and mythical creatures. (Coco 2017)

Following Miguel, a young Mexican boy who travels into the land of the dead in Coco, we enter a stunning world of death presented by Disney-­ Pixar. Contributing to diversified cultural and social representations, popular media has aided death’s return from the tabooed underworld. Unlike news media, whilst fictional entertainment films (e.g., Disney productions) often feature death in their main storyline, they mostly surrender to visual-graphic purposes and portray death in spectacular and unrealistic ways (Sobchack 1974). Despite a handful of productions attending to the emotional complexity of death (e.g., Up’s portrayal of widowerhood and grief), Disney-Pixar productions predominantly hide the ‘ugly’ side of death, producing an approachable public image of death as a centrepiece of contemporary children’s movies (Sumiala and Hakola 2013). Despite children-/family-friendly branding, Disney productions have long been problematised for infusing ideological assumptions into seemingly apolitical content by portraying minority communities in questionable ways (Giroux and Pollock 2010). Framing their re-iterations of historical and modern worlds as ‘imaginative’, Disney productions feature

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patriarchal and racist perspectives throughout their content (e.g., sexist portrayal of women in The Little Mermaid, orientalism in Mulan, and colonial undertone in Pocahontas). Modern Disney productions seemingly deviate from this path, producing content better aligned with contemporary values. Its subsidiaries, especially US-based animation studio Pixar, have inherited Disney’s dominance of children’s cinema. Despite critiques of somewhat tokenistic attendance to and simplified understanding of complex social affairs (see Soares 2017; Baig, Khan, and Aslam 2021), Pixar productions increasingly reflect democratic values: fighting racism in Zootopia, empowering women in Frozen, and celebrating fatherhood in Finding Nemo/Dory. Death is one such theme frequently invoked by Disney-Pixar. This has attracted considerable scholarly attention (Laderman 2000; Graham, Yuhas, and Roman 2018). Observing their pervasive influence, use of child-friendly depictions, implicit discussions of morality, and introduction of coping mechanisms, Tenzek and Nickels (2019) discussed the educational possibilities of Disney-Pixar films. Similarly, Bridgewater et  al. (2021) argue that Disney-Pixar animated films often present death in ways that align with current biomedical understandings (e.g., a non-functional and irreversible bodily death). As such, these films are said to support end-­ of-­life education in childhood, especially considering their potential in helping children to understand physical aspects of death. Content analysts of Disney-Pixar films argue otherwise. Observing the often-non-emotional death of villains, Cox and colleagues (2005) argued such portrayals are unrealistic. Following biomedical theorisation of death subcomponents, Graham and colleagues (2018) argued that Disney-Pixar movies poorly attend to bodily aspects of death. Reversible death, for example, is typically only available to certain characters, explicitly for storytelling purposes (e.g., protagonists often survive death—see Frozen), and sometimes linked to the stories’ cultural context. As such, they implicitly align with practices of exclusion, which we unpack in our analysis of Coco below. By analysing children and adolescent cinema in general, Miles (2014) concluded that Disney-Pixar should not be used as the sole source of ‘realistic’ childhood death education as they discord with established models of grief (e.g., Kübler-Ross and Kessler 2005). This, however, fails to acknowledge the multiplicity of death—from physiological, to socio-­ cultural and religious meanings—and death education in childhood. Both featuring strong themes of death and dying, two of Disney-Pixar’s most recent productions, namely Coco (2017) and Soul (2020), have

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received considerable attention. Utilising quantitative sentiment analytical tools, Hsu (2021) concluded that even though death is their central theme, positive sentiments still dominate these movies. Liu (2020) argued that alongside normalising death and fear, Coco dilutes death with various themes, such as family and dreams. Its overwhelming use of storytelling and artistic techniques (e.g., colouring) arguably reduces death’s emotional confrontation (Chen 2021). These attempts to simplify emotions related to death have been criticised (see Soares 2017, Baig, Khan, and Aslam 2021). With most of Disney-Pixar cinematic productions rated General and marketed towards younger audiences, such portrayals invite questions. The demise of a realistic death and its discursive rebirth in virtual and romantic ways, whilst seemingly attending to children’s emotional management needs, reinforce developmentalist assumptions of children being cognitively unready to confront death. Meanwhile, when exposed to realistic death events, children are caught in between this cinematic ‘simulacrum’ (Baudrillard 1994) and late modern fixations on risk/death (Beck 1992). In this chapter, we critically analyse Coco and Soul’s visual-discursive portrayals of death. Acknowledging CDA as an assemblage of methods, we adopt Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s (1999) problem-oriented framework, combining micro-, meso-, and macro-level interpretations to analyse discourse-relevant power. Specifically, we ask: how are normative deaths celebrated, reinforced, or disrupted in contemporary children’s cinema? In addition to unpacking semiotic tools constituting of textual and visual representations of death in these movies, this framework prompts us to consider the audience (e.g., young children), the cultural contexts in which they are produced (i.e., non-western cultures), and their intersections with the emerging societal forces and other mechanisms of social lives (e.g., dominant childhood discourses). Most importantly, recognising the unstable and shifting connections within the network of these social mechanisms, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) equips our analysis with interactional and structural insights into intersections across children, death, and their visual-textual portrayals in Disney-Pixar movies.

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Findings Although both rated PG (parental guidance), no other elements in Coco (2017) and Soul (2020) are likely to be considered sensitive (e.g., violence, nudity) apart from death.1 Presumably, the theme of death and dying is the reason for their ratings. Additionally, both situated in specific cultural backgrounds (i.e., African-American in Soul; Mexican in Coco), these films provide an opportunity to enquire into alternative interpretations of death and dying, which are typically unavailable in Disney-­ Pixar cinema. Starting with their (problematic) cultural depictions, we first provide our analysis of Coco and Soul. We show that, although the cultural and social contexts of death and dying are acknowledged, biological and emotional aspects to death are trivialised and disciplined through death’s temporary nature and embodied form. This raises concerns about the educational value of the representations of death and dying within these films. Through  analysing narrative and animation techniques, we show how death is marginalised, revealing a developmentalist treatment of the audience (children) as not yet ready to engage fully with death and dying. Problematic Cultural Depictions Coco and Soul are situated within and dependent on specific cultural settings. Coco sits within a Mexican context of the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), in which death becomes a festive and celebrated event. Coco successfully incorporates many traditional and cultural semiotics of death into the animated Día de los Muertos (e.g., ofrendas, Miguel playing with skulls at the market). Taking a slightly different approach to normalising death, Soul uses each individuals’ unique life talents (i.e., ‘sparks’) as media enabling individuals’ entrance into ‘the zone’ situated in-between life and death. Specifically, Joe’s entrance into ‘the zone’ through jazz music references African-American culture. These cultural representations invite concerns about implicit racism. Although both movies consulted with relevant cultural communities during development, racist practices are evident: marginalising non-white communities, white-saviour plotlines, and microaggressions remain. 1  Notably, Bambi (1942) features the violent death of the main character’s mother yet received a ‘G’ rating.

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Observing Disney’s history of exploiting Latinx culture and attempt at trademarking Día de los Muertos, Morales (2020) argues that Disney-­ Pixar risks creating a uniform image of Día de los Muertos, despite the diversity of practices across Mexico. Similarly, although seemingly referencing African-American cultural symbols (e.g., barber shops, jazz music), critics argue that Soul’s depiction of African-American communities remains problematic. Consistent with Owens’ (2020) observation of systematic racism in American animations, the leading black character in Soul is only present for a small portion of the movie; more often he is portrayed as a raceless ‘soul’, whose voice is played by a white woman (i.e., Tina Fey). Actions of 22—the child-like soul that partners with Joey throughout his journey—reflect the movie’s white-saviour and racist undertones: taking over Joe’s body, dismissive comments on Joe’s life highlights, and ‘helping’ Joe to find his life’s purpose by bodily possession. Such insensitive and superficial engagement with culture extends to death and dying. A Trivialised Biological and Emotional Death Whilst foregrounding social and cultural aspects of death, both movies still simplistically attend to the biological and emotional components of death. Various storytelling techniques, especially humour and foreshadowing, are heavily incorporated in both films to subvert strong emotional components (e.g., sadness) that frequently accompany death. Romantic representations of death support its normalisation in both films. After joking about ‘dying a happy man’, Joe has three near-death encounters (i.e., car accidents). In Coco, Mama Coco’s death is only implied by her photo on the ofrenda. Despite their somewhat realistic components, other deaths feature dramatic (e.g., Ernesto being smashed by a giant bell), simplified (e.g., Hector simply falling down after being poisoned), and poetic portrayals (e.g., Cheech dies by turning into light pieces). Not limited to characters’ death experiences, these artistic, romantic, and non-bodily portrayals extend to depictions of death itself. Being framed as ‘the great beyond’, death in Soul takes the shape of a starry cosmos connected to an infinite flight of staircases. Despite implied complexity, death is imaginatively portrayed as a messy and unstructured destination. Functioning as hints to ease audiences into actual death events, these witty and visual-graphic tactics attract children’s attention while undermining death’s emotional confrontation. Aligning with Hsu’s (2021) and

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Liu’s (2020) findings, we argue these movies support a developmentalist understanding that children cannot understand death, evident through simplifying and trivialising both biological and emotional components of death. Foregrounding the artistic and visual effects, these movies avoid emotional confrontation by drawing children’s attention to the imaginative and artistic and away from the bodily and biological aspects of death, preventing children’s emotional investment. Rule of Temporariness Despite their functions in normalising and diluting the theme of death in both movies, celebratory and romantic representations of death have limits. To start with, life and death are deemed time-sensitive in both movies. In Soul, Joe had only one day to visit ‘the great before’ due to his performance deadline. As required in Coco, Miguel’s travel between the land of the living/dead could only happen on Día de los Muertos. Being instructed to leave before sunrise, the land of the dead is implied to be a dark underworld that only exists temporarily at night, excluded from everyday living. Despite both being protagonists—who normally have the most privilege in Disney-Pixar storylines—Joe and Miguel are not exempt from this fundamental rule about life and death: the living’s trip to the realm of the dead must be brief. Echoing Cox et al.’s (2005) findings that protagonists are less likely to die in Disney productions, both Joe and Miguel do not follow the rule of irreversibility since they return to life from their temporary ‘death’ experiences. Building on Laderman’s (2000, 40) discussion on death’s pivotal role in classic Disney movies, namely, to be overcome by ‘virtuous heroic actions’, we argue that death themes within these movies legitimise protagonists’ undying privilege. Although seemingly limited, here the rule of temporariness grants the protagonist more agency. Rather than a universal human experience, death becomes something that serves to enrich protagonists’ agenda (e.g., accomplishing life goals). Observing both movies’ portrayals of death as a brief, negative experience, we argue that death is used to contrast life’s longevity and positivity.

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‘I’m a No-Body, Get It?’2 Apart from time, human bodies form another barrier between life and death in both movies. Bodies are functional in Coco and Soul’s portrayals of living and dead. With no actual dead bodies presented in either movie, almost all characters are presented with the same level of liveliness, regardless of their mortal status. Consistent with a longstanding Disney-Pixar tradition of anthropomorphising characters (Booker 2010), almost all main characters presented in Coco and Soul have functional living human bodies. When dying in Soul, Joe turns into a (raceless) soul that resembles a human shape on a smaller scale. Similarly, no change is observed in Miguel’s embodied functioning when he visits the land of the dead. Both Coco’s and Soul’s representations of dead characters being able to move their bodies freely are clearly in discord with biomedical conceptualisations of death’s non-functionality (Speece and Brent 1984). Recent scholarly discussions (see Bridgewater et  al. 2021; Graham, Yuhas and Roman 2018) have argued that many of Disney’s animated productions portray an accurate biological death. However, bodily representations of death are clearly, further complexified in Coco and Soul. Made evident through animation and storytelling techniques, it has become a rule in both Coco and Soul that no matter how similar they are, dead characters’ bodies must differ subtly from those of the living. Notably, some dead characters present higher levels of functionality compared to the living. In Coco, skeleton bodies of the dead characters enable them to perform extraordinary activities (e.g., reassembling after being scattered). Taunting the laws of physics, Joe and other souls can float and fly in Soul. Such representation echoes Disney’s longstanding tradition of giving animated characters a ‘plasmatic’ quality that allows them to freely reshape (Lönroth 2021). Drawing on and extending Wells’ (2013) theorisation, we argue these bodily differences in Coco and Soul originate from Disney-­ Pixar’s marginalisation of death. Wells (2013) concluded that Disney productions have become increasingly realism-oriented. However, through our observation of Coco and Soul, we found that this realistic trend only applies to living characters, since dead characters are ‘unorthodox’, representing impossibilities of the living and becoming part of Disney-Pixar’s ‘hyper-reality’ in the name of imagination and creativity (Wells 2013, 20). Extending on Lönroth’s (2021, 36) observation of the ‘plasmatic’ quality 2

 This is a line from the character 22 in Soul.

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being more often applied to minor and marginal characters, we argue that death and the subtle bodily differences of the dead in both Coco and Soul are used to ‘add detail, nuance and complexity’ to the living. These alternative bodily imaginations, alongside death’s marginalisation from reality, further distance death from the living. A Disciplined Death In Soul, 22 lectures Joe that souls cannot taste or smell since ‘all that stuff is in your body’. Clearly, this not only demonstrates body-mind dualism but also suggests that the dead—compared to the living—are incomplete and subjected to a set of restrictions. First off, both movies require characters to access to certain media (i.e., ‘zones’ in Soul; marigold flowers in Coco) before they can access death. Strategically making protagonists’ access to death as a result of a series of unlikely coincidences (e.g., Miguel stealing a celebrity’s guitar during Día de los Muertos, whilst standing on marigold flowers), we argue this is Disney-Pixar’s disciplining practice to make sure that protagonists are the only ones that are allowed to access death since they are the only ones who are heroic and powerful enough to conquer death (see Rule of Temporariness). Protagonists’ coincidental  encounters with death, therefore, become sites of power struggles. We argue that there exists a power imbalance between the living and the dead. Through rhetorical and discursive devices that describe characters’ privileges, the dead are portrayed as lesser. In both movies, journeys between life and death include missions for travellers to accomplish. To live on Earth, souls need to finish training to earn an ‘earth pass’ in Soul, and the dead need to prove that they are remembered by the living in Coco. In both scenarios, the dead’s entry to the living world depends on the livings’ assistance. The dead are also at the mercy of the living (e.g., Cheech’s ‘final death’ is due to being forgotten by all living people). Even if granted entry, one of the most important rules established in both movies is that the dead cannot freely interact with the living. For instance, Miguel’s living and dead family members cannot see or hear each other despite being seemingly reunited. Their much too literal ghostly presences within Miguel’s living family members at the movie’s conclusion serve as a reminder of the dead’s comparative powerlessness status. Disciplining of the dead continues. Both movies feature policing. Being responsible for counting and regulating the number of deaths, Jerry and

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Terry stop Joe’s escape from death and later grant him a second chance to live. With strict border regulations, the land of the dead in Coco has customs and border force officers to prevent illegal crossing from the land of the dead. Punishment is also in place for trespassing (e.g., Hector being arrested). However, the trespassing of the living (i.e., Miguel smuggling into the land of the dead) is left unpunished. This, again, demonstrates the livings’ superior hierarchical positioning. Building on discussions of Disney culture (Ward 2002), we consider this as a reflection of the paternalistic nature of these movies. The discursive introduction of institutions, surveillance, and punishments are classic practices used to subject the dead to regulation and power, shielding them from the living. With more serious crimes (e.g., murder—Ernesto poisoning Hector; manslaughter—stage staff accidentally killing Ernesto) being left unpunished, governance practices over the dead are, indeed, overly harsh and unwarranted. Building on Nielsen and colleagues’ (2017) observation of the often-conflicting relationships between laws and common moralities in Disney animated movies, we argue the referencing of legal restrictions (e.g., customs in Coco) further serves to legitimise the dead’s powerless position. Overall, through our critical analysis, we have foregrounded the power struggles embedded in Disney-Pixar’s marginalisation of death in Coco and Soul. In trivialising emotions in death, removing and reimagining bodies from death, and using temporal and embodied plotlines to restrict character’s access to death, both movies seek to discipline death. Observing their attempt to overshadow and dilute death through fantastic, imaginative, yet power-evasive visual and storytelling approaches, we argue these Disney-Pixar productions surrender to dominant developmentalist assumptions about death and childhood, thus reinforcing children’s lesser social positioning.

Conclusion With their main audiences being young children Coco and Soul display Disney-Pixar’s portrayals of death and dying in distinct cultural contexts. In this chapter, we drew on CDA to examine the underlying ideological assumptions about death in these movies. Situated in specific cultural contexts and accommodating younger audiences, both Coco and Soul portray death in less emotionally and biologically confronting ways. Framing death as a time-sensitive matter, these

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movies reinforce traditional Disney-Pixar portrayals of death as a quest for protagonists to conquer with heroic actions. Used for storytelling purposes, death is depicted negatively, serving protagonists’ agendas, and contrasting life’s positivity. Most importantly, with dead characters being marginalised and disciplined, death is attributed a powerless position in these movies so the living—especially those who are white and privileged—can be prioritised. We argue that despite being a central theme in both movies, the portrayal of death remains simplified and unrealistic. The marginalised and powerless depictions of death reveal a strong developmentalist underpinning in their conceptualisations of children’s understandings of death, which, in turn, serves to reinforce children’s exclusion from this subject despite growing evidence of children’s capacity to understand complex phenomena.

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CHAPTER 9

Hashtag Feminism: Challenging Rape and Femicide in South Africa Adelina Mbinjama

I don’t want to die with my hands up or legs open. —Koleka Putuma

South Africa (SA) has the worst known figures for gender-based violence for a country not at war, with one in three women facing the possibility of being raped in their lifetime (Moffet 2006). SA also has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The latest crime statistics made available by the South African Police Service indicate that between April and June 2022, 6424 people were killed—an average of about 70 people per day. During the same period, 9516 rapes were reported to the police (Mitchley 2021). In Rape: A South African Nightmare (2015), scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola explores the scourge of rape in SA, including a close look at the high-­ profile rape trial of former SA President, Jacob Zuma. When ‘Khwezi’ (whose real name was Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo) accused the

A. Mbinjama (*) Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_9

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then–Deputy President Jacob Zuma of raping her in 2005, there was a significant and complete dismissal of her claim by large swathes of the population (Manyathela 2016). A decade later, during a time of significant social critique in response to rape culture and femicide in SA through Black Twitter, #JusticeForKhwezi emerged, bringing to national consciousness the injustice of ‘Khwezi’s’ rape—and by extension, rape victims in the country—and other judicial and legislative failures in protecting victims. Orth, van Wyk, and Andipatin (2020, p.  192) explain that the term ‘rape culture’ was coined in 1975 and refers to ‘a culture in which male sexual violence is normalised and victims are consequently blamed for their own assault’. According to Stats SA (2018, p. 24), femicide is ‘the intentional killing of females (women or girls) because they are females’. Over the years, women have expressed their outrage with the rape and murder crisis in the country through other online feminist movements such as #MenAreTrash, which went viral in SA in 2017 after Karabo Mokoena was murdered by her boyfriend and her body was found burned. Then in 2019, yet another instance of the femicide phenomena occurred when 19-year-old University of Cape Town (UCT) student Uyinene Mrwetyana was brutally raped and murdered (Merten 2019). Her death shocked the country and highlighted, once again, why SA is regarded as the rape capital of the world. Inspired by protesting women across the country, media organization, News24 produced a video documentary on Uyinene’s rape and murder, originally entitled #IamNene: How Uyinene Mrwetyana’s Murder Ignited a Movement (2019). It is also known as the #AmINext documentary. This chapter offers an analysis of News24’s #AmINext documentary as a complementary media response to the online feminist movement #AmINext? which is an adaptation of the #MeToo movement. This chapter examines the documentary and the online social movement of #AmINext? together to explore the positioning of rape and femicide in SA as difficult deaths that reveal marginalization and engrained social inequalities, whilst also showing how they reveal the resistance that has emerged in response to such difficult deaths. It places these deaths into historical and cultural context alongside the documentary and online social movement.

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#MeToo and Black Twitter The #MeToo movement began as a Twitter hashtag, established in 2006 by African-American activist Tarana Burke (#MeToo movement 2019). She used the hashtag after a conversation with a 13-year-old girl who had opened up to her about the sexual abuse she was experiencing at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend (Langone 2018). The movement sought to provide support to women, especially Black women, from poorer neighbourhoods who had experienced sexual violence, by providing a safe space for survivors to share their experiences and vent their frustrations, thereby bringing about healing. #MeToo became a trending topic on Twitter when allegations of sexual assault and harassment against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein began dominating the headlines. The ascendence of #MeToo to greater public awareness was due in large part to actress Alyssa Milano’s tweet on 15 October 2017, a social experiment of sorts aimed at highlighting the prevalence of sexual assault. Her tweet, aimed at soliciting the experiences of women with unwanted sexual attention, said, ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet’. According to Langone (2018), more than 66,000 Twitter users responded. Burke wants people to understand that the #MeToo movement is more than just a hashtag; it is, she says, ‘the start of a larger conversation’ and a space for ‘community healing’ for all (Langone 2018). Milano was, at first, unaware that the term had already been coined by Burke, but within days of being made aware of Burke’s activism, the actress went on Good Morning America to publicly show support and gave Burke credit for her activism against gender-based violence (Langone 2018). Since the #MeToo movement was started by a Black activist, this, in essence, links the movement to ‘Black Twitter’. According to Mbinjama-Gamatham and Mbinjama (2021, pp. 181), ‘Black Twitter is a sort of cultural identification on Twitter…a cultural movement…in which Black people and those who stand for the Black community can voice their opinions’. Black Twitter specifically has allowed for Black people to draw attention to the socio-political issues synonymous with Black communities, and to freely express their views (Reid 2018). The #MeToo movement has triggered a rise of feminist movements against gender-based violence, that are student-led, female-led, and Black-­ led in SA.  These movements have challenged dominant ideologies of power such as existing attitudes towards rape culture, patriarchy, and sexual violence. This digital and real-world resistance becomes an important

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‘line in the sand’ for those oppressed by SA’s existing cultural and sociological ideologies. Sexual politics can be creative, but also oppressive, especially when power is used for domination (Gibson 2020, p. 222). It is the resistance to and challenging of the repression which is inherent to the considerations of response to the sexual assault, rape, and murder of females within SA which forms the focus of this chapter, exploring the development of defiance and solidarity amongst those most under threat of violence in SA through real incidents of violence and difficult death in recent years. Therefore, the forthcoming sections will address the ways in which social media has formed a space through which to challenge these dominant attitudes of power online and manifested them offline. The following cases will be discussed in a chronological order; before the Twitter era, the high-profile rape case of Zuma and ‘Khwezi’ led to the #RememberKhwezi movement. Post-#MeToo, these dynamics play out in SA Twitter with #RUReference, #MenAreTrash, and #AmINext. According to Mbinjama (2021, p. 242), online movements in SA have been centred around gender-based violence, university fees, and other social issues.

High-Profile Rape Case: #JusticeForKhwezi When Zuma was acquitted on the rape charge in 2006, claiming the sex had been consensual, he had already gained support from the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). Ultimately, he was in line to become the president of the Republic of SA and so was already in a politically as well as socially privileged position of power. The ‘One in Nine’ Campaign was formed in 2006 in the aftershock of Zuma’s acquittal to the alleged rape and as a drive against, and resistance to, sexual violence. ‘Khwezi’ and her mother were offered asylum in the Netherlands after their home was burnt down and ‘Khwezi’ had received death threats, the culmination of a systematic campaign of hate directed at her and her family. Zuma became the President of SA in 2009. ‘Khwezi’ returned to SA in 2011 and died at age 41 in 2016. She died without experiencing any justice. Importantly, this was the year in which Zuma’s presidency was being heavily criticized, which forced him to resign on 14 February 2018. Before her death, on 6 August 2016, ‘Khwezi’ and many other South Africans witnessed the live broadcast of Zuma’s address at the Independent Electoral Commission results centre when silent protestors (four Black women) held up signs ‘#I am one in three’, ‘Khanga’, ‘Remember Khwezi’ and ‘10 years later’.

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‘Khwezi’ was an HIV-positive AIDS activist, and the daughter of an ANC member who spent ten years incarcerated on Robben Island with Zuma during apartheid. ‘Khwezi’s’ HIV status allowed her credibility to be questioned. She falls into the category of people who Gqola explains are ‘impossible to rape’; these include sex workers, wives as well as slave women and men. Gqola (2015, pp. 31–32) adds that ‘this does not mean that nobody raped them. It means that when they were sexually violated, it was not recognized as such, legally and socially’. She continues to express that powerful, popular, and successful men are often excluded from the category of potential rapist, which was the case with Zuma. As a political figure, people could not view him with the same lens as ‘Khwezi’ who accused him of rape, even though he is a polygamist who has been married five times and, to date, has fathered 20 children among his wives and mistresses. It is important to note that polygamy is legal in SA; the 1998 Recognition of Customary Marriages Act 120 allows for the ‘legal recognition of both monogamous and polygamous customary marriages, provided they are concluded according to the customs traditionally observed among the indigenous African peoples of South Africa and which form part of the culture of those peoples’ (Department of Home Affairs, Republic of South Africa 2023). Women like ‘Khwezi’ are expected to find powerful and affluent men ‘irresistible’ (Gqola 2015, p. 33). This is one of the underlining drivers of violence against women, in that Black men in South Africa are conditioned to think they are entitled to the bodies of Black women; furthermore, they are able to reject sexual assault and even murder claims because they know that the system will support them. In ‘Khwezi’s’ case, her sexual history and HIV status worked to nullify her allegation of rape. Her associated social standing and that of Zuma, a hypermasculine persona which thrives on unquestionable respect and control—led to her losing the case. Khwezi, along with her mother, had to endure numerous threats, insults, and harassment. In one instance, outside of the courtroom during the trial, ‘Khwezi’ was attacked by the ANC Women’s League in support of Zuma. Some yelled, ‘Burn that Bitch!’ and ‘Khwezi’s’ photo was circulated outside the courts and burnt (Pather 2016). She was humiliated in the media and on social media. ‘Khwezi’—the rape victim—was treated as though she was the perpetrator, while the accused rapist experienced support. Gqola argues that rape—which she likens to a recurring nightmare— is a ‘patriarchal act of aggression linked to language and power’ (Buti 2016). This is why the hashtag #JusticeForKhwezi became so important. It

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not only created awareness around ‘Khwezi’s’ mistreatment, but it also redirected the narrative of blame away from her and back to its rightful place, that of Zuma and a society which favours the testimony of a man over that of a woman.

Student Protests Against Rape In 2016, students at South Africa’s Rhodes University staged a protest against rape culture on campus (The Daily Vox 2018). The protest began when a list of names of alleged serial rapists and abusers on campus, dubbed the #RUReference list, was anonymously published on a Rhodes student Facebook. The largely female contingent of protestors went through each of the university’s residences to confront the alleged rapists, thus forcing the university to shut down until it adequately handled cases of rape and sexual violence on campus. Some female students protested with their breasts exposed and were later referred to as the ‘Naked protestors’ by popular media (Senne 2017). The symbol of stripping off your clothes suggests vulnerability, but also asserts bodily autonomy as women’s bodies are often criminalized and sexualized. The protesters’ physical resistance disassociated nakedness with sexuality and defiantly asserted that ‘even with my breast out, I’m still not asking to be raped’. The female students were reprimanded for public indecency, but male students from the LGBTQI+ community (who were allies of the protests) who were also naked or bare chested were not regarded as breaking any rules. This shows the gender discrepancy in the public and legal response to the exposing of breasts. The naked protestors were using their bodies to convey their message against gender-based violence but iterating that although they may be naked it is not an invitation to intercourse, forced or consensual. The policing of female bodies and the double-standards in the response to nakedness add to women’s frustrations to be taken seriously and fears related to sexual abuse. Social media is a place where protest can happen without a direct bodily threat, a virtual resistance which can empower movement towards real-world protest and testimony. Representations by national and international media have cast these student protestors as irrational, emotional, and violent radicals (Haith 2016). The consequences of this are twofold: they obscure the purpose of the protest and shift the public’s attention away from discussions about rape culture and patriarchal social structures. They also contribute to a violent racist discourse that constructs women, especially Black women, as overly emotional, ‘angry’, and unwilling to ‘hear reason’.

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#MenAreTrash As mentioned earlier, #MenAreTrash, trended on social media in 2017 after Karabo Mokoena was murdered by her boyfriend. #MenAreTrash is a response to the various forms of violence women experience at the hands of men daily. Black Twitter offered significant social critique in response to rape culture and femicide in SA. The above-mentioned online movements that emerged from Black Twitter set the stage for #AmINext? and to call for the government to take these difficult deaths experienced by women more seriously.

#RememberingNene Mbinjama (2021, pp. 243) explains that ‘Foucauldian discourse analysis allows for an interpretivist approach to how social media platforms provide a certain level of autonomy to individuals on these platforms’. This section of the chapter focuses on News24’s #AmINext documentary which serves to critique some of the ideologies fundamental to #AmINext? Using Foucault’s definition of discourse, the ways that the documentary creates knowledge through communal practices; how it represents forms of bias and power relations, will be explored (Foucault 1990, 1995). The 13-minute documentary begins with Cape Town protesters chanting ‘Enough is Enough!’ They are calling on the government to take action and bring back the death penalty, after news broke that 19-year-old UCT student Uyinene Mrwetyana was raped and killed by a 42-year-old employee at the Clareinch post office, where she went to collect a parcel of clothes that she had ordered online (Merten 2019). After her disappearance for several days in August 2019, social media users joined her family, friends, and the police in their search for the missing teenager by sharing her information and image online, along with the hashtag #bringNenehome. Private investigator Noel Pratten was hired to search for Uyinene after he had completed his search for Meghan Cremer, missing since 3 August 2019, whose body was found in Philippi, Cape Town on 28 August 2019. On 2 September 2019 breaking news across the country confirmed that a body found dumped in the township of Lingelethu West,

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in Khayelitsha, was that of Uyinene. Post-office worker Luyanda Botha confessed to the crimes. Botha was convicted with the double rape and murder of the former UCT student and is serving 25 years in prison.

Wake-Up Call to Government Leaders and Men The documentary depicts how on 5 September 2019, an estimated 10,000 people, dressed in purple and black clothing as a sign of solidarity, protested outside of Parliament, demanding to be addressed by President Cyril Ramaphosa, with a call for a new effective policy for gender-based violence, child abuse, and femicide. They also marched to the World Economic Forum Africa Summit hosted in Cape Town. But this did not only take place within the borders of SA because South Africans in Amsterdam staged their own #AmINext? picket at Dam Square to create awareness of gender-based violence and femicide in SA (Cape Argus 2019). These mass protests were coordinated largely by ordinary citizens posting information online about where and when protests would be held. While the documentary is dedicated to Uyinene, it features family and friends giving testimonies on her life and how her sudden death shaped them and the country. It also features Bheki Cele, Minister of Police. He and President Ramaphosa are seen and heard telling protestors that they understand how they feel but the reaction of the crowd is that of distrust and disagreement. According to Olivier (2010, 294), language and power-­ relations come together when considering discourses. The two government officials use words that others understand but the majority seem to reject because the protestors are mostly citizens of SA and have been systematically let down by government through their lack of addressing of other societal issues such as the rise of unemployment, access to public services, and developments in rural areas. The disgruntlement expressed by the protestors towards their leaders allows us to characterize the movement and documentary as a discourse in itself, whereby it is ‘a battle, a struggle, a place and an instrument of confrontation’, ‘a weapon of power, of control, of subjection, of qualification and of disqualification’ (Foucault 2020, p. xx). Olivier (2010, pp. 294–295) explains that ‘the language we use is not innocent, but carries the imprint of power-relations, and the discourse that first structures our psyche configures it one way or another’. A young, Black female protestor is captured shouting, ‘This is infuriating, you are a fucken Minister of Police’. Culturally, this is no way to address an elder, especially a Black man. Yet, this depiction allows viewers to see how various forces of discourses reject historical decipherment and are

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advancing ‘another conception of power’ (Foucault 2020, p. xxi). This conception of power is a collective power that emerges from online feminist movements that cut across social demographics and provide public platforms for marginalized groups to express themselves freely and form systems and discourses of resistance. The young woman represents women who are no longer asking to be protected by the law, who are demanding that measures are put in place to deal with perpetrators of rape and murders against women and children. She also represents young Black women, who are the most raped and killed demographic in SA. Uyinene’s rape and death are also a reminder that most rape survivors in SA are Black, because most people in SA are Black. For clarity, it should be noted that Black in SA refers to people of colour, such as Africans, Coloureds (mixed-race), and Indians (Biko 1977). The #AmINext? movement was mainly supported by these groups of women, followed by white women and the LGBTQI+ community, all of whom are potential victims to gender-based violence in SA.

Women Reject Indoctrination and Being Silenced The words of South African queer poet Koleka Putuma, ‘I don’t want to die with my hands up or legs open’ (2017), are shown several times in the documentary by protestors. Here we see how News24 frames the documentary to showcase how distinct groups of people exercise a certain type of power over others. The documentary and the movement serve as agents against dominant ideologies, challenging them in the cultural domain. By controlling the narrative, News24 captures women rejecting the power of the law and it conveys how political technologies such as social media can be mobilized by populations to challenge powerful ideologies. Graça Machel, a respected politician and social activist, was at the time of the protest the outgoing Chancellor of UCT. She states in the documentary that ‘something absolutely, deeply wrong is happening in our society’. Uyinene’s death happened when Women’s Month was ending; thus, various women were attending women-centric gatherings during the period. UCT Vice Chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng is shown talking to protestors with a loudspeaker, shouting: It is not right that young women have to think twice before they go into the public…before going into the streets. We want to live freely; we want to walk freely. In 1994 when we voted, we thought we voted for our liberation, but it seems we went into another form of bondage.

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Machel and Phakeng’s speeches are received well by protestors, because they are relatable. Both are Black women in leadership positions at one of the country’s most prestigious universities and understand the plight of marginalized and vulnerable groups in SA’s societies. #IamHer, #SheisUs, #WeAreHer, #IamNene are hashtags used in the documentary to highlight the massive effects rape and murder has on individuals. Given SA’s intolerable levels of gender-specific murder and rape, any of the women in the video or elsewhere in SA could become the name on behalf of which the next such protest is held. Mbinjama (2021, p.  241) explains how at local and national levels, disciplinarian forms of power are rebuked and mocked through online movements. In the documentary Ramaphosa and Cele are not trusted as they deliver speeches because they not only represent government but are Black men (like Zuma) who are products of colonialism and apartheid in which they carry elements of patriarchy and male privilege as character attributes (Gqola 2015). As such, they are removed from the threat of rape by virtue of their gender and privileged positions as members of the executive. Foucault’s governmentality is generally associated with the willing participation of the governed, but the #AmINext? movement represents citizens unwilling to become mere docile bodies to be used by juridical power. When Ramaphosa says, ‘I know what you are going through’, his words are met with disbelief as SA has a hypermasculinity problem, as epitomized by Zuma and Botha. Uyinene Mrwetyana’s case is very different from ‘Khwezi’s’. The former was killed by her assailant who was later convicted; this suggests that there was some sense of justice for the life that was lost. There was also sufficient evidence gathered to convict Botha, which is why he chose to confess and acknowledge his guilt. The latter experienced a different type of marginalization since she accused Zuma of raping her; he was acquitted of the sexual allegations and went on to become the President of SA. News24’s AmINext documentary is not only a complementary media response to the online feminist movement #AmINext? but it also provides audiences with a culmination of difficult deaths; all have not experienced a real sense of justice. Even though Uyinene’s rapist and killer is serving prison time, she lost her life. She was a young person who had great aspirations for the future, but her life was cut short by Botha who later on expressed in court that Uyinene fought him till the end. This is what makes accepting her death even more difficult. Firstly, why did she have to fight him in the first place as Uyinene’s passion for fashion and arts is what

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took her to the post office; to retrieve a parcel with items she ordered online. How could this result in death? Returning to the documentary, ‘Our Nation Weeps’ and ‘Not her fault, it’s his’ is one of the signs a protestor holds up in support of the movement. The narrator later on explains how Uyinene was born in the Eastern Cape (one of the poorest provinces in SA). Lisa Vetten, a gender activist and researcher at Wits University, comments to say that there are many women who get killed per month but never make it onto social media yet Uyinene’s case shows that social media decides who is the national subject. A young, Black female student killed for no apparent reason than her being born female shows how very little this demographic is regarded in society by its male counterparts.

#RememberKhwezi and No to Rape Culture! Uyinene’s brutal death sparked memories of ‘Khwezi’s’ rape ordeal because both have been prominent in South African media. In the documentary, protestors are seen with posters that say, ‘Remember Kwezi’, ‘No to Rape Culture’, ‘Evil prevails while good men do nothing’ and ‘It’s not #AmINext. It’s become when I’m next will I survive?’ Unfortunately, Uyinene did not survive the sexual assault. One can draw parallels between 'Khwezi' and Uyinene.  The legal and moral arguments of Zuma’s rape trial are ones that need to be revisited, as they symbolize the patriarchal and political systems at play in the country. Zuma was not determinedly asked if he committed the crime. He was the senior; he had the power. He exploited his power, knowing ‘Khwezi’ since she was a young girl and that she considered him a second father, after her own father had died in a car crash. Botha, a government employee, on the other hand used his position as a government employee  by luring Uyinene back into the post office after hours so  he could rape and kill her. The documentary shows ‘Khwezi’s’ name so that one remembers the unsatisfactory way that her story ended, with no justice. The documentary focuses on the death of women who were remembered for being victims of  rape culture and gender-­based violence just like ‘Khwezi’. Ratele (2006, p. 49) states that, during the trial, she referred to Zuma as umalume, meaning uncle in isiZulu. Ratele (2006, pp. 48–64) explains how Zuma’s ruling masculinity and sexuality played itself out inside and outside the court. During his trial, Zuma said that, in his culture, a Zulu man could even be accused of rape for leaving a woman sexually aroused. He said that ‘Khwezi’ wanted to have sex because she was dressed in a khanga (also spelled kanga)—a

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large piece of colourful printed fabric that most African people use, especially women, to wrap around their bodies; which some use to sleep in or wear around the house when cooking and cleaning, and with which babies are carried. Zuma also mentioned that he had taken a shower after having sex with ‘Khwezi’ to reduce the risk of infection (News24.com 2006). In Uyinene’s case, she did not know her perpetrator, yet he lured her to return to the post office after hours, locked her in there, raped and killed her. It could be argued that he felt protected by his position as a government employee to commit the violent acts and to continue with his life, exemplified by simply going out for a drink afterwards before heading home. News24’s documentary does not focus so much on Botha, but the actual sadness, anger, pain and shock experienced by Uyinene’s friends, family, community, and general public. In the documentary, one of the women comments that there is a school opposite to where Botha worked (at the post office) and some said they used to see and talk to him when they would visit the post office. Thus, the idea that any one of them or their children could have been Botha’s victim is a chilling realization as he certainly did not look like a criminal but a regular government official working for public service and attending to their needs at the post office. Uyinene’s death is a reminder that any woman and child can be raped and killed violently in SA by someone who is meant to be of service to the public.

Conclusion Rape and femicide are made up of complex structures of power and ideology which have constructed the female body as the site on which power and ideologies are enacted. This chapter reveals that the war against women is evident through the accounts of many Black women who have died through various forms of violence whilst in their homes, marriages, communities, political organisations, or by merely going to the post office in SA. It is nearly impossible to fully comprehend or analyse the rape and femicide crisis in SA. In the context of the documentary considered here and how online feminist movements emerged in SA, one can safely articulate that concerned citizens acquired knowledge from #MeToo movement by ‘following a set of complex hidden cultural rules for discourse’ (Gibson 2020, p.  239). What should be noted is that #JusticeForKhwezi came about in 2015, ten years after ‘Khwezi’s’ alleged rape and again in 2016 during and after the silent protest of #RememberKhwezi and recently in

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2019 when Uyinene’s death caused a revolutionary reaction amongst women and other supporting groups against gender-based violence. When Uyinene was raped and killed, there was a different type of outcry from the nation compared to the response during ‘Khwezi’s’ trial in 2005. This is because of the increase in rape and femicide while the conviction rate remains low, thus causing women to become more reluctant to report incidences of rape or abuse. There has also been an increase in ‘corrective rape’, homophobic rape or lesbian rape over the years (Stats SA 2018). These issues have now become widely shared and discussed by Black Twitter, and other social media sites which has resulted in South Africans participating in online feminist resistance and activism against gender-­ based violence. News24’s documentary is only a short glimpse into a death that resulted from a visit to the post office. With the looming statistics of women and children dying daily in the country, but very little justice as outcomes to the crimes, one is left with a grave concern for the future of women and children in SA.  Ironically, Uyinene died in the post office, which is opposite the police station, which is another indicator that men in SA do not fear the law nor do they fear protective and judiciary services because they are also dominated by men and unfortunately some are corrupt and criminals themselves. This makes the feminist movements about these kinds of deaths challenging, as it is so difficult to attain justice. Black women and children are marginalized groups that can be easily used and discarded. News24’s documentary, as well as the social media hashtags and broader social movements discussed here, is able to reveal these social inequalities.

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CHAPTER 10

‘A Prison for the Dead’: Hart Island and Spatial Histories of Marginalization Fiona L. Kenney

Introduction ‘It’s like we’re visiting an inmate in prison.… But then, that’s what Hart Island is, a prison for the dead,’ stated Rosalee Grable in a 2015 interview for the Guardian (Walshe 2015). Grable, whose mother died at 85 years old and is buried on the island, had been active at public hearings, advocating that the island be preserved and that the dead be treated with dignity. She had been denied visits multiple times for multiple reasons: a paperwork error, or no visits scheduled on Mothers’ Day. Her mother being buried in a mass grave did not bother Grable who, unable to afford an alternative, said she would be buried on the Island herself when the time came. ‘They call it a “mass grave.” But this is New York City,’ she said. ‘You live in an apartment, and you find yourself dead in an apartment. My mom just has a lot of neighbors’ (Murdock 2015).

F. L. Kenney (*) Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_10

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A visitor like Rosalee has two options. Until July 1, 2021, when responsibility was transferred to the Department of Parks & Recreation and the Department of Social Services, the Island was managed by the Department of Corrections (DOC), making access even more difficult. Each time she wanted to visit her mother’s grave, she had to prove a ‘close relationship’ and ‘that the deceased [was] buried on the island’ before she would be granted a gravesite visit (City of New  York Department of Corrections n.d.). She was required to submit a Visit Request Form at least five days in advance, and to select from a list of scheduled visit times: two days a month, at 9:00 am and 12:00 pm each day, for a two-hour visit. Each scheduled visit could accommodate up to fifteen visitors. The second option, before it was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was a gazebo visit: open to the general public, these visits did not go as far as the graves and were offered at 9:00 am on the third Thursday of every month. Visitors were ‘escorted to a designated location at the gazebo and [remained] there for the entirety of the visit’ (City of New York Department of Corrections n.d.). Regardless of which visit type one chose, identification had to be presented upon arrival at the City Island dock and a liability form signed. All visitors were subject to search by DOC officers. Rosalee Grable died in 2016. According to the Hart Island Project’s (HIP) burial records, she is buried at Plot 376, Section III, Grave 6. Her mother, Gladys Van Aelst, is buried at Plot 365, Grave 30 (The Hart Island Project n.d.). The DOC’s maps identify plots up to 345; the Grables’ graves are not locatable in DOC documents, making it difficult to pinpoint the grave. *** Four times a week, New York’s unidentified or unclaimed dead were transported by truck to City Island, at the western end of Long Island Sound and part of Bronx Community District 10. The bodies, packed into pine boxes marked with identifying numbers in black permanent marker, were then loaded onto a ferry to be delivered to Hart Island, a third of a mile away. Eight incarcerated individuals from the nearby Rikers Island prison complex, supervised by seven DOC staff members, would then unload the boxes. If the identity of the deceased was known, their last name was scrawled onto the box—if not, a number. The pine boxes containing the bodies were stacked three deep in each trench, allowing for the burial of ‘between 150 to 162 adults and 1,000 infant and fetal remains per trench’

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(New York City Council n.d.). ‘It’s like a warning for people who want to do better for themselves,’ said an individual who worked on the island burying bodies during his incarceration at Rikers. ‘I’ve seen my last name on one [casket]. It’s kind of scary, it makes you think. I don’t want to wind up here’ (Seitz and Miller 1996, 144). This was virtually the same procedure as had been in place since burial began on the island in the nineteenth century. It is estimated that over one million people are buried on the Island today. Situated off the eastern edge of the Bronx, New  York, east of City Island, Hart Island is a mile long and has served as the site of numerous interventionist projects since the mid-nineteenth century. The land had been managed by the New York Department of Correction (DOC) until just last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a state of emergency for the strain it placed on State and City operations and social services. As of July 1, 2021, jurisdiction of the land belongs to the Parks Department and the Department of Social Services, with the continuation of burial operations being of the utmost importance (‘Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of Corrections, the Parks Department, and the Department of Social Services’ 2021). From quarantine stations to a psychiatric hospital, the island’s varied public use history has always revolved around the containment and disposal of society’s most marginalized, both in life and in death. This chapter focuses on the spatial, political, and economic entwining of burial and imprisonment on Hart Island, in order to argue its specific landscape has lent itself particularly well to this weaponization—and that its troubled ownership pattern has rendered this weaponization all the more effective. How are geography and landscape deployed to marginalize difficult deaths? How do they contribute to and sustain narratives about the difficult dead?

Histories of Marginalization Hart Island has served as a convenient and effective site for the isolation and alienation of ‘difficult’ populations for hundreds of years, with an archaeological assessment completed in 2017 finding no information regarding use of the island prior to the mid-1800s (Loorya and Kao 2017, 15). These functions entered public awareness in 2020 when quarantine, isolation, and distance became central to our collective vernacular.

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Sometimes referred to as ‘Hart’s Island’ in archives and newspaper articles, the island’s use as a public cemetery (or ‘potter’s field’) began in 1869. At this time, prison labour sourced from the penitentiary on nearby Blackwell’s Island was used for the burial of bodies unclaimed or unidentified after their death (The Hart Island Project, n.d.). Mass burials began on Hart Island six years later. Due to its isolation, the island has often been a top choice for forced medical quarantine during public health crises. People suffering with tuberculosis, declared to be infectious by the New York City Department of Health in 1894, were quarantined on the island in the early twentieth century. The bodies of victims of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s were buried on a remote tip of the island, separate from the mass graves for fear of infection spreading. Tuberculosis was declared to be infectious by the New  York City Department of Health in 1894, and tuberculosis patients began to be quarantined on the island in the early twentieth century. The Department required public institutions to report the names and addresses of all infected people, and in 1904 instituted a forcible detainment policy for tubercular patients who did not follow regulations. After 1900, the disease was concentrated among the poor—in particular people of colour. The poor were targeted disproportionately not only by the illness but also by state responses to it: ‘the determinants for forcible detention of tuberculosis patients included the financial resources of the family, thus ensuring that rich and poor were treated very differently’ (Abel 1997, 1809). As noted previously, the bodies of victims of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s were buried spatially separated from the mass graves for fear of infection spreading. In 1985, the first bodies of AIDS victims arrived on the island to be buried—the only bodies to ever arrive in body bags instead of pine boxes. Uncertainty if dead bodies were still contagious thus caused a change in means of disposal. The individuals from Rikers tasked with burying these bodies were given protective clothing so as to avoid infection. Once it was learned that the corpses were not contagious, the usual practice of mass grave burial was resumed, often digging up graves to add bodies. By the mid-1990s, more than 8000 people in New York City were dying of AIDS annually (Kilgannon 2018). With the crisis overwhelming public health resources, medical personnel dedicated their attention and resources to treating the living. Once a patient died, the fate of the body was deemed irrelevant and records seldom kept: dying from so stigmatized a disease only to be buried anonymously in a mass grave was described as a ‘double indignity’ by the daughter of a man

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buried this way (Kilgannon 2018). Long-standing stigma attached to the island and the virus and general upset with the burial practices have made city agencies and the DOC unwilling to share records or data regarding AIDS. What’s more, private burials were near impossible to arrange for these people as funeral homes, too, feared the spread of infection. Mass burial was often the only option. Like the New York City Department of Health, the DOC has a history of using Hart and its surrounding islands for the separation of ‘dangerous’ individuals from the mainland. Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt) was the main base of the DOC from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s (Belcher 2021). Inmates from the prison on Blackwell’s were transferred to the newly acquired Rikers upon its acquisition by the City in 1884. As early as 1895, when ‘the department of corrections established a jail workhouse on the island for aged and infirm inmates, misdemeanants, and drug addicts,’ varied marginal and undesirable populations were entwined with each other on Hart Island (Seitz and Miller 1996, 141). After World War II, the prison population was moved to Rikers to make room for barracks, and prisoners were moved back and forth between Hart and Rikers Islands due to overcrowding in the years following the war. Until 2021, as in the 1800s, incarcerated individuals were fully responsible for the burial of incoming unidentified and unclaimed bodies. An 1885 article in the New York Tribune reported that ‘the men go about their work at the pits as carelessly as if they were handling logs. Sometimes the coffins are broken, and parts of a human body may be seen exposed, and laughs and jibes are heard as it is dashed into a hole. […] They contain the remains of the dead from the hospital dissecting rooms’ (New York Tribune 1885). Each weekday Rikers prisoners were transported to Hart via ferry to perform burials, disinterments, and general maintenance. Today, more than a million people are buried on the land in unmarked graves, with approximately 10% of adult burials being unidentified (Bernstein 2016). The rest are unclaimed or could not afford funerals. The largest public burial ground in the country, the dead are rendered ‘nameless and innumerable, obscure and obscured’ (Murray 2006, 192). Hart Island has thus served as a geographical location to place difficult populations, ranging from people in prison to the dead bodies of people who died of AIDS. The landscape is littered with difficult bodies, both dead and alive, and tells the history of groups of people whose voices have been largely ignored throughout history. Hidden away from other parts of

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society, this small piece of land shows the complicated and multi-layered history of this landscape, and how this history continues to unravel into the present.

Landscapes of Marginalization Cultural attitudes have a long history of being legible in the built environment. Epidemics like yellow fever and cholera stoked a public perception of cemeteries as carriers of these diseases, stoking the push of American cemeteries out of city centres, and allowing a spatial separation of the diseased dead from the healthy living. Islands, in their own right, hold cultural currency as trapping, isolating, and housing evil—think Shutter Island (2010) or the dark-tourism-lore of hauntings at Alcatraz. Quarantine is necessarily spatial, physically separating those considered ‘dangerous’ to public health from the ‘vulnerable’ rest of the population. Derived from the Italian quaranta giorni meaning forty days, quarantine was originally a temporal isolation, but by ‘the late modern period the prominence of spatiality in problematizing disease produced a notion of quarantine which always turned on questions of both space and time, and, if anything attributed a primary significance to geography, the element of “isolation”’ (Bashford 2004, 130). Since their first iterations, quarantine mandates have spatially restricted the movement of ‘dangerous’ populations: those with communicable diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the role of space in managing the spread of illness. The pandemic saw an increased number of bodies being buried on Hart Island as the city’s death rate skyrocketed, not unlike the Island’s designation as a temporary burial site when the influenza pandemic of 2008 ravaged New  York City. Viral drone footage published by The Washington Post shows the grim reality of the Island’s use during the COVID-19 pandemic. With spatial isolation inherent and access to these landscapes organically difficult, island landscapes lend themselves naturally to function as a border between the healthy and the sick, and the City of New York turned to its island stock as solutions to ‘problematic’ populations. In addition to making use of the Pelham Islands archipelago, of which Hart Island is part, the federal government built two artificial islands, Hoffman and Swinburne islands, for use as quarantine stations during the cholera and yellow fever outbreaks of the late nineteenth century; today, neither island is in use or accessible to the public (Freeman Gill 2020). While Hoffman still has only the foundations of medical buildings long-since razed, some of the original buildings still stand on Swinburne.

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Not only do the islands themselves represent geographies of marginalization, but the islands off the shore of the Bronx, historically the borough with the highest proportion of non-white residents and the highest rates of poverty, have disproportionate histories of use for these purposes compared to islands off the shore of Brooklyn or Manhattan (United States Census Bureau 2018). North Brother Island, for example, originally housed a smallpox hospital and tuberculosis sanatorium; South Brother Island was New York City’s first dump for bodies and biowaste; Rat Island served as an overflow site for the Hart Island prison and a quarantine site during the yellow fever outbreaks; the city’s main jail complex has been housed on Rikers Island since the 1930s. In this way, the landscape becomes doubly implicated in the New York City islands’ narrative of ‘difficult’ lives and ‘difficult’ death.

Double Indignity: Erasing the ‘Difficult’ Dead The New York Times reported in 1859 that ‘the great problem of the age seems to be, to establish a Quarantine without having it located anywhere’ (18 March 1859, 4). Hart Island perfectly exemplifies the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia (Vural 2019), a discursive space that is physically separate but mirrors social norms, with Foucault’s examples including cemeteries and prisons (Foucault 1984). It also embodies the margins, or a state of exception, a ‘necessary entailment of the state, much as the exception is a necessary component of the rule’ allowing for a spatial illustration of deeply embedded denial (Das and Poole 2004, 4). The margins are ‘peripheries,’ forming ‘natural containers for people considered insufficiently socialized into the law’ (Das and Poole 2004, 9). In the history of the Island, the landscape has conveniently sequestered lives and deaths deemed ‘difficult’ by the state: the mentally ill, the sick, the incarcerated, and, most famously, the unidentified or unclaimed dead. The state’s diverse uses for Hart Island since the nineteenth century have compounded to produce a complex, lasting ecosystem of marginality and disposal. At different scales, all forms of denial have social origins, ‘learnt by ordinary cultural transmission, and [drawn] from a well-­established, collectively available pool’ (Cohen 2001, 59). According to Cohen, the ‘social conditions that give rise to atrocities merge into the official techniques for denying these realities—not just to observers, but even to the perpetrators themselves’ (Cohen 2001, 10).

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Death looms everywhere on the island. Architecturally, ‘the island is littered with abandoned structures: Gutted jail administration buildings greet the ferry on the eastern shore; a greenhouse once operated by recovering drug addicts is overrun with weeds; a Catholic church, built in 1939 and emptied of its stained-glass windows, altar, and pews, feels cavernous, dwarfing the figure of a saint left in a nook by a visiting member of St. Benedict’s’ (Seitz and Miller 1996, 143). The erasure of any clues as to the site’s history strips it and the populations who have moved through it of their place in collective memory. Hart Island embodies what De Leon calls a ‘zone of confinement, a place no upstanding citizen is supposed to see’ (2015, 64). Death on Hart Island is also made more difficult for those grieving. As contended by Avril Maddrell, mourning is inherently both a spatial and temporal phenomenon (2010, 123). Ambiguous loss, described by clinical psychologist Pauline Boss as grief without closure or resolution, also complicates mourning (2000, 10). For years, it was nearly impossible to find information about a loved one suspected of being buried on the island, let alone to visit the grounds. Rosalee Grable’s mourning was impeded by the complexity of locating, finding information about, and visiting her mother amidst the island’s bureaucratic and geographic hurdles. Marginality, like that of those incarcerated, dead, or seeking to grieve on the island, can be left to compound, or these populations can be pushed further into exclusion or exception by direct state action. In this way, state power at the margins ‘is now twofold: it is direct violence that many condone by recognition or omission, or minimally acknowledge via pseudonyms or socially acceptable metaphors (…) it is also the space of abandonment, and a practice of abandonment as a form of rule, in which direct violence is made possible, logical, and uncontestable’ (Willis 2018, 549). The Island has served as a convenient and effective site for the isolation of ‘difficult’ populations for hundreds of years, the landscape providing a putative border between the mainland and its heterotopia-on-the-water. Hart Island and its inhabitants, dead and alive, embody and occupy the margins—a geographical periphery. Whether a heterotopia, a state of exception, or a space of denial, or a challenging, elusive griefspace, the landscape becomes an agent in maintaining power dynamics and in keeping certain deaths difficult.

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Conclusion: Challenging Difficult Death This chapter has shown the complicated and multi-faceted history of a small piece of land, and the challenging interplay between difficult living and difficult dead bodies. From the start, Hart Island has been used as a space of separation, and the landscape continues to divide people to this day. The history of the island has been slowly uncovered and recovered through The Hart Island Project. The Hart Island Project (HIP) was founded in 1994 by artist Melinda Hunt and incorporated as a public charity in 2011. The project has primarily focused on public advocacy, mapping, and historical research. It has maintained an online database of burials from 1980 to present and has engaged designers to map grave locations. With a team primarily made up of designers and attorneys, the Hart Project has improved access to and awareness of the island, mapping trenches using GPS data and engaging in public advocacy. Through awareness, access, and research, the Hart Island Project has worked to transform both the liminality and denial of the space and its inhabitants, seeking to reverse the dynamics of death and disposal on Hart Island. This will, hopefully, make the bodies kept on the island less ‘difficult.’ This chapter has demonstrated the various uses of the island throughout history, but also showed the ongoing developments on the island. And things continue to change. In November 2019, encouraged by the HIP advocacy, then–New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill that would see control of the island transferred from the DOC to the Department of Parks and Recreation. In 2021, with a hand forced by the pandemic, Parks and Recreation took control along with the Department of Social Services. Melinda Hunt’s project, ongoing since 1994, has been working to highlight the problematic withholding of burial records and information, historical documents, and rationale for the Department’s decisions. This reassignment of ownership is long overdue, signalling an optimism that there may be a future in which the island emerges from the margins. In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic saw an increased number of bodies being buried on Hart Island as the city’s death rate skyrocketed, not unlike the Island’s designation as a temporary burial site when the influenza pandemic of 2008 ravaged New York City, and this became the tipping point for change. Improved transportation, a relaxing of security, and an opening of visit restrictions are just some of changes expected that could serve to bring the island and its inhabitants out of obscurity.

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Hopefully, with increased public access and attention, those quarantined, incarcerated, and buried over the last 200 years can be remembered. Abandonment is the protagonist of Hart Island’s story: ‘the uncertified potter’s field is a terrestrial manifestation of what a politics of abandonment makes possible,’ writes Graham D. Willis (2018, 559). Architecture and landscape are here both evidence of and central to abandonment and denial. The landscape serves to complicate already difficult deaths, removing them from public view and anonymizing the bodies of those deaths considered ‘difficult.’

References Abel, Emily K. 1997. Taking the Cure to the Poor: Patients’ Responses to New York City’s Tuberculosis Program, 1894 to 1918. American Journal of Public Health 87 (11): 1808–1815. Bashford, Alison. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Belcher, Ellen. 2021. New York Prisons and Jails: Historical Research. https:// guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/NYPrisons/NYCJails. Bernstein, Nina. 2016. Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves. The New York Times, May 15, 2016, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-­york-­mass-­graves-­hart-­island.html. Boss, Pauline. 2000. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. City of New York Department of Corrections. n.d. Hart Island. Accessed 5 Jan 2022. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hartisland/index.page. Cohen, Stanley. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole, eds. 2004. The State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies. In Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. De Leon, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. Translated from Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5: 46–49. Freeman Gill John, 2020. Islands Created for Quarantines. The New York Times, 22 May 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/realestate/ quarantine-­hoffman-­island-­swinburne.html. Kilgannon, Corey. 2018. Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field. The New York Times, 3 July.

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Loorya, Alyssa, and Eileen Kao. 2017. ‘Documentary Study and Archaeological Assessment for the Hart Island, Bronx (Bronx County), New York – Shoreline Stabilization Project.’ http://s-­media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/arch_reports/ 1773.pdf. ‘Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of Correction, the Parks Department, and the Department of Social Services.’ 2021. Murdock, Sebastian. 2015. Island of the Dead Gets New Life As Mourners Visit Graves for First Time. Huffington Post, 21 July. https://www.huffpost.com/ entry/hart-­island-­visitors_n_55ad5328e4b065dfe89f1346. Murray, Stuart J. 2006. Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life. Polygraph 18: 191–215. New York City Council. n.d. Hart Island: The City Cemetery. New  York City Council. Accessed 12 Jan 2022. https://council.nyc.gov/data/hart-­island/. New York Tribune. 1885. City of the Unknown Dead: Where Friendless Ones Are Buried—Scenes at Die Potter’s Field on Hart’s Island — 150 Bodies in a Grave. 12 July. https://www.proquest.com/docview/573235253/BB31223AD135 4E5FPQ/1?accountid=12339. Seitz, Sharon, and Stuart Miller. 1996. The Other Islands of New  York City: A Historical Companion. Woodstock: The Woodstock Press. The Hart Island Project. n.d. The Hart Island Project. Accessed 12 Jan 2022. https://www.hartisland.net/. ‘The Quarantine Question.’ The New York Times, 18 March 1859. https://www. proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/docview/91469435/238E013B0D7B498 4PQ/1?accountid=12339. Vural, Leyla. 2019. Potter’s Field as Heterotopia: Death and Mourning at New York City’s Edge. Oral History 47 (2): 106–116. Walshe, Sadhbh. 2015. ‘Like a Prison for the Dead’: Welcome to Hart Island, Home to New York City’s Pauper Graves. The Guardian, 3 June 2015. https:// www.theguardian.com/us-­n ews/2015/jun/03/hart-­i sland-­n ew-­y orkcity-­mass-­burial-­graves. Willis, Graham D. 2018. The Potter’s Field. Comparative Studies in Society and History 60 (3): 538–568.

CHAPTER 11

Hamnet Shakespeare: A Difficult Dead Celebrity Child Edel Semple

Hamnet Shakespeare’s fame arises from his premature death. In historical biography and literary criticism Hamnet would be guaranteed celebrity status as the only son of William Shakespeare and, by association, as his name is similar to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most famous play. However, Hamnet’s death at the age of 11 adds tragedy and mystery to his history. In addition, the scant facts of the boy’s biography (born in 1585, one of a pair of twins, he died in 1596), along with the apparent absence of a response to his death from his literary genius father, makes Hamnet an inviting subject for creative appropriation. As I will show, Hamnet’s literary afterlife is worth exploring because he represents a nexus between the issues of child death, parental grief, and the social role of art. While Hamnet died more than four centuries ago, the last decade has seen a flurry of representations of this dead child. Shakespeare was first resurrected in the theatre in the late seventeenth century, and the success of Shakespeare in Love (1998) led to an upsurge in Bard biofictions in the

E. Semple (*) University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_11

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ensuing decades, but it is remarkable how Hamnet has been central in recent works on the page, stage, and screen. He is the star of the one-boy play Hamnet (Dead Centre 2017), a recurring character in the BBC sitcom Upstart Crow (2016–2018), a spectral presence at the heart of Kenneth Branagh’s biopic All Is True (2018), and the focus of Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet (2020). For all their differences in form and style, each of these works, I propose, depicts Hamnet’s death as difficult due to his symbolism and Shakespeare’s dual status as literary icon and parent. In life and afterlife, these four texts grant Hamnet a voice as well as the agency to engage audiences, giving them insights into and facilitating reflection on the difficult issues of death and grief. Moreover, I argue that whether on the page, stage, or screen, these representations of Hamnet use Shakespeare’s body of work to suggest that art aids in understanding and coping with loss. Across media, Hamnet is a symbol of innocence, futurity, and vulnerability. Since ‘children tend to serve as both indices of cultural nostalgia and harbingers of potential yet to be realized’ (Campana 2011, 8), Hamnet’s premature death inspires mourning for and with him, but also for what he represents. This is apparent in the play Hamnet, where the setting of a hellmouth means the theatre becomes ‘a transversal space that allows us to imagine crossing the boundaries of life and death’ (O’Neill 2021, 211), as well as place and time. Thus, in Dead Centre’s production the audience readily accept the eponymous protagonist is Shakespeare’s long-dead son and a lively twenty-first-century pre-teen who can use Google on his phone. This Hamnet is an eternal child; he is inexperienced, unworldly, and striving to comprehend his personal situation and life’s big questions. From the play’s opening lines, Hamnet establishes a genial rapport with the audience and co-opts their help and attention in his search for answers. Early in the play, quoting from what he calls ‘the most famous speech in the world’, Hamnet says: To be, are not to be: that is the question. I can’t say the rest so I don’t know the answer. When I find out I’ll be a great man and be able to do whatever I want. Until then I have to do what I’m told. I’m only 11. But I’ve been 11 for years. I don’t know why. (Dead Centre 2017, 11)

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Hamnet is consumed by the idea of greatness—what it is, how to achieve it, who should be his role models in becoming great—and the audience are observers of and participants in his examinations of this and other concerns both mundane and profound. Hamnet idolises his father as the ultimate authority figure. When he appears though, he often fails to answer his son’s questions: ‘What’s a wanker? […] Why did you go away? […] Why would anyone choose not to be?’ (24, 26, 27). For all of Hamnet and the audience’s expectations, Shakespeare turns out to be both a ‘great man’ and just ‘a man’ (26); flawed and fallible, he is unable to justify or explain his actions, or to help his son. When Hamnet asks his father about Hamlet’s ‘sea of troubles’, he brings to mind the deaths of other children familiar to the audience. Specifically, Hamnet refers to the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean in September 2015. The photograph of his small corpse on a Turkish beach made international headlines and prompted an outcry over the refugee crisis: SHAKESPEARE: […] why are you thinking about people drowning? HAMNET: There was a picture of a boy washed up on the beach. SHAKESPEARE: Where? HAMNET: On my phone. On the news. SHAKESPEARE: You shouldn’t be watching the news at your age. HAMNET: Did he choose ‘not to be?’ SHAKESPEARE: You shouldn’t be watching the news. HAMNET: What was his name? SHAKESPEARE: I don’t know. [Pause] HAMNET: What is it like not to be? SHAKESPEARE: I don’t know. HAMNET: You don’t know much. (Dead Centre 2017, 28–29)

In this exchange, the audience are simultaneously distanced from the difficult issue of child mortality (by time, space, and art form) and must confront it via a dead character’s allusion to the recent death of a toddler. As Penfold-Mounce recognises, ‘news mediated dead [make for] controversial and uncomfortable viewing’ (2018, 107). Like these dead, Hamnet may discomfort the viewer, not only as he represents a real albeit historical dead boy, but also in his knowledge and querying of the death of a modern-­day child. Hamnet may also amuse the audience and stimulate discussion of social concerns; it is macabrely comic that Shakespeare, an

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adult and reputed genius, is uninformed and evasive on such a significant issue, and that the child Hamnet is too young to watch the news but is old enough to die. The audience are implicitly identified as the flawed, ‘guilty creatures sitting at a play’ (Dead Centre 2017, 16) and encouraged to reflect on their responses to shocking news footage and difficult questions about death and the refugee crisis. Hamnet’s death is presented as untimely and, so, especially lamentable. As the boy himself complains, he is stuck in this strange place and: ‘it’s like I’m being punished. But I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve done nothing! You can’t be guilty for doing nothing!’ (Dead Centre 2017, 15). Connecting the premature deaths of Hamnet and Alan Kurdi, the play figures both boys as symbols of a potential that will never be realised. These children have ‘done nothing’; they are not responsible for their deaths and have not lived long enough to experience much of anything. Hamnet is preoccupied by ‘nothing’, and this is unsurprising given that he is fixated on Hamlet, which has the second-most usages of the word in all of Shakespeare’s canon.1 Hamnet’s opening words to the audience draw attention to his connection to Hamlet and Hamnet’s authors underscore the almost reflexive association: ‘Hamnet is a typo. Write his name in a Word document and the little red squiggly line appears – an ignominy that does not befall his near namesake, Hamlet. He is one letter away from greatness’ (Kidd and Moukarzel 2017). ‘Nothing’ is also a concept that haunts the play and it is suggestive of Hamnet’s, and society’s, understanding of death. Throughout, Hamnet fears being nothing, insignificant and forgotten, and simply ceasing to exist. As he occupies an uncanny space betwixt life and afterlife and disappears occasionally from the audience’s view—on stage and on the projection screen behind it—his fears are a reasonable reaction to the real threat presented by death. Hamnet has ‘done nothing’ but he does not wish to be nothing, so he staves off this possibility with a revitalising mantra: ‘I choose to be. I choose to be’ (Dead Centre 2017, 22). To return to Hamnet and Alan Kurdi’s deaths, the play depicts both as not only personal tragedies but as irrevocable, far-reaching losses of the innocence, possibility, and hope that children embody. Death, grief, and social injustice are linked in a programme note to the 2017 production of Hamnet at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin: 1  ‘Nothing’ is used on 28 occasions in Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s corpus, only King Lear makes more frequent use of ‘nothing’, with 29 instances of the word.

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We are so often told to deal with grief through acceptance, we must accept reality. […] But, whilst [death] might be common, it may even be natural, that does not mean it should ever be acceptable. […] The dead haunt the living, and the living haunt the dead. Theatre stages that space, the dead holding the living to account, the living suspended like ghosts, in a world that is not always acceptable. (Kidd and Moukarzel 2017)

This statement from the playwrights suggests that Hamnet haunts the audience to hold it, and by extension contemporary society, to account. Acting as a kind of Virgilian guide,2 Hamnet brings the audience into his domain—which is temporary and comfortably fictional—to confront the unacceptability of child death, the difficulties of grief, the in/adequacies of state responses to tragedy, and personal and ‘cultural fears, norms, traditions, and perceptions about mortality’ (Penfold-Mounce 2018, 5). At the play’s finale, Hamnet quotes Hamlet’s dying words and then builds on them, asking the spectators: ‘To tell my story. Don’t worry. It isn’t very long. I didn’t do much. I did nothing. In this harsh world. We did nothing’ (Dead Centre 2017, 44). Hamnet’s agency is apparent as he instructs the audience to tell his story, and perhaps by implication, the truncated stories of other dead innocents too. In these closing lines he acts as a memento mori, calling the audience’s attention to their mortality and all of life’s possibilities. With a poignant final reminder that he and countless dead children ‘did nothing’, Hamnet implies that the living spectators can do something, and he prompts them to action, to choose ‘to be’. Whereas Hamnet is the hero of Dead Centre’s play, in Upstart Crow he is a recurring minor character. The series three finale, however, opens with news of Hamnet’s upcoming Confirmation. In this episode, Hamnet represents familial responsibilities for his sitcom-dad Will. Will is sceptical of the Church and reluctant to attend the Confirmation, and so he chooses professional pleasure—staying in London—over his son’s ‘spiritual wellbeing’ (Boden 2018, S3 E6). Later Will returns home and learns that ‘Hamnet’s dead’ from plague. As Will mocked the Church and acted selfishly, the sudden death of Hamnet may seem like a punishment for his paternal failings. However Anne, Will’s wife, steers her husband, and the audience, to interpret the death as part of God’s plan. To Anne, the loss of Hamnet proves that all children are vulnerable; it is a fact that ‘one in 2  In Dante’s The Divine Comedy the poet Virgil serves as Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory.

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three kids dies before they’re 11’ and ‘there isn’t a family in England that hasn’t got empty places at the table, and we have only one’ (Boden 2018, S3 E6). As Anna Blackwell observes, Anne’s faith is underscored by ‘the episode’s title, “Go On and I Will Follow”, which […] suggests that the Shakespeares will share in their son’s afterlife’ (2021, 136–137). With his only son dead, the bereaved Will seems to transfer his hope for the future to his two surviving children; he tells his eldest Sue that ‘Hamnet’s light’ continues as it shines ‘in you, in Judith, in his mother’s heart, and in mine’ (Boden 2018, S3 E6). This episode, like others in Upstart Crow, ends with an epilogue scene where Anne and Will rest companionably before the kitchen fire. Whereas normally the couple chat about recent events and close on a joke, which prompts the studio-audience’s laughter, this episode has the spouses silent while Will’s voiceover recites the now-famous speech on grief delivered by Constance in Shakespeare’s King John. It is unsurprising that the ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’ speech appears here as scholars have often used it to infer Shakespeare’s personal feelings on the loss of his son (Holderness 2015, 103).3 On the episode’s finale, Alessandra Petrina argues that ‘by using an undeniably moving passage, [the script] offers a superimposition of poetic production over biography that is proposed as an indisputable fact’ (Petrina 2020, 124). This may be the case, but I suggest that Constance’s speech also constructively links grief and art. Will grapples with bereavement through a piece of creative fiction, here his own ‘poetic production’. Like Constance, Will takes solace in grief because it reminds him of his lost son. The episode pays a final homage to Hamnet by ending with an obituary on a black screen: ‘Hamnet Shakespeare / Only son of Anne and William Shakespeare / January 1585 to August 1596’. A key power of popular culture, according to Penfold-Mounce, is that it ‘neutralises discomfort with death. It is a safe, fictional, unreal space; it is a lens through which to witness human mortality’ (2018, 115). The sitcom format of Upstart Crow provides a natural limit and counteraction to discomfort with mortality in this episode. The sitcom’s audience vicariously engage with death and grief through the characters and obituary, but the sombre tone is short-lived and life goes on in the next episode. At the beginning of Branagh’s All Is True, Will retires to Stratford, where he encounters the ghost of his son. At first Will and the audience mistake the child for a stableboy, until the restless spirit asks a strange  Constance’s speech is also spoken by Shakespeare in Dead Centre’s Hamnet (2017, 41).

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question and then disappears: ‘I had a story, but it was never finished. Will you finish it for me please?’ In their depiction of Hamnet, Branagh and scriptwriter Ben Elton draw on Shakespearean drama where children ‘occupy a powerful space in the ways in which they erupt into the adult world: often disenfranchised, excluded, or oppressed, children belong to a counter-narrative in which the adult world is confronted, rarely successfully, by its own failings’ (Scott 2018, 29). Seemingly a suppressed spectre until now, Hamnet erupts into Will’s quiet life where his request for help brings about the exposure of family rifts and parental failings. By the finale of All Is True, because Will learns the true story of his son’s life and death, he and his family are restored and reconciled. Hamnet’s story initially seems to be that of lost potential in All Is True. Will comments to Anne that ‘He showed such promise’, and later recalls how he encouraged his ‘brilliant boy’ by saying that his poetry made him ‘the proudest father in the kingdom’. In his preoccupation with Hamnet’s writing, Will seems to be troubled not simply by the death of his only son, but also by the loss of his own futurity. Will’s genius, his legacy that would live on through his male heir, is lost.4 This seems especially affecting as Will has retired from the theatre, the institution that brought him fame and fortune, but kept him from his son while he was alive. Will’s long-­ supressed grief finds an outlet in his construction of a memorial garden for Hamnet, but his return home and fixation on his son stirs up buried emotions for the Shakespeares. On one hand, Judith is angry at her father’s favouritism and seeming belief that ‘the wrong twin’ died. On the other hand, Anne resents Will’s abandonment of his family and his unfeeling response to Hamnet’s death. She criticises her husband’s belated mourning for their son, accusing him of self-pity: ‘It’s not Hamnet you mourn, it’s yourself. […] Now, you mourn him now, at the time, you wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor’. An audience could agree with Anne’s conclusion that Will was callous or weak, or more sympathetically, view his professional ambition after Hamnet’s death as a way to avoid grief. However, All Is True shores up Shakespeare’s iconic status and affirms his humanity by mitigating his actions, if not excusing them entirely, by depicting a heartfelt confession.

4  I discuss gender and Will’s mourning in my article ‘Anti-Shakespeare Shrews: Women and Sexism in Upstart Crow and All Is True’ in a forthcoming Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, edited by Kavita Mudan Finn and Jonathan Pope.

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Alone with the Stratford cleric, Will views the entry on Hamnet’s death in the church records. With tears in his eyes, Will confesses that his writing was actually a method of remembrance and resurrection. Fantasising about an exchange of places, Will declares: ‘I imagine that it’s not me who thinks of him at all, but that I am dead and Hamnet lives, and it’s him who thinks of me’. He claims he wrote ‘play after play after play’ with ease because in doing so he ‘was always in the company of [his] son’. In this scene, Hamnet has a kind of agency as it appears he inspired, or at the least aided, his father’s writing. However, Hamnet is also a source of guilt as it emerges that Will was in London when his son died: ‘Hamnet died and I wasn’t here, I know that. […] We lost our boy, I know that! And I wasn’t here!’ Guilt-ridden at his absences and inability to prevent his child’s death, Will cleaves to his son’s poems as a tangible testament to his paternal love. Hamnet’s papers are sacred because they simultaneously prove his brilliance and Will’s connection to the boy. (It is notable too that only Will and the film’s audience see Hamnet’s ghost, affirming the poet’s superiority via his access to the immortal realm and also increasing viewers’ identification with the poet.) Will’s release of pent-up guilt ends up being cathartic for the family, as it leads to the revelation that Judith is the true author of the cherished poetry. With Hamnet no longer a genius-in-miniature freighted with all his father’s hopes and ambitions, Will claims he better understands his son. The truth about Hamnet seems to free Will of the burden of his own literary iconicity; his son was an ‘ordinary little boy’, and he can now mourn him as an ordinary father. Having been prompted to finish his son’s story, Will does so by unearthing his true cause of death. Although Hamnet reportedly died of plague, Will is suspicious and so he asks: ‘How did Hamnet die?’ Anne and Judith confess finally that Hamnet drowned, either by accident or by suicide, but they claimed otherwise so as to enable a Christian burial.5 With this news, Will rushes to Hamnet’s deathplace and is reunited with his son across the Greenwood Pond. Hamnet bestows a benediction on his father: ‘You finished it, thank you. My story’s done. I can rest now’. The boy smiles and disappears, leaving his father to fall asleep at the pond’s edge. Hamnet is invested with the agency to grant Will, and himself, peace, and so bring his story and Will’s to a satisfactory end. Solving the mystery of Hamnet’s death grants Will comfort and closure; when the poet dies only a few scenes later, it is peaceful and his family are united in their mourning.  This method of death links Hamnet with Ophelia in Hamlet, who dies by drowning.

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In Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, the eponymous boy-hero succeeds in cheating death by exchanging his life for his twin sister’s, and is posthumously resurrected in his father’s most famous play.6 Vulnerability is virtually a precondition of being a child in this biofictional novel. When Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, gives birth to the twins, Hamnet is a hardy infant, but Judith is weak. As Agnes knows well as a healer, the babies’ survival is uncertain: ‘She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible, that one of her children will die, because children do, all the time’ (O’Farrell 2020, 239). Judith sickens with the plague and looking at the buboes on her body, Agnes sees her death as inevitable: ‘What she has always dreaded is here. It has come. […] The pestilence has reached her house. It has made its mark around her child’s neck’ (O’Farrell 2020, 125). The novel’s recurrent foregrounding of dead children makes the death of Agnes’ child a certainty. Her children may have died many decades before, but Mary, Hamnet’s paternal grandmother, is eternally fixed as a bereaved mother. She does not anticipate the child’s death, she knows for a fact that history will repeat itself. To Mary, she and her daughter-in-law are powerless to prevent their children dying: There is nothing they can do now. Just as three of her own daughters were taken […] Judith will go from them. [… Agnes] would keep her here […] Mary knows this urge – she feels it; she has lived it; she is it, now and for ever. […] What is given may be taken away, at any time. (O’Farrell 2020, 195)

Tending to Judith, Agnes’ awareness of the girl’s proximity to death is heightened due to the presence of a spectral child. Even without looking, Agnes knows Anne, the twins’ aunt who died of the plague aged eight, is ‘in the room with them, over by the door […] Agnes makes herself form the thought, Anne, we know you are there, you are not forgotten. How frail, to Agnes, is the veil between their world and hers’ (O’Farrell 2020, 129). Children’s vulnerability and the permeability of the boundary between life and death mean that they are at risk of slipping out of the mortal world at any moment. However expected a child’s death is, the loss still shocks and devastates. Indeed, Agnes’ medical skills, mental

6  Some editions of the book bear the subtitle ‘A novel of the plague’, while in other editions the novel is titled Hamnet and Judith.

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preparedness, and maternal determination to save her child all come to naught; Judith recovers, but Hamnet sickens and dies. In contrast to modern-day children, who are often shielded from loss and death (Pentaris 2020, 175), O’Farrell’s child characters are conscious of their mortality. They are aware of the inevitability of death, but Hamnet, at least, has some agency in its workings. Seeing Death in the room with Judith, Hamnet substitutes himself for his sick sister: ‘It will be easy for Death to make a mistake, to take him in her place. They cannot both live: he sees this and she sees this. There is not enough life, enough air, enough blood for both of them’ (O’Farrell 2020, 201). While death, in the form of the plague, is ‘insatiable; unstoppable’ (O’Farrell 2020, 249), life is imagined to be finite and in scarce supply. If only one of the twins can have the remaining store of it—of being, of possibility, of the future—Hamnet ensures it will be Judith. Death is depicted here as a sacrifice, one that makes the boy Hamnet heroic and his story worth telling. In part, Hamnet’s death is inexorable because of his biographical history, which the reader may or may not know. However, from the beginning of the novel his ghostlike appearance, which is created by a cluster of references to silence, absence, and uncanniness, also prefigures his death. Hamnet’s family home is normally noisy and crowded with relatives and workers, but as he searches desperately for an adult to help his ailing sister, he finds it deserted: ‘He is utterly confounded to be so alone […] He waits. Nothing. Silence presses back at him’ (O’Farrell 2020, 8, 10). Hamnet’s presence seems spectral; his voice is unheard, he is alone in an eerily empty space, and he does not yet interact with other characters. When he finally locates someone—his grandfather—he frightens him, prompting him to cry out ‘Who’s there?’ (O’Farrell 2020, 11). This question is the first line of Hamlet, asked by the spooked sentry who has seen the Ghost stalking the castle battlements, and its use in the novel further marks Hamnet as one of the dead-to-be. Hamnet’s death is prefigured too by his grandmother’s response to him: ‘You look like a ghost, standing there like that’ (O’Farrell 2020, 127). In resembling the dead (albeit unintentionally), Hamnet readies the reader for his demise, foreshadows his own death, and intuitively prepares himself for the afterlife. Of the four texts explored in this chapter, only O’Farrell’s novel depicts Hamnet’s death in detail. The reader is confronted by dying and the reality of death through Hamnet’s account and the experiences of his mother, sisters, aunt, and grandmother. Each has different responses and thoughts as they watch Hamnet endure convulsions, fever, buboes, and gangrene.

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To an anguished Agnes, ‘Her son’s body is in a place of torture, of hell. It writhes, it twists, it buckles and strains’ (O’Farrell 2020, 249). Hamnet’s aunt Eliza thinks that: ‘Anyone […] who describes dying as “slipping away” or “peaceful” has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle’ (O’Farrell 2020, 250). Hamnet’s physical suffering is contrasted to the peace his mind feels, as it occupies a different place than the sickbed. The tranquillity of this other place is emphasised; Hamnet notes its welcoming ‘whiteness, blankness, stasis’, how ‘It is cool here, and quiet’, and how he finds ‘The silence, the cool’ soothing as he lies down to sleep (O’Farrell 2020, 250). Like ‘nothing’ in Dead Centre’s Hamnet, the word ‘silence’ recurs from our introduction to Hamnet, as discussed above, to his final moments. In O’Farrell’s novel, silence is a condition associated with the dead. As the boy-hero dies, four short sentences emphasise the silent inertia that is death’s hallmark: ‘Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more’ (O’Farrell 2020, 251).7 Although the characters imagine death to be a certainty (as discussed above), here death is depicted as unpredictable and inconstant. It appears that Judith will die from the plague but she recovers, and Hamnet ails, and then Hamnet’s physical and mental-spiritual state diverge as he perishes, and finally his dying is violent but his death is quiet. Through the characters’ memories and experiences death is shown to be a universal social and cultural reality, but also one that is subjective. It is fitting then that the novel’s second half focuses on the impact of this personal loss on Hamnet’s parents. ‘Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more’: these lines nod to the Danish Prince’s famous last words—‘the rest is silence’—and they form a link between Hamnet and Hamlet that will be played out more fully at the novel’s finale. As Holderness (2015, 105) notes, ‘the relationship, if any, between Hamnet’s death and Shakespeare’s work, specifically Hamlet’ invites speculation and is something of a commonplace in biography. In Hamnet, having learned that her husband has written and staged a play bearing their son’s name, Agnes travels to London to see it.8 The novel’s 7  The significance of Hamnet’s death is also marked textually, as these are the final words of Section I of the novel. Section II narrates Hamnet’s wake, funeral rites, and burial, and the impact of bereavement on his family over the next four years. 8  One of the epigraphs to the novel quotes the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, who points out that the names ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ were interchangeable in early modern England.

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closing scene presents Hamlet as the ultimate marker of Hamnet’s posthumous agency. Standing in the playhouse, Agnes sees her husband William play the role of the Ghost of Old Hamlet and a lad playing the role of Hamlet but imitating her son.9 Initially shocked and confused, Agnes quickly apprehends that her husband has taught the young actor to mimic Hamnet. William’s play is an act of paternal love that uses his creative genius to do the impossible: he has brought his son ‘back to life, in the only way he can. [… He has] done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live’ (O’Farrell 2020, 366). This imagined swap of father for son (unknowingly) recreates the exchange that Hamnet accomplished, and so the reader may view William as similarly heroic. Additionally, this fantasy swap enforces fairness, as judged by the parent, upon the operation of death; the parent and senior in age dies, while the youth lives, ‘to be’ and to do something. The young actor’s performance of Hamnet-as-Hamlet also functions as proof of William’s parental devotion. He paid attention to his son, he remembers his appearance, voice, and mannerisms in such detail that he has trained and ‘schooled [the actor] so exactly’ that Agnes immediately recognises her son (O’Farrell 2020, 365–366). Furthermore, Hamlet brings Hamnet’s estranged parents together, healing emotional wounds. The theatrical illusion of seeing their son ‘grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived’ aids them in coping with their loss and what might have been (O’Farrell 2020, 364). Most significantly though, O’Farrell presents Hamlet as a vehicle for Hamnet’s memorialisation and resurrection. This idea draws not only on the events of Hamlet, a play where the dead return and interact with the living, it articulates a fundamental power of theatre itself. The editors of The Shakespearean Death Arts remark that: there are very good reasons why the death arts figure so significantly in Shakespeare’s plays: paramount among them, the inherent theatricality of death and dying. […] And the obverse is true as well: there is something that smells of death in the mocking shadows of actors playing out the lives

9  Shakespeare is not named in the novel, but for the sake of clarity in this chapter, I refer to O’Farrell’s Shakespeare as ‘William’.

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of characters for others to see and to marvel at the cunning counterfeit. (Engel and Williams 2022, 12)

Dead Centre’s play emphasises the theatricality of death—Hamnet even plays dead with an audience volunteer (2017, 20–21)—but O’Farrell’s novel stresses the restorative power of drama. The actor counterfeits Hamnet, reanimating a lost child and playing out a life that he never had, and restoring his parents in the process. Thus, the final moments of Hamnet celebrate the stage’s capacity to blur the lines between life and death, reality and fiction, finality and possibility; on the stage, death seems impermanent and reversible as ‘the dead [spring] up to take their places in the line of players’ awaiting their applause (O’Farrell 2020, 366). The epigraph to Section II of O’Farrell’s novel quotes Hamlet’s dying request to his friend Horatio: ‘I am dead: thou livest; … draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story’ (O’Farrell 2020, 255). The epigraph suggests that people die and bodies decay, but stories persist. Moreover, the epigraph implies that the living are obligated to do what the dead cannot. In different ways and to different extents, Dead Centre’s Hamnet, Upstart Crow, All Is True, and O’Farrell’s Hamnet are invested in telling the story of a dead boy. Each text attempts to co-opt their living audiences in commemorating this child. Each of these works invests Hamnet with a voice and the agency to engage audiences and entreat them—to be, to remember, to tell his story, to think again about great men and lost boys, to reflect on their own mortality. On the page, stage, and screen, Hamnet can grant us insights into popular conceptions of death, grief, and mourning. Finally, each of these texts puts forward the idea that art—Shakespeare’s canon, theatre, or simply stories—is an aid to understanding and coping with loss. Ultimately, whether on the page, stage, or screen Hamnet’s story isn’t very long but, as Dead Centre’s boy-hero observes, it is certainly worth the telling.

References Blackwell, Anna. 2021. Sympathise with the Losers: Performing Intellectual Loserdom in Shakespearean Biopic. In Variable Objects: Shakespeare and Speculative Appropriation, ed. Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, 127–150. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boden, Richard, dir. 2018. Upstart Crow. Series 3, episode 6. Written by Ben Elton. BBC. DVD.

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Branagh, Kenneth, dir. 2018. All Is True. Written by Ben Elton. Columbia. DVD. Campana, Joseph. 2011. Shakespeare’s Children. Literature Compass 8 (1): 1–14. Dead Centre. 2017. Hamnet. London: Oberon Books. Engel, William E., and Grant Williams, eds. 2022. The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet Among the Tombs. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Holderness, Graham. 2015. Hamnet Shakespeare. In The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, 101–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidd, Ben, and Bush Moukarzel. 2017. Programme for Hamnet, presented at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. O’Farrell, Maggie. 2020. Hamnet. London: Tinder Press. O’Neill, Stephen. 2021. “And Who Will Write Me?”: Maternalizing Networks of Remembrance in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. Shakespeare 7 (2): 210–229. Penfold-Mounce, Ruth. 2018. Death the Dead and Popular Culture. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Pentaris, Panagiotis. 2020. Locating Death in Children’s Animated Films. In Death in Contemporary Popular Culture, ed. Adriana Teodorescu and Michael Hviid Jacobsen, 175–191. London: Routledge. Petrina, Alessandra. 2020. ‘Where Would You Fit the Coconuts?’ The Reinstatement of Sexual Stereotypes in a Mock-Biopic. Textus 33 (2): 115–128. Scott, Charlotte. 2018. The Child in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 12

‘There Is Nothing like a Dead Man to Demand Existence’ (Antonin Artaud) Mischa Twitchin

No longer confined to hospitals and asylums, psychiatric categories now permeate society, along with the drugs that are correlated with them. Disseminated by both the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry (not to mention today’s social media also), prescription and consumption have become two sides of the same coin. In the view of one critic of this bargain, as it promotes the medicalisation of living, James Davies: As suffering is transformed into a market opportunity, it is stripped of its deeper meaning and purposefulness. It is no longer seen as a crucial call to active change, or as the organism’s protest against harmful or traumatic conditions, or as anything potentially transformative or instructive. Rather, it becomes an occasion for yet more consumption and market activity, with an array of industries thriving on the basis of this logic, offering self-­ interested explanations and solutions of the many pains of living. (Davies 2022: 225)

M. Twitchin (*) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_12

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A tragic index of the discrepancy between such commodified forms of mental suffering and ‘anything potentially transformative or instructive’— abetted by ‘the progressive deregulation of the pharmaceutical industry’, which has ‘helped enable the 400 per cent increase in UK psychiatric drug consumption since the 1980s, with nearly a quarter of our adult population now being prescribed a psychiatric drug each year’ (Davies 2022: 219)—is the rate of suicide that is politically tolerated as a barometer of social ‘normality’. This includes not only the immediately fatal consequences of self-harm but also the long-term consequences of behaviours leading to what Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called ‘deaths of despair’: ‘Suicides are deaths of despair. But the circumstances that can lead to suicide find less extreme forms when people turn to drugs or alcohol to seek refuge from pain, loneliness, and anxiety’ (2020: 95). In this chapter, I will explore the double sense of ‘challenging death’ where understanding the social is constantly reduced by—and to—an ideology of the market, the workings of which are, quite literally, careless of life. The relentless expansion of precarity and debt through the neo-liberal capture of politics is part and parcel of a systemic destruction of any sense of long-term futures—a void supposedly mitigated by taking anti-depressants. Rather than the interviews and official reports that inform Davies’ work, for example, I shall draw principally on the vivid testimony offered by the visionary French writer, Antonin Artaud (1896–1948). Writing of his own experiences of the power of medical institutions in the late 1930s and 1940s, Artaud offers excoriating denunciations of capitalist necropolitics: ‘To thus create death artificially as present-­day medicine attempts to do is to encourage a reflux of the nothingness which has never been to anyone’s benefit, but off which certain predestined human profiteers have been eating their fill for a long time’ (2020a: 99). At the risk of simply abstracting from Artaud’s highly personal and often esoterically expressed claims about ‘human profiteers’, these claims may easily be read as applicable to any number of social practices as agencies of death whose reach has deepened, on both local and global scales, since Artaud’s time. After all, as Case and Deaton note (referring to a classic study in the history of sociology): ‘Long ago, Emile Durkheim argued that to understand suicide – and the same could be argued for other deaths of despair – we must look beyond the individual to society, particularly to breakdown and turmoil in a society that can no longer provide its members an environment in which they can live a meaningful life’ (2020: 94). Such an approach remains, however, politically marginalised, reserved for

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‘investigative journalism’, for often award-winning documentaries, for scandals following upon the evidence of whistle-blowers—for work that (if not silenced by threats of legal action) is recognised as exceptional rather than as part of everyday political reality. Reading Artaud also presents the particular challenge of identifying him with the authorial subject whose rights he insists on, not least in his refusal of the forced choice (as he experienced it) ‘between renouncing being a man or becoming an obvious madman’ (2020: 99). It is important to acknowledge, then, that the present chapter is limited to just one aspect of Artaud’s writing, ignoring the ostensibly anti-semantic force of his incantations and glossolalia—the ‘expulsions’ which Julia Kristeva, for instance, addresses in her reading (with Artaud) of the ‘subject in process’ (1998 [1973]: 134; 143–48).1 In the preface to volume one of his Complete Works, Artaud writes that ‘[w]ords are a morass explained, not by existence, but by man’s suffering. As a poet I hear words that do not belong to the world of ideas. For where I am there is no more thinking’ (Artaud 1999: 20). These relations between being and thinking, existence and suffering, challenge readers with the constant oscillation between a sense of Artaud’s life and work, where (as he wrote to Peter Watson, editor of the post-war Anglophone journal, Horizon): ‘My work says much less than my life about all this, but it says it’ (Artaud 1995: 89).2 What gets ‘said’ between the life and the work in Artaud’s witness to the social implications of death is a reversal of the usual elision of cause and effect with nature and society: death is addressed not in terms of ‘natural causes’ and ‘cultural effects’ but rather the opposite, in terms of cultural causes and natural (or, indeed, unnatural) effects (Twitchin 2022b). Reflecting on his own writing, Artaud continually stages the question ‘who am I?’ (Schumacher 2001: 234), a question that provides its own answer to readers asking ‘who is Artaud?’ In English, of course, this is also a question of translation, where Artaud himself writes to Watson, in 1946: ‘You say the English public doesn’t know me’ (Artaud 1995: 84). After all, in the absence of translations at that time, ‘Where indeed could they have picked up’ (ibid.) his work? But even today, with the increasing 1  Patrick ffrench’s translation of rejets by ‘expulsion’ retains an echo of the ‘pulsional’; that is, of the drive-oriented dynamic of vocalisation over discourse in Artaud’s work (see ffrench’s note 7 in Kristeva 1998: 175). 2  I have also explored this relation with the figure of ‘interruption’ in Artaud’s text Artaud the Mômo (Twitchin 2022a).

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availability of his writings in English (although still far from complete), it perhaps remains the case that we do not ‘know’ Artaud; that is, in the sense of knowing how to read him. As Maurice Blanchot already cautioned in 1959, with respect to the first volume of Complete Works (which had finally appeared in 1956): ‘We are not yet able to attend as well as we should to the destiny of Antonin Artaud. Neither what he was, nor what happened to him in the domains of writing, of thought, and of existence’ (Blanchot 1993: 293). This always incomplete temporality of reading is woven through with the very paradox (which Blanchot insightfully elaborates) by which Artaud presents himself to Watson (and thus to his potential readers in English): ‘Dear Sir  – I entered into literature by writing books in order to say that I was unable to write anything, my thought when I had something to say or to write was what was denied me most’ (Artaud 1995: 81). Consider, for instance, the resonances of Artaud’s suggestion in this chapter’s title. That a dead man might ‘demand’ anything—as Artaud asserts here in a letter to his friend Marthe Robert (from 9 May 1946 [2020b: 145])—might surprise us. Certainly, this proposition challenges common sense expectations not only of the temporality of writing but also the finality of death, even though dealing with posthumous demands (from litigating wills to participating in all manner of spiritualism) is as familiar in today’s society as it has ever been. Indeed, what is demanded of the living in the name of the dead presents challenges that are constitutive of cultural memory, especially with respect to past injustice; to think only of demands for reparations or restitution, demands for apology (whether by individuals or by representatives of the state), and the demand ‘never to forget’ particular historical—even genocidal—dealings with death. Beyond the challenges of death for the living that are manifested today in palliative care, the challenges made by the dead to be still cared for by the living are manifest in the archaeological past. This is also evident in the professed salvation, redemption, or consolation of religious practices in the present, as they aim to appease or ameliorate the challenge of death to and for consciousness. Such religious practices typically invoke visions of an ‘after life’ that not only challenge death but profess to negate or transcend it, offering a sense of ‘real life’ in the hereafter—a life no longer confined by or to the body’s mortal coil and its suffering. For Artaud, however, death is no cure for life. In his essays, broadcasts, and letters, he is as excoriating of the Buddhist notion of Bardo—or limbo—in awaiting re-incarnation as he is of the Christian sense of death as purifying

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corporeal existence (and thus original sin) through the promise of an eternal life in the resurrection. (Artaud was writing, of course, before the cryogenic phantasy of a living death became accessible for those able to afford it, as represented by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, for instance, ‘which has been freezing the bodies and brains of the dead since 1975’ [Sample 2022: 7].) If this cultural context sounds all too familiar, the particular challenge of death in Artaud’s testimony is, then, distinct in being made as a demand from a dead man himself; from one ‘who knew that there was no spirit but a body that repairs itself like the gearing of a toothed cadaver in the gangrene of the thighbone within’—as he evokes it under the standard formula of burial, Here lies (2021: 47). While Artaud addresses us from ‘beyond the grave’, then, unlike most other writers he did so as someone who had already experienced death and yet continued to address the living in his own name—affirming this ‘nothingness’ in life, intensified by nearly ten years’ confinement (from 1937) in psychiatric hospitals.3 What had been first presented, in the pre-war texts, as not only a revelation of, but a resistance to, the ‘void’ became interwoven with the experience of the electroshock treatment to which he was subjected in 1943–44. This reflection can be traced in Artaud’s allusions to the figure of a dead man accompanying the living as a double of existence. In the 1937 pamphlet, The New Revelations of Being, for instance, he writes: ‘My sufferings until now consisted in refusing the Void. The Void that was already in me.… I struggled in my attempt to exist, in my attempt to consent to the forms (all the forms) with which the delirious illusion of being in the world has clothed reality. I no longer wish to be a Believer in Illusions’ (1965: 85). By the time this text was published Artaud was already confined within the psychiatric system, where he would later be 3  In a short text, which was originally published in Les Temps Modernes in February 1949, Artaud says that, indeed, after one course of ECT he died ‘legally and medically’, posing the question of both ‘memories’ and medically recognised ‘signs’ of life: ‘One hour after the shock I had not woken up and had stopped breathing. Surprised by my abnormal rigidity, a nurse went to fetch the chief doctor, who after listening with a stethoscope could find no signs of life in me. I myself have memories of my death at that moment, but it is not from these that I assert this fact. I am sticking strictly to what I was told by Dr Jean Dequeker, a young intern at the Rodez asylum, who had it from the mouth of Dr Ferdière himself. It was he who said that he believed me dead that day and had already asked for two orderlies at the asylum to take my body to the morgue since an hour and half after the shock I had not come to [je n’étais pas revenu à moi]’ (Artaud 1994: 123).

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subjected to what was at the time the experimental treatment of electroshock. In a letter (from 6 January 1945) to one of the doctors, Jacques Latrémolière, in whose charge he was then interned at an asylum in Rodez, Artaud speaks of his terror at the comas that this treatment induced and which left him feeling ‘like a dead man alongside a living man who is no longer himself, but who insists on the dead man being present even though he can no longer enter into him’ (1988: 438). Indeed, this form of treatment was explicitly conceived of as undermining psychic structures of identity by electro-convulsive means. As the chief psychiatrist at Rodez, Gaston Ferdière, said (citing its definition by Paul Delmas-Marsalet, who introduced it in France), ECT involves ‘a process of dissolution-reconstruction’ (Mèredieu 1996: 116) of the patient’s sense of being. In a later interview with Charles Marowitz, Ferdière even speaks of ‘the patient who has been reduced to nothingness’, as a precondition for the ‘reconstruction’ of his personality (Ferdière in Marowitz 2001: 73). Artaud had already written to Ferdière, on 25 June 1943, after the third such treatment, which had left him with a fracture in his spine, begging for it not to be continued; and would write again each time that a new series of shocks was arranged (as, for example, on the 24 October 1943 and 2 April 1944 [Mèredieu 1996: 104–108]). As with pharmacological treatments developed after the war, this experimental intervention in the working of the brain aimed to avoid any consideration of the mind—which can be understood as a muscle of the semiosphere in which behaviour is understood as meaningful (or not), including, of course, in the very practice of such treatments themselves. In a text written after his return to Paris (in 1946), more or less at liberty in society once more, Artaud associates his psychiatric treatment with black magic (in contrast to its own claims to science): ‘The magic of electroshock drains a death rattle, it plunges the shocked into that rattle with which we leave life’ (1995: 163). The sense that the voice of suffering (as much from the ‘treatment’ as from delirium) might not be heard haunts these demands of a dead man. After all, the sense of the alchemy of language transforming experience is addressed in the letters to individual psychiatrists, whose claim to be ‘qualified’—that is, institutionally authorised—to reply is manifested (for Artaud, at least) by their administering an experience of death. Stephen Barber’s observation on the contradictory appeals that Artaud makes to Christianity while at Rodez is pertinent here for seeing the effects of the power(s) to which Artaud was legally subjected—powers that were

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addressed (both in person, in the letters, and as phantasms in other writings) as seeking to possess him in ‘his decade-long asylum incarceration during which he would oscillate between atheism and a return to a mystical form of Catholicism’ (Artaud 2021: 67). Barber writes that: It’s conceivable that those religious oscillations were a response to the antithetical belief systems of the Rodez asylum doctors who were administering electroshock treatments to Artaud, which terrified him; the asylum director, Ferdière, was a lifelong militant atheist and anarchist, while his assistant, Latrémolière, was devoted to mystical theologies. To placate both doctors simultaneously was a high-wire act for Artaud. (ibid.)

Crucially, Artaud’s experience of ECT enacts the challenge of death corporeally and not simply as a Cartesian literary thought-experiment, reflecting on the identity of consciousness being compromised by matter or by its relations with others. This view was exemplified in the philosophical dialectics popularised at the time by the existentialism of Artaud’s contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre. The consciousness of death—as of a sense of the ‘void’ in existence (invoked, for example, in the New Revelations of Being)—is not, for Artaud, simply a negation of being, a question of non-­ existence, but of a resistance to its being imposed by the ‘arrogant capitalist of limbo.… The one whom being and nothingness made, as one gives to make peepee’ (2021: 43). Concern with the impossibility of simultaneously being and not being, with the logical exclusion of the one state by the other, is already present in ancient philosophy, of course; with what Franco Berardi, for instance, refers to as ‘the Protagorus principle’ (evoking its appearance in Plato’s Thaetetus): ‘Modern humanism [Berardi writes] has followed the Protagoras principle: “Man is the measure of all things – of all things that are, that they are; of all the things that are not, that they are not”’. For Berardi, ‘Humanism transformed that principle into a methodology for action’ (2021: 30), a transformation that is now undone by the recognition that in the Capitalocene the anthropocentric is not the measure of anything but the hubris of an imagined human exceptionalism. In the context of the Covid pandemic (as but one harbinger of the consequences of this hubris), Berardi notes: In the physical world there is no end: matter is becoming, decomposing, recomposing, emerging and disappearing from sight. But only our con-

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sciousness is something that begins somewhere and that terminates at a certain point. Only consciousness has the ability to become nothing. All other things evolve. Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that may conceive of nothingness and may evolve into nothingness. The virus is not nothing, and it is not going to become nothing: it is going to evolve into something different. (2021: 50)

In this resetting of the question of being and nothingness, Berardi sees ‘the return of mortality as the defining feature of human life. Capitalism has been a fantastic attempt to overcome death. Accumulation is the Ersatz that replaces death with the abstraction of value, the artificial continuity of life in the marketplace’ (2021: 18). As this example suggests, the meaning of death as a figure of and for the future has been profoundly disturbed by the seemingly irresistible triumph of global capitalism. The rationality that makes of life and death an exclusive polarity (rather than a mutual relation) produces death in the reverse image of ‘saving’ or ‘extending’ life, of ‘protecting’ humanity from suffering—including in the mirror of mental health and the incidence of suicide; where, as Case and Deaton note (with respect to the Opioid crisis), interventions are ‘not only… failing to prevent the decline in life expectancy but… actually contributing to its fall’ (2020: 114). As with the effects of electroshock, Artaud exposes the social production of death in the reversal of the very meaning of care. The challenge he presents readers, then, is to be alive to the existence of death where one might not expect it, as in claims for ‘health’, especially when understood as a norm. The commodified claims for ‘fitness’ and ‘well-being’—whereby people are adapted to industries that operate through the phantasms or bewitchments of advertising (rather than a diagnosed delirium)—are exploded by Artaud’s demand for existence as a dead man, where, indeed, this demand is one that society would prefer to think of as delirial rather than political. It is in his refusal of a forced choice between being dead or mad that his testimony gathers its most challenging force, registered in the figure to which he gives the haunting name, in his famous essay on van Gogh (in 1947), ‘the man suicided by society’ (1988: 487). This transposition of death into the estranging sense of being ‘suicided’ (if not, otherwise, of being ‘mad’) exposes an insidious inversion of active and passive in the social meaning of death. Instead of ‘taking one’s own life’, Artaud proposes that the suicide may have had his or her life taken from them, in a

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process that starts with the refusal to recognise creative expression—life— outside of the ‘normal’ (whether in the family, at school, or in work). Addressing his own journey through the care (or treatment) offered by society for madness, Artaud crystallises this in the profound question that ends his 1946 text, Alienation [or Madness] and Black Magic (which he also read for a radio broadcast on July 16th that year): ‘But what guarantee do the obvious madmen of this world have of being cared for by those who are authentically alive?’4 Fundamentally, Artaud’s testimony insists not on the ‘well-being’ and ‘positive thinking’ that are the popular clichés of today; nor does his discussion prey on the vulnerabilities of those in pain, whether psychic or physical (as if this distinction were not itself a source of such pain). On the contrary, his writing insists on the experience of suffering, the affirmation of which is not assimilable to familiar societal expectations of ‘living’. As Byung-Chul Han observes: ‘Every critique of society must therefore provide a hermeneutics of pain. If pain is left to medicine, we neglect its character as a sign’ (2021b: 1). Like James Davies, Han addresses what he calls the ‘palliative society’ in terms that resonate with Artaud’s denunciations: ‘It deprives pain of its character as an object, as something social. The palliative society immunizes itself against criticism through medically induced numbness or numbness produced through media consumption’ (2021b: 12). In relation to what Han describes elsewhere as the necrophilia of capitalism (2021a: 9), Artaud offers the autobiography of a dead man in his own life time, challenging readers’ expectations of the posthumous in bearing witness to pain—at least, as concerns the evidence of his writing itself and his demand of a ‘right to speak’. Indeed, he had already asserted this right in his correspondence with Jacques Rivière (29 January 1924 [1965: 12])—editor of the prestigious interwar literary journal, the Nouvelle Revue Française—the publication of which (in 1925) Artaud later regarded as marking the beginning of his own creative existence. Introducing these letters in the preface written for volume one of the Complete Works, Artaud even mystically associates the ‘black cyst’ of Rivière’s death, shortly after the original publication in the NRF, with his own coming to life in writing (1999: 20). 4  Mais quelle garantie les aliénés évidents de ce monde ont-ils d’être soignés par d’authentiques vivants?/ ‘But what guarantee do the obvious madmen of this world have of being nursed by the authentically living?’ (in Clayton Eshleman’s translation [Artaud 1995: 166–167]).

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Artaud’s challenge remains, then, the intelligibility of his sense of being subject to attack by those feeding off his body as if it were a cadaver, of being subject to the deadly bewitchments of society (above all psychiatry) requiring counter-spells of his own. In the letter to Peter Watson, for instance, introducing himself to ‘the English public’, Artaud addresses this relation to society: What does that mean… [b]ut that one should live happily off the dead, happily on the camphor and powder of the valorous corpses of the dead. I am that dead man whose powder is eaten: thyroidal or ovarian extract of caput, of the end of when it’s over and I know it. Of ghastly petits-bourgeois initiated into puckering their mouths into a kiss to suck in the departed soul, they eat my powder of a departed soul in this way night and day, which is why I’m sick each time I wake up, and am sick all day long. (1995: 89)

As Artaud himself is more than aware, this insight regarding his own existence is likely to provoke a reading in terms only of paranoia. Giving voice to this anticipated response, he interjects, for example, in the ‘Conclusion’ of his last major work, the radio broadcast To Have Done with the Judgment of God, ‘You’re raving, Monsieur Artaud’, ‘You are expressing here, Monsieur Artaud, some very bizarre things’ (1995: 304–06). These interjections (given in an ironically high-pitched tone) also express his mordant sense of humour, the lucidity of which is akin perhaps to an insomniac dream. Indeed, we might wonder at the kernel of truth expressed in Artaud’s earlier observation (made in 1925), reflecting on his ‘lucid unreason’, that ‘Only the Madman is really calm’ (1988: 108 & 109). In Artaud’s work, the challenge of death is as a register of exploitation, a cipher not so much of the body’s relation (indeed, resistance) to pain or disease, for example, as to a social management of life that itself produces pain, albeit figured in terms of a malign bewitchment. But one need not look far for ‘real world’ examples of this feared (indeed, fearful) black magic or malevolence. Artaud’s denunciation of those ‘profiteering’ from ‘creating death artificially’ (Artaud 1995: 166–67) can be easily applied, for example, to Richard Sackler’s ambition, when launching the marketing campaign for OxyContin in 1996, to create ‘a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition’ (quoted in Keefe 2021: 206). In Byung-­ Chul Han’s terms:

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The US opioid crisis is emblematic in this context. This crisis is not just a matter of the greed of pharmaceutical companies. Rather, its foundation is a fateful assumption regarding human existence. Only an ideology of permanent well-being could have brought it about that a medication originally of use in palliative medicine could have been administered on a mass scale to healthy individuals. (2021b: 3)

The claim to eradicate suffering and pain—indeed, ultimately, the suggestion that death itself might one day be ‘cured’—presents a fundamental challenge to consciousness. Arthur Sackler, for instance, proposed (in his address on the opening of the Sackler Museum at Harvard in 1985) that ‘humans, alone among the species, had learnt how “to thwart death”’ (quoted in Keefe 2021: 132). While this claim may be true in respect, say, of antibiotics—the effectiveness of which is increasingly undermined by their ubiquitous abuse—it is clear that what Sackler had in mind was something far more hubristic than the mitigation of disease. The traditional sense of defying death through projecting one’s reputation, becoming ‘immortal’ through the recognition of one’s name after decease, is tragically exploited here. Unlike Artaud’s demand expressed as a poet already dead in his own lifetime, Sackler’s wished-for incorporation of death as a modern Maecenas—through the naming rights conferred by his donations to cultural institutions—has been exposed as paid for, quite literally, by the premature deaths of others. The protests against the Sacklers—such as those organised by Nan Goldin, with the slogan ‘Pain Killers’ where the word ‘pain’ was visibly erased—challenge our acceptance of yet another statistically verifiable example of the ‘suicided’.5 This activist making visible of deaths that would otherwise remain invisible (officially recorded, for example, as ‘accidental’) is a vital dynamic in the double sense of challenging death here. Artaud’s writing too is immoderate in its protest, where death (like ‘madness’) is not to be hidden away, as if it were some sort of individual failure. Nor is it to be addressed simply in terms of stoical recognition, of learning to die ‘well’ through an ars moriendi. The recapitulation of a life lived with a sense of continuity (which such a pursuit of consolation presupposes) is foreclosed in Artaud’s experience of a life in fragmentation, just as it is in 5  A documentary by Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about Goldin’s activism concerning the opioid scandal is about to be premiered as I finish writing this chapter (Sutton 2022).

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the neo-liberal drive to exploit so-called human capital. In contrast to the latter’s promotion of competitive atomisation, Artaud writes poignantly (in denouncing society’s masking of its own part in suicide) that: ‘No one has ever been born by oneself. No one dies by oneself either’ (1988: 511). Even if it is universal, ‘death has never been democratic’ (Han 2021a: 118), any more than pain or disease has. Death may come to us all, but because its condition is social it does so unequally. Indeed, comorbidity is all too often evidence of crimes in which victims are simply abstracted into statistics and for which a corporation (let alone society) is rarely held to account. (As Case and Deaton mordantly note, ‘opioid deaths, like other deaths of despair, are not equal opportunity’ [2020: 114].) Those whose lives are destroyed by air pollution, for example, are likely to be the least responsible for causing it. Many commercial enterprises generate dividends on the basis of products that are known to be a direct cause of death—to mention only the tobacco industry, which nonetheless continues to trade profitably throughout the world (despite settling law suits in America in 1998, for instance, costing 206 billion dollars [Keefe 2021: 5]). The colossal investment in death by the state is addressed in Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947), with its evocation of procreation co-opted for the production of future soldiers, those uniformed workers of industrialised killing. Such state investment is also manifest, of course, in the nuclear weapons that remain a proliferating legacy of WWII. Not simply challenging death as a topic, then, but making of it the very demand of existence, Artaud’s work may be read as a confrontation with a society that he sees as living off the dead, as if their existence offered yet another extractable resource: Ceux qui vivent, vivent des morts (‘Those who live, live off the dead’ [1995: 160–61]). The analyses of Byung-Chul Han (as also of James Davies or Franco Berardi) are resonant for the attempt to read Artaud today, particularly in regard to the commercial ‘imperatives’ of health, where society is rendered available for exploitation through a politics that actively tries to undermine resistance to it: The pain-free life of permanent happiness is not a human life. Life which tracks down and drives out its own negativity cancels itself out. Death and pain belong together. In pain, death is anticipated. If you seek to remove all pain, you will also have to abolish death. But life without death and pain is not human life; it is undead life. (Han 2021b: 60)

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Artaud’s demands offer an example of resistance to precisely this sense of the ‘undead life’, where the challenge of reading of him may yet affirm the sense that (as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have suggested): ‘Even if Artaud did not succeed for himself, it is certain that through him something has succeeded for us all’ (1988: 164).

References Artaud, Antonin. 1965. Artaud Anthology. Ed. Jack Hirschman. San Francisco: City Lights. ———. 1988. Selected Writings. Trans. Helen Weaver. Ed. Susan Sontag. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1994. Oeuvres complètes, Vol. XXVI. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1995. Watchfiends and Wrack Screams. Trans. Clayton Eshleman and Bernard Bador. Boston: Exact Change. ———. 1999. Collected Works, Vol. I. Trans. Victor Corti. London: John Calder. ———. 2020a. Artaud the Mômo. Trans. Clayton Eshleman. Zurich: Diaphanes. ———. 2020b. Succubations and Incubations: Selected Letters. Trans. Peter Valente and Cole Heinowitz. London: Infinity Land Press. ———. 2021. Here Lies Preceded by Indian Culture. Trans. Clayton Eshleman. Zurich: Diaphanes. Berardi, Franco. 2021. The Third Unconscious. London: Verso. Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. 2020. The Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davies, James. 2022. Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis. London: Atlantic Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press. Han, Byung-Chul. 2021a. Capitalism and the Death Drive. Trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2021b. The Palliative Society: Pain Today Trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity. Keefe, Patrick. 2021. Empire of Pain. London: Picador. Kristeva, Julia. 1998 [1973]. The Subject in Process. Trans. Patrick ffrench. In The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack, 133–178. London: Routledge. Marowitz, Charles. 2001. Artaud at Rodez. London: Marion Boyars. Mèredieu, Florence. 1996. Sur l’électrochoc: le cas Antonin Artaud. Paris: Blusson.

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Sample, Ian. 2022. Death Will Change from a Mystery to a Solvable Problem. The Guardian, 17.2.22, G2, 7. Schumacher, Claude, ed. 2001. Artaud on Theatre. London: Methuen. Sutton, Benjamin. 2022. Laura Poitras Documentary on Nan Goldin’s Campaign Against the Sacklers to Show at New York Film Festival. The Art Newspaper, 5.8.22 (last accessed 5.8.22). https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ 2022/08/05/laura-poitras-nangoldin-sackler-documentar y-new-yorkfilm-festival Twitchin, Mischa. 2022a. “A Blank Page…” or “Ten Years Since Language Left…” (Artaud). In Performance Research: On Interruptions, ed. Jan Kühne and Freddie Rokem, 26.5: 160–168. ———. 2022b. Enduring Touch. In Performance Research: On Touch, ed. Martin Welton and Asher Warren, 27.2: 72–80.

CHAPTER 13

Difficult Deaths and Awkward Agendas: How Mainstream News Media Negotiate Coverage of Politically Dissonant Victims Rhian Waller and Ato Erzan-Essien

Journalism, by necessity and custom, is drawn to depictions of violence, fear and disruptive events. In their theoretical model of how newsworthy information is identified, selected and prioritised, Harcup and O’Neill list criteria such as ‘Bad news’, including death and injury, ‘Conflict’, including fights and warfare and ‘Drama’—stories that centre on the unusual (2017, 1470–1488). As death intersects with all these criteria, to some extent, it should not be a shock that many news stories focus on death, and that deaths themselves are broadly considered newsworthy. In addition, Harcup and O’Neill’s more recent empirical analysis of more than 700 news stories suggests the criteria of ‘Agenda’; wherein the contents of a news story resonate with the political or social agenda of the publishing

R. Waller (*) Independent Scholar, Chester, UK A. Erzan-Essien University of Chester, Chester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_13

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organisation, has remained consistently at play since they introduced it to their list of news values more than 20 years ago (2001). It is possible news values may generate internal friction, for instance, where the circumstances of a (dramatic, bad-news) death include elements that conflict with the agenda of a particular news-producing organisation. It is this particular dissonance that will be explored here. This chapter will focus on print and online news reporting. Although the fortunes of print news publications have fluctuated significantly over decades, print media remains a significant cultural force. Collectively, the ‘red tops’ alone command a print circulation of several million per month (Mayhew 2018). Moreover, these publications leverage their resources to cultivate large online audiences, with the Mail Online establishing itself as one of the most frequently visit news websites in the Anglophone sphere (Barker 2021), and The Guardian reaching tens of millions of readers per month (Statista, March 2021). Arguably, British newspapers are still positioned to have significant cultural impact, and to reflect culturally significant discussions around death. Building on observations of press coverage of historic cases such as the coverage of the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Sophie Lancaster, the focus of this chapter is on the deaths of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 and Conservative MP David Amess in 2021. These killings both received significant coverage in the UK press, and the victim in each case has a clear party-political identity. The intent is to analyse the tactics of negotiation that emerge from the discourses around these killings. Although it is sometimes difficult to pin down or articulate the agenda of a particular publication, the Daily Mail and Mail Online and The Guardian are chosen to ensure contrasting political positions. These are regularly identified as sitting on the right and left of the political spectrum, respectively (Pew Research Centre 2018; Smith 2017), and as pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit publications. The politics of Jo Cox, a Labour, pro-EU politician, conflict with the agenda of the Daily Mail, while the socially conservative and pro-­ Brexit stance of David Amess conflicts with the agenda of The Guardian. Moreover, the apparent motivations and backgrounds of the men implicated in these killings are likely to generate counter-agenda friction. For instance, the right-wing, pro-Brexit politics of Thomas Mair, who killed Jo Cox, represent uncomfortable parallels with the politics of the Daily Mail newspaper, while the religious and ideological views ascribed to Ali Harbi Ali, who killed David Amess, present uncomfortable challenges to the pro-­ multicultural line taken by The Guardian.

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While much critical attention has been paid to agenda in the press, including the effects of agenda-setting on the public (Luo et al. 2018) and evaluations of press attitudes to (often political) subjects in the news agenda (Zunino 2016), there is less extant material focusing on the written mechanisms at play in establishing publication-story agenda alignment within articles, particularly those that may include agenda-dissonant elements. Therefore, analysis of a small number of articles, wherein the ‘text is never trusted at face value, but is torn to pieces and reconstituted’ (Van Looy and Baetens 2003, 10) should reveal some of the discursive techniques brought to bear as the publications attempt to align these ‘difficult’ deaths to meet their existing agendas.

Negotiation Tactics Publication agendas are created through interplay between the creators (the owners, editors and reporters of a publication) and receivers of the media products (the audience, imagined or otherwise). It is not necessarily the case that there will be a perfect alignment between the expectations of a cultivated readership/community and the Gestalt ‘voice’ of a publication, which may be informed by business interests, political affiliations and history, and individual employees. However, Baker et al. suggest newspapers suffer penalties if content falls ‘too far out of step with the social group’ of their readership (2013, 6). Douglas states it is important that content ‘concurs with their world-view’ (2009, 51). This leads to tension when a disjunction arises between the perceived need for sensitivity in the case of a death, and when that sensitivity may run counter to previously established political narratives. The publications, we suggest, may utilise one or more of five key tactics to sidestep that tension: minimisation, assimilation, displacement, decontextualisation and delegitimisation. Of the available negotiation tactics, the most obvious may be for a publication to simply devote less time or space to a story if the coverage offers serious challenges to its agenda. A raw count of the keyword results returned by LexisNexis, which hosts an online database of plain-text published news articles, suggests the Daily Mail named Jo Cox in 97 stories between the time of her killing (June 16 2016) and the beginning of the trial for her murder (November 14 2016), while 96 stories were published naming David Amess between his killing (October 15 2021) and his alleged killer entering a plea at a pre-trial hearing (December 21 2021). In comparison, The Guardian named Jo Cox in 408 articles and David Ames

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within 124 articles, suggesting The Guardian showed more interest in the murder of the agenda-aligned MP. These figures must be taken with reservations; they do not take into account what proportion of news material produced by either publication was taken up by coverage of the respective killings, or indicate how many column inches were given over to each story. However, it is possible that minimisation may occur within a story, if problematic details receive comparatively brief mention within the article or are pushed into later paragraphs (in 1983 Atkin and Burgoon found that journalists believed 69% of readers did not read an entire news story). Other, less blunt-force tactics may be employed in addition to minimisation. For instance, among the many complexities involved in its coverage of the Stephen Lawrence race-murder case, McLaughlin recognises a process wherein the Daily Mail, in part to convince its readership of the consonance and newsworthiness of the story, ‘assimilated Stephen Lawrence into Middle England’ (2004, 165). While this enabled the newspaper to establish the relevance of the murder of a young black man to its (white, middle class) core audience, and to deviate from its established patterns of foregrounding black-on-white violence and recent history of ‘rubbish[ing]’ anti-racist protests (Cottle 2005, 55), it contributes, McLaughlin argues, to a kind of ‘erasure’ within which race is ‘made to matter less and less’ (2004, 179), therefore obscuring the institutional racism at play. Assimilation also occurs during coverage of the murder of Sophie Lancaster. Her identity was navigated in different ways by different publications as, though ostensibly apolitical, her ‘gothness’ was problematic because of a socially conservative distrust of youth subcultures. Accordingly, Spooner notes: ‘the Mail emphasises the fact Sophie was a student … rather than a Goth’ (Spooner 2012, 188–189). Further, Spooner suggests that the hostility sometimes reserved for subcultures was ‘displaced’ onto another frequent target of tabloid anxiety: the working-class parents of the murderers and the figure of the ‘yob’, a phenomenon also visible in the Daily Mail’s coverage of the Stephen Lawrence murder (McLaughlin 2004). Alongside displacement, further tactics are evident in the coverage of the death of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old refugee who died at sea in 2015. The image of Kurdi’s body, washed up on a Turkish beach, dominated the front pages of the UK national press. Some news organisations embraced dissonance; The Sun, which evidenced historic (Kaye 2013) and recent (Hopkins 2015) exaggerated, inaccurate and hostile discourse toward refugees and asylum seekers, launched a campaign to find 3000 foster homes for refugee children (Ponsford 2015). In contrast, the Daily Mail

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continued to follow a ‘tougher’ line, with columnist Richard Littlejohn questioning the motives of Alan Kurdi’s father Abdullah Kurdi, who survived the incident, and reframing his story by foregrounding claims that he was a people smuggler which, Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (2017) argue, ‘quickly undermined [him] as inauthentic in news debates’. These accusations have been refuted and debunked by other publications (Khan 2015). There does not, upon searching, appear to be any evidence that the Daily Mail itself did likewise, though it has featured uncritical comments about Abdullah Kurdi in following years (Andrews 2020). Although, like Sophie Lancaster, neither Alan Kurdi nor Abdullah Kurdi is a political figure, the left-wing (broadly refugee-sympathetic, pro-­ integration) and right-wing (broadly refugee-hostile, anti-integration) responses to the refugee crisis position them in relation to the political agendas of news publications. The Mail’s response to the agenda-­dissonant narrative of refugee sympathy was, effectively, to ‘decontextualise’ (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski 2017) all refugees from the political and historical realities of their situation while delegitimising the counter-­ agenda aspects of the narrative. Thus, to paraphrase O’Keefe, publications build and manipulate meaning (442) in ways calculated to align with the views of their imagined readership. Our hypothesis that several of these navigational tactics (minimisation, assimilation, displacement, decontextualisation and delegitimisation) will be present in the coverage of Jo Cox and David Amess, will be tested by exploring a small sample of 12 articles. These incorporate several ‘genres’ of writing, from hard news, which is structured according to an (ostensibly objective) information hierarchy, and features, which sit in contrast to hard news in their subjectivity and use of literary devices (Ricketson 2014). Although this is an interpretive chapter, drawing on techniques of close reading (Showalter 2002) and media discourse analysis (O’Keefe 2012), rather than empirical methods of analysis, the selection of case study articles has been limited to provide some parity; at the time of writing, the David Amess murder case is still active, restricting the nature of reporting on the killing. Therefore, all articles, including those about Jo Cox, are limited to the point where a plea was given by the plaintiff. In addition, as Collier and Mahoney outline, selection bias remains a risk in qualitative (as well as quantitative) discussions (1996, 59–91). Close reading necessarily utilises a small sample of text(s), so rather than identify and analyse those that essentially prove the point, selected articles are those highlighted as

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most relevant by the LexisNexis search engine, adding some element of randomisation. In order to provide a cross-reference, parallel articles which should be agenda-aligned in subject, theme and framing are also included.

Analysis All analysed articles show some of the agenda-alignment tactics outlined above, although these occur in different degrees of intensity from article to article. For instance, while the pro-EU, left-wing politics of Jo Cox broadly resonate with those of The Guardian, they are not discussed in great detail in the hard news coverage of a fundraising effort that followed her assassination, ‘Jo Cox charity fund passes £500,000 target in a day’ (Slawson 2016), which suggests that, while details may be de-prioritised when they do not align to the broader agenda, it is not the case that these details will necessarily be emphasised when they do align to the broader agenda. However, the article does focus on the public, humanitarian activities supported by Cox, which are linked to her socially progressive ideology. Moreover, the inclusion of this quote, among three selected out of hundreds available on the fundraising page, may be influenced by the organisation’s ‘pro-immigration’ (Lecka et  al. 2021) agenda: ‘[I] pray your family gets comfort in this dark hour. I am an immigrant, who found hope in your words of tolerance, compassion and love; in a world where we are written off by many as evil invaders, benefits scoundrels, rapists and terrorists’ (Slawson 2016). However, the emergence of agenda-aligning rhetoric is more pronounced in those stories that might include aspects that challenge the dominant agenda. In the case of Jo Cox, the hard news and editorial gleaned from The Mail frames both stories around a Brexit controversy, suggesting that the killing, which took place in the lead-up to the 2016 referendum, was being ‘politicised’ by pro-EU and Labour politicians in particular. The opening, and therefore key, line of the hard news story read: ‘DAVID Cameron yesterday evoked the pro-EU views of murdered MP Jo Cox amid a continuing row over whether the tragedy was being politicised’ (Martin 2016). It is arguable the evocation of this controversy is itself political, representing an attempt to forestall or undermine potentially legitimate questions about the political dimensions of the killing itself— the article notes in its second-to-last line that Thomas Mair gave his name as ‘Death to traitors, freedom for Britain’ in a pre-trial hearing (Martin

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June 20 2016); this rhetoric holds close parallels to that used by far-right pro-Brexit groups such as Britain First. Three sources, including then Prime Minister David Cameron, Jo Cox and Alastair Campbell, are accorded space to share pro-EU views, but both Cameron and Campbell’s quotes are contextualised as examples of ‘politicisation’, and Campbell is identified as ‘a former spin doctor’, a non-­ official ‘biased’ term used, according to Esser, ‘by journalists to discredit, hype, or mystify’ (2008). Although they are ostensibly the focus, extracts from Jo Cox’s pro-EU piece are used in the latter half of the article. This placement indicates an element of minimisation as, typically in a hard news article, more important information is prioritised earlier within the article structure. The placement, positioned after a quote from a pro-Brexit source that opines: ‘she [Cox] would want no one to link anything around this referendum with that terrible tragedy’ (Martin 2016), priming readers to view Cox’s words in isolation, to divorce her politics from the killing, and the killing from its political context. Effectively, the article is engineered to minimise or de-legitimising anti-Brexit discourse on the basis of a moral position: the sensitivities of death-coverage are weaponised to limit the discursive frame to one palatable to a right-of-centre audience. This de-coupling of politics from political assassination carries over more overtly in the opinion piece ‘JO’S KILLING AND THE SCANDAL OF THE WAY WE CARE FOR THE MENTALLY ILL’ (Lawson June 20 2016), where displacement and delegitimisation strategies are seen in full effect. For instance, returning to the subject of politicisation, repeated emphasis is given to the timeframe within which pro-EU voices ‘wrapped up the case to their satisfaction’ (Lawson June 20 2016), commenting Conservative MEP Charles Tannock, Tweeted ‘within hours’ of the killing, while Alastair Campbell ‘picked up immediately’ on a link between the killing and Brexit politics, in a way that appears to imply a rushed, knee-jerk response in comparison to the more measured tone advocated by The Mail. MEP Charles Tannock’s pro-EU position is invoked to delegitimise his views as subjective—a potentially risky tactic to use in an opinion column which is by its nature constructed on subjectivities. Again, the pro-EU stance of the murdered woman is de-prioritised; Cox’s position is detailed five paragraphs in, after she is referred to as ‘a remarkable mother of two children’ (Lawson June 20 2016), a sequencing of information that prioritises the personal aspects of Jo Cox’s life and death above the political.

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In contrast to the hard news article, the opinion piece suggests a root cause for the killing: a mental health crisis. Rather than address the right-­ wing political background of the killer, or the context of pro- and anti-­ Brexit campaigning, Lawson proposes an alternative framing by shifting the debate to the subject of mental health as a ‘genuine issue of public policy’ (Lawson June 20 2016)—thereby devaluing discussions around public political discourse as comparatively disingenuous. This reframing allows Lawson to, somewhat obliquely, lay responsibility for the killing at the door of the NHS and the ‘lamentable state of [its] provision for the mentally ill.’ As in the model of displacement outlined by Spooner (2012), attention is displaced onto a target that will already be familiar to the core readership, as ‘right-wing political sources are known for their criticism of state institutions, including the NHS’ (Kelsey 2016). The Guardian’s handling of the political context of the Cox killing is direct and comparatively even-handed in ‘How did the language of politics get so toxic?’ This article suggests that ‘both sides in the EU referendum debate were trying to work out how to capitalise on her death without seeming to do so’ (Bland 2016). The obituary, in clear contrast with The Mail tribute piece, is focused almost entirely on Cox’s career and her political campaigns and beliefs, denoting her as ‘a modern Labour Party feminist’ (Bland 2016) and describing her critical attitude toward the Conservative government’s Syrian policy and her pro-refugee stance. This is in stark contrast with The Mail tribute piece (Tozer and Duffin 2016) which emphasises Cox’s social and family life, detailing a planned holiday and party, and describing her marriage day. While the sample of articles is far too small to draw verifiable and definitive conclusions about how Cox is depicted across the entirety of The Mail’s coverage—it is possible her career is detailed extensively elsewhere—it is notable this particular article condenses her killing into the sub-clauses of two sentences: ‘Before her murder - as she arrived for a constituency surgery in Birstall on Thursday/where the 41-year-old was shot and stabbed to death on Thursday afternoon’ (Tozer and Duffin 2016), and her career is likewise minimised. Her party affiliations are omitted almost entirely, to the point where a reader unfamiliar with the story might struggle to recognise her as a left-wing politician. However, it is also possible this selectivity allows The Mail to present Cox as a sympathetic figure, in line with the culturally inscribed sensitivities accorded to the recently deceased, without including facets of her life that would be incompatible with the ideologies of the readership and which may either erode sympathy for the figure at the

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centre of the tribute or risk being seen to endorse their politics by association. The Mail’s coverage of David Amess sits in contrast to this: both the headline and the opening paragraphs of the tribute piece relate overtly to his political career and more subtly to his euro-scepticism: ‘CRUSADER OF BACKBENCHES WHO LOVED STRICTLY  - BUT NOT EUROVISION’ (Wilkes 2021). In comparison to the Jo Cox coverage, neither career nor character is diminished in relation to each other; in fact, they openly intersect in an anecdote that described how ‘Sir David brought the cut-out [of Margaret Thatcher] to his daughter Alexandra’s wedding’ (Wilkes October 16 2021). There is no hint of incompatibility between the party politics and the moral virtue of the figure receiving tribute: Amess is reported as ‘funny’, ‘kind’ and ‘caring’ (Wilkes October 16 2021) and also an opponent of gay marriage and an anti-abortionist. The construction of the caring politician is leveraged in the opinion piece THE LIFE OF SIR DAVID AMESS IS PROOF IT’S WRONG TO LINK ‘RIGHT WING’ WITH UNCARING (Lawson October 18 2021), which is far more explicit in its agenda-aligning intent: Amess’ support for the death penalty is evoked as a symbol of his political affiliation, but is waved aside for ‘the much more important aspect of the man … that he was a thoroughly good human being.’ An imaginary left-wing collective, in contrast, is invoked to make the point that ‘we should not be in the least surprised when a so-called ‘Right-winger’ turns out to be much more decent than many who would consider that very person’s politics to define him as wicked’ (Lawson October 18 2021). The implication is that the personal and closely interpersonal behaviour of a given political figure trumps the broader but more nebulous systemic and institutional impact of their voting and campaigning history. This, Lawson believes, meshes with: ‘the cares of voters, which are, as David Amess always understood, not about abstract notions of political affiliation but about how we actually behave’ (Lawson October 18 2021). This sidesteps (and minimises) the reality that political campaigning and voting choices link both to behaviour and to real-world impacts that are complex but not abstract— although mediating these actions in a way that depicts them as abstract may be a convenient fit in terms of agenda. The negotiation of cognitive dissonance in politics is a phenomenon that carries across all parts of the political spectrum, but the bluntness of The Mail’s discussion of Amess’ politics is most relevant here in that it is echoed in The Guardian obituary, which sums his position up as ‘a

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long-standing Eurosceptic and committed Brexiter … also opposed to abortion and gay marriage and in favour of capital punishment’ (Bates 2021). In ‘Sir David Amess obituary’ The Guardian does not engage in displacement, instead it appears to embrace dissonance, choosing, like The Mail, to draw a line between the personality and political profile, although there are also aspects that suggest some attempts at minimisation and assimilation. In terms of minimisation, the piece includes some editorialising on the character of its subject, but the article deploys features of linguistic distancing and modifiers absent in The Mail tribute; ‘his manner’ [our emphasis], Bates writes, ‘was genial, friendly and lacking in rancour or conceit’ (compare this to The Mail article, which twice uses the descriptor ‘genial’ without any qualifiers). In terms of assimilation, greater space is given to Amess’ agenda-aligned political activities (voting to ban fox hunting, piloting animal welfare and anti-fuel poverty legislation, work on health advocacy committees) than on those aspects that may prove problematic to the readership. The Guardian editorial echoes the Daily Mail’s uncritical evaluation of Amess in a tone epitomised by the headline: ‘Dedicated and tireless, David Amess was a paragon of a good constituency MP’ (Jenkins 2021). This piece entirely minimises Amess’ potentially counter-agenda politics; in fact, his partisanship is not mentioned at all. Instead, the article follows a similar trajectory to the Daily Mail’s Jo Cox editorial, diverting into a discussion about threatening and abusive online political discourse and the role unregulated social media providers play in facilitating this. Like The Mail’s invocation of mental health provision, this discussion has some validity and relevance. However, unlike the earlier Jo Cox Guardian editorial (Bland July 31 2016), which, while taking aim at the right-wing politics and rhetoric of Donald Trump, provides examples of problematic behaviour from supporters on both sides of the political agenda, it skews towards agenda-alignment in its critical tangents. While more subtle than The Mail’s overt targeting of left-wing political figures and ideology, it leverages the incident to call for (agenda-resonant) reform of ‘Parliament’s combative debating chamber and absurd “upper house” of lords’ (Jenkins October 19 2021), takes aim at the Conservative-introduced electoral mayor role, exclusively selects Conservative or conservative-associated politicians Duncan Sandys and Edmund Burke as examples of the remote MP, and identifies exclusively Labour politicians as victims of ‘appalling anonymous trolling’ (Jenkins October 19 2021). Unsurprisingly, given the legal restrictions placed on coverage of the David Amess killing, which limit the ability of reporters to editorialise and

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speculate on a case, and the conventions of hard news writing, it is more difficult to detect agenda-aligning tactics within The Mail and The Guardian news articles. Both openly identify Ali’s actions as related to Islamic extremism, The Guardian identifying the attack as ‘jihadist’ (Badshah and Clinton October 16 2021) and the Daily Mail claiming Ali is ‘affiliated with Islamic State and that the killing has a terrorist connection with religious and ideological motivations’ (Sinmaz 2021). However, the format of The Guardian’s news coverage allows more space to include counterpoints to agenda-dissonant information; accordingly, a joint statement by several Southend mosques and a direct quote from Imam Mansoor Clarke decrying the apparently religiously motivated attack are incorporated into the news flow. The far shorter Daily Mail article, ‘MAN DENIES MURDERING MP STABBED AT SURGERY’, includes no direct quotes, and references sources taken from the court hearing, in line with the restrictions of the Contempt of Court Act (1981), although a hint of anti-immigrant agenda may be evident in the decision to include a reference to Ali’s background a member of a ‘prominent Somalian family’ (Sinmaz December 22 2021), though he is British-born. In short, analysis of the small sample suggests that agenda-associated negotiation in the coverage of ‘difficult’ deaths occurs on a micro as well as macro level, and that several agenda-aligning techniques of negotiation, for example, displacement and minimisation, may be deployed within the same article. These agenda-aligning techniques may be present even in articles that otherwise embrace agenda-dissonant information without attempting to reframe it.

Conclusion This small study suggests that several intersecting methods of negotiation are at play in those stories that may pose difficulties in relation to agenda but fulfil enough news value criteria to justify coverage. Although the examples of literature above are not focused wholly on agenda-resonance or agenda-dissonance, the terminology and tactics proposed in passing by Spooner (displacement), McLaughlin (assimilation) and Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (decontextualisation and delegitimisation) have validity beyond the circumstances in which they initially appear. Further, we suggest that publications also engage in minimisation, avoiding the inclusion of agenda-dissonant details that might otherwise appear in articles in

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agenda-resonant publications, in instances where the publications do not simply embrace dissonance or drop the story from the news agenda entirely. We suggest these negotiation tactics are both more obvious and more necessary in opinion/editorial and emotive tribute and feature pieces, as these are more likely to engage directly with both the politics and anticipated expectations and emotions of a readership community. However, they do still occur in ostensibly ‘objective’ hard news articles. Although the purpose is not to compare The Mail and The Guardian to evaluate which publication is more likely to engage in agenda-related reframing and negotiation, any disparity between them may be explained by the tabloid-­ broadsheet distinction, as tabloids are significantly more likely than ‘quality’ publications to utilise overtly emotive, dramatic, non-­ objective language and phrasing (Kitis and Milapedes 1997; Palmer 2000). As they may be more intense in their partisanship, they may therefore require correspondingly intense and overt negotiation of agenda-­dissonant stories. Finally, this chapter is limited in size and scope and, we suggest, there are grounds for other broader or more detailed studies focusing on the written techniques used to reframe agenda-dissonant stories and story details.

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CHAPTER 14

Dissected, Torn, and Exposed: The Death and Remains of the Jack the Ripper Victims in The Illustrated Police News Rosie Binfield-Smith

Introduction In 1888, amid Victorian England, the Whitechapel area of London was ravaged by a serial murderer who left the country in a state of resounding shock. While the identity of the murderer was never discovered, he became commonly known as Jack the Ripper; a name that has continued to haunt the British cultural and criminal imagination ever since (Walkowitz 1992; Jarvis 2007). Although it is thought that there could be many more, there are five canonical victims that are widely accepted to have been murdered by the infamous criminal: Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. The violence these women were each subjected to was horrific, bloody, and destructive; each of them had their throats cut, and four of the women had their organs

R. Binfield-Smith (*) York St John University, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_14

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and breasts removed and displayed outside their body. Murdered both in their homes and on the streets of London, after death their bodies were discarded, often left exposed and lying, abandoned, in their own blood. The intricate details of their deaths and the heinous violence these women experienced were told again and again across the country in public gossip as well as in newspapers and pamphlets. During the late nineteenth century, seen as the ‘golden age’ of newspaper production, print technologies such as the rotary press and linotype machine, revolutionised the speed that journalists could bring stories to print as well as their reach. Despite these developments, it is believed that during this time literacy rates were still growing and many still relied upon illustrated publications to engage with current affairs in a visual way. One of the most prominent illustrated publications at the time was The Illustrated Police News (1864–1938). First published in 1864, it became one of the first British tabloids and its popularity soared in response to the Jack the Ripper murders, as journalists swarmed the East-End eager to construct a sensational story that would shock and entertain. Using a visual criminological framework, this chapter examines The Illustrated Police News archives that have been digitised by, and made publicly available through, The British Library. The archives offer a rich insight into not only the fear and anxiety that surrounded the Jack the Ripper murders, but also the public and media treatment of his victims. Each publication opens a window onto how the crimes were told, re-told, and embedded into the public and historical imagination (Farge 2013); their “‘story of crime’ is imaged, constructed and ‘framed’” (Hayward in Hayward and Presdee 2010: 9) through the illustrator’s pencil. These archives have received somewhat minimal attention within academia to date (see Stratmann 2011, 2019; Smalley 2017; Logan 2020), especially by criminological and thanatological scholars, and, as such, this chapter shines a light on a largely overlooked cultural snapshot of Victorian England. The Illustrated Police News serves as a valuable documentary insight into the social and cultural norms surrounding women, marginalisation, and death during the late nineteenth century, and reveals the punitive and penetrative powers of early media. More specifically, this chapter analyses the illustrations and representations of the women killed by Jack the Ripper, and contends that the drawings are far from objective, factual depictions of the crimes that occurred. Rather, they are morally loaded images, imbued simultaneously with narratives of disapproval and salacity. Importantly, the post-mortem visual representation of Nichols, Chapman,

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Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly exposed them to a second process of victimisation which further reinforced their perceived position at the social periphery. They were victimised by Jack the Ripper and then subsequently exposed and scrutinised by illustrated print media. This process of double victimisation is achieved through the passivity and openness of the women in the illustrations, and the penetrative gaze this affords the reader. The drawing of their bodies and the perpetrating of further, symbolic, violence exposes similarities with the nineteenth-­ century anatomists and the dissection of marginalised individuals (Sappol 2002). At the time of the murders there were rapid developments in the medical profession, and the anatomical dissection of human cadavers was central to this. The dissection of cadavers not only subjected the bodies to the penetration of the clinical scalpel but also to the powerful gaze of the white, male, middle-class elite (see also Mulvey 1992). Sappol writes that dissection is “quintessentially phallic” (2002: 89) and so too, it is argued here, are the illustrative powers of print news and the new seeing powers they afforded the late nineteenth-century public. In providing a detailed view of the torn and ripped bodies (Seltzer 1997, 1998), the illustrations make the women vulnerable to the penetrative gaze of the media and the symbolic violence that surrounded medical and judicial Victorian dissection (Sappol 2002). The women killed by Jack the Ripper are all too often invisible, overshadowed by the mystery and allure of their unknown killer (Rubenhold 2019). In response, this chapter presents four key arguments. Firstly, it puts the women at the very centre of its investigation and in doing so, not only seeks to examine their cultural, pictorial representation within Victorian England, but to re-centre their identities and experiences in contemporary narratives of victimisation and death, too. Secondly, the chapter highlights the performative and punitive function of The Illustrated Police News as it serves to further victimise the women after death whilst also fulfilling its role as a tool of moral instruction. Thirdly, it outlines the ways in which the publication commodifies marginalised bodies by constructing the women as disposable ‘matter’ and legitimising the voyeuristic gaze of the reader. Finally, whilst the illustrations themselves are not included within the chapter, the chapter demonstrates the value of visually analysing historical news archives for the advancement of both criminological and thanatological understandings of the difficult dead (Spokes, Denham and Lehmann. 2018). They represent a visual snapshot akin to Barthes’ photograph; “a micro-version of death (…) a specter” (Barthes 2000: 14).

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The Torn and Open Female Body The women murdered by Jack the Ripper were eviscerated; their bodies were violently torn apart and discarded. Four out of the five women were murdered in a public space, typically in an alleyway or street. Their bodies were often abandoned by their killer with their clothing partially removed or disturbed. Their bodies, in multiple ways, were thrown into a state of openness. This section will discuss this relationship, and more specifically, it will examine the visibility of the women and their bodies after death and how their bodies were presented as objects primed for public consumption. Beyond the physical, material openness displayed in the illustrations of the women, representations also point to a moral ‘openness’, a sense of promiscuity that is relevant here. In fact, in presenting a discourse (both written and visual) of moral promiscuity and destitution, we see The Illustrated Police News presenting a dual image of the victims. The openness of their corpses after death constructed a distinct passivity of the women; their bodies were objects, made vulnerable by their abhorrent victimisation. While illustrations of the women when they were alive, in particular, the representations of the women in the final moments before their death, whether keeping company with Jack the Ripper or socialising in public, present them actively as morally free women often observing behaviours associated with those ‘fallen’ from perceived middle class, Victorian grace (see Walkowitz 1980; O’Neill 2010). In essence, ‘openness’ in this context refers to the representations of their dead bodies as cut, bleeding, and overflowing, but also in the moral and social judgements present in these pictorial depictions. They are drawn as ‘open’ women, objects of passivity and provocation, danger and desire. We start with the representations of the physical bodies of the women. In many of the illustrations depicting their bodies after death, put simply, they are leaking and open. On 6 October 1888,1 the paper depicts the inquest on the “Fifth Victim”, Elizabeth Stride as well as the discovery of Catherine Eddowes’ body in Mitre Square, both of whom were murdered on 30 September 1888. Catherine’s body is drawn in each frame lying on her back on the pavement, upon which she was murdered. She is laying in a pool of blood, her arms stretched out from her body, and her throat is 1  Anon. 1888. Two more Whitechapel murders. The Illustrated Police News, October 6. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/two-more-whitechapel-murders-from-theillustrated-police-news

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cut. In each frame, her body is surrounded by male figures, including police officers shining an oil lamp above her to illuminate “the Mutilated Body” (Anon, 6 October 1888), as well as male civilians engaged in scuffles or striking matches to gain a clearer view of her body. On 24 November, the publication details the murder and mutilation of Mary Kelly in her bed at 13 Miller’s Court (Anon, 24 November 1888). The illustrations here depict the Ripper in the act of murder, standing over Kelly in her bed, his hand around her throat and brandishing a knife. Kelly is seen fighting for her life, drawn with fear in her eyes as she is brutally murdered. The next frame shows Kelly, now deceased, as a lifeless body in her bed. Her body is bleeding and abandoned, with her room in a state of disrepair. A further two publications in October 1888 illustrate the discovery of a “Mutilated Trunk” (Anon, October 1888) and its subsequent investigation at the coroner’s office (Anon, 20 October 1888). Illustrations depict a naked female trunk that had been separated from the rest of the body, with the images placing emphasis on the exposition of the woman’s breasts. In each image, once again, we see the body surrounded by male figures ranging from the civilians who discovered the body, to male figures of (perceived) profound expertise and knowledge including police officers and coroners. Thus, the woman’s naked, mutilated body is drawn as powerless in the hands, and at the mercy, of male authorities. One of the most common visual tropes that the paper engages in is to illustrate the women both before and after their victimisation, including both portraits of the women as well as illustrations of them with Jack the Ripper moments before their death and then finally in the mortuary. On 22 September, we see illustrations of Annie Chapman “Before and After Death” (Anon, 22 September 1888). Before death, she is drawn as looking ‘respectable’ by Victorian moral standards, her hair is neat, skin clean, and she is staring into the distance with a perceived look of contentment. Beside this, we see the image of Chapman after death. By contrast, her forehead is furrowed, she has a black eye, two wounds on her left cheek, and her throat has been cut so that she is nearly decapitated. Above these juxtaposing illustrations, Chapman is framed by three male portraits: an unnamed “Foreman of the Jury”, “Dr Phillips”, and Annie’s unnamed brother (Anon, 22 September 1888). Similarly, the following month we see two portraits of Catherine Eddowes (Anon, October 1888). Before her death she is drawn to reflect her normality; she is wearing a bonnet and her modesty is preserved with a dress that has a very high neckline.

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Post-mortem she is drawn reclining on the mortuary table, her bleeding eyes are closed, the tip of her nose has been mutilated and, much like Chapman, her throat had been almost entirely severed. At every stage, the deceased bodies of Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly are made open by the illustrations. They are cut, they are bleeding, and they are laid bare. After death, they became powerless over their own narrative, handing over control to middle-class, male authority figures to define their stories both formally through the implementation of justice and, equally, in media representations. As Rubenhold powerfully advocates “[…] that which has continued to cling to and define the shape of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Kate and Mary Jane’s stories is this: the values of the Victorian world. They are male, authoritarian and middle class” (2019: 15). The violent and graphic depictions of the women as passive, open objects after death reflect the socio-cultural attitudes towards the women whilst they were alive. The Illustrated Police News reflects such attitudes when narrating the final moments of the five women, who are typically drawn as walking the Whitechapel streets at night, meeting men in dark alleys or public houses, or in police custody. On 20 October, The Illustrated Police News explores “The History of the Last Victims of the Mysterious Monster of the East-­ End”, specifically, the final moments of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. First, we see ‘Long Liz’ drinking with her friend “‘one armed Liz’” in a public house (Anon, 20 October 1888). The next frame jumps to Liz later that evening in an embrace with a man in a dark alley that is plastered with police posters offering reward money for public information on Jack the Ripper. The couple are seen by a male witness, who is observing them from afar. Below, we see Liz’s dead body lying on her back in the gutter while Jack the Ripper is seen running off into the night, knife in hand. Alongside this, we see illustrations of Catherine Eddowes being removed from a public house, found drunk in the streets by the police, and then placed in a holding cell to sober up earlier in the day. Upon her release, illustrations show her, much like Liz, once again standing under the light of a streetlamp in a darkened London alleyway with ‘The Whitechapel Monster’. The final image shows Eddowes’ dead body mutilated and bleeding on the cobbled road of Mitre Square. Similar illustrations of Nichols depict a perceived moral openness and promiscuity, who, in October 1888, was drawn speaking with a man in the doorway of a lodging house stating “I sharnt (sic) be long getting my bed money look at my smart bonnet” (Anon, October 1888). The illustration

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directly next to it shows “Fatal Bucks Row” (ibid) where Nichols’ dead body lays mutilated on the ground. In the same publication Mrs Turner, who at the time was believed to be the Ripper’s second victim, is drawn flirtatiously engaging with two soldiers in a public house with her friend. Both women are seen drinking alcohol. Surrounding this image, we see two illustrations, the first is of Turner’s dead body “pierced with 39 wounds” (ibid). The image visibly displays numerous stab wounds, and she was clearly violently murdered. Below this, there is an illustration of Turner’s stays (a fully boned lace bodice, similar to that of a corset) that had been pierced by the knife which strikingly alludes to the intimacy and penetrative nature of the violence inflicted upon the victims. In each of these illustrations we see clear attempts to relate the active behaviour of the women whilst alive with the brutality and violence of their deaths. The true identities and histories of Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly were rendered irrelevant following their victimisation by Jack the Ripper, supplanted in favour of a construction that privileged moral judgements and the voyeuristic objectification (Mulvey 1992) of marginal female bodies.

The ‘Disposability’ of Marginalised Bodies Whilst contemporary studies, such as Rubenhold’s (2019), dispute the historical labelling of the Ripper victims as prostitutes, this dominant narrative very much defines the storytelling within The Illustrated Police News, and which served to “everlastingly freeze these women…into a singular identity” (Anwer 2014: 435). Polly, Annie, Liz, Catherine, and Mary Jane were portrayed as marginalised women who lived in the heart of the East-­ End which, during the Victorian era, was commonly seen as “the embodiment of all that was rotten in England” (Rubenhold 2019: 11). They sat firmly at the intersection of two profoundly disadvantaged social groups, women and the poor, and consequently after death their bodies were framed as ‘other’ by the media. Their bodies which in death had been so violently destructed were illustrated for public consumption. In nearly every image we see their bodies discarded as ‘matter’ by Jack the Ripper; abandoned powerlessly in the road or violated and obscured in their bed. The illustrations demonstrate a flagrant disregard for the humanity of the women, choosing instead to construct them as passive objects, rendered immobile by the weight of moral judgement and condemnation. They were constructed as disposable women whose bodies were laid bare for

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public scrutiny, yet this exposition was not purely one of sexual voyeurism but rather the illustrator documents, and simultaneously performs, acts of penetrative dissection. In Sappol’s (2002) A Traffic of Dead Bodies, he writes of the cultural obsession with anatomical dissections within the nineteenth century across America as well as parts of Western Europe, including England. Sappol argues that there existed a profound relationship between “anatomical acquisition, dissection, and representation of bodies [and] the making of professional, classed, sexed, racial, national, and speciated selves” (ibid: 1). To unpack this, the book contends that the surge in public and political interest throughout America in anatomical dissections was indicative of a growing appetite for knowledge of the human body, but more than this, it was bound up with the construction of a distinctly white, male, middle-­ class identity. Public anatomical dissection became a means of solidifying the authority of the medical profession and reinforcing its opposition to women and femininity. Typically, nineteenth-century public dissections used bodily remains of some of the most marginalised individuals in society such as criminals, prostitutes, members of the black community, and manual labourers (ibid). For Sappol, “dissection, body snatching, anatomical iconography, and the history of anatomy were venues in which physicians staged rituals and exhibitions and told stories that constituted the profession as an authoritative cult, a male fraternity of dissectors” (ibid: 76), which, vitally, strongly contrasted the powerless, marginal identities of those they were cutting open. The identity of the dissector was thus relational; reliant upon the profound objectification and social ostracising of the bodies that were at their disposal. As Anwer writes, “behind every successful man is a decaying woman” (2014: 435). Nineteenth-century anatomical dissections of marginalised individuals were typically public affairs, where dissectors performed their ‘craft’ and were eager to impress an audience who waited with bated breath to see inside the bodies of those identified as ‘other’. “As staged in sickbeds, medical colleges, professional journals, morgues, public school classrooms, graveyards, legislatures, courtrooms, novels and newspapers, anatomy was a cultural poetics” (Sappol 2002: 8). Yet, dissection of such bodies can be seen as more than simply a demonstration of medical skill and technique, as these public displays of torn and sliced marginalised bodies became a form of “atrocity exhibition” (Penfold-Mounce 2016: 21) that often embraced the gratuitous and pornographic. The inherent vulnerability of a corpse is only further compounded for the bodies of those who are

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marginalised, who, after death, were subjected to a violent attempt by white male, middle-class, elite to further “divide[…], colonize[…], and drain[…] of agency” (Sappol 2002: 80). For the disadvantaged and socially ostracised, after death, their bodies were at heightened risk of acts of public destruction that served to further enhance the power of a growing elite; the strength of the anatomists and dissectors was fed by the physical and symbolic violence of posthumous undressing and dismembering (physically, emotionally, and morally). Unlike Victorian aristocrats who could request a private dissection after death,2 the bodies of the marginalised lacked agency and could not consent to their posthumous, public dissection; their powerless identity stripped them of any social status or empathy and as such their corpses became faceless objects, present purely to be fetishised and rendered disposable matter. Disposability and invisibility are themes that dominate the images and narratives of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane in The Illustrated Police News. Throughout the publications detailing their victimisation, the five women are very rarely named, referred more commonly as “The Murdered Woman” (Anon, 8 September 1888), “The mutilated body” (Anon, 6 October 1888), or “The Seventh Victim” such as with the death of Mary Jane Kelly (Anon, 17 November 1888). By comparison, the papers frequently name and identify the occupation of male figures of ‘expertise’ who were working on the case including “Constable Neil”, “Dr Llewellyn”, and “Inspector Helston” (Anon, 8 September 1888), to name only a few. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane were bodies, devoid of identity and character; discarded by Jack the Ripper and left defenceless on Whitechapel streets and then portrayed as passive corpses and cadavers by the press who privileged representations of the women as open and lifeless. The Illustrated Police News constructs these five women as collateral damage, figures of disgust and titillation who were victimised by a ghoulish, mysterious male figure who continuously evaded a highly skilled, respectable male elite. The identities of the five women were rendered irrelevant by comparison to the male figures who were portrayed as working tirelessly to find the perpetrator and bring him to justice. Thus, public outrage was less concerned with the deaths of five women who were mothers, sisters, and daughters and focused more on the fear that the lurking ghoul of Jack the 2  The bodies of aristocrats and the social elite were deemed important enough to warrant a medical examination in the interest of establishing a cause of death.

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Ripper incited. The Illustrated Police News constructs the women as very little other than corpses, the incidental bodies without whom Jack the Ripper would not have climbed to fame. Thus, their marginality, stemming as it did from their intersectional identities as women of a lower social class, rendered them as disposable ‘matter’ after death, and where they were visible, they were passive objects, very often even physically marginalised within the illustrated frame; cast aside and typically in the background or below male figures of the Victorian middle-class, white authorities.

Double Victimisation These five women are so often discussed in relation to their shared identity as victims of Jack the Ripper, yet their experiences of victimisation did not cease after their deaths. The narratives told throughout Victorian media, but more specifically here in the representations of The Illustrated Police News exposed Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane to an additional means of victimisation. The ways in which the publication prioritised representations of the women as deceased bodies that were torn and open and discarded in public spaces or laid bare and bleeding in the mortuary under the watchful gaze of the anatomist serves a punitive function. The paper served as a means of moral instruction for Victorian citizens in need of deterrence or perhaps fear to be guided away from perceived morally ‘dubious’ lifestyles or behaviours. They were constructed as frightful reminders of the dangers of promiscuity, and whilst their label as prostitutes has recently been discredited, the impact of such harmful stigmas continues to be relevant as it defined their representation in the public press, which remains one of the most common means through which we can learn about and engage with these women even to this day. Their identities as marginalised ‘others’ continues due to the cultural afterlife of Jack the Ripper and the significance of these archives in the visual history of the criminal case. Anwer writes of how the “Rippers ripping prefigures the process of slicing, opening up, and investigating the body during autopsy procedures” (2014: 437) and while the anatomical, medical dissection of the bodies is a dominant narrative within the publication, The Illustrated Police News itself extended this clinical dissection and further violates the women. Nicholls, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly experienced an additional layer of victimisation, this time posthumously, through the damning

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strokes of the illustrator. Much of the existing literature that examines the objectification and double victimisation of women’s bodies after death, focuses on their representation in popular culture, for example in crime programmes such as Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) or Silent Witness (see Nunn and Biressi 2003; Tait 2006; Foltyn 2008; Penfold-Mounce 2016). By comparison there is less research which examines this process in visual and narrative reports in real-life historical criminal cases. Perhaps this can be somewhat attributed to a post-nineteenth-century move away from seeing dead bodies and human corpses in news media. Nevertheless, the victimisation of women who are objectified and have their vulnerabilities commodified is a profoundly important area for criminological and thanatological investigation, especially in a criminal case whereby journalistic reporting and academic research has, for so long, focused on the male perpetrator and the power of male authorities to solve the crime. Women sit at the very heart of this case and, sadly, without their victimisation the spectre and mystery of Jack the Ripper would not exist, and so understanding who these women were and how they were visually represented and the narratives that were told about their lives and deaths, is in both the interest of gaining a fuller understanding of the case but also, of valuing their identities and experiences. For Carney, “the modern photographic spectacle punishes in a performative way as part of a tradition of disfiguring image-punishment, a mode of virtual marking” (Brown and Carrabine 2017: 281). He goes on to argue that “we should extend the idea of the virtual mark to the circulation of traces in pamphlets, newspapers, as well as in the social murmur of gossip” (ibid: 286). It is hoped that this chapter has made a compelling case in support of Carney’s latter call and for the need to recognise the punitive powers of the media, but not only those that are characteristic of “the modern photographic spectacle” (Carney in Brown and Carrabine 2017: 281), but of early media too. Print and visual discourses that monopolised on public understandings of criminal cases, that saturated the public consumption of crime news in a world without 24-hour information where information could be sourced from a myriad of global outputs. The Illustrated Police News, by comparison, had a relative monopoly and, as a result, it was able to define the narrative of these five women both in 1888 and frame their legacies during the centuries since. This narrative was one of disposability, marginalisation, and objectification.

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Conclusion There are four key arguments that this chapter has made. Firstly, it begins with the premise that there is a need to change the narrative focus of the Jack the Ripper case. Building on the work of Rubenhold (2019), this chapter puts the identities and experiences of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane at its very core and calls for greater recognition of their identities both in academic and public discourse. As part of this mission, this chapter highlights their histories through a detailed visual and discursive analysis. The Illustrated Police News was the first British tabloid, and while it undeniably gained momentum following the Jack the Ripper murders, by focusing simply on the elusive perpetrator, we obscure powerful insights into how the murders were handled by Victorian communities. By failing to examine these women, we limit ourselves to only a partial understanding of the events. Secondly, this chapter has demonstrated the performative and punitive function of the publication. The Illustrated Police News served as a moral mechanism of Victorian England and thus was both used as a means of exercising the power and ego of the middle-class, white, male elite as well as being a means through which moral judgements were passed over the lifestyles and identities of marginalised and ‘othered’ communities. By illustrating the women, after death, as torn and open, the publication exposed them to an additional process of victimisation. After death, the women were largely denied respect or compassion from the public and the press, and instead, they were drawn as symbols of moral deviance and consequently objects for voyeurism and consumption by the reader. Thirdly, in centring these visual representations of the women after death, this chapter demonstrates the role of the publication in commodifying marginalised individuals and corpses. The Illustrated Police News encourages the reader to view the women as ‘matter’, as disposable objects, and privileges a representation of them as open, both morally and bodily, and vulnerable. It functions as an extension of the anatomical gaze and medical dissections that gained such popularity during the Victorian era. Firstly, it validates the power of the clinical male elite, by prioritising representations of figures of medical and judicial authority, for example, frequently illustrating them at the forefront of the investigation. The crimes were very much framed through the actions and values of this privileged group. Secondly, in emphasising the corporeal, materiality of the women’s bodies in the illustrations, The Illustrated Police News facilitates a public

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voyeurism of their corpses in much the same way theatres, classrooms, and medical colleges (and many more spaces) opened their doors to public dissections of marginalised bodies. Finally, the chapter has demonstrated the value of investigating this historical case through visual methods (Carrabine 2012, 2014; Rafter 2014; Brown 2017; Brown and Carrabine 2017). The chapter contributes to the ever-growing, valuable body of visual criminological research which focuses on understanding issues of crime, deviance, and punishment through visual methods such as images, videos, or artwork. By examining the visual representations of these five women within the Illustrated Police News, we can better understand the socio-cultural context in which they were living and immerse ourselves in texts where these women are present. This is invaluable because in so many journalistic and academic discussions of Jack the Ripper, they are all too often side-lined and relegated invisible, in attempts to further romanticise the man that killed them.

References Anon. 1888a. Incidents Relating to the East End Murders. The Illustrated Police News, October 20. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/incidents-­relating-­tothe-east-­end-­murders-­from-­the-­illustrated-­police-­news ———. 1888b. Murder at Bucks Row. The Illustrated Police News, September 8. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/murder-­at-­bucks-­row-­from-­the-­illustratedpolice-­news ———. 1888c. Seventh Ripper murder. The Illustrated Police News, November 17. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/seventh-­ripper-­murder-­from-theillustrated-­police-­news ———. 1888d. The Whitechapel Monster. The Illustrated Police News, November 24. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/the-­whitechapel-­monster-­from-­theillustrated-­police-­news ———. 1888e. The Whitechapel Mystery. The Illustrated Police News, October. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­i tems/the-­w hitechapel-­m ystery-­f rom-­t heillustrated-­police-­news ———. 1888f. Two More Whitechapel Murders. The Illustrated Police News, October 6. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/two-­more-­whitechapelmurders-from-the-­illustrated-­police-­news ———. 1888g. Whitechapel murders. The Illustrated Police News, September 22. https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/whitechapel-­murders-­from-­the-illustratedpolice-­news

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Anwer, Megha. 2014. Murder in Black and White: Victorian Crime Scenes and the Ripper Photographs. Victorian Studies 56 (3): 433–441. Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Brown, Michelle. 2017. Visual Criminology. Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.206. Brown, Michelle, and Eamonn Carrabine, eds. 2017. Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Carrabine, Eamonn. 2012. Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology. British Journal of Criminology 52 (3): 463–489. ———. 2014. Seeing Things: Violence, Voyeurism and the Camera. Theoretical Criminology 18 (2): 134–158. Farge, Arlette. 2013. The Allure of the Archives. London: Yale University Press. Foltyn, Jacque-Lynn. 2008. Dead Famous and Dead Sexy: Popular Culture, Forensics, and the Rise of the Corpse. Mortality 13 (2): 153–173. Hayward, Keith, and Mike Presdee. 2010. Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image. Abingdon: Routledge. Jarvis, Brian. 2007. Monsters Inc.: Serial Killers and Consumer Culture. Crime Media. Culture 3 (3): 326–344. Logan, Louise. 2020. Drawing Species Lines: Sensation and Empathy in Illustrations of Vivisection in the Illustrated Police News. Victorian Periodicals Review 53 (1): 13–33. Mulvey, Laura. 1992. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Buckingham: Open University Press. Nunn, Heather, and Anita Biressi. 2003. Silent Witness: Detection, Femininity and the Post-Mortem Body. Feminist Media Studies 3 (2): 193–206. O’Neill, Maggie. 2010. Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research (PAR). Journal of Law and Society 37 (1): 210–232. Penfold-Mounce, Ruth. 2016. Corpses, Popular Culture and Forensic Science: Public Obsession with Death. Mortality 21: 19–35. Rafter, Nicole. 2014. Introduction to Special Issue on Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment. Theoretical Criminology 18 (2): 127–133. Rubenhold, Hallie. 2019. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. London: Penguin. Sappol, Michael. 2002. A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Seltzer, Mark. 1997. Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere. The MIT Press 80: 3–26. ———. 1998. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge.

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Smalley, Alice. 2017. Representations of Crime, Justice, and Punishment in the Popular Press: A Study of the Illustrated Police News, 1864–1938. PhD Thesis, The Open University. https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.0000c4cc. Stratmann, Linda. 2011. Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: The Illustrated Police News 1864–1938. London: British Library Publishing. ———. 2019. The Illustrated Police News: The Shocks, Scandals and Sensations of the Week, 1864–1938. London: British Library Publishing. Spokes, Matthew., Denham, Jack. and Lehmann, Benedikt. 2018. Death, Memorialization & Deviant Spaces. Bingley: Emerald. Tait, Sue. 2006. Autoptic Vision and the Necrophilic Imaginary in CSI. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (1): 45–62. Walkowitz, Judith. 1980. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-­ Victorian London. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 15

Photographing Death to Save Photojournalism: Mafia Homicides in Letizia Battaglia’s ‘Archive of Blood’ Francesco Buscemi

Photojournalism and Television This chapter analyses the photographs of mafia homicides taken in the Sicilian city of Palermo by the photojournalist Letizia Battaglia from 1975 to 1982. Battaglia, who died in 2022, is the most popular photojournalist in Italy, to the point that recently RAI, Italian public service TV, broadcast a series about her adventurous life and fight against mafia (Penzavalli 2022). The chapter also links Battaglia’s photos to the general situation of photojournalism in the same period and specifically to the relationships between photojournalism and television. In fact, certainly photojournalism suffered from the rise and success of television; however, Battaglia found her way to survive the new medium, as this chapter demonstrates.

F. Buscemi (*) University of Insubria, Como, Italy Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_15

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She in fact responded to the omnipresence of television by representing something TV could not depict: death, and specifically the violent deaths caused by mafia on the streets of Palermo. This links this chapter to the overall theme of this book. In those years, in fact, photojournalism went through a serious crisis, suffering from the competition of television. Heerten (2015) argues that in the late 1960s, photojournalism and television collaborated to highlight relevant events. Since the 1970s, however, this collaboration has ceased as moving images became  more captivating for the public. This caused a decrease in advertising revenues and the related closing down of some of the magazines promoting photojournalism (Cookman 2009, 85; Kennedy 2016, 53). Already in 1969, the photos taken by Neil Armstrong of Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon were certainly important (Hansen 2012, 275–277), but they could not be compared to the live show of the astronauts on TV as highlighted by Soluri (2008). What happened so clearly in the Moon landing also occurred in many other cases where television was faster, very often live, and always more spectacular, than photography (Cookman 2009; Kennedy 2016). The two media, during the 1970s and 1980s, underwent a period of aesthetic and content-related adjustment. To survive, photojournalism partially transformed its style. It changed the way it looked at reality, as in the case of William Klein’s street photography (Langton 2014). Klein and many other street photographers did things that the founders of photojournalism, from Cartier-Bresson to Capa, would have never done. They in fact adopted filters to modify the image, special lenses which deformed the actuality of the subject and post-­ production techniques which further added visual effects to the photographed matter (Warren 2006, 877). This allowed photography to walk through paths which TV could never follow. Television, in fact, arriving in families’ homes without filters or permission, had to manage its power in a very careful way. It had to clean the images sent to its unspecified audience made up of adults, children and people with particular sensitiveness. In reporting, for example, tragic news events or death, television banned the most shocking images (Campbell 2004). This major control over images occurred after the first years, when images were broadcast with more freedom. Cookman (2009, 132) points out that in the 1960s, television had broadcast violent images of death in the Vietnam War, and that this had suggested that many Americans became critical about the intervention in Vietnam just because of those

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distressing images. After that experience, TV eliminated the most shocking images from its news programmes, and specifically disturbing death representations tended to disappear.

Letizia Battaglia, a Photographer at War Letizia Battaglia is an internationally renowned (O’Hagan 2019) Sicilian photographer. She was the first European woman who won in 1985, along with the American photographer Donna Ferrato, the Eugene Smith Grant. Moreover, she won Dr. Erich Salomon Award in 2007 and the Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Award in 2009 (Santagata 2021). Battaglia acquired popularity in the mid-1970s and in the 1980s for her reportages on mafia homicides in Palermo. She started photographing in Palermo, her birthplace, at the end of the 1960s, and in 1970 moved to Milan to transform her passion into a job (Battaglia 2018). However, she came back to Palermo in the mid-1970s, when the city was shattered by a war between opposing mafia gangs which from 1979 to 1986 caused about one thousand victims among both mafiosi and people who fought them (judges, police officers, journalists, etc.). To better explain the seriousness of this situation, it is sufficient to say that in 1982, only in Palermo, there were more than 200 homicides (Del Frate 2017). Battaglia’s photos of these events, often published by the left-wing Sicilian newspaper L’Ora, have shocked the audience for their shocking representation of dead bodies in Palermo’s streets and the abundance of blood. She used to arrive in the crime scene even before the police, thanks to the fact that she continually went around the most dangerous areas of the city. This allowed her to take photographs of the corpses from a really short distance and no people around. Other photos, instead, were taken some minutes later, and depicted the relatives of the dead crying in front of the corpses of their dears, be they a mafia criminal or a mafia fighter. Later, she would define these images as a sort of ‘archive of blood’ (O’Hagan 2019) for their bare representation of violence and death. Battaglia has also reached increasing popularity for her photos of children and women in the poorest areas of Palermo. In these pictures, these people look at the camera as if they were challenging the viewer. In other photos, she depicted mafia bosses, such as Leoluca Bagarella, with the same defying gaze. Other times, she has also photographed the richest class of the city participating in luxury private parties (Lysakowski Hallal 2019). By doing so, Battaglia ended up representing the whole of Palermo

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social life, even though she has remained closer to the poorest. For Stille (2001), the fact that she has continued to live in an underdeveloped area of the city testifies to her attention and love for Palermo’s lower social strata. Stille (2001) argues that Battaglia’s work goes well beyond the representation of the mafia war. Battaglia became a symbol of the anti-mafia fight and has contributed to de-romanticising the criminal organisation and its bosses’ lives, by showing the squalid existence of many mafiosi, the misery of the places governed by the organisation, and the violence of the mafia boys. In this way the Sicilian photographer gave the Sicilians, the Italians, and the international public a revisited image of Sicilian crime, exactly the depiction that the mafia did not want. For this reason the photographer received various death threats by the criminal organisations, to the point that Judge Giovanni Falcone advised her to leave Palermo, a suggestion she never followed (Penzavalli 2022).

Photography Between Death and Resurrection In the last part of his life, Roland Barthes (2000) turned to Buddhism and to photography. In studying our perception of death, he writes that Buddhism and other Asian philosophies and religions fully acknowledge the importance of the perception of mortality during life. Western culture, by contrast, hides death. Since the second part of the twentieth century, however, a sense of death has emerged from photography. After the Western crisis of religion, in fact, photography has somehow replaced faith, and continually reminds us of our corporeity and thus of our finite destiny. In doing so, photography has the ability to illuminate the dark. For Barthes (2000, 9–10), the viewer is involved in a photograph thanks to two effects: studium and punctum. Studium is a quite normal feeling through which one may pay attention to a photo, a moderate interest which regards the entire image. Studium implies intellectual enthusiasm for photography and the ability to appreciate and read an image. In the end, it is a form of appreciation. Punctum is much more intense (in Latin this term refers to a sting or a puncture) and concentrates on one specific aspect or theme depicted in the viewed photograph. Barthes (2000) points out that it is a sort of accident, a surprising emotion which stings the viewer, moving and shaking them. By doing so, it resembles love. Punctum may span from joy to repugnance, in any case with strong intensity. Finally, for Barthes (2000, 9–10) punctum is not produced by the shocking images represented by, for example, photojournalism, not

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being linked to easy strategies of involvement; rather, it is provoked by more profound emotions. Susan Sontag (2003, 24) insists, as Barthes, on the links between photography and death. Photography is for her the most credible medium when it comes to representing death. She mentions the photographs of the just liberated Nazi concentration camps taken in 1945, giving the viewers a limpid representation of horror. Other media, such as cinema or TV, tend to discuss death and talk about evil, softening the power of the images showing them. The best choice is instead the approach of photography, Sontag points out, that is, to simply show death and evil directly and in their horror. This is clear in Battaglia’s photographs: as it will be clearer in the next sections, they in fact depict death without any filter, confirming Sontag’s assumption about the strength of this form of expression. Finally, to better understand Battaglia’s photos and their relationships with television, this chapter draws on remediation. Bolter and Grusin (1999) explain the ability of the various media to draw on each other through the continuous adjournment of their languages. Each medium appropriates content, technical strategies, forms of expression, themes, and everything else that already belonged to other media. Each medium re-elaborates these elements according to historical contexts, cultural values, political ideologies and so on. As a result, they construct new messages based on styles and choices already adopted by others. It is an endless mediation of a mediation, a continuous reproduction and mutual replacement which is necessary to the renewal and transformation of the media system. It has occurred since the Renaissance, Bolter and Grusin (1999) say, but since the twentieth century the process has accelerated. Photography has always been a part of this process of remediation. It has in fact given to and received from the other media. We may look, for example, at how cinema and television have built on it; but also at how photography, considered almost dead after the rise of the moving image, has returned by enacting processes of remediation with the media which have flourished after cinema and TV, that is, the internet and the social media. Instagram, for example, is a social medium remediating photography. Following on from all of this, the present study aims to answer this research question: how did Battaglia’s photos of mafia homicides impact photojournalism’s crisis and its relationship with TV in the late 1970s and early 1980s?

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A Semiotic Analysis of Death This chapter applies visual, social semiotic analysis to Battaglia’s ‘archive of blood’, her photos of mafia homicides taken in Palermo during the mafia war from 1975 to 1982. Semiotics is today a wide academic discipline studying signs philosophically and methodologically. Semioticians have progressively elaborated many categories referring to the nature of signs and the strategies to research the systems they create. The final aim is to investigate texts in always deeper and more analytic ways. What interests this chapter are first of all the two ways the structure of a text may be studied. They are the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic dimension (Mingers and Willcocks 2017). 1. The syntagmatic dimension refers to the way the elements of a text are positioned and combined among each other. A syntagmatic analysis, thus, takes into account the way the various signs are distributed within a text and tries to make sense of this (Chandler 2017, 80–84; Mingers and Willcocks 2017). This category assumes that all the signs in a text relate to each other to produce meaning, forming “networks of structured relationships” (Hockett 1958, 249). In a written phrase, for example, a syntagmatic analysis investigates the sequence of the words, which is not fixed, as if we change this order the phrase may change meaning or highlight one concept or another; in a film, it investigates the sequence of the scenes. In a photograph, the order is clearly visual. Social semioticians Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 218–230) find three ways to read an image in sequence: firstly, from top to bottom, with the most important element be positioned up (Lakoff 1987, 276); secondly, from left to right (only in Western culture, as other cultures read right to left), with a temporal connotation (the images on the left are those given or older, while on the right we will find the new and those still to come); and thirdly, from centre to periphery from more important to less relevant elements. 2. The paradigmatic dimension considers the text as a system of signs. It looks at the associations that each element in a text may produce, leading to other elements that are absent in the text but are recalled mentally (Chandler 2017, 98–104). In a written text, for example, the word ‘apple’ may recall the entire category of fruit, or William

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Tell; and the same happens in a photograph or painting. Other associations may also concern texts belonging to the same genre or associations between various genres or media. Thus, analysing something paradigmatically means finding the mental associations that each element may refer to within a text. The meaning resulted by this kind of analysis is certainly most based on interpretation and pertains to connotation, a deeper level of meaning in comparison to the more immediate denotation (Mingers and Willcocks 2017). Both syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes (Chandler 2017, 80–104; Mingers and Willcocks 2017) demonstrate the relevance of the social context in such analyses. Reading a photo from right to left or vice versa simply depends on what culture the photographer belongs to; similarly, the associative nature of the paradigmatic category and its interpretive basis change according to the cultural roots of ì the receiver. Thus, social semiotics is the branch of semiotics continually relating the sign and the social context where it has been generated (van Leeuwen 2005). Finally, as regards the selection of Battaglia’s photos, this research adopts purposive sampling, which is ‘a non-random sampling method in which the sample is arbitrarily selected because characteristics which they possess are deemed important for the research’ (Sproull 2002, 119). It relies on participants or items that ‘have a particular type of experience, characteristic or understanding to share’ (Macnee and McCabe 2008, 122). In this case, I have selected Battaglia’s photos representing violent death. Among its advantages, this strategy offers the researcher a sample that is certainly useful for the study; the method, as ever, also presents potential disadvantages, as for example the danger of bias or excessive interpretation.

Letizia Battaglia and the Stage of Death The photographer Giuseppe Santagata (2021) argues that Letizia Battaglia, in her most tragic photos, uses wide-angle lenses. However, they are totally different from those adopted by street photography, as they do not deform the image. The aim, as Santagata (2021) points out, is to get the member of the public seeing the photo, or the viewer, as I define them along the entire analysis, closer to the scene; to enter it, I would add. For example, in Battaglia (1975a), which depicts the homicide of a person belonging to mafia, the viewer is really close to the centre of

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the photo, with the corpse of a man on the floor, just next to the rear of a car, following the diagonal from one angle of the photo to the other. Nothing interposes between the sight of the viewer and the corpse and this put the viewer in the crime scene. In Battaglia (1975b), the corpse is alone, in the centre of the image. Other people are farther, looking at the scene from the end of the street. As a result, here the viewer is even closer to the killed man than the viewer of the previous case; moreover, here the viewer is also closer to the assassinated than the other people present in the crime scene, who are at the end of the street, kept at a distance by the police. The viewer has thus a sort of privileged place from which to watch the scene. Further, in Battaglia (1980b) the viewer is even more drawn to the scene than in the two previous cases. The viewer, that is, who watches the photo, is, in fact, next to the corpse in medium shot and the fact that there are no other people close to the victim in the dark makes the viewer feel like the only person keeping vigil over the corpse, in an atmosphere of extreme quietness and silence, even thanks to the limpidity with which photography can depict death (Sontag 2003). Thus, many of Battaglia’s photos attract the viewer into the image thanks to these visual strategies. As suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 218–230), the centrality of the victims underlines their importance within the system of signs of any analysed photo. Importantly in the centre of the photos the victims are not alone, as there is the viewer, that is, the member of the public, ideally close to them. Thanks to this strategy, we may say that Battaglia relies on the emotional involvement of the spectator, and thus on Barthes’s punctum rather than on the more rational studium. Viewers, that is, people watching the photos as members of public, entering and emotionally participating in the tragic scene is a very useful starting point for this analysis. If we analyse what happens to the viewers after entering the tragic scene, we find that there is no way out for them in all the analysed photos. Once into the image, in fact, the sight of the viewer cannot move from the corpses and the people around them to other places. All the escape paths for the members of the public are in fact blocked by other people; usually the view of a corps drew the spectator’s attention, but thanks to this visual strategy this happens more intensely, and the spectator feels to be part of the crime scene (Battaglia 1975b, 1979, 1980a, c); buildings (Battaglia 1977, 1982); the police (Battaglia 1979); journalists (Battaglia 1979); or walls (Battaglia 1975a). These photos have no horizon. It is as if Battaglia wants the viewers to remain

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within the scene, without any possibility to get out or to be distracted. The viewer has to stay within the image and see the entire horribleness of mafia homicides. Again, Barthes’s punctum seems to be the key that Battaglia offers the spectator to interpret her photographies, and this is her strategy to overcome the language of television, as explained in the conclusive section. So far, the analysis has regarded the syntagmatic level (Chandler 2017, 80–84; Mingers and Willcocks 2017), investigating the series of people and things that we can see on the image. If we turn to the paradigmatic level, however, we can see more. What strikes the viewer of these photos is the frequent presence of two elements: cars (Battaglia 1975a, 1980a, c, 1982) and other people looking at the corpses (Battaglia 1975b, 1977, 1982). These two recurring elements may be seen through the paradigmatic level (Chandler 2017, 98–104; Mingers and Willcocks 2017) and linked to what has been said so far in the syntagmatic analysis. Cars are in fact objects linked to relevant mental associations: moving in full autonomy, leading to a different place, change, and the discovery of new places. When they are still or parked, they may be associated with the contrary, a failed change or a status of crisis (DeBord 2017, 81–82). What is more, in some of these photos people have been killed in their cars (Battaglia 1979, 1980a, c). Relevantly, these photos report homicides of people fighting the mafia and not members of it. In fact, Battaglia (1979) depicts the homicide of Michele Reina, one of the Sicilian leaders of the Christian Democrat party, DC.  Battaglia (1980a) represents the assassination of Piersanti Mattarella, President of the Region Sicily and brother of the Italian President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, who in the photo is the man with glasses trying to save the victim. The fact that they are still within their automobiles, on a paradigmatic level (Chandler 2017, 98–104; Mingers and Willcocks 2017), underlines their attempts to go out of that situation and solve the problem of mafia, and the violent way in which these attempts have been frustrated. Getting back to the syntagmatic dimension (Chandler 2017, 80–84; Mingers and Willcocks 2017), we can see that in other photos the people who are near the corpses seem to have the same destiny of the viewer. In fact they are never offered the opportunity to go out of the scene. They never look beyond the scene, in the direction of the viewer (Battaglia 1975b, 1979, 1980a, c, 1982). This is in contrast to Battaglia’s other photos, where, as said above, children and mafia bosses look at the camera, and so at the viewer. Looking in the viewer’s eyes or beyond the scene of

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the assassination would have suggested a way of exiting the violence and death. Conversely, not looking at the camera means that they are destined to remain close to death and to renounce any horizon. This also links to the position of the corpses in many images. Victims are somehow in relief, emphasised in comparison to the other people who stay around the dead person and sometimes seem to be speaking with each other. Going back to the paradigmatic dimension (Chandler 2017, 98–104; Mingers and Willcocks 2017), this makes the picture resemble a stage scene, in which the people surrounding the victims play the role of the public. Moreover, given the tragic content and context it represents, it may be considered the theatrical scene of a tragedy. In two of photos (Battaglia 1975b, 1977) the public is quite far from the main character, the dead. However, in other pictures (Battaglia 1979, 1980c) people are closer and appear emotionally affected; further, in a photo (Battaglia 1982), people seem to be even more involved and playing another role, the chorus of the Greek tragedy. As the chorus, in fact, they comment or lament close to the main character. Thus, the very act of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999) that Battaglia’s photos put forward is not with television but with theatre. It is the iconicity of the Greek tragedy that Battaglia refers to in order to detach her photography from the dominant aesthetic of television. The stage, for her, is exactly the same as in classic theatre, a space oscillating between the signifying space of the theatrical system and the signified external dimension useful for the spectator to understand the piece (Pavis 1998, 360). Battaglia uses the photographic (and signifying) element of the stage to offer the spectator a way to enter the crime scene. Representing the death of the main character and even depicting the chorus she references to the Greek tragedy, to difference the representation of death from TV, as is discussed in depth in the next conclusive section.

Conclusion Looking at Battaglia’s photos of mafia homicides through the social context, as social semiotics (van Leeuwen 2005) recommends, provides interesting results. The first evidence is that street photography was not the only way for photojournalism to react to television. In fact, Klein and his colleagues, as said at the beginning of this chapter, have changed the eye with which they have looked at reality. Letizia Battaglia, conversely, to react to the dominion of television has changed the object of

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photography, showing what TV was not allowed to show. In doing so, she left the realistic eye of photojournalism intact, apart from the use of wideangle lens, which however has not deformed reality in her photos as it did with street photography. However, this is only the surface of an innovative process which is much deeper. Barthes’s (2000, 9–10) opposition between studium and punctum may be useful here to better understand the more profound distance of Battaglia’s representation of death from the cleaned and comfortable depiction on TV. We may say that the punctum is certainly the principal component of the involvement of Battaglia’s viewers, as the analysed photos without any doubt rely on all the already mentioned characteristics of Barthes’s second category: with the upsetting images of the homicides, they in fact have an intense impact over the viewer; they may be seen as an unexpected and surprising emotion; they present one element that is central to each photo, physically and figuratively, death; and the images of the dead judges and politicians who tried to fight mafia certainly have the ability to move and shake the public. Actually, even the images representing people belonging to mafia may move, as the public see them as corpses, and, in fact, the people around them sometimes show sufferance. Barthes (2000, 9–10) also points out that punctum does not necessarily involve the public through positive emotions. It in fact also draws on negative sentiments such as repugnance and violence. The atmosphere pervading many of the analysed photos reflects a negative world made up of violence and pitilessness, and this is another feeling that can be classified as a part of the punctum; finally, death in these photos is able to involve the viewer as it contains the most important component that punctum must have, intensity. No one may call into question that all the images that this chapter has analysed are constructed on intensity. In the end, if Barthes sustains that the punctum sometimes resembles love, we may say that in Battaglia’s photos punctum is death. It is death, in fact, that is the focus of all these images. This is exactly the profundity which marks the difference between simply shocking images and punctum. As for Barthes (2000), in Battaglia’s photos blood and death per se have nothing to do with the simplicity of shocking images. It is instead Barthes’s punctum which allows death to be mediated in a more profound way. It is a surprise and a sting that the viewer receives, but all of this has its roots in two thousand years ago. The recourse to theatre, and to the Greek tragedy specifically, has thus been fundamental to communicate to the viewer in depth, to show death

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moving the spectator more profoundly. Hall (2010, 3) points out that what unifies all the characters of the Greek tragedy (both the dead and the others) is that they all live in a continuous proximity to death. This is exactly what happens to Battaglia’s characters. Those dying fighting the mafia, those dying as pertaining to the mafia, and all of the others live in Palermo in a continuous closeness to death. By depicting this, Battaglia has really represented the tragedy of Palermo in those years. The visual system of the tragedy, united with the limpid representation of death by photography (Sontag 2003), has allowed Battaglia to impressively involve the viewer. If punctum is represented by death, studium, on the contrary, is the strategy pertaining to these images somehow cleaned from death, the TV ones. It has been television, thus, which remediated photography, by abolishing their most violent images, by never insisting on the corpses, hiding death among other elements (one of the characteristics of Barthes’s (2000, 9–10) studium), and not showing blood in their news programmes destined to be watched by families and children. Television had adopted the strategy of punctum during the Vietnam War, but later it changed its strategy for a softer approach to death. Instead Battaglia, in these photos, does not look at television but at theatre, making photography a new medium in relation to TV, by showing what television is not allowed to represent. By doing so, she made photojournalism surpass television just in the field where TV appeared stronger, the emotional involvement of the public. This served the purpose of making photojournalism survive. In the end, in Letizia Battaglia’s ‘archive of blood’ (O’Hagan 2019) people are dead, but their deaths meant life, at least for photojournalism.

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Penzavalli, Alice. 2022. “Solo per passione”, Isabella Ragonese diventa Letizia Battaglia: su Rai la fiction sulla grande fotografa. Io Donna, 22 May. Available at: https://www.iodonna.it/spettacoli/tv/2022/05/22/letizia-­battaglia-­ fotografa-­mafia-­fiction-­rai-­puntate-­storia-­isabella-­aragonese/. Accessed 12 June 2022. Santagata, Giuseppe. 2021. La fotografia di Letizia Battaglia. Fotografia Artistica, https://fotografiaartistica.it/la-­fotografia-­di-­letizia-­battaglia/. Accessed 24 Nov 2021. Soluri, Michael. 2008. Examining the Iconic and Rediscovering the Photography of Space Exploration in Context to the History of Photography. In Remembering the Space Age, ed. Steven J. Dick, 271–339. Washington, DC: NASA, Office of External Relations, History Division. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Sproull, Natalie L. 2002. Handbook of Research Methods: A Guide for Practitioner and Students in the Social Sciences. Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press. Stille, Alexander. 2001. Letizia Battaglia: Her Photographs Awakened Awareness of the Sicilian Mafia. In Profiles in Journalistic Courage, ed. Robert Giles, Robert W. Snyder, and Lisa DeLisle . London: Routledge.e-book Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. Abingdon: Routledge. Warren, Lynne. 2006. Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge.

Photographs Battaglia, Letizia. 1975a. Omicidio targato Palermo. Nikon School. https://www. nikonschool.it/sguardi/105/letizia-­battaglia.php. Accessed 24 Nov 2021. ———. 1975b. Dopo i colpi dei killer restò seduto sulla sedia, senza cadere. Maestros de la fotografia. https://maestrosdelafotografia.wordpress. com/2015/01/13/letizia-­b attaglia-­l a-­f otografa-­d e-­l a-­m afia/#jp-­ carousel-­2503. Accessed 24 Nov 2021. ———. 1977. Dead Man Lying on a Garage Ramp. International Center of Photography. https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/dead-­man-­lying-­ on-­a-­garage-­ramp. Accessed 24 Nov 2021. ———. 1979. Omicidio Reina. Artnet. http://www.artnet.com/artists/letizia-­ battaglia/omicidio-­reina-­n_QUqdgP8ZKqUDAxGri5Hg2. Accessed 24 Nov 2021. ———. 1980a. Piersanti Mattarella viene estratto dall’auto morente dal fratello futuro presidente della Repubblica. Nikon School. https://www.nikonschool. it/sguardi/105/letizia-­battaglia.php. Accessed 24 Nov 2021. ———. 1980b. La scena con quell'albero rinsecchito. Doppio Zero. https://www. doppiozero.com/materiali/clic/letizia-­battaglia-­spiazzamenti. Accessed 24 Nov 2021.

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———. 1980c. Il procuratore Gaetano Costa ucciso da Cosa Nostra il 6 agosto 1980. Antimafia Duemila. https://www.antimafiaduemila.com/home/di-­la-­ tua/238-­senti/74795-­letizia-­battaglia-­fotografa-­della-­mattanza-­mafiosa.html. Accessed 24 Nov 2021. ———. 1982. Letizia Battaglia, Isola delle Femmine. Omicidio di Vincenzo Enea, imprenditore. Mufoco. http://www.mufoco.org/digitalexhibitions/portfolio/ storie-­dal-­sud-­dellitalia/#2041-­storie-­dal-­sud-­dellitalia/821. Accessed 24 Nov 2021.

CHAPTER 16

Economies of Mortalities: Ageism and Disposability During the Covid-19 Pandemic Natalie Pitimson

Introduction This chapter explores the rhetoric of the disposability of older people that emerged within the United Kingdom’s (UK) public discourse around mortality expectations during the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. A common informational approach in UK news coverage at the outset of the pandemic focused on portraying older adults as needing stricter isolation than younger adults. This, coupled with coverage that frequently constructed the virus as a particular concern for older adults (Ylänne 2022), helped to create a social and cultural context that justified what turned out to be destructive and deadly policies around healthcare and older people during the pandemic. There was a very specific mobilisation of entwined and intersectional ageism within society, reflecting

N. Pitimson (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_16

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distinct tropes that are hidden in plain sight within policy and public attitudes towards older people. Indeed, Greenberg et al. (2017) suggest that ageism remains perhaps the final acceptable prejudice within society, a sentiment echoed by Dannefer (2021, p. 36) who suggests that the subject of age remains ‘fair game’. In observing the pandemic response in the United States (US) and Italy, Cohen (2020) suggests there was an implicit insinuation discernible in much of it: ‘[f]or the majority to evade or escape from the society of total quarantine, the old…must be abandoned and let die. I frame this abandonment(…) [as] gerocide – the willed mass death of persons deemed old’ (Cohen 2020, p. 544). Cohen sees ‘gerocide’ as a metonym for the pandemic response. He cites media coverage of early triage approaches in Italy where severely ill older people were excluded from respirator access and in Canada, where Covid-19 infected patients who were designated as ‘frail elderly’ were moved out of hospitals and into nursing homes ‘in order to make respirators and beds available in hospitals for the “appropriately” sick’ (Cohen 2020, p. 544). Alongside this, he explores social distancing as an example of both care and abandonment of older people. Whilst much of social life was halted for people of all ages, Cohen suggests that such practices intensified pre-existing, structural forms of isolation particularly present in the older population, giving rise to the belief that ‘to care is to an extent to abandon, to call but not visit, to deposit food at the doorstep and run’ (Ibid. 547). Fundamentally he observed a binary with the oppositional framing of old and young ‘in which ‘young’ is assigned agency and ‘old’ patiency in both the nefarious register of culling and the everyday register of entangled abandonment and care’ (Ibid. 553). Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics will be used as a key concept to understand the treatment of older people during the pandemic. Through analysis of historical and social explorations of systems of governance in colonial and post-colonial regimes, he identifies ‘necropower’ as a form of sovereignty that refers to the capacity to define who is disposable. Mbembe suggests that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power to dictate who may live and who must die. He therefore asks—‘under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right?(...) What place is given to life, death, and the UK body? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 2). In answer to such questions, he suggests that the ultimate expression of sovereignty in such matters emerges from ‘the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through

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communication and recognition’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 3). The UK government’s communication strategy in the early days of the pandemic was built upon creating solidarity and collectivity in the public response, and in so doing, clear age-based messaging was adopted: ‘We are advising those who are at increased risk of severe illness from coronavirus(…)to be particularly stringent in following social distancing measures. This group includes those who are aged 70 or older (regardless of medical conditions)’ (Ferguson et al./HM Government, 2020). Yet this move to apparently protect older members of the community at the outset of the pandemic was at odds with almost simultaneous policy making around the discharging of Covid-19 patients from hospitals to care homes and the blanket application of ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders in many of those homes, as discussed later in this chapter. Fletcher (2021), reflecting on this move by the government to request the quarantine of all over 70s, posits that whilst it is not unusual for some medical interventions to be stratified on the basis of age, what was remarkable in this instance was the extremity of it. ‘Instructing older people to confine themselves stringently to their residences for several months represents an unprecedented state intervention of extraordinary severity’ (Fletcher 2021, p.  480). He highlights too how, following the government’s instruction for over 70s to stay home, the British Society of Gerontology issued a statement that described the government’s response as ageist, making clear that they rejected the implementation of such a policy that was based only on the application of chronological age. This response, Fletcher suggests, points to broader tensions around understandings of chronological age in society, because ‘age categories contain too much human diversity to be of analytic use’ (Fletcher 2021, p. 483/484). Thus, whilst Fletcher agrees that resorting to chronological age during the early and chaotic days of Covid-19 did work to facilitate the swift development and communication of a vital public health response in a major global crisis, he argues that a more sophisticated and nuanced approach could have been developed beyond that initial period. Instead, what persisted was a generalised rhetoric, amplified by the media—that whilst all could catch the virus, it was older people who were most at risk of serious illness and death (BBC News, 15th March, 2020a). This chapter explores how narratives of homogenised old age, entwined with necropolitical acts, led to older people becoming the expected and accepted casualties of this pandemic.

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Beyond Narratives of Decline: Understanding Diversity in Older Age Hagestad and Uhlenberg (2005) highlight the ways in which notions of age segregation are a key element of the construction and maintenance of ageism in ‘western’ society, suggesting that age-based stereotypes have long been a basis of social organisation. Ageism can be observed through the consistent tendency to arbitrarily categorise older adults by using chronological age cut-off points, homogenising the many diversities of later life and falsely implying a conflation of age and disease (Meisner 2021). Baars and Phillipson (2014) similarly argue that the major problems that ageing people encounter are not related to biological decline but rather are constructed through social institutions and economic and political forces. McNamara and Williamson (2019) wonder, if ageism is so rampant in our society and across our social institutions, why are people not more outraged about it? They suggest that a more subtle reason for this pervasiveness should be recognised, that it is more difficult to identify and more ambiguous than other forms of prejudice, explaining that ‘[a]geism can be quiet and elusive, more like a mouse in the room than an elephant’ (McNamara and Williamson 2019, p. 13). Pickard (2016) argues that the root of this is that in contemporary ‘western’ society our defining existential crisis is our fear of ageing and old age. Pickard notes that this fear has real material consequences throughout the life course, describing it as cultivating a ‘system of stratification that ensures ongoing social inequality with an ideology that justifies it’ (Pickard 2016, p.  3). She asserts that within this complex of stratification, the most disadvantaged and devalued category of all is that of old age, situated as she sees it, within a ‘master narrative of decline’ (Pickard 2016, p. 3). She also relates such ideas to the socio-cultural denial of death that persists in many societies—a key element of which includes the horror of signs of ageing and senescence through which we develop a recognition of our own bodily vulnerability. Weicht (2013) argues that in both political and public discourses older people feature as subjects who are associated with specific, ‘othered’ needs and so, in this way, normative ‘age orders’ are established which situate the older person as the quintessential other. Such processes, he suggests, ‘position older people as a distinct demographic group whose position describes identities outside mainstream society’ (Weicht 2013, p. 189). Indeed, the field of gerontology itself had for a long time emphasised what Longino and Powell (2004) describe as a ‘naturalized conception of ageing in

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which a person is portrayed as proceeding along a generic life course’ (Longino and Powell 2004, p. 199). There is a long-standing tendency to reduce ageing to a set of ‘normative stages’ that apparently determine the experience of old age through a chronological lens and ‘inevitable physical and mental decline and preparation for death’ (Longino and Powell 2004, p. 201). They describe too how the medical model constructs old age in terms of physical, psychological, and biological problems of the body, depicting it as a site of inevitable decay and deterioration. However, Longino and Powell (2004) are critical of this approach, emphasising the impact of personal history and social context more as key proponents in the varied lives of older people and advocating thus for increased recognition of diversity in later life experiences and the rendering of the label ‘the elderly’ as meaningless. What followed then, was the ‘conceptual disaggregation’ (Longino and Powell 2004, p. 202) of ‘the elderly’, enabling gerontologists to prioritise a perspective of embodied subjectivity. Indeed, as Morgan and Kunkel (2011) note, older adults are not uniformly poor or unhealthy or isolated. Importantly they argue that biological and psychological developments increasingly do not correspond meaningfully to contemporary Western society’s socially constructed stages of life. Despite such progress in understanding how chronological age as a marker of oldness is meaningless, Ayalon et al. (2020) observed that, concurrent with the pandemic, there has been a parallel outbreak of ageism and (re)homogenisation of older people. ‘What we are seeing in public discourse is an increasing portrayal of those over the age of 70 as being all alike with regard to being helpless, frail(…)These views are being spread by social media, the press and public announcements by government officials throughout the world’ (Ayalon et al. 2020, p. e49). Within the context of such persistent discourses of decline and weddedness to fixed descriptives of chronological age and oldness, the removal or at least the hiding away of the ageing, vulnerable body from society still holds both an existential and physical power, as evidenced by the use of care homes to house elderly hospital leavers in the earlier days of the pandemic. Between March and June 2020 there were 66,112 deaths of care home residents and of these, 19,394 involved Covid-19, which therefore accounts for 29.3% of all deaths of care home residents (ONS, cited in Stevenson 2020, p.  218). Stevenson argues that these statistics demonstrate how there was a huge increase in the number of ‘excess’ deaths in care homes during the initial lockdown phase in 2020, that is, deaths that would most likely not have occurred if Covid-19 patients had not been

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moved into them. In addition to this, around half of all deaths at that time in the UK (totalling around 40,000) were in care homes (2020). ‘As a collective panic overtook the nation in March 2020…there was feverish activity to eject patients from hospitals and to build extra capacity within the National Health Service (NHS). It was as if the care home sector was engulfed in darkness. Once older patients were out of sight and away from the NHS, they were set out of mind. They no longer mattered’ (Stevenson 2020, p. 218). Stevenson highlights that it was several weeks into lockdown before the government noticed that they were not counting the excess deaths of people in care homes, an act that she depicts as ‘the ultimate isolation for older people: to be living there and be so insignificant as not to be counted within the country’s daily death toll’ (Stevenson 2020, p. 219). A key outcome of this abandonment of older patients, both the living and the dead ones, as Ayalon et al. (2020) observed, was that older adults were portrayed as being most susceptible to the ravages of Covid-19, meaning that younger people were tending to therefore view themselves as somehow immune to the virus. Morris (1998) suggests that when it comes to experiences of illness in contemporary ‘western’ society, the public has a taste for quick fixes through drugs and surgery. In characterising the notion of ‘postmodern illness’ however, Morris argues that such understandings must encompass the specific anxieties that are created by rapid and uncertain change: ‘the anxieties of a period in which both patients and doctors may feel adrift(…) caught in the turmoil of shifting times’ (Morris 1998, p. 17). This conceptualisation can be mapped onto the rapid emergence and emergency of Covid-19. It was quickly understood that even if they were not ill yet, everyone was a potential patient. All normal expectations of regular biomedical engagement in society were suspended and GP visits became virtual and/or virtually impossible to obtain. A Covid-19 diagnosis did not itself lead to a clear prognosis or treatment plan, as both were largely non-­ existent in the early days of the pandemic. The virus appeared to impact people unevenly, with the afflicted experiencing anything along a spectrum ranging from the asymptomatic to the fatal. Emerging therefore from such an anomic medical landscape, was the desire for a ‘quick fix’ within a more traditionally understood model of illness, diagnosis and treatment, followed by rapid realisations that such medical trajectories were simply not happening with Covid-19, this then quickly became a defining underpinning fear for many. It was out of this context that notions of the  disposability of older people began to bed-in. The medical

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profession needed time to develop effective treatments and vaccines. People were dying in alarming numbers, but the message so often repeated by the government and subsequently the media was that most victims were older people and therefore their vulnerability to the illness should be expected (BBC News 11th May 2020b). This worked to cultivate a discourse that such losses were expected and inevitable elements of the time-­ sensitive project of developing effective treatments for younger patients whose deaths, in contrast, were considered neither inevitable nor acceptable. Fundamentally, the messaging in those earlier days of the pandemic was that older patients caught and died from Covid-19 because of their age—a way of thinking that reflects decades of ageism and cultural conceptions of the ‘othered old’, as Morris suggests—‘illness is no longer a purely biological state but rather something in part created or interpenetrated by culture’ (Morris 1998, p. 71). So, I suggest that our understanding of Covid-19 and its likely victims during this period came not from biomedical discourse alone but from its intersections with cultures of ageism that are so powerful as to have become part of public health rhetoric and indeed public calming strategies, thus emulating Morris’ (1998) idea that our understanding of illness in contemporary society is situated at the crossroads of biology and culture.

Necropolitics and the Pandemic As mentioned earlier, notions of disposability and state-sanctioned loss of life can be meaningfully framed through Mbembe’s (2019) discussions on necropolitics and, in particular, his ideas on sovereignty around decisions on who lives and who dies. He makes the point that very specific conceptions of ‘the other’ are required in order to share the view of an outsider group as being ‘a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my life potential and security’ (Mbembe 2019, p. 72). He suggests too therefore that, within such contexts, power is based upon a ‘fictionalised notion of the enemy’ (Mbembe 2019, p. 70). Undoubtedly Covid-19 presented a significant danger to many, but it was the framing by the UK government and in turn the media of who our fear of it should be focused upon, that was so striking as the pandemic unfolded. In this scenario, older people were the Other—not Covid-19—they came to represent intense vulnerability to the illness, which threatened therefore to overwhelm the NHS and make it harder for younger age groups to get treatment and care. They were also seen as bodily threats in that they were

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identified as key spreaders of the disease within care homes and subsequently in hospitals, hence them being kept away from them (Stevenson 2020). They became the mortal threat, the absolute danger in this scenario, rather than the virus itself and this is how we can understand the rhetoric of disposability that quickly arose. The notion of older people as a threat, to others and to the health service, rather than under threat because of UK government policy, is key to understanding the discourse that underpinned Covid-19’s victimology. Whilst provisions were made to ‘protect’ older people, the understanding was that this was primarily to mitigate the potential impact of their ill health on younger members of the population. The deaths of older people within such a framework did not need to be considered a failure of those provisions of protection, but rather an inevitability of an illness that posed a disproportionate risk to older people, as Skeggs (2021) describes, ‘The abstraction and objectification of life and death are discussed by the media and government representatives as if people were not involved and dead pensioners were a benefit to the nation’ (Skeggs 2021, p. 137). This wrings the emotion out of the happenstance and frames it instead as expected, almost rational, loss, that is, ‘the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality’ (Mbembe 2019, p. 72). Analysis of the public health response to the pandemic in the UK reveals necropolitics in play. Covid-19 mortality statistics show that many deaths within vulnerable populations could have been prevented if governments had seen their lives as worth saving (Daher-Nashif 2022). Mbembe’s original analysis of necropolitics speaks to a more ‘visceral and stark order of violence and exposure to death: apartheid and concentration camps’ (Howard 2022, p. 4), with the roots of his work showing how racialised groups have frequently been subject to state violence, in the form of both neglect and direct attack. Skeggs (2021) argues that such ideas feed more broadly into neoliberal assessments  of human value, resulting in a ‘valorisation of death alongside the governance and distribution of life’ (Skeggs 2021, p.  125). She cites Mbembe’s point too that techniques used against racialised groups throughout history are extended to other groups made vulnerable for predation. In observing the UK government’s response to the pandemic, Skeggs notes that they seemed to be operating with a ‘value assessment of specific groups whose lives were considered as disposable, definitely not considered worthy of protection’ (Skeggs 2021, p. 126). The UK government’s initial policy was that economically harmful lockdowns could be avoided if the country could accept

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the deaths of the most vulnerable whilst working towards herd immunity (Howard 2022). In discussing debates about who should be protected, Skeggs (2021) lists some key media and government responses during these early stages of the pandemic. These included Toby Young, ex-member of the Board of the Office for Students, who tweeted that spending £350 billion to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand, mostly ‘elderly’ people was an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money. She cited too a statement from the former Supreme Court Justice and advisor to the Conservative party, Lord Jonathan Sumption, who declared some lives less valuable. Likewise, she points to comments from Jeremy Warner, a journalist from the Telegraph newspaper, who suggested that Covid-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately ‘culling elderly dependents’. But perhaps most telling of all is the content of a leaked WhatsApp message sent in October 2020 by Boris Johnson, to his former senior advisor, opposing the third English lockdown on the basis that those dying were ‘all over 80’ (Skeggs 2021, p. 137). Skeggs suggests that such examples demonstrate that letting those who represent a significant cost to the state die, was viewed as legitimate. Relatedly, there was a strong focus on protecting the NHS, with Stevenson (2020) pointing out that the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) did not contain one advisor with expertise on older age or social care, as she explains: ‘In February [2020] much SAGE time was spent planning how the NHS would cope. While 400,000 people live in care homes in England, official minutes show that care homes did not appear on the agenda for the first eleven meetings’ (Stevenson 2020, p. 220). On the 19th March 2020, hospitals were told to discharge vulnerable patients into care homes (UK government 2020) at a time when there was no proper testing available. Stevenson (2020) says that around 25,000 patients were discharged to care homes in this way and it was not until the 16th of April that testing before discharge from hospital to care homes was finally required. This period also saw the blanket application in some care homes of do-not-resuscitate orders (DNRs), a process that normally requires sensitive discussions with a person about their wishes towards the end of their life, ‘and can be designed to empower frail older and disabled people’ (Stevenson 2020, p.  221). However, she notes, instructions were given to some care home managers to apply DNRs to all residents, regardless of any prior discussions. Having observed such acts of mismanagement of the care home sector by the government during the early days of the pandemic, Amnesty International (2020) released a report titled ‘As if expendable: The UK

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government’s failure to protect older people in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic’. In this report they argue that the government was aware that residents of care homes live with multiple health conditions as well as issues such as physical dependency, dementia and frailty, putting them therefore at exceptional risk to the medical impacts of the Covid-19 virus. They argue that a number of decisions and policies adopted at the local and national level served to increase care home residents’ risk of exposure to the virus, therefore ‘violating their rights to life, to health, and to non-­ discrimination’ (Amnesty International 2020, p. 6). They comment too on the blanket implementation of the DNRs, explaining that any decision regarding such an order must be made on an individual basis by the patient and/or their families and implementing them without this is unlawful. They note that under the human rights laws to which the UK are party to, it is required to ‘protect and guarantee fundamental human rights(…) notably the right to life, the right to highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, the right to non-discrimination  – including on the grounds of age, disability or health status’ (Amnesty International 2020, p. 45). Therefore, they assert that decisions, policies and actions taken by national and local authorities and institutions violated the human rights of older patients being released into care homes and indeed existing residents of those homes in England and violated too their obligation to protect the right to life without discrimination that all UK citizens should be able to expect.

Conclusion This chapter focuses on the UK, but wider literature shows that, albeit differently in various places, ageism and the disposability of older people were part of policy and public health responses across the globe (Lichtenstein 2020). The widespread amplification of the conflation of ageing with Covid-19 mortality led to an intensification of ageism and ‘intergenerational tension’ in public discourse (Meisner 2021, p.  58). Schaffer (2021), in observing the global response to Covid-19, labelled it a societal triage, a sorting system that would ‘identify the criteria on which we decide the extent to which resources will be allocated’ (Schaffer 2021, p. 46). In so doing, Covid-19 more generally has therefore brought necropolitics into a field of visibility, making it apparent ‘who in our own societies has been rendered expendable’ (Howard 2022, p. 2).

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As Stevenson (2020) points out, the proclamation that ‘we’re all in it together’ has rung hollow during this pandemic and as such she suggests that ‘we must not see the younger generation turn against older people (…)The only way this can happen is for our country’s leaders and policy makers to embrace the understanding of why we have neglected older people(…)during the most desperate time of danger to our population(…) This is the way out of darkness, and it starts with taking a long hard look at ourselves’ (Stevenson 2020, p. 224). What we have witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic is a full-blown (re)-emergence of ageism and intergenerational division. Fletcher (2021) suggests that it was inevitable that efforts to understand Covid-19 would lead to it being categorised by age (and sex and ethnicity and socio-economic status) because that is what researchers ‘know’ to look for. However, Skeggs (2021) argues that the pandemic also highlighted the ways in which ageism underpins the institutions and infrastructures of government that prop up such social categorisation, noting that ‘[e]ntwined processes of classification distribute not just moral and economic value to specific groups but also distribute life and death chances’ (Skeggs 2011, cited in Skeggs 2021, p. 138). Globally, management of the pandemic reflected the politics that was driving public health policies, highlighting the ways in which these were structured around ‘necropolitical governmentality that saved some lives but sacrificed others, based on perceptions of who deserves life and who deserves death’ (Daher-Nashif 2022, p. 10). In this way, Covid-19 was a revealing moment, highlighting the result of decades of stigmatisation and marginalisation of older adults. This leads to key debates over the future, and what comes next, depending on whether or not society accepts its dead as collateral damage or whether it instead channels the shared grief and outrage towards a greater collective consciousness (Howard 2022). Fundamentally, as Stevenson (2020 articulates, ‘we want to die when it is our time, not when others determine it because they do not value older people’ (p. 227).

References Amnesty International. 2020. As If Expendable: The UK Government’s Failure to Protect Older People in Care Homes During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Available online: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur45/3152/2020/en/. Accessed 8 Aug 2022.

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Ayalon, L., A. Chasteen, M. Diehl, B. Levy, S.D. Neupert, K. Rothermund, and H.W.  Wahl. 2020. Aging in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Avoiding Ageism and Fostering Intergenerational Solidarity. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B 76 (2): e49–e52. Baars, J., and C. Phillipson. 2014. Introduction. In Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic Gerontology, ed. J.  Baars, J. Dohmen, A. Grenier, and C. Phillipson, 1–10. Bristol: Policy Press. BBC News. 15 Mar 2020a. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­51895873. Accessed 21 June 2022. ———. 11 May 2020b. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­52575594. Accessed 21 June 2022. Cohen, L. 2020. The Culling: Pandemic, Gerocide, Generational Affect. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34: 542–560. Daher-Nashif, S. 2022. In Sickness and in Health and Their Implications During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Sociology Compass 16 (1): e12949. Dannefer, D. 2021. Age and the Reach of the Sociological Imagination: Power, Ideology and the Life Course. London: Routledge. Ferguson, N., D.  Laydon, G.  Nedjati-Gilani, N.  Imai, K.  Ainslie, M.  Baguelin, S.  Bhatia, A.  Boonyasiri, Z.  Cucunuba, G.  Cuomo-Dannenburg, A.  Dighe, I. Dorigatti, H. Fu, K. Gaythorpe, W. Green, A. Hamlet, W. Hinsley, L.C. Okell, S. van Elsland, H.  Thompson, R.  Verity, E.  Volz, H.  Wang, Y.  Wang, P.G.T. Walker, C. Walters, P. Winskill, C. Whittaker, C.A. Donnelly, S. Riley, and A.C. Ghani. 2020. Report 9: Impact of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand. London: Imperial College. Available at https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperialcollege/medicine/sph/ide/gida-­fellowships/Imperial-­College-­COVID19-­ NPI-­modelling-­16-­03-­2020.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2022. Fletcher, J.R. 2021. Chronological Quarantine and Ageism: COVID-19 and Gerontology’s Relationship with Age Categorisation. Ageing & Society 41: 479–492. Greenberg, J., P. Helm, M. Maxfield, and J. Schimel. 2017. In How Our Mortal Fate Contributes to Ageism: A Terror Management Perspective in Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice against Older Persons: A Second Edition, ed. Todd D. Nelson, 105–132. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hagestad, G.O., and P.  Uhlenberg. 2005. The Social Separation of Old and Young: A Root of Ageism. Journal of Social Issues 61 (2): 343–360. Howard, M. 2022. The Necropolice Economy: Mapping Biopolitical Priorities and Human Expendability in the Time of Covid-19. Societies 12 (2): 1–15. Lichtenstein, B. 2020. From ‘Coffin Dodger’ to ‘Boomer Remover’: Outbreaks of Ageism in Three Countries with Divergent Approaches to Coronavirus Control. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B 76 (4): e206–e212.

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Longino, C.F., and J.L. Powell. 2004. Embodiment and the Study of Aging. In The Body in Human Inquiry: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Embodiment, ed. V.  Berdayes, L.  Esposito, and J.W.  Murphy, 199–216. Cresskill: Hampton Press Inc. Mbembe, A. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. ———. 2019. Necro-Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press. McNamara, T.K., and J.B.  Williamson. 2019. Ageism Past, Present and Future. New York and London: Routledge. Meisner, B.A. 2021. Are You Ok, Boomer? Intensification of Ageism and Intergenerational Tensions on Social Media amid COVID-19. Leisure Sciences 43 (1–2): 56–61. Morgan, L.A., and S.R. Kunkel. 2011. Aging, Society, and the Life Course. 4th ed. New York: Springer Publishing Company. Morris, D. 1998. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pickard, S. 2016. Age Studies: A Sociological Examination of how we Age and Are Aged through the Life Course. London: Sage. Schaffer, S. 2021. Necroethics in the Time of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. In COVID-19 Volume I: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions, ed. J.M. Ryan, 43–53. London and New York: Routledge. Skeggs, B. 2021. Necroeconomics: How Necro Legacies Help Us Understand the Value of Death and the Protection of Life during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Historical Social Research 46 (4): 123–142. Stevenson, A. 2020. Shining a Light on Care Homes during the COVID 19 Pandemic in the UK 2020. Quality in Ageing and Older Adults 21 (4): 217–228. UK Government. 2020. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ coronavirus-­covid-­19-­hospital-­discharge-­service-­requirements. Accessed 21 June 2022. Weicht, B. 2013. The Making of ‘the Elderly’: Constructing the Subject of Care. Journal of Aging Studies 27: 188–197. Ylänne, V. 2022. Older Adults and the Pandemic in UK News Media. In Ageing and the Media – International Perspectives, ed. V. Ylänne. E-book.

CHAPTER 17

Reflecting Grief During a Pandemic: Online UK Newspapers’ Reportage and Researchers’ Experiences Erica Borgstrom, Ryann Sowden, and Lucy E. Selman

Introduction In Spring 2020, the World Health Organisation declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) a pandemic (World Health Organisation 2020). In the weeks immediately before and after this announcement, the British news media was heavily focused on the disease and the potential implications for UK residents and citizens. Whilst UK newspapers’ early reporting focused on the impact of COVID-19 in other countries (e.g. the rising cases and deaths in China and Italy), there was soon increased attention on the UK, highlighting deaths linked to the virus. Dying from COVID-19

E. Borgstrom (*) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Sowden • L. E. Selman University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_17

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has been described as a difficult death (Breitbart 2020), and those bereaved during the pandemic may experience specific challenges including access restrictions (Selman et al. 2021) that means death from COVID-19 may be particularly painful for those bereaved. As researchers interested in death, dying and grief with an awareness of how social discourses can impact these experiences, we set out to explore how the media was talking about these issues early on in the pandemic (Sowden et al. 2021; Selman et al. 2021). We approached this research with an awareness that death sells newspapers (Walter 2017) and media tropes and techniques influence the public: they create a lens which shapes experiences and attitudes, and highlight socio-cultural fears and anxieties. With projections of high death rates in the UK due to initial limited political intervention to minimise the outbreak, the increased national mortality rate meant there would be an increase in bereaved people, and due to the nature of the disease, many of these deaths could be considered sudden. At the start of the pandemic, there was also uncertainty about how bereaved people would be impacted both by the nature of the deaths as well as the multiple social restrictions that were being implemented, although it was hypothesised based on prior research that it would negatively impact people (Selman et al. 2020; Gesi et al. 2020). Early reports suggested that death, dying and grief during the pandemic significantly challenged people’s expectations about how someone should die and what bereavement should be like. We therefore focused our attention on how grief was reported following a bereavement due to COVID-19 and sought to reflect on how this reporting could impact both people who were bereaved and the general public reading such reports. To investigate media discourse about grief following the bereavement from a COVID-19-related death, we conducted a qualitative document analysis of text from online media reports. We decided to focus on online news media for several reasons. UK online newspaper readership increased by 6.6 million in the first quarter of 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (Mayhew 2020). Online newspaper articles are a readily publicly available source of discursive data which, unlike first-person primary qualitative data, was easier to collect during the initial phases of the pandemic. Such news reports also represent a socially influential form of discourse—they are widely discussed in person, on social media, and on broadcast media and have cultural influence beyond their own medium.

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In this chapter, we briefly explain the project’s methodology for how we conducted a document analysis of UK newspaper reporting. The latter part of the chapter focuses on reflection about what it was like to be analysing data of this kind during an ongoing pandemic. This is particularly pertinent as the effects of the pandemic and rising death rates increased over the time of the study, as well as the personal, emotional and physical burdens of living and working during a pandemic. There is an increasing recognition in death studies that researcher wellbeing matters (Woodthorpe 2011; Visser 2016; Borgstrom and Ellis 2021; Jones and Murphy 2021; Six 2020), and the reflections in this chapter add to this growing body of literature.

Epistemological and Theoretical Underpinnings of Our Research Our approach was informed by critical discourse analysis (Wodak and Meyer 2015). Our initial aim was to understand how newspaper discourse implicitly and explicitly described experiences of people bereaved by COVID-19. We also sought to identify how media reports accounted for or reflected on the implications of such bereavement. Critical discourse analysis is concerned with identifying and examining the ideologies embedded in discourse and their social and material consequences (Johnson and McLean 2020). Consequently, we acknowledge that newspaper discourses are not neutral—they have power to impact how bereavement is experienced, influence societal discussions about what is considered ‘normal’ for bereavement, and can impact professional practices and policies. Epistemologically, we understand that what is considered ‘normal’, ‘expected’, or ‘difficult’ in relation to death, bereavement and grief are social constructs, informed by and replicated in societal discourses; these can vary cross-culturally (McCarthy et  al. 2019; Reimers 2003; Walter 2006). During our analysis, we found it useful to not only consider the social constructions around death (such as the notion of ‘good death’) but also draw on Terror Management Theory (Selman et  al. 2021). The latter provided a useful lens to help us make sense of how journalists and editors (as media creators) talked about death, bereavement and grief. Terror Management Theory describes the psychological conflict between the human need for self-preservation and the realisation that death is

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inevitable and largely unpredictable (Greenberg et al. 1986). According to this theory, terror is managed by taking increased comfort in one’s existing cultural worldview (such as religious or nationalistic identities), minimising uncertainty by ‘weaving the individual more securely into a meaningful cultural fabric’ (Arndt et al. 2002:307) and providing a sense of ‘symbolic immortality’ through which one lives on after death (Menzies and Menzies 2020). Terror Management Theory has been applied across disciplines and found to be applicable in different religious and cultural groups (Heine et al. 2002; Pirutinsky 2009). This is particularly applicable when thinking about how deaths or the dead may be viewed as difficult. Conducting the Research: Data Analysis During a Pandemic We ranked the online UK newspapers and their Sunday counterparts according to readership numbers (Ofcom. 2019), selecting the top seven for inclusion (Sowden et al. 2021) to capture a range of political perspectives, readership demographics, and newspaper types. We specifically focused on newspaper outlets, rather than broadcasting platforms such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), to enable us to meaningfully compare the articles. Firstly, we acknowledge that the type of media—how it is created and packaged—impacts the messaging (McLuhan 1964). Online newspapers therefore arguably provide a specific and different role from wider broadcasting platforms in terms of how they provide and disseminate news. We wanted to be able to focus our comparison of news items to those were similar in medium (i.e. compare like for like). We conducted the first searches on 18 March 2020, before the first lockdown was announced in the UK but when initial restrictions had already been introduced in clinical settings. As the pandemic progressed, we decided to structure our data collection to cover full weeks and to cover a time period that reflected significant changes and events. This resulted in a four-week time period for searches (18 March 2020 to 14 April 2020)—selected to represent a time when deaths were becoming widely reported. Due to the high numbers of articles (over 100 articles across the four-week period), rather than analysing all items across all four weeks, we adopted a pragmatic approach and picked two time periods to analyse and compare within our data set. We selected the first and last week of this month-long period for analysis, which encompassed key points in the UK COVID-19 timeline and would enable us to explore

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changes in media discourse over time. The first week (Week A: 18 March 2020–24 March 2020) covered the UK’s transition into the first lockdown; the fourth week (Week B: 08 April 2020–14 April 2020) occurred at the first peak of the pandemic. Searches resulted in 55 articles for inclusion in the analysis: 19 from Week A and 36 from Week B. This time period included a period before the UK government announced its first ‘lockdown’ (lockdown was announced on 23rd March 2020), the beginning of that lockdown, and time leading up to the lockdown extension (lockdown was extended on 16th April 2020). In the UK, lockdown during Spring 2020 referred to a national set of measures designed to reduce the spread of the virus by restricting people’s movements. The Church of England also issued their funeral guidance on 18th March 2020, restricting attendance numbers at funerals. That was later updated by Public Health England on March 31st 2020 and extended the guidance to apply to all faiths. Our search range unknowingly included the peak number of daily deaths in the first wave of COVID-19 in the UK, by which time over 1000 people were recorded as having died on a single day. By the end of our data search period, over 17,252 people were recorded as having died of COVID-19. Many of the newspapers kept running logs of the total number of deaths and referred to this regularly. By focusing on this period, we therefore were able to capture and reflect on a rapidly changing societal landscape and how the media were publicly making sense of both the rising cases and death rates due to COVID-19 as well as the restrictions put in place to minimise this trend. All articles were imported into Nvivo12 for data management and analysis. Even though qualitative document analysis is an established research method in explorations of media representation, there is no single accepted methodological approach (Altheide et al. 2008; Elo and Kyngäs 2008). We drew on Altheide’s emergent/ethnographic analysis methods: deep immersion in the data and asking questions about the organisation, production and consequences of the content (Altheide 2000). We examined how behaviour and events were placed in context and identified themes, ‘frames’ and discourse (Altheide 2000). In our study, the act of interest is bereavement and grief due to COVID-19 and as such our analysis sought to identify the main frames and themes in how this phenomenon was presented in mainstream UK newspapers. Initially, each author independently read and extrapolated themes from three varied and qualitatively rich articles. Our first stage was a conventional content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005), which was useful

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given our interdisciplinary backgrounds and different approaches to qualitative coding. The overall coding strategies and resultant themes are reported elsewhere (Sowden et al. 2021; Selman et al. 2021). Our team meetings enabled us to discuss how the data related to existing theoretical and empirical critical understandings of media representations of death and bereavement and the normative narratives within the data. Our meetings therefore involved established processes for categorising the texts and evolving sense-making and cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing. We adopted a reflexive approach to our analysis and teamworking throughout. We had regular video meetings to discuss our thoughts on the project, analysis, and ongoing events and how we were making sense of the data. Unlike others who may undertake historical newspaper discourse analysis, or analyse documents from another country, our analysis was contemporary and was influenced in real time by events around us. These regular team meetings helped generate a collective understanding of the data, and enabled individual and group reflection upon it. Additionally, the meetings helped record how the ever-changing events were influencing the analysis process. For example, during the ‘lockdown’ in the UK, people were instructed to stay at home, with only essential trips and one daily session of outdoor exercise, and hospitals and care homes severely restricted visitors. The guidelines around what kinds of social activities were permissible regularly changed. Keeping track of these events ensured we understood the data in the context during which it was produced. We noted in our meetings that experiencing events later in the pandemic as ‘common’ or ‘common knowledge’ could impact how we analysed articles that were written before such events occurred or discourses were widely recognised. Our methods meant that not only were we exposed to the ‘pandemic knowledge’ through our day-to-day lives, but that through our project we were confronted with this quick rise of death rates, the reports of mounting and complicated grief, and considerations of the impacts of all of this on a regular and in-depth basis. Therefore, the meetings were also crucial for facilitating team connectedness and wellbeing. As a team, we ensured that we recognised the emotional impact that researching death can generate (Borgstrom and Ellis 2021), as well as the change to our working and personal lives due to the lockdown. Providing support to each other when researching this topic, which at times can be emotive and sensitive, was particularly important. It was also useful in that it enabled us to have

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regular contact with each other at a time when other aspects of our lives were greatly impacted by the pandemic. The reflexive team approach was beneficial for this project on several fronts (see Evans et al. 2017 for an example of how to conduct reflective team analysis). From an analysis point of view, we were able to bring together our interdisciplinary backgrounds and accommodate and integrate these by considering each other’s interpretations and how these influenced what data we coded and how we coded them. Reflexive team meetings gave space to our evolving individual and collective sense-­making of the pandemic and were a way of supporting ourselves and the team throughout this difficult period. Overview of Findings from Our Research Overall, we found that grief as a result from a death due to COVID-19 was commonly reported and that the nature of the reporting changed over the time sampled. We identified two main ways in which the media discussed bereavement and death in the early weeks of the pandemic in the UK. One focused on making sense of the new ways in which people were dying and mourning. The other recognised the disruptions people faced in ‘saying goodbye’ because of the pandemic mitigation measures. We identified three narratives around COVID-19 death and bereavement: fear of an uncontrollable, unknown new virus and its uncertain consequences; managing uncertainty and fear through prediction and calls to action; and mourning and loss. Each narrative was signified through specific language, metaphor and associated emotion(s) and this analysis was informed by our use of Terror Management Theory. The three narratives often intersected within articles. An in-depth account of these themes can be found in Sowden et al. (2021). Media representations of COVID-related bereavement focused on profound disruption to the act of ‘saying goodbye’ before and after death; acts portrayed as important closure rituals intrinsic to the processes of dying and grieving. Disruptions were reported at three main stages: prior to but close to death (e.g. when a person was being treated in an Intensive Care Unit), at or shortly after the moment of death (e.g. being present at the deathbed) and after the death (e.g. arranging and attending a funeral). Newspapers used the term ‘final goodbye’ to describe closure or comforting contact occurring at any of these stages. Examples of these can be

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found in our article by Selman et al. (2021) along with recommendations for healthcare professionals working in these contexts. Overall, these ways of discussing death, bereavement, and grief during the first few months of the pandemic demonstrate how within media these deaths and the contexts in which they occurred were positioned as inherently problematic. The articles focused on societal uncertainty, quoted individuals’ social media posts to emphasise personal distress, and shared frustrations about interrupted ‘final goodbyes’. By using the voices of bereaved individuals, newspaper articles frequently included calls to action encouraging readers to adhere to public health measures whist also publishing articles which stressed how such measures were leaving people feeling as if they could not grieve properly. Collectively then, the articles contained fear about the deadly virus and lamentations about the pandemic responses that were aimed at protecting people, a contradiction not recognised within the print media at the time—a double-bind that people could not readily escape. Reflecting on Doing Analysis Whilst Living Through the Same Pandemic We facilitated our data analysis by working collaboratively yet remotely and adopting a reflexive team approach. In this section, we discuss what it was like analysing articles about death and bereavement whilst living in the place and through the period that was being described in these news reports. We start with team reflections followed by personal accounts. We have written these in ways which reveal both our personal and professional reflections, and in a manner that shifts between voices and writing styles. As we undertook the project, the topic grew in importance, and we noticed ever-shifting interpretations (both in the media and by ourselves) about what COVID-19 and death during the pandemic meant. Team meetings often focused on ‘re-reading’ of articles and sharing our interpretations over time. One memory of note is how, several months into the project, the team were discussing current news about high COVID-19 death rates amongst Black and Asian people in the UK and the relative lack of attention to such issues early on in the pandemic. Ryann recalls reflecting on how Black and Asian people seemed to be dying at an increased rate compared to white people, and how this did not appear to be widely reported in the newspapers until the deaths of the first NHS workers (who were disproportionately Black and Asian). Paying close

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attention to what was known at the time of publication using our key-date timeline was vital for us. We had to be mindful that we were not being overly critical of past newspaper articles when analysing them through a contemporary lens, even if the time difference between these two points was only a few months. In meetings we also discussed an increasing sense of individual and collective (even societal) grief during our analysis. Not only did we experience that doing this research at this time could be emotionally upsetting for us, but we were also aware that our personal experiences of the pandemic were impacted by the very things we were analysing and experiencing with others in society—a sense of uncertainty and ‘limbo’, an increase in death and bereavement, and restrictions impacting our access to social support. Whilst at times our recognition of this encouraged us to work on our research, at other times we openly acknowledged needing the time and space to feel our emotions, be aware of the risks of burnout (not just from work but also from living in a pandemic and our caring responsibilities), and work as a team to share the responsibility of producing timely publications. Being honest with each other about our emotions and weekly capacity helped us to ‘share the load’ during the project.

Erica’s Experiences My background is in conducting ethnographic research in palliative and end-of-life care, having previously written about good death and the organisation of services, individual choice and social relationships, and social death. The lockdowns early on in the pandemic necessitated that my typical research activities—such as spending time in hospitals and hospices—had to cease, and yet left me with questions about how the very topics I typically studied were now playing out behind closed doors. I was acutely aware that the layers of physical protection and lack of visiting in care homes and hospitals could shift how people were experiencing, and delivering, end-of-life care; making it much more difficult to realise the ideals of palliative care. Emails and Zoom calls with clinical collaborators told me that they were having to shift to more symptom management and education, with patient and family contact (both physical and verbal communication) being more ‘removed’ (Driessen et al. 2021). Our calls and my responses required holding space for their concerns, reflecting back to them academic insights from previous projects about how people make sense of dying and death. Even though I had researched end-of-life care

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for a decade by this point, during these moments the magnitude of death—how to understand it and the anticipation of more deaths on the horizon—was difficult for me to mentally shift, leading to occasional late-­ night writings (Borgstrom 2020; Kirby et al. 2020) and tired homeschooling with toddler entertaining. I also found it suddenly incredibly difficult to care for my neighbour, whom I had regularly visited. Knowing she had several conditions that put her in the ‘vulnerable category’, which was frequently mentioned in the news articles, we had several discussions about what it would mean if myself or her family accidentally infected her. The early reports of how people died from COVID-19 were a form of dying she was willing to risk, but not one those around her could fathom—the potential guilt like a heavy fog preventing us from seeing her. The ‘calls to protect others’ that were present in our data, and discursively used to shape the narratives in the media, reminded me of these difficult relational decisions. Now, over two years later, there is guilt for not seeing her as much during the lockdowns as she wanted. She died in 2020 in hospital from an acute infection related to her other conditions. Funeral restrictions and her family’s religious practices meant that I (nor my children who viewed her as an additional grandmother) were not able to attend any service to mark her death. Responses to the pandemic shifted what people felt was possible—not just in what was reported in the news, but in how we spoke and negotiated access and daily living amongst the threat of death—and ultimately, quality of living towards death for people like my neighbour. My eldest daughter and I made plum jam in 2021 to honour our neighbour, trying to replicate her recipe. Moments like those often brought me back to this research. The voices of the bereaved people quoted in newspapers struggling to articulate a sense of loss previously unknown to them, and our group discussions about reimagining what grief and bereavement can look like now.

Ryann’s Experience I was new to researching end-of-life care and bereavement. My interest started with a recently launched project looking at how patients with advanced renal disease communicate with their clinicians to make decisions about their treatment options. This project was put on hiatus when COVID-19 reached the UK.  As a speech and language therapist, I am

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particularly interested in communication, and wanted to understand ways in which health messaging could be clearer during the pandemic. I moved in with my grandmother in a caring role for the first lockdown. We had discussions as a family about how she would find it difficult to manage on her own. We had been very recently bereaved as a family, with her brother dying unexpectedly a few weeks before the first lockdown. I had been looking for supportive care options for him to be discharged from hospital when he died from pneumonia, so it was a very raw time for us. Despite our pain at losing a family member, I think we all found some comfort in the fact he would have found the pandemic very difficult and isolating, and that we had been able to say our goodbyes in person without time limits and personal protective equipment (PPE). I was also very aware that these small comforts were often not available to those who died or lost loved ones during the pandemic. I was working from home, and grateful that this situation helped me care for my grandmother, who was struggling with both her physical and mental health. However, I felt guilty that others were facing an increased risk of becoming infected and/or dying from COVID-19. This guilt increased when speaking to family abroad who were unable to work from home. I lost several extended family members, and it was difficult hearing their loved ones’ pain. I worried for family members who I knew could be at an increased risk through demographic factors: for my mum, and her side of the family, who are Black; and those who had existing health conditions. I remember wishing for more nuanced news communication, which I felt could have helped people better minimise risk, and increased focus on support for people who were bereaved. I sometimes found reading the articles sad, something managed by taking breaks and talking to the research team as part of our meetings. It surprised me that this type of data collection/analysis could be so upsetting despite its level of abstraction from those directly affected by the pandemic. However, overall, I found it a helpful process, and understanding some of the processes behind the media’s approach to death helped mitigate some of the negativity.

Lucy’s Experience I’ve been conducting research in palliative and end-of-life care since 2005, often with a focus on understanding and improving people’s experiences of end-of-life care and advanced illness and supporting family caregivers before and after a death.

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The pandemic came at a significant time for me personally: two years previously our second daughter was stillborn, a subject I have written about since (Selman 2018, n.d.). While I have been bereaved previously, it was this sudden and traumatic loss which brought home to me how much our society struggles with grief, and what an isolating experience it can be. Even in palliative care and associated research, grief and bereavement are often deprioritised or ignored. I became pregnant again quickly, and our third daughter was born in March 2019. While on maternity leave, I channelled my grief into working with collaborators to develop a public engagement festival called Good Grief, which aimed to provide opportunities to learn about and share experiences of grief and won funding for the festival from the Wellcome Trust. I returned to work after maternity leave in November 2019 ready to deliver the festival alongside my other projects, a few months before the arrival of the pandemic in the UK. Like many healthcare academics who are not clinicians, as the first weeks of the pandemic progressed, I felt increasingly helpless, wanting to help but unsure how. Perhaps given my own recent experiences, I immediately thought of all those bereaved during the pandemic and, with other work on pause, began to focus on this topic (Selman 2020; Selman et al. 2020). Clinicians and journalists began to contact me as the scale of loss and disruption to social networks became clearer, and the need to consider bereavement more pressing. I reached out to Ryann and Erica with the idea for this project, keen to document and understand the implications of media representations of COVID-19 deaths and bereavement at this unprecedented time. As a team, we were acutely aware that there was a fear of impending catastrophe in clinical and social care settings—and as the pandemic continued, a growing recognition of how ageism and other biases were impacting who, how and when people died. Some of the horrors and injustices (e.g. affecting people living with learning disabilities, and living or working in care homes) only became truly apparent later in the pandemic. However, as researchers in this field, I felt we were observing these inequalities unfolding in real time, and that we had a role to play both in bearing witness and giving voice to these events. Given our research experiences and expertise, we felt a degree of responsibility: what could we do to best help? This was something that we reflected on individually and together; our responses varied as we witnessed what was happening and balanced our work alongside the other challenges of living during a

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pandemic. These challenges included caring, working and homeschooling responsibilities, our own fears for family members, or of COVID-19 itself, and living with profound uncertainty.

Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it new challenges for societies and individuals in 2020 and beyond. Early in the pandemic, British newspapers frequently reported upon deaths linked to the virus and how public health measures were impacting the ways in which the end of life and bereavement were experienced. We undertook discourse analysis of this early reporting to understand how bereavement and grief were being portrayed, reflecting on how this may further impact people’s experiences of death and grief during the pandemic. In this chapter we discussed our process of data collection and analysis, focusing on our team and individual reflections of the process. In particular, highlighting how researching these topics whilst also living through the unfolding pandemic impacted our own experiences of life, death, and work, and the importance of ongoing team dialogue to reflexively identify how this influenced our analysis.

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McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. The Medium Is the Message. In Understanding Medium: The Extensions of Man, 23–35. New York: Signet. Menzies, R.E., and R.G. Menzies. 2020. Death Anxiety in the Time of COVID-19: Theoretical Explanations and Clinical Implications. The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist 13. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1754470X20000215. Ofcom. (2019). News Consumption in the UK: 2019 report. Ofcom. https://www. o f c o m . o r g . u k / _ _ d a t a / a s s e t s / p d f _ f i l e / 0 0 2 7 / 1 5 7 9 1 4 / u k -­n e w s -­ consumption-­2019-­report.pdf Pirutinsky, S. 2009. The Terror Management Function of Orthodox Jewish Religiosity: A Religious Culture Approach. Mental Health, Religion and Culture 12 (3): 247–256. Reimers, E. 2003. A Reasonable Grief—Discursive Constructions of Grief in a Public Conversation on Raising the Shipwrecked M/S Estonia. Mortality 8 (4): 325–341. Selman, L. (2018) Reducing Preventable Stillbirth Rates in the UK, The BMJ Opinion. Available at: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/09/06/lucy-­ selman-­reducing-­preventable-­stillbirth-­rates-­in-­the-­uk/ (Accessed: 27 June 2022). ———. (2020) How Coronavirus Has Transformed the Grieving Process. Available at: https://theconversation.com/how-­coronavirus-­has-­transformed-­the-­ grieving-­process-­136368 (Accessed: 24 May 2021). ———. (n.d.) Time after Stillbirth, Taking Time. Available at: https://www.takingti.me/articles/timeafterstillbirth (Accessed: 27 June 2022). Selman, L.E., D. Chao, R. Sowden, S. Marshall, C. Chamberlain, and J. Koffman. 2020. Bereavement Support on the Frontline of COVID-19: Recommendations for Hospital Clinicians. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management: e81–e86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2020.04.024. Selman, L.E., R. Sowden, and E. Borgstrom. 2021. ‘Saying Goodbye’ during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Document Analysis of Online Newspapers with Implications for End of Life Care. Palliative Medicine. https://doi. org/10.1177/02692163211017023. Six, S. 2020. Anticipating Doing a Study with Dying Patients: An Autoethnography on Researcher Well-Being. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406920967863. Sowden, R., E. Borgstrom, and L.E. Selman. 2021. “It’s like Being in a War with an Invisible Enemy”: A Document Analysis of Bereavement Due to COVID-19 in UK Newspapers. PLoS One. Edited by J.C.-S. Cheung 16 (3): e0247904. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247904. Visser, R.C. 2016. “Doing Death”: Reflecting on the Researcher’s Subjectivity and Emotions. Death Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187. 2016.1257877.

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Walter, T. 2006. What Is Complicated Grief? A Social Constructionist Perspective. OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying 52 (1): 71–79. ———. 2017. What Death Means Now: Thinking Critically about Dying and Grieving. Policy Press. Wodak, R., and M. Meyer, eds. 2015. Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory. 2nd ed. Sage. Woodthorpe, K. 2011. Researching Death: Methodological Reflections on the Management of Critical Distance. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 14 (2): 99–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2010. 496576. World Health Organisation. (2020). WHO Director-General's Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19  - 11 March 2020. World Health Organisation. https://www.who.int/director-­general/speeches/detail/who-­ director-­general-­s-­opening-­remarks-­at-­the-­media-­briefing-­on-­covid-­19%2D%2D-­ 11-­march-­2020

CHAPTER 18

Conclusion to Difficult Death, Dying, and the Dead in Media and Culture Sharon Coleclough, Bethan Michael-Fox, and Renske Visser

Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. (Janet Malcolm 2011, 58)

An interest in death has driven a good deal of popular entertainment and artistic endeavour; music, literature, film, television, social media, photography, journalism, and art all have in their turn asked us to consider our mortality and the myriad ways in which a life might be ended. As Janet

S. Coleclough Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Michael-Fox (*) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Visser Independent Scholar, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_18

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Malcolm so succinctly offers ‘Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us’ (2011, 58).  In turn, as this book has shown, there is growing momentum building in research communities regarding death, dying, and the dead from a cultural perspective, exploring not simply the mediation and cultural spaces of the difficult dead but also difficult death and dying. The key themes of this collection have therefore offered a range of approaches to the ways that death, dying, and the dead are addressed through culture. The chapters deal with different media and ideas and the collection finds realisation through popular entertainment, documentation, artistic endeavour, and analysis. As with any edited collection the work looks to wider themes regarding the importance of our enduring relationship to our mortality and the cessation of life. Of course, each author has approached the concept of a difficult death through the frame of their selected media; with this in mind, we can consider the effect of the medium and the target audience for that focus text or situation, as a factor that delineates the approaches to exploring and discussing death and its difficulties. The wider themes of this book have focussed upon concepts of the ways in which death, dying, and the dead are utilised to address audience interest and need for examination. As we identified in the introduction the consideration and concern for the needs of the spectator when exploring what can easily be emotional experiences or doubts/concerns which can be personally important must be foregrounded within such explorations. Although, as we see within some of the texts examined, the moral questions around the examination of death as a ‘real’ event are even more problematic than those founded in fiction, each encounter via a textual use means that the presentation of the death, dying, or the dead must be considered and approached with care. The effect of human agency and choices undertaken through the selections made in communicating and recording the circumstances of a death became a key element of the thematic journey of this book. The importance of the approach and selections made via the mediation of the examination of mortality became central to the exploration of our relationship to death or dying. One of the main binary oppositions within the book is the examination of real and fictional death and importantly the effect of the overlapping of these areas. Alongside this consideration is the blurring of the boundaries between what we might term the public and private sides of death, those times when a person’s death is shared and preserved,

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whether willingly or unwillingly, through the stasis provided by their inclusion in a media text. In this way the privacy accorded loss is challenged and expanded to the public, for reasons of entertainment, connection, visibility, exploration, and in some cases a virtual immortality. Media representations of death, dying, and the dead and, importantly, what we have termed here ‘difficult death’—death, experiences of dying, and treatments and representations of the dead that might be especially troubling for a broad range of reasons—are areas which are growing in prominence within the area of death studies and the interdisciplinary fields and disciplines that inform it. This book has aimed to take a wide scope by including a range of work and approaches to this topic from authors and researchers working across many different areas. This is primarily because the concept of death and our encounters with it as actual occurrence, reported event, historical narrative, and visual/mediated entertainment tend to permeate all aspects of our day-to-day existence. Death likely enters our lives through media and culture on a daily basis. That death has been adopted as entertainment but also a journalistic imperative, research motivation, representational coda and social discussion not only reveals our enduring fascination with the ‘final frontier’ but indicates the ways in which the fascination with and extended relationship to death are increasingly complicated ones. After everything that has been examined in these pages, we can ask again, what do we mean by difficult death? One of the reasons for the use of this term is that it is open to interpretation, its meaning contingent upon an individual’s reaction to and exploration of the death being offered to them and the context in which it occurred and is in turn presented or accessed. The difficulty of a death and its lasting impact or availability for re-examination, on a wider stage, tends to focus upon the attention garnered from its place within collective (and revisited) memory, media attention or social media perpetuation. Our relationship to difficult death can be one that is accidental or sought, an encounter which is unexpected or is traced and knowingly experienced albeit in a mediated form. Within this collection we can see these possibilities at work through the exploration of a range of ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ encounters with death, the dying, and the dead. The difficulty of death may be, as we have seen, found in myriad of contexts. It may be that the situation and circumstances of the death are traumatic and violent, an encounter which feels, or might be ‘too real’, and so stirs disquiet or indeed stimulation in a viewer or reader. Alternatively, it may be something about the kind of death that creates

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difficulty; child death, suicide, or murder all present sensitive social and cultural questions for audiences to work through. Such difficult deaths certainly ask us where we might draw the lines of acceptability and accountability in an arena where death is used for entertainment. As the introduction to this collection discusses, death might be difficult when it is en masse, the death of haunting ‘statistical apparitions’ (Rojek 2016, 5), numbers of the dead that are difficult to contend with due to their enormity, as often caused by wars, disasters, and disease. In this case death is difficult as it is hard to pin down the individuality of the dead. With this difficulty in mind, we can look to the work of those involved in repatriating those killed in war, holocaust, disaster or epidemic, their efforts focussed on giving an identity to each casualty and closure for their family or community. However, death may also be difficult because of very specific and constructed individuality of the dead, or specifically the notoriety or star status of the individual concerned. The perpetual returning to many ‘star’ deaths offers a useful example of this. People who are well known and in the public eye offer an encounter with the difficulty, perhaps, of accepting death for many fans. Although their status may be enhanced through their demise, this raises ideas such as the phenomenon of the ‘27 club’, a concept which became ‘widely known after Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, with rock fans connecting his age to that of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix’, all of whom died aged 27 (Rolling Stone 2019). The fetishisation of young death becomes difficult, as it overlooks the reasons for each individual’s demise, glamorising the death itself and not the circumstances of it. As Penfold-Mounce (2018, 29) has pointed out, ‘death opens up new avenues through which posthumous careers can thrive, even for people whose celebrity status is not rooted in film, television or music’—some of the ethical challenges of this, and some of the difficulties that emerge, surround who profits from the death in the context of media and culture. Death of the famous can also be used as a totemic banner to be invoked for impact many years after their actual passing. Marilyn Monroe garners evocations of female mistreatment, an objectified and symbolic image through the perpetual re-use of her persona and narrative. That her death remains ambiguous, and the subject of ongoing conspiracy theories offers a clear indication of the entertainment factor which inhabits celebrity mortality. Recently the invocation of the death of Diana, The Princess of Wales, both through anniversaries of her fatal car crash revisited through documentaries of her life and death, and via repeated reference by her son

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Prince Harry to her experiences, final end, and funeral, ensures that her celebrity is maintained alongside the importance of her death in that narrative. As Boyce and Dove (2022, 487) point out, ‘while some celebrities are overlooked in death, others take on a transcendent, symbolic immortality’. Princess Diana’s death demonstrates how media and culture can function to cement an iconic image. As Marr (1998) offers, ‘the shock of death’ gave Diana an ‘iconic status for good, safe from the corrosion of events’. Whilst the haunting presence of Princess Diana must no doubt be difficult for her children, it also represents a ‘difficult death’ for many in the broader public sphere. Furthermore, it raises difficult questions about the responsibility of the media and their involvement in her demise. Famous deaths offer the spectator shared associations and experiences with those we never knew. The suddenness of a celebrity death, its meaning increased through disbelief that one so successful, in modern terms, could be caught by mortality, finds a place within collective consciousness, a fleeting ‘notable death’ or one which becomes increasingly important and to an extent ‘celebrated’ through repeated return. The unexpected death of Chadwick Boseman from colon cancer, a condition he kept private whilst continuing to work, offers both suddenness and impact to those who knew him and his fans into the wider realm of Marvel film audiences. Boseman’s death announcement on Twitter became the most liked tweet ever (‘liked’ being a curious term in this context) with 7 million likes (Del Rosario 2020). In a social media-orientated world this record stands as an immediate identification of the impact of unexpected death. Additionally, Boseman’s death is centrally alluded to in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Coogler 2022). T’Challa (Boseman’s titular hero) dies off-screen of an incurable illness  presenting the theme of loss and grief processing at both a familial and wider level. This is a clear example of how the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, as discussed in the introduction to this collection, can blend together as culture at large and those who produce it use media sources to negotiate a response to a death high on the public agenda. The loss of T’Challa and so Boseman, so intrinsically linked were actor and character, was so profound for audiences and those involved in the production of the films that ‘a near silent “Marvel Studios” opening logo in which we only hear the sound of rustling wind and see a composite of numerous shots of Boseman from previous MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe] films’ (Kaye 2022) was offered as tribute to Boseman. The death of a famous person perhaps resonates more strongly because of the perceived availability of that individual through their chosen art

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form and increasingly through social media. For most of us who use social media there is a ‘durable biography’ (Walter 2020) a presence of action, interaction, contribution, and creation which survives us. As Bassett offers the internet presents the opportunity of ‘digital memory boxes; they enable storytelling, on-going narratives, memorialization and “renegotiated” relationships with the dead in a digital afterlife’ (2015, 1129). Such opportunities for memorialisation and ongoing engagement and fan support can be seen within the reaction to Boseman’s death. Boseman held a central importance for a wide audience, the Marvel universe character of Black Panther, becoming a beacon to inclusion with a Black hero for a modern audience as Boseman’s other roles spoke strongly to a breadth of genres and representation which resulted in a posthumous Oscar in 2021. The belief that someone we respect or idolise might one day ‘see’ us through a comment or a like, and a perpetuation of the conviction of many that they are offered a connection to a star through a Twitter Blue Tick (a marker of an authentic account) means we feel we have access to and affinity with total strangers. Taking this concept further and looking back to Walter’s ‘durable biography’ we can see Boseman’s presence continuing, his legacy perpetuated by ongoing engagement with his memory and interactions between his fans. Indeed, this perceived affiliation or alignment is not only limited to ‘stars’ but to people we have only a digital link with through text or emoji interaction. When death occurs within these relationships we can be strangely moved. The platforms of social media accommodate and perpetuate a kind of connection, whether it be imagined with the focus of our messages or in the memento mori wall of shared response and grief offered through the comments. We find solace that famous people experience the same highs and lows that we do, albeit through a more visible lens. Therefore, the relationships built digitally gain meaning as we ‘share’ in each other’s life events. Death feels more sudden and unexpected as we learn of it more quickly than ever before via social media. However, social media also provides an outlet to discuss violence and death, as we see in Mbinjama’s work on the issue of femicide in South Africa. A groundswell of digital calls to action and response can be seen in the exploration of the experiences (and in one case murder) of two young South African women who, without the input of social media and the associated social movements, would have become statistics in South Africa’s endemic femicide and rape rates. Thomas, McKenna, Spokes, Harju, and Huhtamäki all offer, through specific texts and morbid spaces, examinations of the effects and

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implications of encountering ‘real’ death. The moralities of human choice relating to the recording and dissemination of death in the real world are important concerns of this entire collection. The potential for death as spectacle is of course implicit in any use of death, the dying, or the dead within any text, however as Thomas offers in the examination of the Golden Gate Bridge as ‘suicidal cluster site’ the potential reduction of a person’s traumatic decision making to that of literal entertainment raises important questions for creators and producers. McKenna extends this concern to the use of produced death for entertainment, Snuff as cultural phenomenon and implicit mapping to people’s darker and immoral use and dissemination of actual animal murder, cannibalism, and in some cases potentially real death onscreen extends the concerns related to death and dying as actuality and intentional diversion. Where real-world death is encountered in the work of  Harju and Huhtamäki and Spokes, citing the events of the 2019 Christchurch massacre and those summiting Mt. Everest respectively, we can see the provocations of public spaces where death has entered the narrative, creating difficult chronicles of violent public death and its affect. Such challenges ask us to consider the expectations of space and action, where events invade a place of safety in the case of Christchurch and where conversely a location associated with inherent danger asks what action is acceptable when death inevitably occurs as on Everest. Mbinjama looks to the impact of death when that act becomes a focus for change and social and cultural protest. The increased visibility of two women who would otherwise have been yet another casualty of femicide in South Africa becomes an important point of identification, a face and person which can be less successfully overlooked or ignored. With this in mind the sociological and cultural effect of the delivery and use of mediated death, dying, and the dead evolved as a focus of the collection. The audience, their expectations and the effect of their address are central concerns within this work. With respect to this we can look to the fictional encounters with death and the dying which Rosa, O’Mahony, Merchant and Order, Zheng and Olson explored through television and film uses of death, the dying, and the dead. Central to these chapters were the ways in which audiences wish to encounter fictionalised death through entertainment. Rosa’s use of Band of Brothers to examine patterns of and reflections upon conflict and its representation of death and dying as a violent and frightening process rather than heroic occasion presents the text’s defiance of the ‘good death’ seen in many war narratives. The

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violence and impact of death within fiction speaks to the cultural explorations and challenges to accepted depictions of war and survival as we look across the historical representations of conflict. The concepts of survival and moral quandary found in Band of Brothers are also examined in the work of O’Mahony, Merchant and Order as they consider the graphic nature of death found within The Walking Dead. In both chapters genre and audience expectation is utilised to consider the effect of the delivery of death within each series, an entertainment which asks its audience questions as they enjoy/endure each show’s use of narrative death. Shock and violence, their deployment as both graphic commentary and horrific demonstration, raise questions of the requirements of the audience and their reactions to the varied morals surrounding death and the dying in fiction. The difficulty of death in The Walking Dead focussed not only on the violence of death within the series but also on the use of child death within some of the show’s key moments. The moral vacillations regarding the justification and legitimisation of child fatality within the series links strongly to the same moral uncertainties of war and combat seen in Band of Brothers. Zheng and Olson offered a complimentary consideration of cultural and audience expectations as they looked at Coco and Soul and the communication of death within children’s animated film. The use of fantastic journeys through death and associated interactions with the dead by the child protagonists offered extended considerations of the sociological assumptions regarding the understanding of and concerns about death and the afterlife that children carry. The mediations found within these fictionalised encounters with death and the dying asked the reader to consider the moral implications of the use of death as a narrative moment or vehicle. This collection reveals the importance of examining popular culture from across history to evaluate the response to and effect of mortality within the narratives that are constructed around death, the dying, and the dead. The expressions of grief, death, mortality, and their exploration have changed but the stories and the storytelling, visiting and revisiting of mortality, life and death remains a central preoccupation of our arts and entertainment, and these preoccupations become a way to examine choice, effect, reduction and stereotyping, through the narratives that are built. Such considerations are seen within the work of Kenney as she unpacked the reduction of the unidentified and unclaimed dead of New York. The placement of the ‘marginalized’ and the devaluation of their lives are

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central concepts within this chapter. Such othering and diminishment of humanity are also explored within Binfield-Smith’s exploration of Jack the Ripper’s victims through the lens of the Illustrated Police News. In comparing cultural legacies of killer and killed the chapter unpacked how the Ripper’s casualties have become secondary to his notoriety and fame. Such disposability of the living is also explored within Buscemi’s work on the photographer Letizia Battaglia whose images revealed the reality of mafia killing in Palermo, a stark representation of death which met and challenged its audience in print. The effect of the presentation and exploration of death within the media is one of significant cultural and social importance, this can be seen in Waller and Ezran-Ettien’s consideration of the coverage undertaken within the mainstream British media in response to the murders of two members of parliament Jo Cox and David Amess. Situating this work in the political landscape of the crimes and the approaches of differing publications the work asked how such high-profile deaths are navigated by the print media and the impact of the negotiations within those approaches. Social media, therefore, holds a very specific place in our contemporary interactions with death and dying, and can offer an avenue for the negotiation of ‘difficult death’. Many now live in a world where 24-hour rolling news channels ensure that the inevitability of death is brought into homes and onto screens. It should be acknowledged that the mass media have always reported on the dramatic and spectacular dead; however, the ubiquitous and embedded nature of social media engenders a re-surfacing of the non-spectacular dead’. (Bassett 2015, 1130)

The access to and revisiting of the deceased extends their lives beyond their time and indeed demise. In some cases, the revisitation is propelled by the fame of an associated figure, as in the chapter by Semple on Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, offering the connection between the spectacular and non-spectacular dead. The impact of death offered in relation to its relationship to another person, persona and their creative contributions is extended in Twitchin’s exploration of Antonin Artaud’s own relationship to death and dying. Such personal cultural and sociological exploration is brought into contemporary light in the examination of the difficulties surrounding COVID-19  in the chapter from Borgstrom, Sowden and Selman. Through use of individual reaction, the work acknowledges the

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response to living through a pandemic and also examining death, grief, and bereavement during an uncertain and unprecedented time. By offering concepts surrounding the discourses of death during COVID-19 Pitimson presented a return to what might well be termed ‘the non-­ spectacular dead’ as she explores the ‘rhetoric of disposability of older people’ in the UK during the pandemic. In returning to the individual experiences and what might be termed personal experience being offered as public discussion the chapters offer a completion of the ways in which the media address difficult death, its contextualisation, and perpetuation. As demonstrated by the contributions to this collection, the ‘difficult’ aspects of death take many forms and pathways. As an initial comment the difficulty of death lies ultimately with its finality, the way in which an end, however and whenever it is reached, is permanent. The real world asks that mortality is respected, no cure for actual death has been found and society must accept this fact. This is perhaps why we search for answers or comfort/escape in the fictional world, exploring possibilities of an afterlife or resurgence to the world in another form, one which is less fragile than our mortal selves. We also look to encounter death at a remove, to experience and see mortality safely and with the potential to remove ourselves from the vicinity. The use of still and moving images to offer us multiple forms of death, to allow us to engage with finality, both fictional and documented can be seen in the variety of media-based texts that the authors in this collection have drawn upon. Clearly society wishes to see and yet not see death every day. As the mortal body pervades social and cultural experience, we are, in turn, encouraged to work hard to stave off the inevitable reduction of our biological selves and yet we indulge through entertainment and documentary in the deaths of others. Usually, we wish to see justice for that individual, but sometimes as explored in these pages there are darker urges at work as we seek out violence and terminal injury as entertainment. As this collection has shown, death, dying, and the dead can be difficult in a broad range of ways and contexts. Perhaps, then, the extent to which death might be experienced and understood as difficult is not only contextual, but reliant upon the ways in which we frame it, try to cope with it or react to it. This can account, perhaps, for the dominance of both death and arguably difficult death in media and culture.

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References Bassett, Debra J. 2015. Who Wants to Live Forever? Living, Dying and Grieving in Our Digital Society. Social Sciences Journal 4: 1127–1139. https://doi. org/10.3390/socsci4041127. Del Rosario, Alexandra. 2020. Twitter Crowns Chadwick Boseman’s Last Post Most Liked Tweet Ever: ‘A Tribute Fit for a King’. Deadline Hollywood. August 29, 2020. Accessed 9 Jan 2023. Kaye, Don. 2022 How Black Panther 2 Addresses the Passing of Chadwick Boseman, Den of Geek. Available at: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/how-­black-­ panther-­2-­addresses-­the-­passing-­of-­chadwick-­boseman/. Accessed 9 Jan 2023. Marr, Andrew. 1998. Saturday Review: The Way We Are Now When Diana Died, Britain Looked in the Mirror and Was Startled by What It Saw. But Now the Tears Have Dried, Are We Really Living in a Changed Nation? The Guardian, 1 August 22. ISSN 02613077. Accessed 09 Jan 2023. Malcolm, Janet. 1993. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Penfold-Mounce, Ruth. 2018. Death, the Dead and Popular Culture. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Rojek, Chris. 2016. Presumed Intimacy: Parasocial Interaction in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rolling Stone. 2019. The 27 Club: A Brief History, Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-­lists/the-­27-­ club-­a-­brief-­history-­17853/robert-­johnson-­26971/. Accessed 9 Jan 2023. Walter, Tony. 2020. A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography. Mortality 1 (1): 7–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/713685822.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #BringNeNehome, 139 #MenAreTrash, 134, 136, 139 #Metoo, 134–136, 144 A Abandonment, 156, 158, 167, 236, 240 African-American, 8, 122, 123, 135 African National Congress (ANC), 136, 137 Afterlife, 14, 15, 17, 53–65, 161, 162, 164, 166, 170, 212, 270, 272, 274 Age, 4, 5, 19, 30, 44, 48, 95, 105, 110, 117, 136, 155, 161, 172, 236–241, 243–245, 268 Ageism, 19, 235–245, 260

Agency, 17, 28, 60, 63, 118, 124, 162, 165, 168, 170, 172, 173, 211, 236, 266 AIDS, 17, 137, 152, 153, 162, 172 AIDS crisis, 152 Ali Harbi Ali, 190 Allende, Salvadore, 8 All is True, 162, 166, 167, 167n4, 173 Ambrose, Stephen E., 86, 92 Amess, David, 18, 190, 191, 193, 197, 198, 273 Anatomical dissection, 205, 210 Anti-mafia, 222 Anxiety, 77, 176, 204 tabloid, 192 Apartheid era hangover, 137, 142, 242 Appropriation, 161 Archive of Blood, 219–230 Artefacts, 54–56, 58, 59, 61–65

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Coleclough et al. (eds.), Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1

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278 

INDEX

Assimilation, 18, 191–193, 198, 199 Assisted dying, 9 Asylum seeker, 192 Atheism, 181 Attention economy, 14, 48–50 Audience, 4, 9, 10, 12, 16, 30, 38, 40, 41, 46, 48, 49, 59, 60, 65, 75, 99, 101–108, 110, 111, 121–123, 127, 142, 162–168, 173, 190–192, 195, 210, 220, 221, 266, 268–273 B Bad news, 189, 190 Barthes, Roland, 19, 205, 222, 223, 226, 227, 229, 230 Battaglia, Letizia, 18, 19, 219–230, 273 Battlefield Gothic, 90, 91, 94, 96 Belonging, 28, 96, 225, 229 Bereaved, 8, 55, 56, 60–62, 65, 166, 169, 250, 251, 256, 258–260 Bereavement, 19, 56, 166, 171n7, 250, 251, 253–258, 260, 261, 274 Billions, 3, 4 Biofiction, 161 Biological, 16, 116, 122–125, 238, 239, 241, 274 Biomedical, 16, 117, 120, 125, 240, 241 Bipolar disorder, 29, 30 Black Lives Matter, 8 Black Twitter, 16, 134–136, 139, 145 Blockbuster, 8, 70, 73, 74 Body, 7, 11, 13, 17, 29, 39, 48, 71, 73, 75–78, 80, 85–90, 92–97, 105, 108, 123, 126, 134, 139, 144, 152, 153, 162, 169, 171, 178, 179, 179n3, 184, 192, 204, 206–212, 215, 239, 251, 274

Branagh, Kenneth, 162, 166, 167 Brass, Dick, 40 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 7, 162, 252 Buddhist, 178 Burial, 3, 4, 17, 94, 150–154, 157, 168, 171n7, 179 Burke, Tarana, 135 C Cameron, David, 194, 195 Campaign for Decency Through the Law (CDL), 42, 43 Campbell, Alistair, 195, 220 Cannibal Holocaust, 43 Capa, Robert, 220 Capitalist necropolitics, 176 Care homes, 237, 239, 240, 242–244, 254, 257, 260 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 220 Casualty, 89, 268, 271 Catholicism, 181 Causality, 88, 117 Celebrity, 3, 14, 17, 49, 50, 126, 161–173, 268, 269 Censorship, 90 Chapman, Annie, 18, 203, 204, 207–209, 212 Child, 5, 16, 17, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106–111, 140, 144, 161–173, 268, 272 Childhood, 27, 116–118, 120, 121, 127 Children, 16, 27, 46, 71, 80, 100, 101, 104, 106–110, 115–128, 137, 141, 144, 145, 162–167, 169, 170, 192, 195, 220, 221, 227, 230, 258, 269, 272 Christchurch, 14, 54, 55, 57–58, 60, 61, 63, 65, 271 Christian, 168, 178

 INDEX 

Christianity, 180 Church, 156, 165, 168 Church of England, The, 253 Climber, 15, 69–73, 71n2, 75, 75n3, 77–81 Climbing, 15, 27, 31, 69–75, 77, 78, 80, 81 Coco, 16, 115–128, 272 Colonial, 120, 236 Combat, 15, 63, 85–97, 272 Combat zone, 85, 86, 89 Commemorative, 58, 64 Comorbidity, 186 Containment, 17, 151 Copycat, 24, 31 Corporeal existence, 179 violation, 88–92, 94–97 Corpses, 48, 74, 80, 152, 163, 184, 206, 210–215, 221, 226–230 Covid-19, 6, 19, 150, 154, 235–245, 249–253, 255, 256, 258–261, 273, 274 Cox, Jo, 18, 190, 191, 193–198, 273 Cremer, Meghan, 139 Criminological, 18, 204, 205, 213, 215 Cryogenic, 179 Cultural nostalgia, 162 D Dahmer, Jeffrey, 47 Daily Mail, The, 18, 190–193, 198, 199 Danger, 40, 74, 77, 95, 104, 206, 212, 225, 241, 242, 245, 271 Data, 7, 14, 15, 18, 53–65, 70, 105, 153, 157, 250–256, 258, 259, 261 Data death, 58 De Blasio, Bill, 157

279

Dead Rich List, viii Deathbed, 54, 255 Death Positive Movement, the, 4, 5 Death rattle, 180 Death zone, 71, 74 Deceased, 18, 28, 54–57, 59–62, 64, 65, 95, 96, 150, 196, 207, 208, 212, 273 Decline, 116, 182, 238–241 Decontextualisation, 191, 193, 199 Deep fake, 8 Delegitimisation, 191, 193, 195, 199 Department of Corrections (DOC), 150, 151, 153, 157 Department of Parks & Recreation, 150 Department of Social Services, 150, 151, 157 Depression, 29–31 Dereje, Moti, 7 Despair, 24, 29, 34, 94, 176, 186 Día de los Muerto, 122–124, 126 Digital afterlife, 14, 15, 53–65, 270 Digital artefacts, 54–56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65 Digital material, 55–56 Digital murder, 44–48 Dignity, 56, 65, 95, 149 Discomfort, 106, 163, 166 Disease, 115, 152, 154, 184–186, 238, 242, 249, 250, 258, 268 Disney, 10, 116, 119, 120, 123–125, 127 Disney-Pixar, 16, 116, 119–123, 125–128 Displacement, 191–193, 195, 196, 198, 199 Disposability, 18, 19, 209–213, 235–245, 273, 274 Disposal, 17, 151, 152, 155, 157, 210

280 

INDEX

Dissection, 205, 210–212, 214, 215 Distribution, 38, 39, 46, 49, 242 Dnepropetrovsk Maniac, The, 46, 47 Documentary, 2, 10–14, 16, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 39, 43, 44, 49, 69, 78, 79, 87, 134, 139–145, 185n5, 204, 274 Do Not Resuscitate (DNR), 237 Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, 49 Dory, 120 Download/downloaded, 61 Dworkin, Andrea, 42, 43 E East-End, the, 204, 208, 209 Easy Rider, 40 Eddowes, Catherine, 18, 203, 205–209, 212 Eder, Richard, 42 8Chan, 60 8mm film, 43 Elderly, the, 239 Electroshock, 179–182 Elton, Ben, 167 Emotion, 7, 108, 127, 167, 200, 222, 242, 255, 257 Emotional impact, 254 End-of-life, 115, 118, 120 End-of-life care, 257–259 Epidemics, 154 Erotica, 40 Ethiopia, 7 EU Referendum, 196 Euphemism, 119 Everest, 69–81, 69n1, 271 Execution, 38, 71 Exploitation, 40, 184, 186

F Facebook, 7, 47, 49, 53, 60, 138 Faith, 166, 222, 253 Family, The, 39, 40 Fantasy, 119, 172 Fatality, 25, 79, 90, 272 Father, 7, 30, 79, 143, 161, 163, 167–169, 172, 193 Fear, 6, 106, 121, 138, 145, 152, 164, 165, 189, 204, 207, 211, 212, 238, 240, 241, 250, 255, 256, 260, 261 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 14, 38, 40, 44, 46, 48–50 Female, 80, 87, 134, 136, 138, 140, 143, 144, 206–209, 268 Female death, 87 Feminist movement, 37, 40, 42, 134, 135, 141, 142, 144, 145 Fetish video, 45 Fey, Tina, 123 Final goodbye, 255, 256 Finding Nemo, 120 First-person Shooter (FPS), 54 Floyd, George, 8, 63 For Life, 8 4Chan, 60 Fraternal, 86, 94, 96 Frozen, 15, 75, 77, 78 Funeral, 153, 171n7, 253, 255, 258, 269 G Gaze, 14, 18, 54, 205, 212, 214, 221 Gender, 5, 11, 15, 79, 138, 167n4 Gendered, 16, 45, 80 Genre, 14, 45, 85, 86, 90, 91, 102–104, 107, 110, 111, 193, 225, 270, 272 Ghost, 71, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172 Golden Gate Bridge, 14, 23–25, 27, 29, 31–33, 271

 INDEX 

Goldhaber, Michael H., 48 Good Grief, 260 Google, 49, 162 Gothness, 192 Graphic, 87–90, 93, 94, 100, 103, 104, 106, 110, 208, 272 Graphicness, 16, 99–111 Greek tragedy, 228–230 Grief, 5, 6, 9, 17, 19, 24, 56, 94, 116, 119, 120, 156, 161, 162, 164–167, 173, 245, 249–261, 269, 270, 272, 274 Griefspace, 156 Grievability, 15, 62, 65 Grieving, 15, 27, 32, 59, 156, 255 Guardian, The, 18, 27, 190–192, 194, 196–200 H Hamlet, 17, 161, 164, 170–172 Hanks, Tom, 86 Harm physical, 102 social, 102 Healthcare, 235, 256, 260 Herd immunity, 243 Hero, 96, 102, 165, 269, 270 Heroism, 16, 85, 86, 89–92, 96, 97 Heterotopia, 155, 156 High-altitude cerebral oedema (HACE), 72, 74 High-altitude illness (HAI), 72, 73 High altitude pulmonary oedema (HAPE), 72, 74 Himalaya, 71, 81 Himalayan Database, 70 Historical, 6, 11, 13, 17, 86, 87, 89, 91, 117, 119, 134, 140, 157, 161, 163, 178, 193, 204, 205, 209, 213, 215, 223, 236, 254, 267, 272

281

Hollywood, 8, 70, 76, 79, 135 Holocaust, 37, 90, 268 Holy, 77, 105 Homicide, 19, 219–230 Horror, 9, 12, 54, 73, 79, 90–92, 96, 104, 105, 107, 223, 238, 260 Hospices, 257 Hospitals, 17, 87, 151, 153, 155, 175, 179, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 243, 254, 257–259 Humanity, 37, 59, 167, 182, 209, 273 Hunt, Melinda, 157 I Identity, 64, 70, 74, 89, 96, 102, 105, 150, 180, 181, 190, 192, 203, 209–212, 268 Ideology, 63, 144, 176, 185, 194, 198, 238 Immature, 117, 118 Immortal, 168, 185 Influenza, 154, 157 Instagram, 70, 223 Intensive Care Unit, 255 Internet Movie Database (IMDb), 99 Interstitial realm, 77 Interview, 24–30, 34, 39, 72, 77, 87, 149, 176, 180 Irreversibility, 117 Isolation, 71, 151, 152, 154, 156, 195, 235, 236, 240 J Jack the Ripper, 12, 18, 203–215, 273 Jazz, 122, 123 Journalism, 2, 13, 18, 177, 189, 265 Journalist, 18, 19, 42, 47, 73, 192, 195, 204, 221, 226, 243, 251, 260 Jumpers, 24–34

282 

INDEX

K Kelly, Mary Jane, 18, 203, 205, 207–209, 211, 212 Kill, 29, 38, 75, 110, 236 Killing, 18, 32, 38, 39, 42, 46, 47, 63, 101, 104, 110, 127, 134, 186, 190–196, 198, 199, 273 Kirkman, Robert, 99 Klein, William, 220, 228 K2, 72, 79, 80 Kurdi, Abdullah, 193 Kurdi, Alan, 163, 164, 192, 193 L Lancaster, Sophie, 190, 192, 193 Latinx, 123 Lawrence, Stephen, 190, 192 Left wing, 193, 194, 196–198, 221 Legacy, 14, 56, 64, 90–92, 94, 96, 97, 167, 186, 270 LexisNexis, 191, 194 Life expectancy, 116, 182 extending, 182 saving, 182 Liminal, 77, 104 Lin, Jun, 14, 38, 39, 44–46, 48, 49 Linguistic distancing, 198 modifiers, 198 Little Mermaid, The, 120 Live-stream, 53, 54 Lockdown, 239, 240, 242, 243, 252–254, 257–259 L’Ora, 221 Loss, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 17, 29, 59, 61, 86–89, 91–93, 97, 156, 162, 164–167, 169–173, 241, 242, 255, 258, 260, 267, 269 Love, 28, 29, 109, 168, 172, 194, 222, 229 Luckhurst, Roger, 9

M Mafia, 18, 19, 219–230, 273 Mafiosi, 221, 222 Magical, 28, 117 thinking, 118–121 Magnotta, Luke, 14, 38, 44, 46–50 Mail Online, 190 Male, 28, 87, 134, 138, 142, 143, 167, 205, 207, 208, 210–214 Male death, 87 Manslaughter, 127 Manson, Charles, 40 Marginalisation, 5, 17, 125–127, 204, 213, 245 Marginalised, 17, 18, 63, 122, 128, 176, 205, 209–212, 214, 215 Massacre, 14, 53, 54, 60, 61, 271 Maternal, 170 McLuhan, M., 252 Mediation, 11, 223, 266 Medical drama, 9 Medium, 107, 219, 223, 226, 230, 250, 252, 266 Meme culture, 45 Memento mori, 165, 270 Memorialising, viii Memorialization, 70, 71, 90–92, 95, 270 Memory, 6, 15, 55–57, 60–62, 64, 65, 89–91, 96, 156, 178, 256, 267, 270 Mental health, 29, 30, 34, 182, 196, 198, 244, 259 Mental illness, 23–34, 108 Mental suffering, 176 Messaging, 237, 241, 252, 259 Mexican, 119, 122 Microaggressions, 122 Microcelebrity, 49 Middle England, 192 Milano, Alyssa, 135 Minimalisation, 204 Mokoena, Karabo, 134, 139

 INDEX 

Moore, Tony, 99 Moral, 18, 63, 71, 79, 88, 104, 143, 195, 197, 205–209, 212, 214, 245, 266, 272 Morality, 76, 78, 79, 120 Morbid space, 9, 15, 71, 76, 270 Morgue series, 179n3, 210 Mortality, 2, 3, 7, 9, 15, 19, 31, 69–81, 116, 163, 165, 166, 170, 173, 182, 222, 235–245, 250, 265, 266, 268, 269, 272, 274 Mosque, 54, 55, 57–59, 65, 199 Mosque attacks, 60 Mother, 27, 29, 30, 79, 80, 108, 135–137, 149, 150, 156, 166, 169, 170, 195, 211 Mourn, 62, 63, 167, 168 Mourning, 12, 64, 90, 156, 167, 167n4, 168, 173, 255 Mrwetyana, Uyinene, 134, 139, 142 Mulan, 120 Multidisciplinary, 2, 10 Murder, 5, 8, 14, 37–40, 43–50, 64, 100, 101, 127, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140–142, 190–193, 196, 204, 205, 207, 214, 268, 270, 271, 273 Muslim, 55 Muslim community, 55 Myth, 14, 37–43 N Narrathanatographical, 88 Narration, 88, 93, 95 Narrative, 9, 15, 16, 41, 49, 61, 71, 73–75, 79, 80, 85–96, 101, 102, 104, 106–108, 110, 111, 122, 138, 141, 151, 155, 191, 193, 204, 205, 208, 209, 211–214, 237–241, 254, 255, 258, 267–272

283

National Health Service (NHS), 196, 240, 241, 243, 256 Natural causes, 177 Natural death, 4 Nazi, 38, 223 Necropolitics, 9, 19, 176, 236, 241–244 Negotiation politics, 18, 197 Netflix, 49, 69 Newspaper, 6, 19, 47, 152, 190–192, 204, 210, 213, 221, 243, 249–261 New York Times, 42, 155 NHS workers, 256 Nichols, Mary Ann, 18, 203, 204, 208, 209 9/11, 8 Nonbeing, 88, 89, 97 Non-functionality, 117, 125 Non-normative bodies, 63 Normality, 176, 207 Nothing, 24, 34, 42, 96, 143, 164, 165, 169–171, 175–187, 226, 229 O Obituary, 166, 196–198 1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick, 14, 39, 48–50 P Palermo, 18, 219–222, 224, 230, 273 Palliative care, 178, 257, 260 Pandemic, 6, 19, 150, 151, 154, 157, 181, 235–245, 249–261, 274 Panic, 240 Paradigmatic, 224, 225, 227, 228 Participatory, 44 Paternal, 165, 168, 169, 172 Penfold-Mounce, Ruth, 1, 9, 10, 15, 71, 76, 163, 165, 166, 210, 213, 268

284 

INDEX

Perpetrator, 14, 15, 54, 57, 59, 65, 86, 100, 107, 137, 141, 144, 155, 211, 213, 214 Photojournalism, 18 Plague, 165, 168–171, 169n6 Plasmatic, 125 Pocahontas, 120 Pornographic, 42, 44, 45, 210 Pornography, 40, 42, 43 Possession, 123 Post-apocalyptic, 100 Post-colonial, 236 Post-death data, 7, 53–65 Posthumous, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 79, 169, 172, 183, 211, 268, 270 demands, 178 Post-traumatic, 94 Potters field, 152, 158 Pre-death, 56 Prison, 29, 140, 142, 149–158 Privacy, 55, 56, 60, 64, 267 Pro-Brexit, 190, 195 Pro-EU, 190, 194, 195 Provocative morbid space, 15, 71, 76 Proximity, 25, 27, 96, 169, 230 Psychiatric, 17, 29, 30, 151, 175, 176, 179, 180 Public, 4, 6, 11, 15, 17–19, 25, 33, 34, 40, 63–65, 70, 71, 79, 117, 119, 135, 138, 140, 141, 144, 149–154, 157, 158, 177, 191, 194, 196, 204–206, 208–215, 219, 220, 222, 225, 226, 228–230, 235–242, 244, 245, 250, 256, 260, 261, 266–269, 271, 274 Public cemetery, 152 Public Health England, 253 Punctum, 222, 226, 227, 229, 230

Q Quarantine, 17, 151, 152, 154, 155, 236, 237 Quickie, 40 R Race, 5, 192 Race-murder, 192 Racism, 120, 122, 123, 192 Rainbow Valley, 77, 80 Rape, 16, 49, 133–145 Rat Island, 155 Real death, 5, 7, 8, 14, 37–50, 54, 271 Realism, 9, 103, 125 Refugee children, 192 crisis, 163, 164, 193 Religion, 222 Remediation, 19, 223, 228 Remembering, 15, 23, 53, 55, 57, 58, 61–65 Reparations, 178 Repatriate, 77 Representation, 2, 5, 9, 11, 15–17, 19, 23–34, 60, 73, 76, 77, 79–81, 86–90, 92, 94, 96, 100, 102, 107, 119, 121–125, 138, 161, 162, 204–206, 208, 210–215, 219–230, 253–255, 260, 267, 270–273 Rescue teams, 77 Restrictions, 126, 127, 157, 198, 199, 250, 252, 253, 257, 258 Reversible death, 120 Right wing, 190, 193, 196, 198 Risk actual, 72–74, 76–79 perceived, 72, 74, 75 Romance, 28, 29

 INDEX 

S Sacred, 77, 94, 168 Sacrifice, 85, 86, 91, 92, 97, 170, 245 Sanders, Ed, 39 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 181 Schizophrenia, 29, 30 Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), 243 Selfie, 59 Selfie deaths, 53 Semiotic, 19, 121, 122, 224–225, 228 September 11, 7, 8 Serial killers, 46, 50, 71 Sexual voyeurism, 210 Shackleton, Allan, 40, 42, 43 Shakespeare, Anne, 165–169 Shakespeare, Hamnet, 17, 161–173, 273 Shakespeare, Judith, 166–171 Shakespeare, William, 5, 17, 166 Sherpas, 72–77, 80 Shock sites, 44–46, 48 Sickbed, 171, 210 Slaughter, The, 40, 41 Sleeping Beauty, 80 Snuff, 37–50, 271 Snuff, definition of, 14 Snuff movie, 37–40, 43, 44, 46–50 Soap opera, 9, 12 Social death, 257 Social distancing, 236, 237 Social media, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10–12, 16, 47, 53–55, 57, 59, 61, 64, 79, 80, 104, 136–139, 141, 143, 145, 175, 198, 223, 239, 250, 256, 265, 267, 269, 270, 273 Social networks, 49, 63, 260 Socio-technical, 14, 55, 60–62, 65 Sontag, Susan, 117, 223, 226, 230 Soul, 16, 115–128, 272

285

South Africa, 10, 16, 133–145, 270, 271 South Brother Island, 155 Spielberg, Steven, 86 Storytelling, 116, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 209, 270, 272 Stress emotional, 78 physical, 78 Stride, Elizabeth, 18, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 212 Studium, 19, 222, 226, 229, 230 Suicidal cluster site, 24, 27, 33, 271 indicators, 26 Suicide location, 25 plan, 33 prevention, 24 Sun, The, 47, 192 Survivors, 28, 31–33, 99, 100, 105, 107, 108, 110, 135, 141 Symbolic immortality, 56, 252, 269 Symbolism, 86, 93, 162 Syntagmatic analysis, 224, 227 T Taboo, 115 Tannock, Charles, 195 Tate, Sharon, 39 Television, 2, 3, 8–10, 13, 16, 19, 39, 99–105, 219–221, 223, 227, 228, 230, 265, 268, 271 Temporal, 58, 88, 116, 127, 154, 156 temporal-spatial, 118 Terrorist, 7, 53–65, 194, 199 Terror Management Theory, 251, 252, 255 Thanatechnology, 56 Thanatological, 204, 205, 213

286 

INDEX

Theatre, 40, 42, 161, 162, 167, 173, 215, 228–230 power of, 172 Thoka La, 76, 77 3 Guys 1 Hammer, 45, 46 Torture, 37, 100, 171 Trauma, 6, 32, 86, 88, 92, 94, 97, 109 Traumatic, 7, 8, 15, 56, 60, 62, 65, 86, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 175, 260, 267, 271 Tuberculosis, 152, 155 Tweetboard, 58 Twitter, 16, 57, 58, 60, 104, 134–136, 269 U UK Government, 237, 241–243, 253 Ukraine (the), 2 Ultraviolence, 89 Unacceptability, 165 Uncanny space, 164 Unclaimed, 150, 152, 153, 155, 272 Unidentified, 150, 152, 153, 155, 272 Universality, 117 Unnatural death, 106–110 Upstart Crow, 162, 165, 166, 167n4, 173 Urban legend, 40, 46 V Victimisation, 12, 205–207, 209, 211–214 Victimology, 242 Victims, 7, 9, 12, 14–16, 18, 24–31, 46, 48, 54, 55, 57, 59, 63, 65, 71, 89, 94, 95, 101–103, 105, 106, 134, 137, 141, 144, 152, 186, 189–200, 203–215, 221, 226–228, 241, 273

Vietnam War, 85, 220, 230 Violated bodies, 18, 86, 87, 92 Violence illegitimate, 102 justification for, 16, 101, 102, 108 legitimate, 102 Viral video, 45 Virus, 19, 153, 182, 235, 237, 240, 242, 244, 249, 253, 255, 256, 261 W War, 2, 16, 71, 85–87, 89–97, 117, 133, 144, 153, 180, 221–222, 268, 271, 272 Weaponization, 151 Weinstein, Harvey, 135 Wellcome Trust, 260 Werther effect, 24, 32 Whitechapel, 203, 208, 211 White-saviour, 122, 123 Wide-angle lens, 225, 229 Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), 42 World Trade Centre, 8 World War 1 (WWI), 25, 85 World War 2 (WWII), 6, 15, 85, 86, 89–92, 96, 97, 153, 186 Y Yatzenko, Sergei, 45, 46 Yellow fever, 154, 155 YouTube, 47, 53 Z Zombie, 99, 104, 107–109 Zombie horror, 9 Zootopia, 120