The Art of Dying: 21st Century Depictions of Death and Dying 3031352173, 9783031352171

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The Art of Dying 21st Century Depictions of Death and Dying Edited by Gareth Richard Schott

The Art of Dying

Gareth Richard Schott Editor

The Art of Dying 21st Century Depictions of Death and Dying

Editor Gareth Richard Schott University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand

ISBN 978-3-031-35216-4    ISBN 978-3-031-35217-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35217-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 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 credit: Photology1971 / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This collection has been directly touched by death. Two close colleagues, Associate Professor Geoff Lealand (1947–2022) and Dr Dean Ballinger (1973–2022), passed away within weeks of one another. Participating in and attending their farewells gave further meaning to the necessity of creative and expressive contemplations of death in acceptance of our physical impermanence, and the ways in which we opt to fortify our memories and characterise the lasting influence of the departed. Like many examples discussed in this collection, Dean was able to contribute directly in this process with his own creative contemplation of the challenges of living with a life-ending condition. After receiving a diagnosis of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) in 2020, Dean responded with pictorial inventiveness and humour. A talented and influential comic book artist in the New Zealand independent comic scene, Dean devoted time in his final years to his craft. He leaves a comic book that is forthcoming but also presented his work at a Pecha Kucha event in 2021, in which he was assisted by a close friend. One of the first symptoms of MND that Dean experienced was impaired tongue movement. This was swiftly followed by fasciculation of the tongue that rendered him unable to speak. With the advancement of the disease, Dean’s drawings and creative voice became even more crucial as a channel for expressing the phenomenology of his experiences and the providence of his physical deterioration. I dedicate this book to both colleagues not only for the support, generosity and friendship they provided in life but the deep grief that their passing generated—a grief that stimulates a curiosity in the life-affirming presence of death.

THRENODY IN D FLAT MINOR Let my shade flit between the mingimingi and the coffee cart, Let my spectre boogie on the traffic island, Let my soul echo through the gullies. Place pumice on my eyes And a sprig of miro in my hands And cast my corpse out from the long gravel banks Upriver, not down, up through the tannins and fats, up past the pictographs and the chimneystacks, up into the loam and the ignimbrite, into the desert on the slopes of the mountain, a wilderness full of doors, grant me passage to the chamber where Waikato-iwi issues forth. by Dean Ballinger

Acknowledgements

Written and edited during the height of the global pandemic, contributors to this collection had to contend with the stresses and uncertainties associated with the ferocity, spread and impact of Covid-19. Many of the contributors contracted Covid-19, resulting in some unable to continue with the project. Whether their work appears in the final version of the collection or not, everyone associated with this project showed a real commitment during very difficult and challenging times, both personally and professionally. As the editor of this collection, I learned more about the personal circumstances and challenges faced by my academic colleagues and collaborators than I would have ordinarily. In the process of checking in with authors, it became equally important to enquire about their well-­ being and that of their whānau (family) and communities. As the pandemic advanced, wishing authors ‘kia kaha’ (to stay safe and strong) became as important as progress on the publication. I am truly grateful to all the contributors for their dedication.

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Contents

1 Expressions  of Grief: Creative Processing and Reflections  1 Gareth Richard Schott 2 The  ‘Creative’ Grief of Heart of a Dog and Dick Johnson Is Dead 21 Kyle Barrett and Gareth Richard Schott 3 M  ediated Suicide in 13 Reasons Why: An Argument for Caution in Television Portrayals of Suicide 43 Elizabeth Paton and Tiffany Bodiam 4 Absent  Presence: Exploiting the Temporal Flexibility of Graphic Memoir 65 Kirstine Moffat and David Simes 5 Retain  or Delete? Intentions for Social Network Accounts After Death 89 Akiko Orita 6 “Okay?  No, not okay:” Does Romance Deliver a Good Death for Terminally Ill Young People?115 Moira Armstrong and Gareth Richard Schott

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7 Death  Is Not the End (of the Game): So, What Is It?135 Nicholas J. Munn 8 The  Live Reality of Death: Representations of Dying and the Dead in Documentary Theatre155 Missy Mooney 9 How  Soon Is Too Soon? Death as Comedy175 Melody May and Gareth Richard Schott Index197

Notes on Contributors

Moira Armstrong  is a writer and researcher. Their current research, in partnership with the Queer Britain museum, involves transcribing oral histories from LGBTQ+ individuals in the United Kingdom and creating multimedia elements for a queer history display. They also serve as a writer and editor for Curtain Call and Fusion magazines and their poetry has been published in Luna Negra, Red Earth Review, Neon Mariposa Magazine and others. They have been interested in young adult sick lit since their own near-death experience in high school. Kyle Barrett  is an award-winning filmmaker and lecturer at the University of Waikato in the Screen and Media Programme in the School of Arts. His research focuses on global, low-budget production cultures and cinemas, gender representation and creative practice. He has also directed several documentaries that have been screened internationally. Tiffany Bodiam  has worked in the area of mental health and early-intervention research and practice for more than twenty years. Working across the criminal justice, OOHC, homelessness, disability, youth-at-risk and youth mental health sectors, Tiffany has mobilised research, clinical and practice teams to integrate trauma-informed, person-centred and strengths-based therapeutic approaches to the care and support of some of the most vulnerable members of our communities. Melody  May  holds a PhD in English with Creative Practice from the University of Waikato. Her research and creative work seek to analyse and challenge attitudes and social structures that exclude people often xi

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relegated to the edges of society. She is concerned specifically with the ideals that create expectations about what ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’ mean. Her current research focuses on the marginalisation of women and girls, specifically, at the intersection of disability and gender, represented in contemporary film, literature and comedy. Kirstine Moffat  is Associate Professor of English in the School of Arts, Waikato University, New Zealand. She has published widely on nineteenth-century New Zealand literature, music and culture and is the author of Piano Forte: Stories and Soundscapes from Colonial New Zealand. Kirstine loves teaching contemporary literature and film and has recently written about the Hunger Games and Kingsman. She provides an annual overview of contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand literature for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature with co-authors David Simes and Aimee-Jane Anderson O’Connor. Missy  Mooney  is an Aotearoa New Zealand-based theatre practitioner with experience in constructing, directing and performing in a variety of documentary theatre works. She is interested in how the ethical considerations or responsibilities theatre makers may have when working with the ‘real words’ of ‘real people’ might influence their work’s dramaturgical construction and creative expression. Missy’s research is primarily practice-led/practice-based and she is currently completing a PhD exploring the process of creating documentary theatre from pre-existing documentary materials such as letters, diaries and personal writings after the death of the document’s originator(s). Nicholas J. Munn  is a philosopher and senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Waikato University. He is interested in how our societies are run and in the position of the disadvantaged within society. His focus has been on young people and democracy—specifically why the young are systematically excluded. He also researches virtual worlds—asking what kinds of places these are, whether and how they differ from the physical world and how we should treat our actions within them. Akiko  Orita is a professor in the Department of Communication, College of Human and Symbiotic Studies at Kanto Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan. She received her PhD and MA degrees in Media and Governance from Keio University. Her research interests lie in the broad areas of online identity and privacy issues, including post-mortem data

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privacy, use of personal information for AI and information literacy education for young people. Elizabeth Paton  is project lead on the Mindframe program at Everymind, which supports safe media reporting, portrayal and communication about suicide, mental ill-health and alcohol and other drugs. She also leads the Words and Images project, including the development of guidelines and web-based resources to support image and language use that is safe, inclusive, hopeful and non-stigmatising. She has published across areas such as suicide prevention, responsible research and innovation, media, communication and the creative industries. Gareth Richard Schott  is Professor in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. As a media psychologist he holds an interest in both the psychological impact of media and the role of creative media in exploring human psychology and psychological knowledge. Throughout his research career, he has held an interest in the way individual sense of self is constructed. He began with an interest in measuring adolescent sense of self as a relational concept, before moving on to examine how the self is extended online via networked technologies and avatars that led to his current interest in the post-self. The post-self reflects the reputation, memories, memorialisation and presence of the individual after death. This collection of works was inspired by the increasing range of memorialisation practices online and offline that currently reflect the co-construction of a post-self by the deceased and the bereaved. David  Simes recently completed his Master’s at the University of Waikato. He writes on comics, adaptation and theatre and will begin his PhD in 2023. He has previously been published in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and his personal essay ‘Mr Fox & Me’ was highly commended by Landfall.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8

Hospitalised fiancé Cheryl Weaver by Anders Nilsen (2012, p. 74). (Copyright Anders Nilsen. From Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly) “So is this all there is?” by Anders Nilsen (2013, p. 5). (Copyright © Anders Nilsen. The End. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantagraphics.com)) Pinhole image by Kristen Radtke (2017, p. 1). (Credit Line: “illustrations” from IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS by Kristen Radtke, copyright © 2017 by Kristen Radtke. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved) ‘Radtke performs an autopsy’ by Kirsten Radtke (2017, p. 124). (Credit Line: “illustrations” from IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS by Kristen Radtke, copyright © 2017 by Kristen Radtke. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved) Individual preferences for digital assets (social media accounts) after death Intentions for post-mortem Facebook accounts by age Intentions for post-mortem Instagram accounts by age Intentions for post-mortem Twitter accounts by age Frequency of use (Facebook) Frequency of use (Instagram) Frequency of use (Twitter) Profile management and Facebook

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84 101 101 102 102 103 103 104 104 xv

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Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 5.14

Profile management and Instagram Profile management and Twitter Wishes for family’s post-mortem SNS by country Wishes for friend’s post-mortem SNS by country Intentions for family’s post-mortem SNS by age Intentions for friend’s post-mortem SNS by age

105 105 106 107 107 108

CHAPTER 1

Expressions of Grief: Creative Processing and Reflections Gareth Richard Schott

I’m neither for or against death. It just happens to insist upon itself. It exists. So therefore I need to deal with it. —B. J. Miller (2021)

The idea that death is taboo is somewhat of a misnomer. While death may not be a comfortable subject, we understand that it is universal—it impacts all of us. Despite this knowledge, we have cultivated cultural practices that suppress the certainty of death, conceal it (out of respect) or censor it, while other practices encourage us to attend to death as a depersonalized non-threatening mode of entertainment. ‘Death awareness,’ or the appreciation of the realities of dying, has become distorted by the persistent appropriation and application of death as a dramatic turn or plot change in narrative fiction, a spectacle in death-defying or death issuing action sequences, or in its recursive use to communicate ‘failure states’ (followed by instant resurrection) when playing digital games. In “The Pornography

G. R. Schott (*) University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. R. Schott (ed.), The Art of Dying, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35217-1_1

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of Death,” Geoffrey Gorer (1955) identified how the professionalization of the physical management of death (by medical and funeral industries) has served to shield individuals from the absolute state of death. As Tercier (2013, 221) goes on to reason, “thwarted fascination” with death is then redirected towards graphic and violent representations produced in the media. It is this “surfeit of morbid representation” that Gorer considered a mode of pornography, for its effect of dampening the profound implications of death in the real world. The following collection of academic essays has been compiled to discuss a range of creative processes and practices that have been employed in the production of portrayals of, and reflections on, death and dying many of which reconnect readers, viewers and users to the phenomenology of dying and grief. In giving attention to subjective accounts of a life, death and/or experience of loss, this collection serves to acknowledge the ways in which artistic contemplations can be a valuable source of insight. As Woodthorpe (2011, 100) has stated: “Everyone is an ‘insider’ when it comes to death due to its ‘universal reach.’” Death is not a discrete subject that can be claimed by one discipline or understood using a single method of investigation above others. Death is a complex process to endure, acknowledge and act on, inviting multiple perspectives, considerations and practices. Death can be accounted for in dispassionate, clinical and professional terms, but can also be impenetrable, deeply affecting and incapacitating in its impact on the bereaved. Our capacities for coping with or managing death are however subject to the uncertainty of grief, which “manifests through a comprehensive affective register” (Køster, 2020, 125) ranging from emotions such as sadness, longing, anger, resentment, hostility, hopelessness, fear and guilt (Fernandez & Køster, 2019). Compensating for the unbalancing emotions and upheaval that grief can bring are social arrangements and support structures that serve to ‘publicly invigilate’ (Walter et  al., 1995) or ‘contain’ the impact of death (Blauner, 1966). That is, we ‘specify’ behaviours for the bereaved, “as well as those who interact with the bereaved” (Corless et al., 2014, 132), prescribing “structural behaviours in [a] time of flux” (Rando, 1984, 190). While public mourning ceremonies remain essential for the ways in which they reinforce social ties in times of vulnerability and loss, we have to recognize that they also represent a form of social regulation (Fowlkes, 1990). In recognizing that grief feelings and their behavioural manifestations are subject to socially informed ‘display rules’ (Zeman & Garber, 1996). Furthermore, ‘normal’ levels of grieving has been identified and situated between

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impediments and immoderations, such as notions of ‘disenfranchised grief’ (Doka, 2002) when a loss cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned, and ‘complicated grief’ (Shear, 2012, 119) when the bereaved resort to “excessive avoidance of reminders of the loss as they are tossed helplessly on waves of intense emotion.” This collection looks beyond the capacity of funerary rites and rituals to publicly acknowledge death, to examine how grief from a loss can be expressed ahead of time (anticipatory), or as an ongoing and persistent set of emotions that “should not be expected to follow time limits and a specific path” (McClowry et al., 1987, 373). It is the prolonged and aphonic elements of grief that this collection attempts to explore further, looking to media and the arts to assist our understanding of the fear and uncertainty that death and loss brings.

Certainty and Comfort: Rituals Ahead of chapters that explore various mediated articulations and responses to dying and death this section focuses on our more public, traditional and symbolic means of expressing our beliefs, thoughts and feelings about the death of someone. As Chism and Strawser (2017, 229) remind us, “[T]he act of burying the dead is one of the oldest known cultural universals, an ultimate foundation of society.” Death has characterized humanity from the moment humans began mourning and burying their dead (Dastur, 2015). In pre-industrial societies, mourning ceremonies were reportedly much more highly ritualized, involving large sections of the community as they served to reaffirm “group sentiments, common bonds, and [the] social solidarity threatened by death” (Osterweis et al., 1984). Whereas industrialization is characterized by its institution of what Blauner (1966, 378) terms the “bureaucratization of modern death control.” This refers to the practice of removing the dead from the home and into the care of professionals to perform ‘last offices’ (Nyatanga & de Vocht, 2009). This change played a significant role in defining people’s experience of bereavement, both practically and temporally (Foster, 2022). Today, professional funeral services extend to assisting and overseeing the formal registration of a death and ensuring that legal requirements for burial and cremation are met. While death verification and civil registration are, as Stoney et  al. (2011) notes, a legal necessity for “insurance claims and the settling of estates,” they also more broadly addressed the ‘scandal of invisibility’ that refers to past instances of those that were “born

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and die[d] without leaving any record of their existence” (Horton, 2007, 1526). Both naming of the dead and caring for their bodies prior to burial have been respected historically as a way of keeping the dead among the living (Laqueur, 2018)—providing a comfort to the living as to their own treatment in death. Thus, we honour human existence via the inviolability of the body after death and the idea that a “human being is entitled to receive ethical treatment, and to be respected and valued in all phases of life and even through death” (Dias, 2015, para. 1). Respect for human life has extended to the treatment of the bodies of the dead as symbols of the pre-mortem person (McGuinness & Brazier, 2008). In doing so, corpses represent “a highly charged object of reflection and remembrance, and as a decomposing, unstable cadaver … [require] deliberate, careful handling” (Laderman, 1996). As Beit-Hallahmi (2012, 326) argues, decomposition is the “hardest [reality] to encounter when confronted with a dead body” as its ‘wet state’ is unstable. He goes on to conclude: “The inevitable physical metamorphosis of the dead body is often interfered with, and always accompanied by conceptual transformation” in order to facilitate coping and change the initially horrifying stimulus of the physical expiry of a loved one. Denzin (1974, 272) defines ritual as a “conventionalized joint activity given to ceremony, involving two or more persons, endowed with special emotion and often sacred meaning.” While only performed once per individual, the practice of death rituals provides structure and a degree of certainty by offering prescribed movements in the wake of a loss of life. As part of a public event guided by respect and a degree of demureness, the ‘horrors’ of decay that follows the irreversible cessation of biological functioning is typically concealed or suppressed. As Deblon and Wils (2017, 49) note: “Embalmed bodies and anatomical preparations were often conserved and perceived as if they were still alive and appeared to be sleeping.” Otherwise known as the ‘beautification of death,’ it refers to how beauty has been wielded “to combat and to deny death, and to console the dead and the living” (Foltyn, 1996, 73). As a powerless entity (Foltyn, 2008) the body is treated in order to neutralize its ‘dangerous characteristics’ (Mathijssen, 2021) before being situated among the living as a “matter out of place” (Douglas, 1966/2003, 44). As Watts (2022, para. 6) notes: “The whole point of a funeral is that it gets the body where it needs to be—a physical presence that we can cope with, buried or processed into ash.”

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As Schott (2018) highlights, ‘veiled’ from the family and loved ones, the body of the deceased can undergo a radical carnographic transformation in preparation for its social reappearance as “cleansed, purified, immobile” (Bronfen, 1992, 99). Subjected to the illimitable aesthetic values of ‘makeover culture’ (Jones, 2008) the deceased becomes a “mixture of nature and artifice” (Van Dijck, 2001, 100). Analysis of commercial ‘death care’ practices not only reveal the visceral realities of death from which the grieving are protected from (see Campbell’s (2022) descriptions of the smell of putrefaction and the sound of rigour snapping), but reveals further horrors associated with how ‘exquisite stasis’ (Reyes, 2014) is achieved. Schott (2018) describes the types of procedures chronicled by Mark Harris (2007) in his account of the modern funeral industry in the US: Learning about some of the measures performed on the body provokes a response of physical empathy for what such actions would mean for a living, feeling, pain-sensing individual. For instance, the use of packing forceps to push “wads of cotton soaked in phenol into Jenny’s anus and vagina” (p. 17), gluing eyelids to an ‘eyecap’ placed on the eyeball, shooting barb-­ tipped wire into the mouth filled with ‘mortuary putty’ in order to draw it and keep it shut, “running a half-curved needle threaded with suture into each breast at a point just off the nipples and pulling the suture taut” (p. 19), all evoke a sense of horror and body trauma. At the very least it requires the body to suffer indignity in order to achieve a ‘peaceful’ appearance to console the living. (22)

Such practices (if performed), occur while the grieving are concerning themselves with the preservation of memories of the dead, as memory becomes a mechanism to “resurrect and restore the past in the present and unite the two” (Wilson, 2012, 484). When stuck between a bleak present and a seemingly unspecified future, the ‘memory’s terrain’ serves as an “intermediacy between the living and the dead” (Sheringham, 1993, 303). In this moment the corpse poses a real risk to the memory of the body as “the locus of the beloved individual [and their] distinct and personal identity” (Tarlow, 2002, 85). The sudden displacement of the bereaved, with for example, the collapse of a ‘lived synchronism’ (Minkowski, 1970) and the loss of a ‘dyadic futurity’ (Riley, 2012) amongst life partners has also led to the evolution of funeral directing services from being solely task-oriented (from body

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removal, embalming/creation to legal procedures) to also being relationship-­focused (Chism & Strawser, 2017). Funeral directors are now expected to provide those who are unready or ill-equipped to deal with death with “support, information, and assistance in normalizing their own unique grief experience” (Lensing, 2001, 45). While funerals offer structure and support to the bereaved and allow the public acknowledgement of a passing, they also signal the conclusion to, and social tolerance for public expressions of grief (Kawaga-Singer, 1994). As Castle and Phillips (2003, 44) note, upon completion of a funeral “social support typically begins to subside … and the bereaved person begins to feel the pressure to ‘get over it’ and move on.” In her discussion of ‘grief work’—a process in which the bereaved gradually transform their emotional connection to a person that has died—Caroline Pearce (2019) draws attention to ‘affective practices’ that go beyond ‘formal’ rituals (such as funerals) to include everyday mundane activities that take on a new meaning and purpose in grief. For example, through personal or household objects the bereaved can metonymically sustain bonds with the deceased (Hallam & Hockey, 2001). As Tilley (1999, 5) states: “One entity is taken as standing for another entity” leading to “residual belongings or traces of someone who has died carry[ing] a particular charge” (Richardson, 2014, 67). When mourners and support-people have left and returned to their lives, the grieving often continues alone on their path to adjustment and resolving loss.

Voicing (or Evidencing) Loss Bereavement theory has moved on from initial understanding of grief as a series of stages (e.g. Lindemann, 1944) that “bereaved persons must follow in order to adapt to loss” (Stroebe et al., 2017, 455) to consider it more “a continuous process in which the bereaved never fully return to some ‘pre-bereaved’ status quo” (Büster & Dayes, 2017). Moreover, death is “a power that humanizes” (Blanchot, 1999, 392) as it defines our existence as mortal, worldly and corporeal—once we cease to be, we cease to be mortal. It follows that we cannot therefore know death and “we cannot draw a likeness of death” (Critchley, 1996, 108) as death only “works with us in the world” (Blanchot, 1999, 392). Considered together, both representation (in art and literature) and immediate experiences of grief constitute encounters with the ‘spaces of absence’ (Brennan, 2008, 103). Distinct from the ‘clinical lore’ (Walter, 1996) of stage theoretical

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approaches that offer a path to recovery or renewal, and with it the pathologization of lasting grief (Bennett & Bennett, 2000), representations of loss and grief do not seek to ‘resolve’ grief (Brennan, 2008) for it understands ‘lack’ in relation to its intangibility and inexpressiveness. While the professionalization of death management and the ceremonial mitigation of grief perform a social duty, they also countermand the incomplete individual manifestations of the significance of loss and our acceptance of our natural limitations as human beings (Moules, 1998). Grief continues to produce a diverse range of oral and nonverbal expressions across individuals and cultures (Corless et al., 2014). To this extent, this collection seeks to demonstrate how ‘death literacy’ extends beyond “a set of knowledge and skills that make it possible to gain access to understand and act upon end-of-life and death care options” (Noonan et  al., 2016, 31) to also include encounters with, and the revelatory power of narrative and creative expressions of anticipated and experienced grief (shown to facilitate insight, recognition, support, relaxation, new emotions, and/or distraction, Koopman, 2014). In A Grief Observed, author C.  S. Lewis (using the pseudonym N.W. Clerk) wrote a series of reflections on the experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, in which he admitted: I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. … There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat. (1960, 50)

Beyond the immediate function of funerary rites a wealth of creative expression exist that reinforces how grief is a “complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular moments” (Goldie, 2011, 134). Travis Curtin (2022), curator of a 2022 contemporary art exhibition that took death as its focus (titled “One Foot In the Ground, One Foot in the Water”), describes how it is the role of art and the artist to “take an intangible experience and make it tangible for

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people to process and to be with” (cited in Miekus, 2022). Among the contributors, the exhibition featured Sara Morowitz’s ‘artist book’ containing photographs of the contents of her stepfather’s wallet on the day he died in a motorcycle accident, an artwork that illustrates the way in which different objects are often selected as “tangible residues of life that are left behind” (Curtin cited in Miekus, 2022). In Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust (2003) wrote of the “endless edifice of recollection”—a phrase that has been adopted to encapsulate several artistic explorations of the interpretive act of remembering (including Chris Marker’s, 1997, Immemory). In Elizabeth Grosz (1999, 18) terms, there is an artistic preoccupation with: “The ways in which we consider the past to be connected to and thus to live on through the present/future.” In The Unforgetting, Peter Watkins’ (2016) presents an artistic “gathering of proof: remnants, belongings and fragments from an interrupted life” (O’Hagan, 2015, para. 2) to expressly address the loss of his mother, who took her own life by walking into the North Sea at Zandvoort in the Netherlands, when he was just nine years of age. Among the objects that evoke his mother’s absence and her continuing presence is the rucksack that she wore on the day of her death. Sealed in Perspex the displayed object is visible but impenetrable, leaving its inner contents hidden yet preserved in place. In this way, Watkins demonstrates “resistance to the obvious or the overtly emotive” (cited in O’Hagan, 2015, para. 5) by offering a mundane object “charged with mystery” drawing attention to the “intricate structures of mourning” (Leader, 2008, 7) and the lack of “precise language to name death, to accept death and our dead” (Klement, 1994, 73). In exploring a range of artistic reflections on, and responses to death and dying, this collection aims to account for the particular affordances, or capabilities, possessed by different expressive forms to capture, embody and creatively represent the end of a life, grief and loss. In La Mort, Jankélévitch (1977, 29) observed that “[b]etween the anonymity of the third person and the tragic subjectivity of the first person, there is the privileged case of the second person,” referring to the space between “the death of others, which is distant and indifferent, and our own death, which is closest to our being.” Death in the second person is “to see death up close” (Camilleri, 2009, 209) typically in the form of the anguished loss of a close relative, or partner. As Camilleri (2009, 141) notes, “[O]nly death in the second person possesses the character of an event in the full sense, that is, the character of an intense adventure experienced integrally and which, precisely for this reason, profoundly changes us.” When that

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change is reflected in art and literature we are able to engage with a “reality of possibility: the reality of imaginable human experience” (van Manen, 1985, 177). Similarly, Morin et al. (2019, 2) state that depictive or fictional accounts permit “us to anticipate mentally events that could occur in the future, and imagine possible reactions to them.” Scholars have of course noted the disruptive nature of grief, and the severe way it undermines the individual’s ‘assumptive world’ (Parkes, 1988), but it is art that strives to give expression or embody the way grief “keeps watch … incising, dissecting, exposing a hurt which can no longer be endured” (Blanchot, 1986, 55–56). Acclimating to a life after a death is the key theme of the Netflix dramedy After Life (2019–2022). In Schott’s (2022) account of After Life he argues that the compassion of its portrayal of the lived experiences of grief is, in part, attributable to the manner it accepts that grief is ‘narratively intractable’ (Westlund, 2018, 29) and non-resolvable in a rectilinear manner. Its portrayal of mourning, allows grief to resurface and endure, in doing so receiving praise from widows (on social media) and charity organization Widowed and Young for its “searingly accurate reflection of what it’s like to be widowed at a young age” (Cooper in Banim, 2019). British illustrator and writer Raymond Briggs (The Snowman, Where The Wind Blows) declared: “I don’t believe in happy endings.” Explaining his position, he stated that: “Children have got to face death sooner or later. Granny and Grandpa die, dogs die, cats die, gerbils and those frightful things—what are they called?—hamsters: all die like flies. So there’s no point avoiding it” (cited in Secher, 2007). Yet cultural preparedness to confront and acknowledge the deceased varies considerably. The West is repeatedly characterized as repudiating death and dying. Adult abjuration is extended to children as results from a British Social Attitudes survey in 2013 revealed. Almost half of the respondents (48%) felt that it is inappropriate for children under the age of twelve to attend funerals (reported in Hilpern, 2013). As a result children are often ‘invisible grievers’ (Ott cited in Saint Louis, 2012), sheltered from witnessing adult expressions of grief and deprived of the opportunity to mourn. Children’s exposure to loss and acknowledgement of death is more likely to occur via incidences of thanatological themes found in creative media. As such, there is a growing body of scholarly work that promotes the ways fiction permits readers/viewers to experience emotions without need for self-protection (Zwaan, 1994), thus opening up the self to feel more than it does in everyday life (Keen, 2007). In The Decay of Living, Oscar Wilde

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(1905/1889) wrote: “One of the greatest tragedies of my life, is the death of Lucien de Rubempré [in Balzac’s Illusions Perudes, 1837–43]. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself.” Today, para-social grief is acknowledged as a legitimate response to the death of fictional characters (DeGroot & Leith, 2018; Schiavone et  al., 2019). Lasting responses, defined by contemplation and meaningfulness, to the deaths of fictional characters were identified and explored with a sample of 506 participants by Fitzgerald et al. (2020). They found participants were able to recall deaths that were meaningful, moving and thought-­provoking to conclude that fictional texts can expose readers/viewers to experiences that they may not want to go through, but know they we will someday, helping them to process that experience.

Memorialization and Post-Self Today the separate states of life and death overlap more now than ever before due to the saturation of our selves (Gergen, 1991). That is, the dispersal of our self via our digital presence and the creation of digital assets come to constitute a digital footprint and our eventual digital legacy. We exist in the age of the post-self, in which Walter Benjamin’s (1936/1969, 93–94) oft-cited assertion that “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” has evolved to also incorporate mediated and enduring online identities that present the deceased in attendance or at hand. Consider the example of Esther Earl (reported by Tait, 2019) who scheduled messages and posts for her future-­ self to recall and reflect on her four years undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer, only to have them tweeted six months after her death and read by family, friends and public followers. While Esther’s delayed tweet were considered accidental (according to her mother Lori: “[Esther] hoped she would receive her own messages … [it showed] her hopes and longings to still be living, to hold on to life” cited in Tait, 2019), there are now digital services designed to manage posthumous posts, emails and updates of the dead (GoneNotGone, Eternime, Replika) and insert the physically departed into the lives of loved ones on key occasions. Shneidman (1973) first posited the concept of post-self to account for human concern with how others will continue to think of us after we have gone. Such considerations, he argued remain “the concerns of the living individual” (45) that reflect how future-oriented thinking can also include post-death. For digitally connected individuals that routinely participate in an online

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‘reputation economy’ (Zimmer & Hoffman, 2011) the construction of a digital after-life has become inexorable. Today the ‘decoupling’ of body from data (Graham et al., 2013) is no longer a barrier to attempts to construct or manage a digital post-self and attain digital continuance and presence. Digital adjuncts to a life offer those that “desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing” (Przybylski et al., 2013) a means to achieve that. A strong desire to be remembered or leave a mark on the world also means that thoughts of being overlooked or forgotten can generate significant fear and psychological anxiety (Ray et  al., 2019). As Wilkins (2013, 14) notes in Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears: “Fear of being forgotten after death is one of man’s deep rooted anxieties.” With knowledge that death is approaching, individuals often respond with increased self-reflection and the “conscious construction of a coherent personal history” (Carr, 2012, 188). Such contemplations serve to palliate looming rituals of separation (Murray, 2010) and the final subtraction of the individual from everyday life. In light of this separation, it is worth noting the two modes of our identity outlined by David Joselit (2000, 27): “one in which subjectivity is immanent to the body, and one in which the architecture of selfhood is imposed from without.” In the case of the latter, symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead (1934) assigned the term “generalized others” to describe a social reference group whose presence and conjectured opinions serve to shape an individual’s sense of their self and the reputation they hold. Intensification of the ways in which the self is represented in a networked society, provides further evidence of how the self is actively co-constructed (Belk, 2015). No longer simply the consequence of reflection and presumption, the digital self can be initiated by others via everyday acts such as posting and tagging an image of another person on social media. The resultant post is typically present and viewable online and can illicit reaction and response from others (in form of comments). In this way, individual desire for symbolic immortality has to contend with an externally executed ‘post self’ that is also directed by others. Germane to the responsibility others assume in fashioning an individual’s post-self, Moncur and Kirk (2014, 1) state that memorialization is a “ubiquitous human practice” that is “bound up with cultural modes of practice” appropriating a growing range of artefacts. Gibbs et al. (2015) have noted how little scholarly attention has been given to the way media platforms currently intersect with traditional mourning practices. This collection therefore seeks to address examples of the ways personal loss is

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communicated within creative system structures and aesthetics afforded by particular platforms or mediums. In some cases, this process includes the co-construction of a post-self for the departed as past experiences and memories are translated into stories or artistic experiences that can be externally presented for others to grasp and experience. As Alan Friedman (1982, 65) notes: [N]arrative is to death as death is to the dying—the one encompassing and giving order to the other. Such telling is an attempt to ‘tame death,’ to validate the fact and make it appear comprehensible.

As Schank (1990, 114) also notes, there is a sense that if stories are not told, it is “as if nothing has happened.” This collection presents different examples of the contrasting ways in “media artifacts engage us with their experiential models of the world” (Fingerhut, 2021). In doing so, it offers a counterpoint to Sadowsky’s (2017, 2) observation that “cultural norms … discourage grief or socialize grief out of people,” offering examples of concerted ‘willingness’ to ‘authentically’ engage with death, dying and grief. In its exploration of all “important aspects of human experience: the psychological and the social” (Mar & Oatley, 2008, 185) art and literature have an important role in shaping death awareness through contemplations on the value and finitude of life. This collection thus examines a range of treatments from the veracity of documentary as a lens-based medium that ‘captures’ the capacity of graphic novels to contemplate experiences with visual and spatial inventiveness, the ability of video games to interactively immerse players in other worlds and bodies, to comedy’s ability to generate observations and perspectives that engage audiences and ignite progressive social change.

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Tilley, C. (1999). Metaphor and material culture. Blackwell. Van Dijck, J. (2001). Bodyworlds: The art of plastinated cadavers. Configurations, 9(1), 99–126. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2001.0008 van Manen, M. (1985). Phenomenology of the novel, or how do novels teach? Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 3(3), 177–187. https://doi.org/10.29173/ pandp14987 Walter, T. (1996). A new model of grief: Bereavement and biography. Mortality, 1, 7–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/713685822 Walter, T., Littlewood, J., & Pickering, M. (1995). Death in the news: The public invigilation of private emotion. Sociology, 29(4), 579–596. https://doi. org/10.1177/0038038595029004002 Watkins, P. (2016). The Unforgetting [Exhibition]. The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Watts, A. (2022). Why we fear dead bodies: It’s easier to forget that corpses are human. Unheard. https://unherd.com/2022/04/why-­we-­fear-­dead-­bodies/ Westlund, A. C. (2018). Untold sorrow. In A. Gotlib (Ed.), The moral psychology of sadness (pp. 21–41). Rowman & Littlefield. Wilde, O. (1905/1889). The decay of lying. Brentano. Wilkins, R. (2013). Death: A history of man’s obsessions and fears. Barnes and Nobel. Wilson, C. (2012). The photobook as object of memory and nostalgia. In P. di Bello, C. Wilson, & S. Zamir (Eds.), The photobook from Talbot to Ruscha and beyond (pp. 179–196). I. B. Tauris. Woodthorpe, K. (2011). Researching death: Methodological reflections on the management of critical distance. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14, 99–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2010.496576 Zeman, J., & Garber, J. (1996). Display rules for anger, sadness, and pain: It depends on who is watching. Child Development, 67, 957–973. https://doi. org/10.2307/1131873 Zimmer, M., & Hoffman, A. (2011). Privacy, context, and oversharing: Reputational challenges in a web 2.0 world. In H. Masum & M. Tovey (Eds.), The reputation society: How online opinions are reshaping the offline world (pp. 175–184). MIT Press. Zwaan, R. A. (1994). Effect of genre expectation on text comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(4), 920–933. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-­7393.20.4.920

CHAPTER 2

The ‘Creative’ Grief of Heart of a Dog and Dick Johnson Is Dead Kyle Barrett and Gareth Richard Schott

Society must deny death if it is to get on with its everyday business, yet it must accept it if its members are to retain contact with reality —Walter, 1991, p. 306

In cinema, the ‘death scene’ has served to typify the idea that when mortality becomes an “irreversible proximity” (Gibson, 2001, p. 307) it will be faced with acceptance, creating a poignant moment for the dying and their consoling witness(es). In such cinematic moments all other matters classically become background—quietened, muffled, softened, blurred— to bring focus to an individual’s “passage of death” (Gibson, 2001, p. 307). The “border between this world the next” (Guthke, 1992, p. vii), or separation of ‘being’ from ‘inexistence,’ brings an expectation that it will be accompanied by a meaningful last utterance. Cinematic depictions of dying conjure an idealised death that is rarely afforded in reality. Indeed, McLeod (cited in Erard, 2019) states that it is “regarded as exceptional for

K. Barrett • G. R. Schott (*) University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. R. Schott (ed.), The Art of Dying, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35217-1_2

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patients to remain mentally clear throughout the final stages of malignant illness”. The authors of Final Gifts (1992), hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley stress that communication often becomes more subtle as the dying become weaker and more lethargic. They advise that, for the dying, it is hearing that is the last sense to fade. For those who have experienced the passing of a loved one, death in cinema is the ultimate artifice. It is then left to other genres, approaches and practices to facilitate a discussion, and reflection, of death and dying. The intention of this chapter is to explore ways in which death and grief are depicted through documentary filmmaking—a genre that makes “claims of truthfulness” (Aufderheide, 2007, p. 25). We feel it is important to note how documentary shares the same techniques for manipulation of images, sounds and speech with its fictional filmmaking counterparts. Thus, while “some quality of the moment persists outside the grip of textual organization” (Nichols, 1991, p. 231), documentary truth is less about “authentic representation of the real” (Bruzzi, 2006, p. 13) but “that which defines our world for us: perception” (Jordan, 2003, para. 1). Laurie Anderson’s (2015) Heart of a Dog and Kirsten Johnson’s (2020) Dick Johnson Is Dead have been selected for analysis due to their distinctive examinations of dying, death and grief. Both employ a range of audio-­ visual practices and techniques to achieve a creative account of the experiences of bereavement and the passing of someone (or something) meaningful. In doing so, this chapter deviates from accounts of traditional documentary practice to focus on artistic responses to the subject matter of death via the (re)construction of a documented life. We argue that the resulting documentaries represent “memorial spaces” (Ornstein, 2010, p. 631) in which creativity accompanies the sorrow of loss and the “realities of adjusting to a changed life” (Bertman, 1999, p.  1). The chapter begins with a discussion of personal filmmaking, or home movies, as a practice of ‘materialising memory’ (Aasman et al., 2018) and precursor to modern documentary filmmaking. When applied to memorialisation, documentary reflects Cook’s (2001, p. 27) view that ‘records’ are a “mediated and ever-changing construction” rather than a stable “autonomous document of a historical fact” (Cuevas, 2013, p. 18). In the case of Heart of a Dog, Anderson’s rumination on personal losses has been described as “quiet acceptance rather than raging against the dying of the light” (Pinkerton, 2016, para. 5)—taking on sentiments of the cinematic ‘death scene’ through its recasting, reflecting and rearranging of memories, images and records.

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Documenting Life: The Raw Material of Home Movies With the advancement of medicine and medical technologies, the medical profession is able to extend and preserve life in multiple ways. Filmmaking too functions as a preserver of life, acting as an audio-visual archive capturing and distilling stories, moments and gestures that can be re-watched or re-examined to leave differing impressions. Indeed, filmmaking has its own life cycle: there is conception (idea/script/development), gestation (production), birth (edit), life (release) and death. Death in filmmaking occurs when footage or films are ‘lost’ or destroyed. Mikesell (2017, para. 1) claims that “half of all American films made before 1950 and more than 90 percent of films made before 1929 are lost forever.” Furthermore, films can also be altered (replacing the director’s original cut), banished through censorship, deteriorated beyond repair or simply become misplaced or deleted. It is also the case that the duration of a cinematic theatre run is now as short as four weeks leading to films gaining an indeterminate ‘afterlife’ in home entertainment as videos, digital versatile discs or streaming content. Outside the life-cycle of modern commercial filmmaking amateurs have documented everyday life in ‘home movies.’ Whereas film would be brought to life in the edit in order to be exhibited to the public, home movies are the product of ‘family filmmakers’ performing as ‘endotic anthropologists’ capturing “moments of life that professionals ignore” (Odin, 2008, p.  263). While amateur home movies possess a less well-­ defined purpose and use in terms of screenings, indeed van der Heijden and Fickers (2014, para. 4) have declared that home screening practices “belong to the more ephemeral moments of family life,” such artefacts have since been “remobilised, recontextualised, and reanimated” (Zimmermann, 2008, p. 1) as “cultural and historical carriers of information” (van der Heijden, 2017, para. 3) by museums, or employed in autobiographical documentaries (Cuevas, 2013). The relatively recent recognition of the value and richness of imagery and footage sourced from private or domestic domains constitutes one of the most poignant moments of Artyom Somov’s (2019) short documentary Dying Alone that examines ‘kodokushi’ or lonely death. The documentary draws attention to the increasing numbers of individuals in Japan who die alone through the work of the man whose job it is to clean up after those who have passed alone with no family. Despite its gruesome account of

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unassisted and unaccompanied death, the manner in which memories, photos and belongings become waste rather than passed on as keepsakes or memorials extends the tragic passing of the individual to also include the devaluing of memory practices. Footage from ‘home movies’ is increasingly being incorporated into funerary rites as they stem from the reality of a past and give the dead presence in these moments, moderating the actuality of loss. As funeral videographer Juliet Campbell (cited in Mack, 2015, para. 7) notes: “Most funerals are a celebration of life. It’s kind of like watching a biography.” Laura Mulvey notes that the capacity to “freeze frame” (2006, p. 18) and re-examine home movies to give focus to a specific person, creates a “dynamic interaction between individuals and their sense of loss” (Buser et al., 2005, p. 176). In discussing the Netflix dramedy series After Life, Schott (2022) focuses on the posthumous video messages featured throughout its three seasons. The show features videos created by a dying wife as a future ‘guide’ for her mourning husband in her absence. This enables the deceased to feature as more than a memory or in remembrance throughout the series. The dead’s continued presence in the here-­ and-­now of After Life’s narrative reflects wider trends in which the dying turn to digital services such as Safe Beyond to leave ‘date messages’ (birthdays, or anniversaries) or ‘event messages’ (weddings, graduations) that insert the physically departed into the lives of loved ones at key intervals of life. These examples of digitally manufactured presence enhance other modes of presence such as ‘bereavement hallucinations’ which include visual, auditory verbal and tactile hallucinations (Rees, 1971; Bennett & Bennett, 2000; Keen et al., 2013; Castelnovo et al., 2015) that describe a “feeling that the deceased person is close by without experiencing them in any sensory modality” (Keen et al., 2013, p. 390). With the digital age it has become a ‘human universal’ to document everyday life in still and moving image (Kislinger & Kotrschal, 2021). The resultant images are most predominately placed on social media platforms. Today, the ubiquity of smartphones means that 83.72% of the world’s population possess advanced imaging technology that provides a convenient means to document anything they attend to (see also Chap. 5). In The Principles of Psychology, William James (1890, p. 302) observed that “[m]y experience is what I agree to attend to.” This pronouncement connects the practices of everyday life, documenting and archiving. As everyday life theorist Ben Highmore (2010, p.  12) articulates in Ordinary Lives, the everyday is “accumulation of ‘small things’ that constitute a

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more expansive but hard to register ‘big thing.’” Technologies such as smartphones suggest a new era of visibility as the “agency of the smartphone camera lies not just in its ability to easily produce an image, but also to grant the power of image distribution to the individual user” (Creech, 2015, para. 5). Yet, the in-hand convenience and storage capacities of smartphones lead to uninhibited digital ‘capturing’ without a great deal of consideration given to editing, categorising and exhibition. As Google’s Vice-President of Photos, Shimrit Ben-Yair (2021, para. 1), admits, “[M]ost of the 4  trillion photos stored in Google Photos are never viewed.” This knowledge is driving the application of machine learning approaches to organise and structure individual’s photographic memories, which are then presented back to the photo taker. In a world of unedited images and raw footage there exists the potential to subsequently graft the captured and observed world onto the narrative frame of a life and its loss.

Death and Documentary Although there are a number of more obvious documentaries that examine the process of dying and the journeys and transformations that the body undertakes in death, for example How to Die in Oregon (2011), Death of a Japanese Salesman (2011), A Certain Kind of Death (2003), Alternate Endings (2019) or Dying at Grace (2003), there are an alternative range of films that provide a framework for the making of memories and remembering and forgetting (as found in Dick Johnson Is Dead and Heart of a Dog). For example, in its tight 32 minutes, Alain Resnais’ (1956) Night and Fog explores the remains of the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Majdanek. In doing so, Resnais utilises the camera as if it were a drifting observer, forcing the audience to absorb the aura of death within landscapes that once witnessed the “very worst of human nature” (Reuter, 2019, para. 2). On December 7, 1941, Hitler issued Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), a decree that determined that suspected enemies of the state would ‘vanish’ without a trace, their fate being obscured from their families. The relevance of Resnais’ documentary to this discussion derives from its motivation as a “quest for memory” (Brody, para. 1). As Monaco (1978, p. 20) notes, the film “deals more with our memory of the camps, our mental images of them, than with the camps as they actually existed.” In a discussion of the art of not forgetting, American author Judith Ortiz Cofer (cited in Kallet, 1994, p. 65) describes how it is

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the combination of memory and imagination that is able to “transform remembering into art.” Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black (1963) is a 22-minute documentary that highlights overlooked and ignored segments of society through its depiction of a leper colony in Bababaghi, Azerbaijan. The film shares with Resnais’ Night and Fog a “creative use of reality and the concern for creating a new reality” (Varzi, 2014, para. 19). Beyond the ‘fact’ of its location, it otherwise functions in the “realm of metaphor” utilising a montage of poetry, imagery and ethnography to produce social critique (Varzi, 2014, para. 5). As Arta Barzanji (2020, para. 1) observes with reference to the film: “The leprous’ body is corrupted, rendering it an outcast from society.” While othering “occupies an important place in the attempt of human beings to understand their own tendency to think and act along lines that divide the human race into different groups and to treat the disfavoured groups badly” (Bellinger, 2020, p. 3), Farrokhzad avoids reducing the subjects of her film to victims as it was made with the “acknowledgement of our look. They … look back at us looking at them” (Bergen-Aurand, 2017, p. 407). In depicting everyday routines, the film also de-stigmatises chronic infectious disease (in this instance Hansen’s disease) by avoiding presenting bodies as “fantastic spectacles, sights or freaks” (Barzanji, 2020, para. 1) but instead conveying the totality of an existence showing individuals as happy, sad, playing, praying and dancing—representing bodies ‘justly.’ The subtlety with which the film achieves its aims also allowed it to survive. As Varzi (2014, para. 4) stresses most of the Iranian films that were made in the 1960s and 1970s were censored “either by the Pahlavi regime or later destroyed by the Islamic revolutionary government.” One final film reference before turning our attention to Dick Johnson Is Dead and Heart of a Dog is Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), a “diaristic and poetic text” documenting Jarman’s AIDS-related illness and impending death, described as an “elegiac journey towards a zone of immateriality” (Wilson, 2013, para. 5). The Blue of the title denotes the singular image of the shades of blue that pervades the whole film that was also representative of Jarman’s partial blindness (cytomegalovirus retinitis)—leaving his vision interrupted by blue light. As Bovenzi (2020, para. 1) notes, Jarman’s use of the single colour, in a manner that “stretches, yawns and is awake” (Blue 21:37), assumes a ‘poetic grip’ that is inescapable for both the audience and Jarman. In contrast to the imagery presented in Night and Fog and The House Is Black, in Blue the absence of visual depictions or

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representations of AIDS and death is exchanged for the thoughts that accompanied Jarman’s illness. Justin Remes (2015, p. 120) notes that in doing so the “film eschews traditional Hollywood depictions of death, which are often drenched in bathos and faux profundity.” Instead, Blue emphasises the ordinary and the mundane, providing a film about dying that is filled with banal minutiae. Jarman was one of the first high profile figures to openly reveal his HIV-diagnosis publicly in a candid interview with Jeremy Isaacs on the BBC’s Face to Face (1989–1998). He disclosed that his openness about his illness and sexuality was for himself and his own self-respect. Echoing elements of The House Is Black, Blue was produced during a socio-political climate that customarily ostracised and demonised homosexuality and, with it, classified AIDS as a ‘gay disease.’ Indeed, AIDS was seen as a symbol for the “danger of sex outside the heterosexual family—in particular of gay sex, with the distinction between gay men and AIDS regularly replaced by the equation Homosexuality = AIDS = Death” (Lawrence, 1997, p. 243). Rather than isolate AIDS in this way, Jarman’s rejection of conventional cinematic visual devices serves to emphasise the subjectivity of the experience and perception of dying. Blue is divided into two halves: the first is narrative-based where a character called Blue has misadventures with other colours; in the second, Jarman reflects on living with and dying from an AIDS-related illness. The filmmaker ruminates on his experiences of treatment and his daily routine: In the hospital it is as quiet as a tomb. The nurse fights to find a vein in my right arm. We give up after five attempts. Would you faint if someone stuck a needle into your arm? I’ve got used to it—but I still shut my eyes.

C. Scott Combs (2014, p. 5) notes that cinematic “death-as-stillness cannot be thought, or at least, it cannot be thought photographically,” but the details provided by Jarman allow the viewer to construct their own mental images to project on to the blue void of the screen. Blue is darkness made visible. In this instance, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1840, p. xliii) notions of colour are appropriate to highlight: Next to the light, a colour appears which we call yellow; another appears next to the darkness, which we name blue.

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As Goethe indicates, blue is close to darkness, and, certainly, Jarman’s voiceover articulates the impending death he faces. He incorporates this darkness, or shadow, which is “not necessarily just less, a reduction: here it is a contortion. The darkness is alive” (Cousins, 2017, p. 34). The most haunting aspects of the voiceover occur at the film’s conclusion. The names John, Daniel, Howard, Graham, Terry and Paul are repeated. They were past lovers that have died from AIDS. While certainly cementing that he too will perish as his lovers did, the filmmaker is paying tribute to these men who were important to his life and his development personally and professionally, acknowledging their existence and demise from a disease that was vilified and othered in heterosexual communities.

Death and the Dog The construction of audio-visual artefacts has been noted to have therapeutic value for the grief-stricken (Arnold, 2020). Bereavement takes many forms with filmmakers often channelling their experiences of loss in an effort to share and engage in open discourses on death and dying. Such creativity is a “transformative, though painful, opportunity for self-­ development and personal growth that are essential elements in the work of mourning, and the means by which a sense of self is recreated or created anew” (Brennan, 2015, p. 298). Heart of a Dog is such a text wherein the filmmaker, multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, ruminates on both personal experiences of loss but also a public catastrophe that resulted in thousands of deaths prompting existential grief and the haunting of a nation. In its brief 75-minute running time, Heart of a Dog addresses the loss of Anderson’s mother Mary Louise whom she cared for but was unable to love, it eludes the loss of partner Lou Reed, and attentions the loss of her dog Lolabelle for whom she developed a deep love. As Anderson (cited in Romney, 2016) has stated in discussing the film: “It’s a film about empathy. Lolabelle was a character that was almost pure empathy, so I tried to express that.” While a triptych (or arguably a quadriptych) of grief informs the film, Anderson (like Jarman) constructs fictional narratives, ruminates generally on the phenomenology of absence and queries the changed world she inhabits. These reflections are shared through a meditative voiceover that echoes Farrokhzad’s film. In essence, Anderson constructs an audio-visual essay that matches her art practices. As Timothy Corrigan (2011, pp. 4–5) explains, essay films are interstitial in nature:

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Straddling fiction and nonfiction, news reports and confessional autobiography, documentaries and experimental film, they are, first, practices that undo and redo film form, visual perspectives, public geographies, temporal organisations, and notions of truth and judgement within the complexity of experience. With a perplexing and enriching lack of formal rigor, essays and essay films do not usually offer the kinds of pleasure associated with traditional aesthetic forms like narrative or lyrical poetry; they instead lean toward intellectual reflections that often insist on more conceptual or pragmatic responses, well outside the borders of conventional pleasure principles.

As Corrigan indicates, the audio-visual essay takes many elements from other genres and mediums. Centrally, the filmmaker utilises the camera as a pen (Rascaroli, 2017, p. 4). Anderson ‘writes’ with images throughout her film, incorporating a mix of styles and various camera equipment that evoke a Do-It-Yourself aesthetic. The combination of approaches, including hand drawn animation, super-8mm home movies, GoPro and iPhone footage create a collage of images, memories and perspectives. The worn images of the grainy super-8mm starkly contrasts with the crisp, clear digital images of an iPhone. The tension of old and new media, to reiterate Mulvey (2006), allows Anderson to emphasise and focus on specific images. While the film incorporates home movies, lending a ‘personal texture’ (Kermode, 2016), the overall aesthetic of combined formats takes it beyond the amateur nature of the home movie as multiple aesthetics combine and overlap to produce complex audio-visual assemblages. Anderson has limited filmmaking experience, with her prior directing credit limited to the concert film Home of the Brave (1986). Instead, her approach to filmmaking comes from a multimedia artist’s perspective. Like other artists that have worked in the realm of cinema, such as David Lynch, their approach can often be differentiated from those who come from an exclusively filmmaking background. As Corrigan (2011) notes, the essay film operates beyond conventional pleasure principles. Indeed, Anderson’s work functions as a ‘tone poem’ (Burr, 2015) on the subject of mourning that is ‘refractive’ in its nature (Kermode, 2016). Additionally, the film draws attention to and questions the process of filmmaking. As Laura Rascaroli (2016, p. 303) notes: Images and sounds of different quality and status (at the image-track level: still and moving images, original, enhanced and re-enacted images, black screens, scratched screens, superimposed captions; at the soundtrack level:

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music: noises, recorded voices and the filmmaker’s voiceover) constitute the superimposed strata of essayistic signification.

In essence, Heart of a Dog has a “hybrid, non-linear effect, and, second, the temporal unorthodoxy that is evident in the essay film, and is redolent of Anderson’s oeuvre” (Williams, 2020, p. 98). Heart of a Dog is entirely self-reflexive, which Maasdorp (2011, p. 209) notes can “at once distance the audience critically and enhance the text’s potential to entertain. This critically engaged position is […] the ideal one for watching documentary film, since it allows the audience analytical freedom.” As already noted, Resnais, Farrokhzad and Jarman all register the audience and invite them into the film’s philosophical space, with Anderson enhancing this approach further. In its opening scene, we view sketches of cats and other animals as well as handwritten scribbles. The camera drifts towards the words “on all the things” signalling how love, death, memory, pain, trust and the eeriness of a post-9/11 world can co-exist, be recalled and experienced as a swirl of memories and philosophical thoughts. Arguably, Anderson is communicating to the audience, informing them from the offset that this is a ponderous text that will fail to deliver a linear narrative. Instead, the film presents fragments stitched together, a playful indictment of a single truth or documentary ‘truthfulness.’ Heart of a Dog moves from sketches and scribbles to an animated self-­ portrait of Anderson. The filmmaker declares that this image is her ‘dream body,’ an avatar that guides us through an abstract terrain of thoughts, reflections, brainwaves and philosophies. Anderson (cited in Walls, 2015) later reflected on the way the resulting film works to comment on “the structure of stories. But it’s also about trying to find some truth in them— and what does that mean, when you misremember them.” In doing so, she draws attention to grief as emotional disruption, which in severe cases of complicated grief can lead to clear long-term defects in both memory and imagination also creating identity confusion (Bellet et  al., 2020). Anderson details dreams she had about her recently deceased rat-terrier Lolabelle. She delights in the way “dreams are just the mind running rampant, entertaining itself with things that really only have meaning for you” (cited in Kramer, 2015). Through the dream sequence Anderson’s meta-­ framework is established, allowing for tangents, digressions and non-­ sequiturs within her audio-visual essay. This reflects a common practice within essay films where ideas are presented in a “casual, even playful way that eschews professional, scientific rigour, and is often infused with details

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of everyday life” (Papazian & Eades, 2016, p.  3). Similar to Jarman’s approach, the recalling of the dream is not directed at the viewer but rather voiced in a free-associative manner, acknowledging thoughts and imaginings. The tone is not authoritative but meditative, remitting multiple trains of thought. Drawing as she does on Buddhism, Anderson (cited in Romney, 2016) notes that it shares a rule with art, that is, “to be aware.” Anderson’s incorporation of archive footage does not serve to trigger or portray nostalgic remembrance. She does not appear to dwell on images of the past, preferring instead to use them to highlight the paradoxes of the present—in her case, the socio-cultural-political context of the post 9/11 era. As a New York resident, 9/11 constituted a waking dream for Anderson as life became clouded in ‘white ash,’ in a city marked by absence and an awakening to ‘undreamt’ threats from the sky above. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are used to emphasise how loss can indelibly damage ways in which we relate to each other and our surrounding environment. A key transformation noted by the film includes the increased use of surveillance that led to everyone being recorded all the time. The purpose of this inclusion by Anderson allows her to draw on the parallels between the artistic practice of documentary and the shadow of surveillance. She notes how all actions became data—data that will only be accessed and watched after the event (e.g. a crime), where stories would be pieced together in reverse. While there is an acceptance that a central aspect of the grieving process involves acknowledging it through organising memories, Anderson also questions the documents that are used as the building blocks for stories. As she notes: “I started thinking about what happens in a surveillance culture, in terms of framing and profiling and telling a story about who you supposedly are. Defining you. It happens all the time: You brand yourself, whether it’s for your Facebook page, or whatever” (cited in Walls, 2015, para. 12). The film also contains a reflection on the role of language in a post-9/11 world. In doing so, Anderson references Homeland Security’s slogan “see something, say something” which evokes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical examinations of linguistics. In the film Anderson comments that the slogan reminds her of his notion that “if you can’t talk about it … then it just doesn’t exist.” What inspires Anderson here is the philosopher’s idea that language [verbal, visual and sonic] creates the world, and therefore life. Anderson (cited in Felsenthal, 2015, para. 17) recalls how the idea and form of Heart of a Dog only began to crystallise when her brother

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asked her to transfer 8-millimetre footage. She remembers: “Suddenly, there’s the lake, there’s my mother pushing my brothers in the stroller. I called my brothers and said, ‘Do you remember when I almost drowned you?’ … That particular story was one of my childhood stories, but not one that I told anyone.” For Anderson (cited in D’Arcy, 2015, para. 27) the film is “a story about how stories work—how you forget your own story, how you repeat your own story, how somebody else’s story gets plastered onto you.” In the film’s final section, Anderson describes her dog’s last days. Anderson refuses to euthanise Lolabelle and instead brings her home to live out the last moments. Throughout the film, Anderson makes numerous references to the Tibetan Book of the Dead (or Bardo Thodol). She draws particular attention to the idea that crying is prohibited as it is believed to confuse the dead. Under guidance of her Buddhist teacher, Anderson is advised that for every time she thinks about Lolabelle she should give something away, to which she wryly retorts then she would be left with nothing. She makes note that death is often linked with feelings of guilt and regrets but later posits the purpose of death is the release of love. Anderson makes several large-scale paintings of Lolabelle as a memorial but the real testimony to her life is the film itself. As the credits roll, Lou Reed’s “Turning Time Around” plays, suggesting that many of the thoughts and feelings expressed throughout the film were the ultimate analogy to Anderson’s relationship with the late singer. Reflecting on Lou Reed’s death (in 2013), Anderson (cited in Kramer, 2015) again refers to how not crying “is about trying to understand what is going on not with your own emotions, but to pay attention to what’s going on with the drama of the person who is dying and dead … it’s to focus on their death, not your reaction to it.” In a farewell to her husband published in Rolling Stone magazine, Anderson (2013) shares an account of his passing: I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died. … His eyes were wide-open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life—so beautiful, painful and dazzling—does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

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In quoting David Foster Wallace’s: “Every love story is a ghost story,” Heart of a Dog reflects how Anderson’s “ghosts can materialize in unexpected fashion” (Dargis, 2015).

Documentary of the Nearly Dead Finally, Dick Johnson Is Dead depicts director Kirsten Johnson’s relationship with her father, the titular Dick, a dementia sufferer. In response to the inevitability of Dick’s death from his illness, the filmmaker crafts scenarios to portray Dick’s demise in various violent ways. Amid these sequences are conversations between father and daughter about death, their family history and the absurdity of life. Johnson conceived the idea from a dream where “there was a man in a casket and he sat up and said, ‘I’m Dick Johnson and I’m not dead yet’” (Handler, 2020, para. 10). While Anderson crafted Heart of a Dog as a eulogy of sorts to the deceased, here Johnson is responding to anticipated grief and a bereavement process by actively and creatively devising her father’s death scenes. Johnson sets up the film in its opening shot. Dick watches his grandchildren playing on a rope swing. He struggles to stand, then as he prepares to push the child on the rope swing Johnson (off screen) advises him to be careful as the floor is slippery. Dick acknowledges the comment, assesses the conditions of the floor but within a few seconds slips and falls on his back, legs in the air. The sequence is reminiscent of a Buster Keaton or W.C. Fields comedy, however in this moment the viewer is unsure if it is staged or a real incident. Visually, the opening shot drifts in and out of focus on Dick’s face—a common occurrence in documentary when trying to focus and capture candid spontaneous moments—but it doubles here to convey Dick’s blurred consciousness. As a close-up lingers on her father’s face, Johnson announces through voiceover that “[j]ust the idea I might lose this man is too much to bear. He’s my dad.” This declaration underlines the extremely personal nature of the film, yet, like many of the examples provided in this essay, Johnson approach seeks to destigmatise death and dying. Within Western discourse, death is described in ‘spatial terms’ as “a ‘final journey,’ ‘crossing to the other side,’ ‘going to a better place’: but the experiences of grief and mourning are typically represented in temporal terms: ‘time heals,’ ‘give it time’” (Maddrell & Sidaway, 2010, p. 1). Johnson addresses her father’s terminal condition and his ongoing decline by challenging the straightforwardness of these spatial conceptualisations.

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She states: “now it’s upon us: the beginning of his disappearance. And we’re not accepting it.” The filmmaker effectively rebuffs passivity and inaction by advancing her father’s death via the construction of death scenes that kick start emotions of loss and grief. Whilst the film adopts a blackly comedic tone it does not ignore the inevitable—Dick’s deterioration remains a consideration throughout the process of the father-­daughter collaboration in staging his deaths. In fact, it becomes integral to the film and is evident “through the loss of his independence, the weakening of his formidable faculties, and the bittersweet joys of their intensified bonds” (Brody, 2020, para. 1), but also as Johnson repeatedly stages losing her father. Johnson even stages a mock funeral in which friends and family eulogise him. In doing so, the film reflects other instances of ‘living funerals,’ an occurrence outlined in Mitch Albom’s (1997) novel Tuesdays with Morrie in which Sociology Professor Morrie Schwartz, dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease, decides to hold a funeral to be able to hear what others have to say about him. In the novel, it is great success, as a woman reads a poem about a ‘tender sequoia’ that moves Morrie to tears. In Japan ‘living funerals’ are known as ‘seizenso,’ providing “a way that elders could remove the burden from their children” (Marsden-Ille, 2020, para. 8). With reference to Bill Nichols (2017) account of the different modes of documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead draws on aspects of performative, observational and participatory documentary practices. It is performative as Dick enacts numerous death scenes, observational and participatory as Johnson “turn[s] the camera on herself and her authorship as she carried out this odd, inspired mission” (Bramesco, 2020, para. 2). These modes are supported by aspects of enactment. Typically documentary has used re-enactment when there is no footage of the ‘real thing’ (Jong, 2012). Both however reflect a creative attribute of documentary to dramatise. The resulting sequences in Dick Johnson Is Dead are violent and abrupt. Leading up to a ‘staged funeral,’ Dick examines a coffin in a church. Johnson and others help him climb in and lie down. Johnson laughs and asks, “Is it cosy in there?” Of course, she is asking her father to articulate his living experience of being in an open coffin, Dick responds with: “No one cares about comfort anymore.” In New Zealand coffin clubs have sprung up across its North and South Islands. Founded in 2010 by retired palliative care nurse Katie Williams (cited in Roy, 2016), she explains that the motivation for the club came from seeing “lots of people dying and their funerals were nothing to do with the vibrancy and life of those

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people. You would not know what they were really like. That they had lived and laughed and loved. I had a deep-seated feeling that people’s journeys deserved a more personal farewell.” In Dick Johnson Is Dead, Dick surrenders to the experience of being laid to rest, in the slumber sense of the word. As Dick drifts into sleep (see Chap. 1 for commentary on the presentation of the dead as sleeping) he is physically manipulated by his daughter to appear more lifeless and positioned by crossing his hands over his chest. While the scene has maudlin undertones most occupying the frame appear to be enjoying the fabrication. One exception is a friend of Dick’s who, standing by the church podium, expresses discomfort at seeing his buddy in a coffin. But he reminds himself that “this is a movie, and you see a lot of weird stuff in movies.” The phrase “this is a movie” echoes the infamous tagline for Wes Craven’s shocker The Last House on the Left (1972) which was advertised with the following assurance: “To keep yourself from fainting, remind yourself it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie.” As a documentarian Johnson consistently highlights the collaborative ‘filming’ process—cameras, boom microphones, headphones and other recording equipment are frequently viewed on screen. As Johnson (cited in Carey, 2021, para. 12) also argues: From my point of view, facing pain—when you can do it with people you love and with the capacity to attempt to build something new out of it, whether it’s a new relationship or whether it is transformed into some form of art—I think that that is the only hope we have

It is only during the death scenes that the production behind the action is concealed. The first death scene is a re-enactment, of sorts, of an accident that Johnson’s now-deceased mother experienced when she fell down the stairs in their home, leading to a broken hip. Dick briefly provides a reference to the accident, commenting that he is being careful when negotiating the stairs. The camera follows Dick’s hands as they grip the rail while he moves down a staircase. We then get a glimpse of Dick tripping over the steps before a cut to a high angle shot of his body on the floor, a pool of blood oozing out of his head, his right leg broken and twisted out of shape. Combs (2014, p. 3) notes that cinema has the “ability to stage, time, and dilate the process of dying” but we do not witness the violent fall only its bloody aftermath. Following this scene, Johnson creates a sensational afterlife sequence, where Dick is surrounded by deceased celebrities including Bruce Lee, Frida Kahlo and Buster Keaton.

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She reveals that she was brought up as a Seventh Day Adventist and notes that “[l]ike any religion it offers answers to our questions about death.” While Anderson followed Buddhist teachings in her response to death, Johnson reflects upon the strictness of Adventism beliefs, commenting there is: “No alcohol, no dancing, no movies.” However, Johnson notes that in an act of defiance, Dick took her and her brother to see Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974), which she felt ‘scandalised’ her. A comedy, the film is a parody of, homage to Universal Studios’ Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939). To a certain degree, Johnson has created her own Frankenstein’s monster, defying death through reanimating her father over and over again post-death. The most graphic death scene occurs towards the end of the film when, in a classic set up, Dick is stood underneath scaffolding when a construction worker absentmindedly and ‘accidently’ strikes Dick with a piece of equipment. Blood spurts out Dick’s wound in the most cartoonish of all of the film’s sequences. The piece of equipment is revealed to be a piece of cardboard and the audience see how the effect was created, continuing the destabilisation of the cinematic by the documentary. The film culminates with the mock funeral for her father. The juxtaposition of the alive Dick witnessing this event and walking through the church weeping with joy in response to his friends and family gathering for his funeral represents one of the film’s most powerful moments as it reinforces the inescapability of Dick’s condition. As the conclusion to Dick’s on-screen life and death(s), Johnson’s Frankenstein Monster is permitted to reawaken once more to walk amongst the living.

Conclusion Documentary depictions of death and dying on screen have seen several permutations, with the most recent and popular adaptations being crime documentary series such as Making of a Murderer (Netflix, 2015–2018) and The Staircase (Netflix, 2004–2018) that explore death through a tabloid and criminal prosecution lens. Such works possess an impersonal approach utilising televisual narrative conventions such as ‘cliff-hanger’ endings, designed and structured to draw the audience back week after week (Bulman, 2007, p. 46). The application of ‘fictionalising’ practices to non-fiction subject matter continues to raise questions regarding the ‘truthfulness’ of documentary. However, the examples discussed in this chapter seek to illustrate how filmic techniques have been used to process,

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reflect and instigate discourses on our experiences of death in a more personal fashion. Resnais, Farrokhzad and Jarman expanded cinema’s capacity to engage with mortality, with Anderson and Johnson taking these principles further in their expression of documentary. Both Anderson and Johnson have delved into their personal lives to pay tribute to those who either are deceased or are in the final stages of their lives. These are highly subjective films that present different responses to confronting death and challenge its taboo associations (Woodthorpe, 2010, p. 57). Judith Butler (2004, p. 20) wrote that loss and vulnerability “seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments.” Anderson and Johnson expose these vulnerabilities openly to their audience, but address them through their practice. By examining the aftermath of bereavement and 9/11, Anderson demonstrates the impact of absence on the living whereas Johnson utilises violent death scenes to cope with her father’s decline creating a pre-emptive stimulus-­ response to the inevitable loss that will occur. These films are not definitive texts in terms of global responses to death and dying but are useful artefacts and archives that demonstrate the creativity in memorialisation.

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Cook, T. (2001). Fashionable nonsense or professional rebirth: Postmodernism and the practice of archives. Archivaria, 51, 14–35. https://archivaria.ca/ index.php/archivaria/article/view/12792 Corrigan, T. (2011). The essay film: From Montaigne, after marker. Oxford University Press. Cousins, M. (2017). The story of looking. Canongate Books Ltd. https://canongate.co.uk/books/2369-­the-­story-­of-­looking/ Creech, B. (2015). The smartphone camera and the material politics of visibility. International Centre of Photography. https://www.icp.org/perspective/ the-­smartphone-­camera-­and-­the-­material-­politics-­of-­visibility Cuevas, E. (2013). Home movies as personal archives in autobiographical documentaries. Studies in Documentary Film, 7(1), 17–29. https://doi. org/10.1386/sdf.7.1.17_1 D’Arcy, D. (2015). The fantastical story of Laurie Anderson and Lolabelle. Observer. https://observer.com/2015/10/the-­fantastical-­story-­of-­laurie-­ anderson-­and-­lolabelle/ Dargis, M. (2015). Review: Heart of a Dog, Laurie Anderson’s meditation on loss. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/movies/review-­ heart-­of-­a-­dog-­laurie-­andersons-­meditation-­on-­loss.html Erard, M. (2019). What people actually say before they die: Insights into the little-­ studied realm of last words. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-­do-­people-­communicate-­before-­death/580303/ Felsenthal, J. (2015). Laurie Anderson takes on love and death in Heart of a Dog. Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/article/laurie-­anderson-­heart-­of-­a-­dog Gibson, M. (2001). Death scenes: Ethics of the face and cinematic deaths. Mortality, 6(3), 306–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576270120082952 Guthke, K. (1992). Last words: Variations on a theme in cultural history. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400820719.237 Handler, R. (2020). Documentarian Kirsten Johnson on fake-killing her own dad (over and over) in Dick Johnson Is Dead. Vulture. https://www.vulture. com/2020/01/dick-­j ohnson-­i s-­d ead-­d ocumentar y-­k irsten-­j ohnson-­ interview.html Highmore, B. (2010). Ordinary lives: Studies in the everyday. Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9780203842379 James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology, Vol. 1. Henry Holt and Co. https:// doi.org/10.1037/10538-­000 de Jong, W. (2012). Life does not tell stories: Structuring devices in documentary filmmaking. In W. D. Jong, E. Knudsen, & J. Rothwell (Eds.), Creative documentary: Theory and practice (pp. 97–117). Pearson Education Ltd. Jordan, R. (2003). Documentary truth between reality and perception: The notion of documentary truth. Off Screen, 7(1) https://offscreen.com/view/ documentary#ref-­4-­a

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CHAPTER 3

Mediated Suicide in 13 Reasons Why: An Argument for Caution in Television Portrayals of Suicide Elizabeth Paton and Tiffany Bodiam

Introduction Context powerfully influences our social relationships with death. Williams (2019) suggests that when death comes to aged people at the end of their lives and when their faculties have started to diminish, it is oft regarded as worthy and timely. Conversely, in today’s society, death seems to be more shocking and seemingly tragic when it occurs swiftly, without notice and in the early years of life. Advancements in research, healthcare and wellness have facilitated the prevention and prolonging of death’s arrival, and the

E. Paton (*) University of Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Australia Everymind, Newcastle, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] T. Bodiam Everymind, Newcastle, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. R. Schott (ed.), The Art of Dying, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35217-1_3

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increased comfort of bodies who are in the immediacy of dying; however, there is still an uncomfortable juncture between life and the inevitability of death. This discomfort is particularly pronounced when death is orchestrated by the self. For in the rawest sense, life is something given to us and death is something that happens to us; suicide challenges these dominant conceptualisations of life. Today, we make sense of death through diverse cultural expressions. Art and media in particular have increasingly emerged as cultural backdrops for public statement on social and cultural issues. We can see this trend of mediated death repeated across time. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, in and of itself, had a critical influence on social thinking about mortality, discrimination and sexuality. The 1993 film Philadelphia shone a spotlight on the death crisis of HIV and AIDS. The film made a statement on the epidemic, the disproportionate burden of death on young gay men and social prejudices. Twenty years later, Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and more recently the television series It’s a Sin (2021) have made similar recitations. Cultural statements are also seen in portrayals of the Holocaust. Across generations, these portrayals—The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Schindler’s List (1993), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008)— gave birth to robust social dialogues and debates, and served to educate current and future generations on the genocide at the time. One of the most controversial of policy debates about death in this century has been that of euthanasia (including assisted suicide or voluntary assisted dying), and this has been reflected artistically in the likes of films such as Million Dollar Baby (2004), Me Before You (2016) and Blackbird (2019) and television programmes such as Way to Go (2013) and The End (2021). If we look at more recent global issues of concern, excluding the COVID pandemic, suicide, particularly youth suicide, is chief among them. Pavlides (2005, p. 51) asks in particular of entertainment portrayals of suicide, as the leading global health concern for young people: how do entertainment media “as examples of popular culture, reflect a social viewpoint regarding suicide …? And does it matter what these movies say? … for good or bad, popular culture both reflects and affects our social worldview.” Pavlides (2005, p. 52) furthers that entertainment media “matter in the sense that they create a cultural backdrop for any discussion we, as a society, have regarding policy.” If we conceive of firstly, artistic expression as a form of death sense-making, secondly, we recognise entertainment media as generating evocative statements on social issues, and thirdly, that today, entertainment media transpose these statements into the hand

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and homes of millions around the world, then these statements matter. For they have the potential to influence the thinking, understanding and behaviours of people the world over.

Werther and Papageno: Two Characters in Research on Mediated Suicide1 Portrayals of suicide across a range of media have long been a controversial topic, with concerns that such depictions may lead to increases in suicidal behaviours, including ‘copycat’ suicide deaths, in those who view them. This media-induced imitation of suicidal behaviour is known as the “Werther effect,” taking its name from the titular character of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (Phillips, 1974). The novel, first published in 1774, follows the story of Werther who found himself caught in a love triangle and subsequently died by suicide, unable to resolve his emotional state and heartache. In response to the novel, anecdotal reports claim up to 2000 young people imitated the character’s death. Some people, for example, were found dead clothed as the character, using the same method of suicide or with a copy of the book nearby. Following these reports, the book was banned in countries like Italy and Denmark in an effort to prevent further copycat suicides and Goethe (1994, p. 432) himself acknowledged the potential influence of his work: But whereas I felt relieved and serene for having transformed reality into poetry, my friends were misled into thinking that poetry must be transformed into reality, that they must re-enact the novel, and possibly shoot themselves. And what began here among a few, afterwards took place in the public at large, and the little book that had been of such great profit to me was decried as hurtful to the extreme. 1  Additional considerations when looking at the effects of communicating about suicide include: firstly, general media effects research may not apply in the same way when discussing suicide. Those who are relatively mentally healthy and well are unlikely to be affected while those who are vulnerable to  suicide are more likely to  search out suicide-related content and be negatively impacted; secondly, the type of communication matters with distinctions between the impacts of public or mass communication as opposed to one-on-one or personal communication; thirdly, little research exists on the impact of communicating about mass suicide or suicide involved with acts such as murder, terrorism or protest because they are extremely rare events.

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While some have doubted the connection between the novel and any subsequent deaths, anecdotal stories of this influence dominated discussion of the impact of mediated suicide on actual suicidal behaviour until the 1960s and 1970s when the Werther effect began to be studied in more depth (Pirkis et al., 2018a, 2018b). More recently, the Werther effect has been contrasted with the more positively focused “Papageno effect” (Niederkrotenthaler et  al., 2010), which emphasises media-induced behaviour that imitates suicide prevention actions or messaging. Like the Werther effect, the Papageno effect is named for a character who finds himself in emotional turmoil. In Mozart’s opera, “The Magic Flute,” Papageno is heartbroken and planning his death, but unlike Werther is able to master this suicidal crisis when reminded by other characters that there are alternatives to dying. From this perspective, some forms of mediated suicide may have a positive influence, leading to a reduction or a halt in suicidal behaviour rather than an increase. Looked at together, the Werther and Papageno effects build on a powerful media effects-based premise, for people in a state of suicidal crisis, how suicide is portrayed may influence, either positively or negatively, that person’s decision to engage in suicidal or self-harming behaviour or not. From this perspective, portrayals of suicide in newspapers or books, on television or cinema screens, on stage or online can lead to imitative effects. In addition to this, mediated suicide may also affect how people understand suicide, seek or offer help, or behave towards those with a lived experience of suicide, whether through personal suicide behaviours, caring for others through suicide behaviours or bereavement by suicide (Pirkis et al., 2018a, 2018b).

Mediated Suicide Versus Suicide in the Population A number of studies have analysed how well news media stories reflect the realities of suicide in the general population, examining the type, frequency and prominence of stories as well as angle and language used in order to assess what and how an audience may think about suicide and particular suicide methods. When compared with causes of death data and other official statistics, analysis of Australian media found only 1–1.3% of all suicides were included in news stories, with overrepresentation of some methods, locations and age-groups (Blood et  al., 2007; Machlin et  al., 2013; Pirkis et  al., 2009). Research in Hong Kong and Europe found

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similar rates of reporting and inconsistencies (Au et  al., 2004; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2009). In terms of age-groups, youth suicides appear more frequently in the media despite significantly lower rates of suicide than in older or elderly demographics (Machlin et  al., 2013; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2009). In terms of location, suicides in public areas or spaces were more likely to be covered than those that occurred on private property, potentially due to greater visibility or civic disruption (Machlin et al., 2013). In terms of method, more ‘violent’ or ‘lethal’ suicide methods as well as rare or unusual methods were overreported, while the most common method was significantly underreported (Machlin et al., 2013; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2009; Pirkis et al., 2007). Overall, this inaccurate representation may give the public a distorted view of suicide and, more broadly, negatively impact meaningful response efforts. The disconnect between suicide behaviour in the community and portrayals of suicide is also present in our social and cultural statements through entertainment media. Pavlides (2005) in his analysis of suicide in film highlighted a cultural tendency to view some experiences, disability and illness in particular, as experiences that demand release rather than support. Such storylines tend to cascade an evolving narrative of sadness, loss, hopelessness and despair, which when viewed as social or cultural statements, it appears that as a society, we mistakenly often view “suicide as preferable to disability” (Pavlides, 2005, p. 46). To more fully contextualise portrayals of suicide, consideration should be given to portrayals of broader social experience, most particularly those that are known to contribute to suicidality. In what way is illness, difference or psychological trauma portrayed over time, and what do these portrayals tell us about our cultural myths and perspectives?

Media Influence on Vulnerable Audiences When considering public communication on suicide, it is important to be cognisant that this may influence whether or how much a person knows about suicide generally or potential methods or locations more specifically. This awareness or knowledge is referred to as “cognitive availability” (Zahl & Hawton, 2004), or a process of “acculturation” (T-Y Chen et  al., 2016). From this perspective, our cultural artefacts are not merely reflections of society or carriers of social statements but play a role in constructing them. In relation to media texts, the cognitive availability of a suicide method may be increased by public communication such as a news article

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or a television programme that includes a detailed description or information on how to access, construct, purchase or employ that method. One qualitative study looking at what informed choice of method by people who had made a near-fatal suicide attempt found the most common source of information was media including news stories, television, film and the internet (Biddle et  al., 2012). Seventeen of the 22 participants named films such as The Bridge and Shawshank Redemption and television programmes such as Casualty and CSI as examples that contained graphic depictions of a suicide. Viewing these had introduced participants to a suicide method they had not previously known or provided information on how that method could be implemented. The study also showed that this information had “longevity,” able to be recalled years later, with “several respondents drawing upon portrayals they had been exposed to earlier when not actively suicidal” (2012, p. 706). In addition, these media portrayals of suicide also gave participants a sense of the likely outcome of using a particular method, including “speed, certainty and cleanliness” (2012, p. 704). With the choice of method strongly influencing the outcome of an attempt, such impressions may lead to a choice of method that is more likely to result in death or prevent opportunities for interventions (Blood et al., 2007). In addition to awareness or knowledge of suicide, research has found a strong association between mediated suicide and actual suicidal behaviour in the population. A recent critical review (Pirkis et al., 2018b) found an association between informational or non-fictional reporting of suicide and suicidal behaviours that—in the case of reporting in newspapers, television and books—was considered strong enough to be deemed causal. Delving deeper into the specific aspects of reporting that may influence suicidal behaviour, a systematic review of the available evidence (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2020) found a particularly strong association between news reporting and actual suicidal behaviour where the stories involved the suicide death of a public figure or celebrity (increasing on average by 13% in the period after reporting). Where the method used by a public figure or celebrity was shared in a news story, on average there was a 30% increase in deaths using the same method in the weeks following (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2020). The inclusion of suicide methods in news and information media, in particular, can increase the risk of media-induced or imitative suicide behaviour (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2020; Pirkis et al., 2018a). This is particularly the case where stories include explicit descriptions or images

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of the method used, where the method is given prominence such as in the headline or where methods are compared or ranked in terms of lethality (Sinyor et al., 2018). Similarly, reporting on uncommon or new methods may lead to increases in deaths using that method (T-Y Chen et al., 2016; Y-Y Chen et  al., 2010; Tsai et  al., 2011; Yip et  al., 2012). Extensive, detailed and prolonged media coverage of a novel suicide method in Taiwan, for example, has seen it become one of the most commonly used there and in other East Asian countries, in what T-Y Chen and colleagues called a process of acculturation, increasing knowledge and use of the method (T-Y Chen et al., 2016).

Fictional Portrayals of Suicide and Their Influence on Vulnerable Audiences In comparison to the impact of news or informational media, the evidence on the association between fictional or entertainment media portrayals of suicide, and actual suicidal behaviour is equivocal (Pirkis et al., 2018b). These mixed findings are partly due to the dearth of contemporary studies in this area. Such absence is potentially owing to the long and somewhat problematic history of media effects research on entertainment media such as radio, film, television and video games (see, e.g., overviews in Traudt, 2005; Valkenburg et al., 2016). These studies were often methodologically poor, tended to be driven by moral panics (e.g. the role of rock-­ n-­roll music in the corruption of young people or mediated violence and its connection to school shootings), and focused on a passive general audience. As noted earlier, however, mediated suicide should be treated differently than other types of mediated death because of its potential to influence those who are already vulnerable to suicide. A recent critical review of entertainment media included 34 studies of fictional portrayals of suicide in television and film, the majority of which showed some evidence of a negative influence on suicidal behaviour (Pirkis et al., 2018b). The evidence reviewed included descriptive studies of individual or multiple cases of suicidal behaviour (including suicidal thoughts), predominantly based on interviews with participants on their exposure to mediated suicide. One case study provided an overview of the suicide death of a 32-year-old man who, like those imitating the death of Werther centuries before, had a DVD copy nearby of a film that gave an extended and detailed portrayal of the method used (Saint-Martin et al., 2009).

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The critical review also included ecological analytical studies that varied from small to large scale; the focus here was generally on comparing aggregated data on suicide behaviour (such as hospital admissions following a suicide attempt or suicide deaths recorded in death registries), across time periods, using a television or film broadcast as an anchoring date (Pirkis et al., 2018b). Just under half of these studies found no general increases in attempts or deaths following a specific broadcast, while some found no general increase but an increase in suicidal behaviour by populations associated with particular personal characteristics (such as gender or age), or by method. Others still found stronger associations. Studies were conducted, for instance, on a German television programme that repeatedly and graphically portrayed the suicide death of a teenaged male character (Schmidtke, 1994; Schmidtke & Hafner, 1988). The programme was re-­ broadcast a year later, giving researchers a second time period for analysis. A significant increase in deaths imitating the mediated suicide was found in the 70 days during and following each broadcast, particularly suicides by young men aged 15–19, almost doubling the mean number of suicides for other periods studied. Individual-level analytical studies were also reviewed by Pirkis et  al. (2018b), with most surveying large groups of non-suicidal and/or non-­ depressed people on their exposure to mediated suicide (or control conditions such as a film containing a non-suicide related death). Four of these studies confirmed earlier work around the influence of non-fictional or information-based depictions of suicide, showing little to no negative effects in ‘healthy’ or general populations (Salo et  al., 2017; Steede & Range, 1989; Till et al., 2010; Till et al., 2014). These studies generally found no significant increase in suicidality. Three studies found some evidence of a negative influence of television or film but relating to measurements such as attitude, psychomotor agitation or arousal rather than suicidal behaviour (Biblarz et al., 1991; Doron et al., 1998; Range et al., 1988). More concerning are the remaining two studies that found an increase in suicidality under certain conditions (Stack et  al., 2014; Till et al., 2015). In one of these, a survey of university students on their voluntary exposure to mediated suicide in movies and their past suicidal behaviour, an association was found between viewing higher numbers of films with suicidal content and increased risk of suicide attempts (Stack et  al., 2014). While the association can be seen as significant (a 47.6% increase in risk of attempted suicide with each additional film exposure), cause and effect could not be determined, that is, whether people who are

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suicidal are attracted to suicide-related movies or if mediated suicide increased suicidality. In contrast, a survey of non-suicidal Austrians exposed to films under three conditions (one with a suicide death, one with a non-­ suicide death and one overcoming suicidal crisis) found those participants with a higher baseline suicidality or who identified with the main character experienced higher levels of suicidality after exposure to the mediated suicide (Till et al., 2015). Missing from this body of research, however, were studies that included more contemporary films and television programmes that would reflect diverse viewing experiences and suicide-related content. Only two studies, for instance, examined content available through online distribution services such as Netflix, which moved into online streaming in the United States from 2007 and more active distribution internationally from 2012. In Australia, this includes the addition of online streaming services to supplement traditional broadcasters (such as ABC iView and SBS On Demand). Factors unique to these services may impact on both viewers and research on this content. Such factors may include the availability of content in bulk and autoplay of episodes facilitating ‘binge’ or ‘high dosage’ viewing, availability through mobile devices and ability to skip introductory material, which may include content warnings or help-seeking information. While research on online streaming services and mobile content has been conducted in other disciplines (see, e.g., Miller, 2011; Goggin & Hjorth, 2016; Vaterlaus et al., 2019; Nee & Barker, 2020), it is only relatively recently that suicide-focused research has included more contemporary media and content.

Netflix and 13 Reasons Why In October 2015, Netflix announced that they would be adapting Jay Asher’s 2007 young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why for television. The “Netflix Original” series, 13 Reasons Why, would be created by playwright Brian Yorkey and executive produced by Yorkey and singer and actress Selena Gomez. The novel and its television adaptation tell the story of Hannah Baker, a high schooler who has died by suicide. Her story is told, like The Sorrows of Young Werther, in an epistolary style, focused on a series of posthumously released cassette tapes on which Hannah discusses the people she believed played a role in her suicide. The first season of the show, aimed at a youth audience, was released on Netflix on March 31, 2017.

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In dramatising the story for television and updating the time period for a 2017 audience, Yorkey and the show’s writers made a number of changes from the novel. Amongst other impactful changes, Yorkey changed the suicidal behaviour originally included in the novel, adding a suicide attempt by a minor character, changing the method Hannah uses to end her life and graphically depicting this on screen in episode 13 of the first season (“Tape 7, side A”). Over approximately three to four minutes, viewers watched Hannah preparing for her death and considering the implement to be used, the act of suicide, her gradual death and her discovery by her parents. It is this extended and graphic scene in the final episode of the season, along with the accumulated distress of binge-watching multiple scenes of trauma including rape, that lead to the show’s most severe criticism. This focused on the potentially harmful impact on viewers, glorification of suicide and pushback from mental health and suicide prevention sector, parents, educators and schools (Paton & Howard, 2020), with articles from 2019 onwards predominantly focused on the emerging evidence of the impact of the show’s mediated suicide on suicidal behaviour in the community. One of the first studies to be published on the impact of 13 Reasons Why focused on how internet searches for suicide-related content changed, in terms of both volume and content, in the 19 days after the release of the first season (Ayers et al., 2017). Researchers found a higher total increase in suicide queries (19% on average, and up to 44% higher on specific days), aligning with the show’s aims to increase suicide awareness and discussion. However, while queries on specific terms relating to “suicide prevention” had increased (“suicide prevention,” by 23%; “suicide hotline number,” 21%), so too had searches on method or instructions for suicide (e.g. “how to commit suicide,” 26%). What is not clear from the study is whether any of these searches (especially those relating to a precise method search), resulted in suicide attempts or deaths. What is clear, however, is the elevation in suicidal ideation in the community, which can precede suicidal behaviour. Other studies also supported this finding of a dual increase in both helpful and harmful effects following the initial release of 13 Reasons Why (e.g. Thompson et al., 2019; Zimerman et al., 2018; da Rosa et  al., 2019) with similar results found after the second season’s release (Arendt et al., 2017). One study surveying young adults and parents from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand and Brazil found only positive or helpful effects for those who viewed the show, such as

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supporting conversations, seeking out further information on difficult topics, increasing help-offering and empathetic behaviours (Lauricella et  al., 2018). That this study was commissioned and funded by Netflix may account for the lack of survey questions that would result in discussion of suicidal behaviour. The most critical aspect of survey results was that Netflix had not provided enough support or resources to support those watching the programme. The release of these study results in March 2018 coincided with new warning labels and a video being added to season one of the series, as well as videos of cast members reading letters from viewers. In May 2018, season two of 13 Reasons Why premiered with a full suite of support and resources, including a website (https://13reasonswhy. info) with help-seeking appropriate to each of the Netflix international regions, discussion guides, cast videos and links to information and services around suicide, mental ill-health, school violence, sexual violence and other issues. Studies with significant negative effects, however, continued to emerge. These showed, particularly for those who were already vulnerable to mental ill-health or suicide, increases in hospital admissions due to self-harm or suicide attempts by young people (Cooper et  al., 2018; Plager et  al., 2019), worsening mental ill-health or suicidality (Till et al., 2019; Hong et  al., 2019), or higher rates of suicide death (Bridge et  al., 2019; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2019). Despite some methodological issues and varying degrees of strength, these studies generally demonstrated that the stimulus preceded response (i.e. effects occurred after the show was available), and a consistent pattern of statistically significant results (particularly in vulnerable young people). While the association in many of these studies could not be described as causal, it was reasonable to hypothesise that the association between the programme and suicidal behaviours may be partly explained by imitation or the Werther effect. Significant media attention was given to the results found in the study “Association between the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and suicide rates in the United States: An interrupted time series analysis” (Bridge et al., 2019), in which Bridge and colleagues found that the release of 13 Reasons Why was associated with a significant increase in monthly suicide rates among 10–17 year olds in the United States (particularly males). In response, Yorkey along with psychiatrist Rebecca Hendrick (who was an adviser on the show) wrote a guest column in Hollywood Reporter, refuting both the significance of the results and their links to the show itself: “It’s always hard to understand correlation with these types of studies,

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given that you don’t know who watched the show or heard about it in the news. … Experts also agree that many factors contribute to people taking their own lives” (Yorkey & Hedrick, 2019). The next day, a study by Niederkrotenthaler and colleagues was published reporting a 15% increase in suicides in 10–19 year olds in the United States in the three months following the show (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2019). On July 16, 2019, ahead of the release of season three of 13 Reasons Why, Netflix announced in a Twitter post that they were editing the graphic suicide scene from the show’s first season. Via the official @13reasonswhy Twitter account, a statement by Yorkey (2019) re-stated the show’s original intentions but also deferred to advice of medical experts: No one scene is more important than the life of the show, and its message that we must take better care of each other. We believe this edit will help the show do the most good for the most people while mitigating any risk for especially vulnerable young viewers.

While the original graphic scene is still available to view online via user-­ generated or pirated videos, the official version streamed worldwide on Netflix now cuts directly from Hannah contemplating suicide while looking in a mirror to her parent’s reaction to her death (refocused on the parents to crop Hannah’s body from the footage). All footage of the suicide method, the act of suicide and her gradual death were removed, with the method now only vaguely implied through the mother’s dialogue and sound effects in those moments of discovery.

Implications for Television Programmes that Focus on Suicide What the 13 Reasons Why producers eventually acknowledged was that, despite occasionally contradictory findings, methodological limitations and the complexity of suicide itself, the research (and considerable expert opinion) on media influence on suicidal behaviour provides an argument for care and caution. Between the show’s release in 2017 and the suicide scene edit in 2019, numerous child health and suicide experts provided editorials, commentary or letters to the editor (see, e.g., O’Brien et al., 2017; Campo & Bridge, 2018; Bates, 2019; Vanderweele et al., 2019). These pieces warned of harm but also called for further research into the affordances of evolving television formats and contexts such as online

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streaming as well as differences in content and audiences that result in either (or both) Werther or Papageno effects. The unprecedented move to edit problematic fictional content now provides researchers with opportunities to delve deeper into these elements of concern, examining for instance the positive or negative effects of implicit versus explicit depictions of suicide.2 In the case of 13 Reasons Why, this could also be an opportunity to test whether merely showing a suicide was enough to make a claim for promoting awareness or discussion in the community. These calls and recommendations were echoed in communication and media disciplines, with scholars considering the impact of suicide narratives and transmedia storytelling, the role of the artist in public health and the ethics of producers in creating suicide content (e.g. Winsall, 2017; Aranjuez, 2019). For Scalvini (2020, p. 1570), there is an ethical dilemma for television producers between potential harms caused by censorship of artists and their work and those posed to audiences viewing problematic content but overall “a producer can still encourage people to be open and start looking for help, while limiting the use of graphic details to portray behaviours that could be damaging to the audience.” In looking at the moral obligations of creators to entertain and inform, Scalvini (2020) concluded that television programmes such as 13 Reasons Why are only one element of influence in the complex picture of suicide and that parents, healthcare providers and educators cannot place all responsibility on such programmes to prevent suicide. For many of the experts, investigation of 13 Reasons Why has strengthened calls for collaboration across disciplines and industries, working together to produce fictional or factual content that allows for portrayals of issues like suicide that are both safe and sensitive. For Campo and Bridge (2018, p. 548), this greater level of collaboration between entertainment industry, young people, parents, educators, mental health professionals and others could better explore “the impact of popular media on suicide and violent behaviours, consider best media practices, and ‘first do no harm.’”

2  While the total number of viewers for 13 reasons Why is unknown as Netflix does not publically release viewer data, they have given an indication of “binge” or “high dosage” watching properties. In 2017, 13 Reasons Why was listed at no. 3 in the top 10 “Shows we devoured in 2017,” measured as watching for two hours or more per day (Netflix Media Center, 2017).

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Best practice communication around news media and suicide has been established for more than two decades, with internationally recognised guidelines available (see, e.g., WHO, 2017; Mindframe, 2020a). More recently, guidelines for screen content have emerged that articulate best practice advice and help to facilitate collaborative relationships between media and mental health and suicide prevention experts. In September 2019, for example, the World Health Organization released its guidelines Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Filmmakers and Other Working on Stage and Screen, aiming to “maximize the positive impact of their work and reduce the risk of potential harmful effects, in particular among those who are vulnerable or have mental health conditions” (WHO, 2019, p.  6). These international guidelines reference many of the recent studies on 13 Reasons Why but also focus on positive or productive steps screen content creators can make towards suicide prevention. The guidelines represent a joint, global approach to support sensitive and accurate fictional portrayals of suicide, and are informed by international experts and stage and screen guidelines already established in a number of countries, including the Mindframe programme in Australia. For more than two decades, Mindframe has provided national guidance, training and education on the safe reporting and portrayal of suicide and mental ill-health (Mindframe, 2020a). Based around a series of guidelines and accompanying resources, training and supports, the Mindframe programme has built collaborative relationships across sectors from media, universities, mental health and suicide prevention and others. Working in collaboration with these sectors, the programme aims to reduce stigma experienced by people with mental ill-health, minimise harm and imitative suicide behaviours and increase help-seeking. Originally released in 2007, and refreshed in 2020, guidelines for those across the entertainment industry, Mental illness and suicide: A Mindframe resource for stage and screen (Mindframe, 2020b), was developed with the support of peak media bodies in Australia, mental health and suicide prevention experts as well as the Australian Writers Guild. The guidelines themselves provide practical advice, key issues to consider and contextual information for those developing Australian film, television and theatre, informing safe, sensitive and authentic portrayals of mental illness and suicide. Alongside information on audience impact, common misconceptions and facts about suicide, the guidelines provide a series of questions for screen creators to consider, notably: “Why am I introducing suicide into the story?” Asking this question prompts creators

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to consider their intentions (is it an easy way to resolve a storyline? Is there an important prevention message?) and to begin to address the ethical dilemmas raised by Scalvini (2020). Important to the success of these guidelines, however, has been their implementation across Australia, and, as promoted in many of the commentary pieces around 13 Reasons Why, collaborative work with screenwriters, producers, directors, actors and other people involved in the production and dissemination of these works. This has included relationships with broadcasters and online streaming services such as Netflix, to ensure Australian audiences aren’t exposed to problematic material or can make informed choices about what they watch. Mindframe worked collaboratively with Netflix (via the Netflix AU office) following the launch of 13 Reasons Why and in the lead up to the release of the second and third seasons to support safe communication and conversations around the series. Netflix’s edits of the problematic scene showed a clearer alignment with the Mindframe guidelines. However, even with the significant amendment of the series, support was still advised for audiences (and those communicating with them) around discussions of mental ill-health and suicide, particularly as viewers often re-watch previous seasons in the lead up to the release of new episodes. Netflix also worked with Mindframe by providing pre-release access to new seasons, which resulted in briefings for media and sector to help inform accurate messaging as well as key support services for those who may be impacted by the show’s themes, including supports for young people, parents, carers and LGBTIQ+ people on issues such as grief and loss, violence, domestic and sexual abuse and alcohol and other drugs. Programmes like Mindframe are available to support content creators who are considering including difficult themes like suicide into their productions.

Conclusion Scalco and others (2016, p.  907) suggested that “one of the ways of understanding the phenomenon of suicide … is through its representation in cinematographic art. Cinema optimises the possibility of seeing, hearing and experiencing something experienced in reality, in a protected manner.” Current research however seems to challenge the ‘protected,’ and indeed protective, manner of some portrayals of suicide and death within news and entertainment media. When artistic creators develop storylines

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and works that are evocative and demonstrative of suicide, we can ask, what is their intent? Durkin (2003) also questions whether unmeasured portrayals of suicide invite us to the possibility of an engagement with it? Are we engaged, or do these portrayals of suicide and other forms of death, serve to increase our awareness, or rather fulfil morbid fascination and curiosity? Death has been a universal component of human experience across time, and for just as long, society has wrangled with making sense of it. Indeed, death rituals and portrayals throughout the centuries serve to tell us a great deal about the working intricacies of earlier societies and social consciousness. If we looked at our rituals and artistic portrayals of death today, particularly unexpected deaths such as suicide, what is it that we are saying? And what is the impact of our current dialogue? Perhaps a more pertinent question should be what do we want our portrayals and statements to be? And what do we want them to say? To consider this question fully, we need to consider what we currently know, or suspect. Firstly, we know that portrayals of suicide impact mood, ideation and behaviour; secondly, we know that media, in all its forms, creates a backdrop for social and cultural statements; thirdly, we know that suicide is a global health concern, and the leading global concern relating to young people. It therefore stands to reason that anything we say about suicide matters greatly. Moreover, as media increasingly transports public statement and artistic expressions into the hands and homes of millions around the world each day, what and how we say it also matters. As a society, we all need to consider what we want to be saying about suicide, and we need to be cognisant that there is a delicate balance between shedding a light on critical social issues and not portraying them in a way where vulnerable members of the audience may be “mislead into thinking that poetry must be transformed into reality” (Goethe, 1994, p. 432).

References Aranjuez, A. (2019). Confronting images: Suicide, rape culture and responsibility in 13 Reasons Why. Screen Education, 88, 41–47. https://link.gale.com/apps/ doc/A521460452/AONE?u=anon~2352a7a6&sid=googleScholar& xid=3b435782 Arendt, F., Scherr, S., Till, B., Prinzellner, Y., Hines, K., & Niederkrotenthaler, T. (2017). Suicide on TV: Minimising the risk to vulnerable viewers. British Journal of Medicine, 358, 3876. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j3876

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Systematic review and meta-analysis. British Medical Journal, 368(m575), m575. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m575 Niederkrotenthaler, T., Stack, S., Till, B., Sinyor, M., Pirkis, J., Garcia, D., Rockett, I., & Tran, U. (2019). Association of increased youth suicides in the United States with the release of 13 Reasons Why. JAMA Psychiatry, 76(9), 933–940. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0922 Niederkrotenthaler, T., Till, B., Herberth, A., Voracek, M., Kapusta, N.  D., Etzersdorfer, E., Strauss, S., & Sonneck, G. (2009). The gap between suicide characteristics in the print media and in the population. European Journal of Public Health, 19(4), 361–364. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckp034 Niederkrotenthaler, T., Voracek, M., Herberth, A., Till, B., Strauss, M., Etzersdorfer, E., Eisenwort, B., & Sonneck, G. (2010). Role of media reports in completed and prevented suicide: Werther v. Papageno effects. British Journal of Psychiatry, 197(3), 234–243. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp. bp.109.074633 O’Brien, K. H. M., Knight, J. R., & Harris, S. K. (2017). A call for social responsibility and suicide risk screening, prevention, and early intervention following the release of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. JAMA International Medicine, 177(10), 1418–1419. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.3388 Paton, E., & Howard, J. (2020). Australian print media coverage of 13 Reasons Why: A case study on coverage of suicide content and best practice communication. Unpublished report, Everymind. Pavlides, M. (2005). Whose choice is it anyway? Disability and suicide in four contemporary films. Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 16(1), 46–52. https:// doi.org/10.1177/104420730501600107 Phillips, D.  P. (1974). The influence of suggestion on suicide: Substantive and theoretical implications of the Werther Effect. American Sociological Review, 39(3), 340–354. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094294 Pirkis, J., Blood, R. W., Sutherland, G., & Currier, D. (2018a). Suicide and the entertainment media: A critical review. Everymind. Pirkis, J., Blood, W., Sutherland, G., & Currier, D. (2018b). Suicide and the news and information media: A critical review. Everymind. Pirkis, J., Burgess, P., Blood, R. W., & Francis, C. (2007). The newsworthiness of suicide. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour, 37(3), 278–283. https://doi. org/10.1521/suli.2007.37.3.278 Pirkis, J., Dare, A., Blood, R.  W., Rankin, B., Williamson, M., Burgess, P., & Jolley, D. (2009). Changes in media reporting of suicide in Australia between 2000/01 and 2006/07. Crisis: Journal of Crisis Intervention & Suicide, 30(1), 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1027/0227-­5910.30.1.25 Plager, P., Zarin-Pass, M., & Pitt, M. B. (2019). References to Netflix 13 Reasons Why at clinical presentation among 31 paediatric patients. Journal of Children

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and Media, 13(3), 317–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/1748279 8.2019.1612763 Range, L., Goggin, W., & Steede, K. (1988). Perception of behavioural contagion of adolescent suicide. Suicide and Life-threatening Behaviour, 18(4), 334–341. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1943-­278x.1988.tb00171.x Saint-Martin, P., Prat, S., Bouyssy, M., & O’Byrne, P. (2009). Plastic bag asphyxia: A case report. Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 16, 40–43. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jflm.2008.05.022 Salo, D., Kairam, N., Sherrow, L., Flesseler, F., Patel, D., & Wall, A. (2017). 13 Reasons Why: Pediatric psychiatric presentations to an emergency department in relation to release date. Annals of Emergency Medicine: An International Journal, 70(4), 90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2017.07.446 Scalco, L. M., dos Santos, J. F., da Scalco, M. G., Bezerra, A. J. C., de Faleiros, V. P., & Gomes, L. (2016). Suicide and suicide attempts by the elderly in film: Related factors as shown in feature films. Revista Brasileira de Geriatria e Gerontologia, 19(6), 906–916. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20016648.v1 Scalvini, M. (2020). 13 Reasons Why: Can a TV show about suicide be ‘dangerous’? What are the moral obligations of a producer? Media, Culture & Society, 42(7–8), 1564–1574. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720932502 Schmidtke, A. (1994). Suicidal behaviour on railways in the FRG. Social Science & Medicine, 38(3), 419–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-­ 9536(94)90441-­3 Schmidtke, A., & Hafner, H. (1988). The Werther effect after television films: New evidence for an old hypothesis. Psychological Medicine, 18(3), 665–676. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0033291700008345 Sinyor, M., Schaffer, A., Nishikawa, Y., Redelmeier, D. A., Niederkrotenthaler, T., Sareen, J., Levitt, A. J., Kiss, A., & Pirkis, J. (2018). The association between suicide deaths and putatively harmful and protective factors in media reports. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 190(30), e900–e907. https://doi. org/10.1503/cmaj.170698 Stack, S., Kral, M., & Borowski, T. (2014). Exposure to suicide movies and suicide attempts: A research note. Sociological Focus, 47(1), 61–70. https://www.jstor. org/stable/24579360 Steede, K., & Range, L. (1989). Does television induce suicidal contagion with adolescents? Journal of Community Psychology, 17(2), 166–172. https://doi. org/10.1002/1520-­6629(198904)17:23 .0.CO;2-­1 Thompson, L. K., Michael, K. D., Runkle, J., & Sugg, M. M. (2019). Crisis Text Line use following the release of Netflix series 13 Reasons Why Season 1: Time-­ series analysis of help-seeking behavior in youth. Preventive Medicine Reports, 14, e100825. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmedr.2019.100825

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Till, B., Niederkrotenthaler, T., Herberth, A., Vitouch, P., & Sonneck, G. (2010). Suicide in films: The impact of suicide portrayals on nonsuicidal viewers’ well-­ being and the effectiveness of censorship. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 40(4), 319–327. https://doi.org/10.1521/suli.2010.40.4.319 Till, B., Strauss, M., Sonneck, G., & Niederkrotenthaler, T. (2015). Determining the effects of films with suicidal content: A laboratory experiment. British Journal of Psychiatry, 207(1), 72–78. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp. bp.114.152827 Till, B., Tran, U. S., Voracek, M., Sonneck, G., & Niederkrotenthaler, T. (2014). Associations between film preferences and risk factors for suicide: An online survey. PLoS One, 9(7), e102293. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0102293 Till, B., Vesely, C., Mairhofer, D., Braun, M., & Niederkrotenthaler, T. (2019). Reports of adolescent psychiatric outpatients on the impact of the TV series 13 Reasons Why: A qualitative study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 64(3), 414–415. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.11.021 Traudt, P. (2005). Media, audiences, effects: An introduction to the study of media content and audience analysis. Pearson. Tsai, C.-W., Gunnell, D., Chou, Y.  H., Kuo, C.  J., Lee, M.  B., & Chen, Y.-Y. (2011). Why do people choose charcoal burning as a method of suicide? An interview based study of survivors in Taiwan. Journal of Affective Disorders, 131, 402–407. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2010.12.013 Valkenburg, P. M., Peter, J., & Walther, J. B. (2016). Media effects: Theory and research. Annual Review of Psychology, 67(1), 315–338. https://doi. org/10.1146/annurev-­psych-­122414-­033608 Vanderweele, T. J., Mathur, M. B., & Chen, Y. (2019). Media portrayals and public health implications for suicide and other behaviors. JAMA Psychiatry, 76(9), 891–892. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0842 Vaterlaus, J. M., Andersen, S. L., Frantz, K., & Kruger, J. S. (2019). College student television binge watching: Conceptualization, gratifications, and perceived consequences. The Social Science Journal, 56(4), 470–479. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.soscij.2018.10.004 Williams, M. E. (2019). How social context shapes our views on death. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/the-­art-­and-­science-­ aging-­well/201903/how-­social-­context-­shapes-­our-­views-­death Winsall, M. (2017). On 13 Reasons Why and social responsibility. FilmInk. https:// www.filmink.com.au/13-­reasons-­social-­responsibility/ World Health Organization. (2017). Preventing suicide. A resource for media professionals: 2017 Update. WHO. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/ 258814

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World Health Organization. (2019). Preventing Suicide: A resource for filmmakers and others working on stage and screen. WHO. https://www.who. int/publications/i/item/preventing-­suicide-­a-­resource-­for-­filmmakers-­and-­ others-­working-­on-­stage-­and-­screen Yip, P.  S. F., Caine, E., Yousuf, S., Chang, S.-S., Wu, K.  C.-C., & Chen, Y.-Y. (2012). Means restriction for suicide prevention. The Lancet, 379(9834), 2393–2399. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(12)60521-­2 Yorkey, B. (2019). @13reasonswhy tweet with statement from Brian Yorkey. https://twitter.com/13ReasonsWhy/status/1150987786243018752 Yorkey, B., & Hedrick, R. (2019, May 28). 13 Reasons Why creator refutes studies linking Netflix hit to suicide increase (guest column). The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/13-reasons-why-creatorrefutes-studies-linking-netflix-hit-suicide-increase-guest-column-1213858/ Zahl, D., & Hawton, K. (2004). Media influences on suicidal behaviour: An interview study of young people. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 32(2), 189–198. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352465804001195 Zimerman, A., Caye, A., Zimerman, A., Salum, G. A., Passos, I. C., & Kieling, C. (2018). Revisiting the Werther effect in the 21st century: Bullying and suicidality among adolescents who watched 13 Reasons Why. Journal of American Academic Child Adolescence Psychiatry, 57(8), 610–613. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jaac.2018.02.019

CHAPTER 4

Absent Presence: Exploiting the Temporal Flexibility of Graphic Memoir Kirstine Moffat and David Simes

In Disaster Drawn, Hillary Chute (2016, p.  27) writes that the comic form is capable of “materializing history,” of bearing witness to trauma in a distinctive way: “the work of marks on the page creates it as space and substance, gives it a corporeality, a physical shape—like a suit, perhaps, for an absent body, or to make evident the kind of space-time many bodies move in and move through.” Appropriating Chute’s phrase, we argue that comics have a unique capacity to materialise death, to provide the ‘suit’ for a literally ‘absent body’ whose very absence is also a dominating and palpable presence. Ruth McManus (2012, p. 212) identifies the mid-1990s as a transition moment in terms of depictions of death, with the growth of ‘real’ accounts of grief and “a shift towards self-reflexive narratives made by the dying people themselves, and their immediately bereaved” (p. 214). This chapter focuses on five graphic memoirs that are rich in this kind of self-­ reflexivity, written by the bereaved as they struggle to come to terms with loss. These memoirs have a dual focus on both the grief of the author and

K. Moffat (*) • D. Simes University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. R. Schott (ed.), The Art of Dying, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35217-1_4

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the life of the loved one who has died and thus oscillate between two impulses identified by Linda K. Karell (2019). Looking back on the loss of a loved one, such memoirs are themselves “an enactment of death” (p. 191). Yet, focusing as they do not just on the moment of death but also the life of the loved one, they also embody a “desire for a kind of resurrection … [which is] the impetus for the memoir itself” (p.  186). Sidone Smith and Julia Watson (2010, p. 138) point to a similar tension inherent in such memoirs, arguing that such narratives act “ambivalently as memorialization of mourning and its melancholic refusal.” Memoirs written by a bereaved family member or friend shift between different emotional affects. The act of writing can bring about an intensification of grief as the author is forced to confront and even relive the moment of loss and its ongoing trauma. As Roland Barthes (2010, p. 42) eloquently meditates in his reflection on his mother’s death, such memoirs are essentially about absence and, more particularly, the “pain of absence,” which Barthes describes as “lacerating.” In revisiting the life of the loved one, there is also, however, the possibility of reconnection and almost an erasure of death. Writing of the death of her mother, Mary Gordon (2007, p. 237) captures this sentiment perfectly: “But if I speak of her, if I write about her, it is possible that I can prevent her disappearance. She will not evaporate, like a scent that is absorbed in air, into a nullity.” This connects to the concept of the ‘post-self,’ a term coined by Edwin Shneidman (1973) in his work on suicide to reflect the human preoccupation with how we will be perceived and remembered after death. Subsequent scholars such as Raymond Schmitt and Wilbert Leonard (1986), Gary Alan Fine (2001), Jack Kamerman (2003), Michael Kearl (2010) and Gareth Schott (2019) have built on this concept by focusing on the construction and fluctuations of the posthumous reputations of public figures in the realms of sport, politics and the creative arts. This chapter focuses on questions of memorialisation in the more private realm of mourning a family member. It draws on Anne Kaloski Naylor’s (2010, p. 251) contention that the post-self has come to include both the “pre-­ death construction of self by an individual, and the assembling and re-­ assembling of that self by the bereaved family and friends.” Importantly, this type of memorialisation is fundamentally a “secular expression of grieving which overlaps with the practice of remembrance” (p.  251). Joanna Wojtkowiak and Eric Venbrux’s (2009, p. 148) work on forms of remembrance in the Netherlands is particularly apposite, revealing that memorial places in the home seek to “preserve the deceased’s postself”

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through “material representations of identity,” such as photographs and letters. The graphic memoirs at the centre of this discussion use the multi-­ modal possibilities of the form to both confront death and loss and challenge its fixity and finality. In keeping with the turn towards death identified by McManus, these narratives use words, images, inserted letters and photographs, and black and empty space to confront death, what the title character of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (2003, p. 129) describes as the “undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns.” Hamlet ends his life by positioning death as an ending, a finite barrier separating speech and silence, selfhood and annihilation: “The rest is silence” (p. 284). Yet, as he dies, Hamlet also urges his friend Horatio to “tell my story,” a task Horatio embraces, declaring that he has “cause to speak” and that in doing so he will draw on Hamlet’s “mouth” and “voice” (pp. 286–287). The authors considered here—Anders Nilsen, Pascal Girard, Tom Hart and Kristen Radtke—follow Horatio’s path, articulating their grief and loss while simultaneously making their deceased loved one vividly present for the reader by ‘telling their story.’ For Nilsen, it is the loss of his beloved fiancé that turns grief into art, while for Girard and Hart, it is the tragedy of a life cut short in childhood that compels both loss and memorialisation. Radtke, mourning the death of a beloved uncle and conscious of her own precarious health, circles out from the particular and personal to existential questions of how to navigate and survive in an evanescent world. Throughout, we emphasise the way in which, more than any other medium,1 the graphic narrative collapses and expands time. Hillary Chute (2008, p.  452) contends that the medium can be defined as “a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially” and create “nonsynchronous” narratives. As Nick Sousanis (2015, p. 66) argues, the combination of images of varying size, shape and placement with speech, thought and narrative captions creates a spatial quality that “can hold the unflat ways in which thought unfolds.” While not all comics use words and images simultaneously, when words and pictures coinhabit one frame, there is an implicit, “powerful message of multiple, juxtaposed perspectives held in one view” 1  Whilst often referred to as a genre, graphic narratives are also a distinctive medium (Chute, 2017). This chapter uses the terms ‘graphic narrative’ and ‘comic’ interchangeably, in line with the conventions set by Hillary Chute (2008).

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(Stoddard Holmes, 2014, p.  152). Comics erase possible distinctions between the spoken, the thought and the seen, as well as the fantasised, remembered, misremembered and imagined. The past, present and future are all accessible and exist on the same plane and the form of the comic provides a space “to reconstitute memory” (Sousanis, 2015, p. 66) and to “hold the communicable in fruitful tension with the incommunicable” (Taussig, 2011, p. 100). There is a seamless fit between this medium and the memoir as a form of both grieving and memorialising, with a rise in the graphic memoir since the mid-1980s (Alaniz, 2021). Joseph Witek (2011, p. 228) contends that graphic memoirs of the twenty-first century have capitalised on the “intrinsic affinity between the comics form and the phenomenological situation of the narrativizing self” which spatialises “both physical and psychic experience, to reflect personal loss.” The graphic memoirs considered here convey the immediacy of the act of dying, its effect on memory and its disruption of the future. Both the medium and the content are laden with complexity, as the body, as well as time and space, is constantly in flux, and the deceased are simultaneously absent and present.

Blank Spaces: Anders Nilsen Anders Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow (2012) and The End (2007) revolve around the death of the author’s fiancé, Cheryl Weaver, from cancer. Both are deeply visceral responses to Cheryl’s death and the grief that followed. Since its first publication in 2007, The End was republished in 2013 (the edition used here) and an expanded edition was published in 2022. This speaks to the ongoing nature of Nilsen’s grief and the way in which the graphic memoir acts as a form of post-self that continually gives life to Cheryl on the page. Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow is comprised of artefacts of the couple’s time together, including letters, postcards, comic strips and drawings done during Cheryl’s final days in hospital. Nilsen does not think of the book “as comics … It’s just storytelling with pictures. And in the case of that book and the story I wanted to tell, the multiple media turned out to be what was needed to tell it right … in the most direct way” (Baker and Nilsen, 2011, para. 53). As this is a memoir, it seemed obvious to Nilsen to use “imagery of actual artifacts from the story, because it is one step closer to reality than a drawing of those artifacts would be, or than a literary description would be”

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(Baker and Nilsen, 2011, para. 39). Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow marks the ephemerality of life, using the tangible to document unimaginable loss. These traces of Cheryl’s life both bookend and punctuate the narrative. This ephemera is all that is left of Cheryl, proof that she was here with Nilsen, and the inclusion of photographs of the couple’s time together and her written postcards and letters creates that paradox of the painful absence, but memorialised presence, that Barthes and Gordon identify. The slightly fuzzy photographs and handwritten letters and postcards have something of a scrapbook quality and create a slightly voyeuristic intimacy. The reader feels like an intruder on moments and words that are intensely private, that perhaps should not be shared. Nilsen addresses this in his ‘Afterword,’ acknowledging that the narrative is “very personal” and “incredibly particular” to him, but also writing of the universality of “love and loss” (p. 93). The book is both “for Cheryl” (dedication) and by Cheryl, a doubleness which speaks to her absent presence. The interior title page asserts Nilsen as the author and dedicates the narrative to Cheryl, but she is given an authorial presence on the front cover through both a photograph of the couple and the credit “(With Cheryl Weaver).” There is a particular poignancy in the use of parentheses. Cheryl is co-author in that her words, her image and her story provide the fabric from which the story is woven. But it is Nilsen who does this weaving after her death. She is in a space apart, or beyond, because of her death, which is signified by the parentheses. She is differentiated, bracketed off from life, but is also vividly present in this memorialisation of the couple’s life together. In “The Hospital,” an episode in the latter third of the comic, Nilsen begins to document Cheryl’s physical decline. His handwritten account of Cheryl’s treatments, operations and emotions are interspersed with close­up sketches of Cheryl’s body. These are much more detailed than his usual style, with harrowing effect. Connected to tubes and confined to a bed, Cheryl is devoid of the emotion and ‘life’ seen in the previous parts of the comic, and is subject to close analysis, more of a specimen than a person (pp. 68–72). The final image of Cheryl before her death is much more of a ‘cartoon,’ a bird’s-eye view of her in bed (p. 74). There is something unsettling about this image (see Fig. 4.1) which presents Cheryl so objectively, her naked body laid out almost as if on a post-mortem table. Each tube is labelled to indicate the function, from the “electrodes to measure heart rate” to the bag collecting fluid “leaking from drainage site on abdomen.” The ravages of cancer on the body are delineated, with words and an arrow pointing to “no hair,” “voice lost” and the stapled incision on her abdomen.

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Fig. 4.1  Hospitalised fiancé Cheryl Weaver by Anders Nilsen (2012, p.  74). (Copyright Anders Nilsen. From Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly)

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The image highlights the indignities of illness, the reduction of the body to procedures, monitors and constant medical surveillance. This dehumanising forms a stark contrast with much of the rest of the memoir in which Cheryl is vividly present through the carefully preserved traces of her life. This raises questions about the purpose of featuring this moment of Cheryl’s life. In some ways it is a betrayal of her privacy and dignity, but it is also testimony to the way Nilsen desperately clings to every vestige of life in his beloved fiancé. She is suffering, but still physically present in this moment. The image also highlights the many losses both the terminally ill and their loved ones confront before the ultimate finality of death. Cheryl not only has to process her diagnosis but also contend with intense pain and multiple medical procedures. Nielsen has had to witness his fiancé’s suffering and has slowly realised that they have lost their planned and shared future. In this respect the image is full of uncompromising truth; Cheryl and Nilsen must endure this moment, and the image forces the reader to confront it and acknowledge its terror and indignity. The anatomised sketch of Cheryl on the hospital bed is immediately followed by a fully black page that signifies the moment of her passing. Such a page has a long history, with Laurence Sterne including a black page in Tristram Shandy (1759) to visualise Hamlet’s famous lament for human mortality, “Alas, poor Yorick” (Vol. 1, pp. 72–73). More recently Jonathan Safran Foer reprised such a page in his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005, p. 284). The black is the only possible representation of the grief that engulfs the narrator Oskar after the death of his father on 9/11. Like his predecessors, Nilsen’s use of the black page is a visualisation of his grief, the unbearable sorrow and emptiness he feels. It also speaks of the end of Cheryl’s consciousness, presence and feeling, underscoring the unknowability of death, and the void it creates, separating the living from the dead. The memoir then moves to a more ‘traditional’ version of the medium, detailing Nilsen spreading Cheryl’s ashes. In this section, he speaks directly to her, telling her she “wouldn’t have liked this very much … everyone fussing over you” (p. 82). Here Nilsen subverts the convention relating to the gutters of the comic by filling in the space between panels with narration. Chute (2016, p. 35) writes that the gutter is “both a space of stillness—a stoppage in the action, a gap—and a space of movement: it is where, in a sense, the reader makes the passage of time in comics happen,” and it is where meaning is made. By filling these blank spaces with words, Nilsen affirms his statement that the comic was “really meant just for

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Cheryl herself,” a “memorial and a document” of her life, death and memory (Baker and Nilsen, 2011, para. 45). It is a memorial to her passing and an articulation of grief: “I miss you, babe” (p. 86). Yet the ongoing dialogue with Cheryl is also the “kind of resurrection” that Karell (2019, p. 186) identifies as a distinguishing feature of memoir. If Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow is a “memorial and a document,” then Nilsen sees The End as ‘art’ (Baker and Nilsen, 2011, para. 59). The End is, for Nilsen, “making images and telling a story to try and understand and communicate a sense of an intense, complicated human experience” (Baker and Nilsen, 2011, para. 43). In this work, Nilsen is back to a more characteristic style, reminiscent of what Gary Groth, in an interview with  Nilsen (2007, p.  80), calls his “three modes: his strict narratives, characterised by an elliptical style with digressions, parallelisms, discreet dialogues between two characters, and an unfolding ambiguity; his talky dialogues between two characters, usually drawn in a minimalist style; and his experimental work.” For Nilsen, the bare bones’ style used in The End evokes “blankness … creating vessels for the reader to invest in” (cited in Sobel, 2015). Nilsen often presents his work as if it were a sketchbook, full of mistakes erased or marked out, but evident to the reader. This shows a glimpse into the mind of the artist, but also highlights that both art and grief are inherently subject to processes. The End begins with a handwritten prologue, detailing Nilsen’s experience of watching Cheryl deteriorate in front of him before she eventually dies. He states that he would “give [her his] body if [he] could, but the doctors don’t know how to do that yet” (p. 3). The accounts of grief that fill the pages of The End employ the modality of what Chute terms the “handwrittenness” of comics, which “demands tactility, a physical intimacy with the reader in the acts of cognition and visual scrutiny” (Chute, 2011, p. 112). The form of this graphic memoir thus draws attention to the inscriptional technology of the medium, foregrounding the act of making a mark on paper. Nilsen’s insistence on unpolished work, appearing in many ways to be ‘found,’ also captures the intimate and secluded nature of suffering alone. Here the art of writing is depicted as an active means of processing grief, well before the notion of compiling the fragments as a collection eventuated. The repetitive, lonely and cyclical nature of grief is further perpetuated in the Sisyphus-like sketches halfway through the memoir, with a male figure dragging grief across a landscape, finding comfort in it as the sun rises (p. 38). Nilsen is metaphorically chained to

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his grief, but finds solace in its presence, as it ensures he is not forgetting Cheryl’s memory. The most experimental element of The End is the persistent haunting of grief, manifested as both intricate mazes, and indistinguishable figures. Throughout, Nilsen draws complex patterns in thick black or blue ink (see Fig.  4.2), with the paths creating Rorschach-like images, or completely displaced bodies. In stark juxtaposition to this, the figures that Nilsen uses to process his grief are devoid of characteristics or intricacies, appearing as ghosts. The male figure asks questions of the female figure that haunts his memories and occupies his present. The most important of these

Fig. 4.2  “So is this all there is?” by Anders Nilsen (2013, p. 5). (Copyright © Anders Nilsen. The End. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantagraphics.com))

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questions is “If I fall in love will you haunt me?” to which the female figure replies “I will always haunt you. No matter what” (p.  65). Nilsen appears to be working towards a resolution, but refuses to relinquish Cheryl’s absent presence, begging her to “Just keep talking. Keep pretending you’re you” (p. 69). Unlike Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, The End’s primary concern is not keeping Cheryl’s memory alive, but, rather, understanding that loss will always be within you, but that grief, much like life, is steeped in ephemerality.

Loss of Innocence: Pascal Girard and Tom Hart Cheryl Weaver dies well before her time. She is in  her prime, recently engaged and contemplating a life with Nilsen. There is a sense of anger and waste in both Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and The End. This is intensified in Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning (2015) and Pascale Girard’s Nicolas (originally published 2008, reprinted 2016). In these memoirs the amplified grief and loss emerges from the death of a young child, Hart’s daughter and Girard’s brother. Laura King (2016, p. 390) writes that children are typically seen as embodiments of “potential” and “future hope.” This perception of children as vulnerable innocents requiring adult protection (Sleight & Robinson, 2016) adds an additional tier to the grieving process, particularly for Hart whose devastation at his daughter’s death is compounded by feelings of parental inadequacy and guilt over failing to protect his daughter. Maaheen Ahmed (2021, p. 7) argues that while comics with child protagonists typically “avoid close confrontation with the key themes of adult literature, such as love and death,” such narratives occasionally move beyond a nostalgic depiction of childhood to explore the vulnerability and trauma that can mark young lives. Rosalie Lightning and Nicolas are two such texts which use the apparent “simplicity” (Ahmed, 2021, p. 9) of the form to both process grief and share the story of a loved one in a way that makes them vividly present for the reader. This emphasis on a post-self does not come through the inclusion of ephemera, except for a final image of Hart with his daughter at the end of Rosalie Lightning. Hart and Girard, both acclaimed cartoonists, let their drawings and words evoke the absent presence of these lost children. Rosalie Lightning is a memoir that both reflects on the agonising aftermath of tragic loss and engages in what Gordon (2007) describes as an act of remembering that seeks to erase death. This is symbolised by an initial

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page which features a pinhole image of acorns against a backdrop of black. The black speaks to both the absolute nature of death, its shock, horror and irreversibility, and the agony of Hart’s grief. Yet the acorn seems to resist the encroaching dark, both a memory of a precious moment and a reassurance that the act of telling the story operates as a kind of resurrection of Rosalie. Chapter 1 begins with a similar pinhole image, this time of a tree (p. 13). The image grows on the next page (p. 14), the dark partially beaten back, until the narrative begins with “her favorite image” (p. 15) a forest of oak trees. Here Hart’s simplistic, cartoonish style, the dark branches set against a white background, reinforces the magic realism of this moment. The oaks in Rosalie’s image “grow … to full height” in “a single night” (p. 15). Rosalie herself never gets an opportunity to grow into adolescence and adulthood, but like the forest in the image her short life is so vivid and memorable that it is as if she has crammed a lifetime into a few short years. This does not, of course, diminish the grief and tragedy of her death. Once the page is turned, and memories of Rosalie’s love of stories, magic and acorns are captured, the reader comes to the most poignant sequence of panels. First, Hart draws Rosalie’s hand reaching for an acorn (p. 17). In the space of a panel she is gone, the next image being of an adult hand reaching for an acorn. The final panel is a close-up of the faces of Hart and his wife. They both look at the acorn in his hand, pain etched on their faces, the black of the background reflecting the shadows under their eyes and the stark lines of grief around their lives. As with Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow the next page is completely black, the stillness and emptiness the only possible depiction of the rawness of their loss, the emotional abyss into which they descend. Hart then attempts to put his grief into words, both he and his wife using images of destruction and annihilation to voice their pain. “It felt like a bomb going off,” he writes. “‘My heart is a blast site,’ Leena says” (p. 19). Hart recounts his largely unsuccessful attempts to find meaning in “art and movies” (p. 23). Horror films at least give him a sense of watching a visual representation of interior darkness. “There I am,” Hart declares as he watches a character descend into a hole in The Vault of Horror (p. 23). The immediate aftermath of Rosalie’s death is the couple’s lowest point. At this moment the “best memories are your biggest torments,” amplifying Rosalie’s absence for Hart (p. 22). The name the couple gave their daughter, Rosalie Lightning, becomes painful; what had represented ‘light’ and hope reduced to the brief flash of lightning against the night

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sky and then silence (p. 36). This is one of those moments where the temporal flexibility of the graphic memoir is most apparent. The very memories that torment Hart capture Rosalie so powerfully that for the reader time is rewound and Rosalie—singing “Itsy Bitsy Spido” (Rosalie’s version of spider, p. 22), telling jokes, painting and dressing up in a pair of glasses—is present and alive. The memoir charts the long process of grieving and the couple’s tentative healing. Gradually memory becomes a refuge and a strength. The act of writing the memoir is not only a record of the “capacious hole” (p. 257) of grief, but an affirmation that Rosalie lived and that she made a joyful, indelible impact on their lives. The final pages are a catalogue of the many things that Rosalie was and did: “Rosalie who vomited and pooped and ate noodles;” “Rosalie who loved watercolours and bubble baths and turtles in the duck pond;” “Who drew on walls and books” (p. 257). Each of these fragments of memory is succeeded by a “Yes,” and as the last pages are turned, each features a single image with this affirmation of Rosalie’s presence and essence repeated. A child’s squiggle becomes the shoot of a tree, which grows to be a full grown, leafy tree (pp. 258–263). Rosalie is gone, replaced by a symbol of her existence, but, through the temporal shifts of the medium, on the page at least she is also forever present. The baffling loss of a small child and the long shadow cast by that child is also the focus of Pascal Girard’s Nicolas. Like Rosalie Lightning, both the title and the memoir are an act of memorialisation. Girard’s comic tells of his younger brother Nicolas who died from a genetic disorder called lactic acidosis when Girard was nine years old. Split into sections of “Before,” “After” and an afterword, Nicolas recounts both Girard’s struggle to process grief at such a young age, and the way in which it haunts his adult life. Nicolas was originally conceived over one weekend, drawn “directly in ink, without a script or pencils” (Girard, 2016, p. 5), resulting in a raw, almost confessional series of drawings, spanning decades. Girard uses simplistic line drawings to depict himself as a child, and this style does not evolve as the Girard in the comic ages. There is no discernible difference between the nine-year-old Girard, and the thirty-something, as both are trapped in a continuous cycle of grief. This is complemented by Girard’s deliberate lack of panels in the comic. This disruption to the formal properties of the medium underscores that Girard’s sense of loss cannot be compartmentalised; he never reaches a place of closure and acceptance in which grief can be consigned to the past. He is almost frozen in time,

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where the past remains as intense as the present. Ahmed (2021, p.  8) writes that within comics, the “child becomes a conduit for the nostalgic gaze towards an irretrievable past.” This irretrievable past, the time where Nicolas was alive, bookends the original story by Girard (the afterword was written for the 2016 updated edition), a yearning that the young Girard would have failed to comprehend. Most of the comic is set after Nicolas’ passing, with Girard unable to comprehend, let alone process, the grief. Nicolas continues to exist through his post-self, memorialised in photographs, and through memory and anecdotes. The post-self also manifests itself through illness, as the cause of Nicolas’ death preoccupies Girard. He is asked by a schoolfriend, “how come your brother’s dead?” (p. 17) and has no answer. When Girard later discovers from a doctor that Nicolas “died of lactic acidosis” (p. 27), this knowledge haunts him throughout his life. Girard undergoes tests to ensure that he is not a carrier of the illness (p. 62), and he is fearful that if he has a child, he or she will die like Nicolas, or “be depressed” or even “reject” Girard for giving him/her the disease (p. 66). The afterword has a distinctly different style of drawing, a more abstract, wavy quality evocative of the animation style “Squigglevision” (Goldman, 1999). This section of the book marks the period of adulthood for Girard, who draws in the style of his other semi-autobiographical works, Reunion (2011) and Petty Theft (2014), positioning him as Girard ‘the cartoonist,’ who is living with and processing his grief. Although he has created Nicolas, his brother and the grief lingers, with Nicolas almost deified in his eyes. Girard keeps a picture of Nicolas in his wallet, but not of his youngest brother Joël, because “he’s still alive” (p. 84). In the memoir, Girard also recounts a cyclical process of writing Nicolas’ name on various parts of his body so he can “always look at it in case of emergency” (p. 92) and feel comforted. By referring to Nicolas in his daily life, as well as memorialising him in comic form, Girard allows for both personal and public post-self, with Nicolas’ death not only affecting his life, but representing the universal heft of personal loss.

Existential Ruins: Kristen Radtke Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This (2017) widens the discussion about death to meditate on existential questions about mortality, evanescence and the traces that linger after loss. As with the graphic memoirs previously discussed, at the centre of the narrative is the painful loss of a

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family member, in this instance Radtke’s beloved uncle Dan. The recurring grief Radtke feels is compounded by the tormenting thought that she may have inherited the same fatal family heart condition. The particularised loss of her uncle thus triggers a deep consciousness of her own mortality, which in turn circles out to a fascination with documenting ruins. Jodi Cressman’s (2021, p. 23) analysis of the graphic memoir positions Radtke as a “disaster tourist” struggling to move from a voyeur of the suffering of others to an ethically responsible documenter of death. Our approach reads Radtke’s memoir through a different lens, viewing her fascination with abandoned buildings as a desperate attempt to find meaning and hope in a world indelibly marked by decay and environmental destruction. The memoir makes an explicit connection between ruins and the human body: “Places are filled and made empty, when the function of habitation wears out, and contaminated and shelled like bodies left to waste” (p. 260). The mood of the memoir is reminiscent of T.  S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Wasteland” which gives voice to the desolation and statis of a world fractured by World War I. Towards the end of a poem (which interweaves references from Western literature, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads) the narrator declares: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (1963, p. 79). This phrase perfectly describes Radtke’s quest. In a broken world of ruins, both at a personal level and at a global level, she desperately grasps at ‘fragments’ to stave off death, depression and disintegration. This may be a doomed enterprise, but throughout tentative hope battles with a dread of erasure. This oscillation between momentary peace and engulfing emptiness is brilliantly evoked by the grey scale colour palette. The first page, and each subsequent chapter title page, features a predominantly black page with a small pinhole image in the centre, reminiscent of the start of Rosalie Lightning. On the first page of Imagine Wanting Only This, the pinhole reveals the face of a child with her hands held in front of her, palms facing outwards (see Fig. 4.3). Shafts of light illuminate her face, but there is an uneasy sense of the dark pressing in and potentially engulfing her. The memoir is rich in images of small pinpricks of light seeking to beat back the darkness, from the fireflies Dan helps Radtke capture and place in a mason jar (p. 6), to the candles lit in remembrance of her grandmother (p.  8), to the home altar she and her boyfriend Andrew construct of tealights and tequila (p. 33). If Nilsen and Hart use the black page to represent Cheryl and Rosalie’s respective deaths, this is a memoir where the

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Fig. 4.3  Pinhole image by Kristen Radtke (2017, p. 1). (Credit Line: “illustrations” from IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS by Kristen Radtke, copyright © 2017 by Kristen Radtke. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved)

black is omnipresent and always encroaching. This is not something Radtke seems to fear, but rather embrace, the one totally black page being a representation of the “black leader” (p. 215) at the start of Chris Marker’s film Sans Solei, which “begins on the Icelandic island of Heimaey” (p. 214) and documents the destruction wrought by a volcano. This is Radtke’s “favorite part” (p. 216) of the film and she rewinds to rewatch. Confronting

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annihilation seems to bring comfort, perhaps because she is encountering another artform that is similarly death-inflected. Paradoxically, one of the pages on which there is no black is also the bleakest. This is the final page, which features a waterscape in tints of grey and white. There is white in the sky and on the ocean’s foam and, visually, this is one of the brightest and potentially more optimistic pages in the memoir. Yet, this page is about mass obliteration, an apocalyptic vision of the sea rising to engulf New York. The concluding panels have built to this point, but also include text boxes which affirm human meaning in the face of impermanence. Human traces on the homes we inhabit offer a kind of solace—“I painted this room. I bought this table” (p.  272)—as do the relationships we build with others in the hope that love will last “always and forever” (p. 275). This speaks to the ingrained death-denying human mindset, a refusal to actively accept our finite existence. But the finale moves away from this distancing from mortality to a harsher message of “rot” and obliteration: “someday there will be nothing left you have touched” (p. 275). The final page, which features the empty sea repeats this refrain, but also alters the order to escalate the sense of annihilation: “You will have touched nothing on the earth” (p. 278). If the first statement is a lament for the destruction of the people and places that have given our lives shape, the final vision is of an utter emptiness that speaks to the futility of memorialisation. If we touch nothing, if we leave no trace, it is as if we have never existed. In Radtke’s bleak apocalyptic vision there is not even anyone left to remember, with the possibility of the post-self obliterated with the rising water. The end point, of a literal and existential abyss, comes after a long journey contemplating the fragility of both people and places. Like Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Radtke tells her story through a bricolage of comic panels and ephemera, including photographs, newspaper articles, diary entries, medical reports, transcripts of recordings and web pages. Many of these relate to her uncle and perform the same act of post-self memorialisation as Nilsen’s lament for Cheryl, resisting the idea of death as obliteration to perpetually remember and mourn. Uncle Dan is Radtke’s “favorite person in real life” (p. 3) and in the opening pages of the memoir he is celebrated through tender drawings of him cradling the young Radtke in his arms (p. 5), heroic tributes to his skill as a firefighter (p. 4), and reproductions of newspapers documenting his success as a college wrestler (p. 3). As Radtke grows and Dan marries and has children, their ongoing closeness is reinforced by the many comic panels featuring their

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conversations, and through the occasional insertion of one of Dan’s letters (p. 116) or a photo (p. 48). One of the most innovate sequences occurs after Dan’s death from dilated cardiomyopathy. Radtke listens to a recording of an interview with Dan for a school project. Here the traces left by Dan are sounds rather than images or words on the page, and thus more of a challenge to bring alive to a reader. A close-up of the tape deck encircled with five speech bubbles puts the focus on Dan’s words (p.  70). Radtke’s younger self conducting the interview appears in a small bottom panel, but for the adult, grieving Radtke, the focus is on the voice emerging from the tape deck. None of the panels depicts Dan, highlighting his physical absence. But he remains present through his words. The reader may not be able to hear his voice, given the print medium, but the graphic form has a unique ability to give him a distinctive space on the page as words inside a speech bubble. Unlike the speech bubbles in the rest of the narrative, these bubbles have jagged edges, which work to both represent the sharp, intense pain of Radtke’s grieving and heighten the reader’s consciousness that these are words that are being remembered, treasured precisely because they are unrepeatable. Dan’s death becomes the trigger for Radtke’s heightened sense of her own mortality. In Chap. 4, she recounts her extensive research into the “incurable heart defect” (p.  115) that kills Dan. The illness is a family condition, leading to the early death of her grandmother and another uncle’s dependency on a pacemaker. This is another multi-modal sequence with drawn panels juxtaposed with text from the books and websites that Radtke trawls for information. Some are long passages filled with medical jargon, some are close ups that draw attention to key words (“skeletal muscle,” 115) and some use shifts in the greyscale to highlight passages (“sudden cardiac death … died suddenly,” 117). Images of hearts dominate this section of the memoir, along with protein diagrams (p.  118), sketches of the “lamin A/C gene” (pp. 120–121) and the readout of an electrocardiogram (p. 119). The cumulative effect underscores Radtke’s obsession with the ventricular tachycardia that took her uncle’s life and that she fears may take her own. The one doctor who translates the medical jargon into basic prose only heightens her terror: “The heart beats itself to mush” (p. 120). Radtke contrasts her own fixated grieving with that of Dan’s widow, Sonia, and his two children who mourn him but also seem able to move on with their lives. They live in the same house, sit on the same couch and continue to use Dan’s message on their voicemail. For

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them, “he just died and they kept living around it” (p. 245). Radtke cannot make this accommodation with death, sharing that she “couldn’t understand why the dead couldn’t be made the undead” (p. 117). It is this puzzlement and unceasing struggle with mortality that propels Radtke’s restless travels. Beyond the private and the personal, Imagine Wanting Only This contemplates death through Radtke’s fixation with ruins. In an interview she shared that everything she was “writing was about some sort of aftermath or some sort of coming towards an end. The way human bodies can become ruined the same way that places can” (cited in Dueben, 2017). She seeks out a succession of what Katy O’Reilly (2017) terms “‘left behind’ environs—an abandoned mining town near where her uncle’s widow lives in Colorado; the formerly bustling and now near-desolate steel-mill town of Gary, Indiana; a deserted military base on the Philippine Island of Corregidor; … the ancient, abandoned cities of Angkor and the Roman Empire;” and “the remnants of America in Vietnam” (p.  147). These reinforce for Radtke that “there are so many ways to reach the same end” (p. 203). Her experience at Gary, which she recounts in Chap. 1, sets the tone for her later travels. In a ruined cathedral in this abandoned town, she discovers some disintegrating photographs. She takes them with her to create an installation memorialising the town. Then she learns that the photos are already a memorial, left in the cathedral as a tribute to a young man of 23 who was struck by a train. Reports of the death of Seth Thomas in 2006 pay homage to his capacity to see “beauty in abandoned buildings” (p. 58) and mention that his friends scattered his ashes in the cathedral which was one of his favourite places to photograph. Radtke’s attempt at salvage and restoration thus implodes. It is desecration, not rescue, and she lugs the rotting bag of photos with her from place to place until she loses them somewhere in Europe, yet another act of abandonment that burdens her. Imagine Wanting Only This is likewise haunted by reimaginings of natural catastrophes, not only the apocalyptic envisioning of a submerged New York and the decimation of Heimaey by a volcano, but also a deadly 1871 wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. As with Radtke’s reflections on Dan’s death, her documentation of these ruins and sites of devastation juxtaposes grief with memorialisation. This is particularly true of the events in Peshtigo. In the historical record this wildfire is overshadowed by a devastating fire in Chicago and has received “limited attention” (p. 192). Fuelled by the family legend of a saint-like ancestor who danced

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round a church in which members of the community were sheltering from the fire in a successful bid to keep the fire at bay, Radtke’s anatomisation of the fire makes visible the tragic history of the town. Through memory and research, the obliterated town is given a post-self. The resurrection of the town’s history, however, only serves to further Radtke’s hyperconsciousness of the ominous cycle of death that surrounds her. Researching the history of the town (extracts from which she includes as panels), she reads a theory that suggests that during World War II, American and British military studied Peshtigo “to learn how to recreate firestorm conditioning for bombing campaigns against cities in Germany and Japan” (p. 193). This leads to a terrifying sequence where she partly researches and partly imagines tests carried out in Utah in 1942. A double page spread is filled with sketches of the 6400 sheep affected by “toxic agents” who “sat down, stopped eating and haemorrhaged internally over the course of two days” (p.  195). Pages of diagrams and the furniture shipped to Utah to test for the effectiveness of chemicals such as “cyclopentane” (p. 200) disturb with their clinical planning of mass destruction. One of the most chilling pages is the seemingly innocuous 16 panels detailing different types of furniture, from an armchair to a crib, a table to a “3 × 15 and 2 × 5” shaped rug (p. 201). In Radtke’s imagining of the test bombings, the function of this furniture is purely to provide the canvas on which the “AN-Ms” can be tested to see “how fast [they] would burn” (p. 202). There is no relief from death in Radtke’s memoir, whether it be caused by a natural catastrophe, human violence or the collapse of a heart into ‘mush,’ it is omnipresent and inexorable in its march. More than any other text considered here, Radtke’s macro level preoccupation with death works to evoke a sense of temporal flexibility. On a personal level, she mourns her uncle and fears the disintegration of her own heart. Her story and his story overlap. Her family history loops and repeats itself. In her documentation of ruins there is a similar collapsing of time periods into one simultaneous, cyclical global history of decay and death. In a terrifying dream sequence the ruins she encounters at Gary merge with her uncle’s dead body. Wielding a scalpel, Radtke performs an autopsy (see Fig. 4.4) on Dan’s heart, but when she cracks his chest the abandoned cathedral in Gary is revealed, which in turn morphs into a disintegrating heart (pp. 124–126). This is redolent of the kind of ‘ruin porn’ Radtke mentions and Cressman (2021, p. 28) analyses. Yet it is more than morbid fascination. Her uncle’s heart and the abandoned cathedral, which is revealed to be the final resting place of Seth who loved to photograph

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Fig. 4.4  ‘Radtke performs an autopsy’ by Kirsten Radtke (2017, p. 124). (Credit Line: “illustrations” from IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS by Kristen Radtke, copyright © 2017 by Kristen Radtke. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved)

it, become a statement about the ubiquity of death. “I saw death everywhere” (p.  146), Radtke reflects. A similar collapsing of building and body, time and place, occurs when Radtke is living in Iowa where she explores derelict mining towns. She describes “pull[ing] up the hem of my clothes and claw[ing] at my skin, searching for signs that I was becoming [a ruin]” (p. 111).

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Conclusion Radtke, like Nilsen, Hart and Girard, is what Arthur Frank (1995) terms a “wounded storyteller.” In sharing their narratives of personal grief and loss these authors all articulate the unimaginable pain of losing an uncle, a fiancé, a brother, a child. Their accounts are in some ways universal, entirely relatable to anyone who has lost a loved one or pondered questions about morality, flux and destruction. Yet they are also deeply particularised and personal, the graphic memoir medium acting as both an outworking of grief but also an act of remembrance, a kind of resurrection on the page of Cheryl, Rosalie, Nicolas and Dan. This tension between loss and remembrance, absence and presence, is a feature of this kind of memoir. But the temporal flexibility of the comic medium offers a unique form of “witness” and “testimony” (Chute, 2016, p. 2). Comics are capable of mediating subjectivity and thought processes in ways other media cannot and do not. The graphic memoirs discussed here encourage the reader to attend to multiple forms of expression that are presented non-­ synchronously, prompting a disjunctive reading practice that remarkably leads the reader to see the “progressive counterpoint of presence and absence” (Chute, 2008, p. 452).

References Ahmed, M. (2021). Reading children in comics: A sociohistorical mapping. Children’s Geographies, 20(3), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/1473328 5.2021.1919996 Alaniz, J. (2021). Death and mourning in graphic narrative. In W.  M. Wang, D. K. Jennigan, & N. Murphy (Eds.), The Routledge companion to death and literature (pp.  117–122). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781003107040 Baker, M., & Nilsen, A. (2011). An interview with Anders Nilsen. Nashville Review. https://as.vanderbilt.edu/nashvillereview/archives/1902 Barthes, R., trans Howard, R. (2010). Mourning diary: October 26, 1977— September 15, 1979 (1st American ed.). Hill and Wang. Chute, H. (2008). Comics as literature? Reading graphic narrative. PLMA, 123(2), 452–465. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25501865 Chute, H. (2011). Comics form and narrating lives. Profession, 1, 107–117. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41714112 Chute, H. (2016). Disaster drawn: Visual witness, comics, and documentary form. Belknap Press.

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Chute, H. (2017). Why comics? From underground to everywhere. Harper Perennial. Cressman, J. (2021). The embodied witness of graphic pathology. In L. De Tora & J. Cressman (Eds.), Graphic embodiments: Perspectives on health and embodiment in graphic narratives (pp. 23–30). Leuven University Press. Dueben, A. (2017). First-Time creator explores deserted cities in imagine wanting only this. CBR.com. https://www.cbr.com/imagine-­wanting-­only-­this­kristen-­radtke-­interview/ Eliot, T. S. (1963). Collected poems 1909–1962. Faber and Faber. Fine, G. A. (2001). Difficult reputations: Collective memories of the evil, inept and controversial. University of Chicago Press. Foer, J. S. (2005). Extremely loud & incredibly close. Houghton Mifflin. Frank, A. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. University of Chicago Press. Girard, P. (2011). Reunion (H. Dascher, Trans.). Drawn & Quarterly. Girard, P. (2014). Petty theft (H. Dascher, Trans.). Drawn & Quarterly. Girard, P. (2016). Nicolas (H. Dascher, Trans.). Drawn & Quarterly. Goldman, M. (1999). Clips; Less is more. Millimeter. Gordon, M. (2007). Circling my mother. Pantheon. Groth, G., & Nilsen, A. (2007). MOME, 7. Fantagraphics. Hart, T. (2015). Rosalie Lightning. St Martin’s Press. Kamerman, J. (2003). The postself in social context. In C.  D. Bryant (Ed.), Handbook of death and dying, Vol. 1 (pp. 302–306). Sage. Karell, L. K. (2019). The death of the author’s mother: Postmodern uncertainties in contemporary memoir. In L. Steffen & N. Hinerman (Eds.), Death, dying, culture: An interdisciplinary interrogation (pp. 185–193). https://brill.com/ view/title/38594 Kearl, M. C. (2010). The proliferation of postselves in American civic and popular cultures. Mortality, 15(1), 47–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/135762 70903537591 King, L. (2016). Future citizens: Cultural and political conceptions of children in Britain, 1930s–1950s. Twentieth Century British History, 27(3), 389–411. https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hww025 McManus, R. (2012). Death in a global age. Macmillan. Naylor, A. K. (2010). Michael Jackson’s post-self. Celebrity Studies, 1(2), 252–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2010.482326 Nilsen, A. (2012). Don’t go where I can’t follow. Drawn & Quarterly. Nilsen, A. (2013). The end. Fantagraphics. O’Reilly, K. (2017). On Imagine wanting only this: An interview with Kristen Radtke. Michigan Quarterly Review 4. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/ mqr/2017/04/on-­i magine-­w anting-­o nly-­t his-­a n-­i nter view-­w ith-­ kristen-­radtke/ Radtke, K. (2017). Imagine wanting only this. Pantheon.

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Schmitt, R. L., & Leonard, W. M. (1986). Immortalising the self through sport. American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1088–1111. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/2780122 Schott, G. (2019). “Look up here, I’m in heaven”: How visual and performance artist David Jones called attention to his physical death. Celebrity Studies, 10(1), 140–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2018.1559126 Shakespeare, W. (2003). Hamlet (B. A. Mowat & P. Werstine, Eds.). Folger. Shneidman, E. S. (1973). Deaths of man. Quadrangle. Sleight, S., & Robinson, S. (Eds.). (2016). Children, childhood and youth in the British world. Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10. 1007/978-­1-­137-­48941-­8 Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2010). Reading autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narratives. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/ bio.2003.0043 Sobel, M. (2015). An interview with Anders Nilsen. The Comics Journal. https:// www.tcj.com/an-­interview-­with-­anders-­nilsen/ Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Harvard University Press. Sterne, L. (1759). The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman (2 vols.). R. and J. Dodsley. Stoddard Holmes, M. (2014). Cancer comics: Narrating cancer through sequential art. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 32/33(2/1), 147–162. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/43653281 Taussig, M. (2011). I swear I saw this! Drawings in fieldwork notebooks, namely my own. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/ book/chicago/I/bo11637787.html Witek, J. (2011). Justin Green: Autobiography meets the comics. In M. A. Chaney (Ed.), Graphic subjects: Critical essays on autobiography and graphic novels (pp. 227–230). University of Wisconsin Press. Wojtkowiak, J., & Venbrux, E. (2009). From soul to postself: Home memorials in the Netherlands. Mortality, 14(2), 147–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13576270902807979

CHAPTER 5

Retain or Delete? Intentions for Social Network Accounts After Death Akiko Orita

Introduction When online profiles of the deceased are retained on social network sites (SNSs) it allows for a form of continued presence of, and communication with the deceased. Among the +3 billion Meta account holders (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), it is estimated that somewhere between 10 and 30 million of those may belong to individuals that are dead (Westreich, 2020). However, individual ‘post-mortem privacy,’ or respect for individual control of their online persona, remains largely under addressed by comprehensive laws or ‘terms of service’ requiring the further development of principles and guidelines for the treatment of accounts that were once maintained by the deceased. Death comes to everyone, and with 50.64% of the world’s population signed up to social media (Andre, 2022), the matter of what happens to social networking services (SNS) accounts after death has become an additional consideration in managing individual affairs. In the digital age, ‘physical death’ now triggers

A. Orita (*) Kanto Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. R. Schott (ed.), The Art of Dying, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35217-1_5

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questions regarding matters such as the inheritance of digital assets and concerns related to protection of online privacy and dignity of the deceased. While the retention or continuance of online accounts (once authored and updated by the living) also provides opportunities for online mourning for the bereaved. Within living memory, people were required to process and print photographs in order to create a physical archive of everyday life and document key moments or events. Today many people carry mobile digital devices (currently estimated over 6 billion) that contain electronic photodetectors capable of image capture that can be stored and shared as a computer file. Through SNS and messaging services individuals now routinely exchange images as part of everyday casual conversations, not only reflecting changes in the nature of communication but also how our communication has become archived as texts or message threads (unless actively deleted). When an individual dies, such data is invariably left behind creating ‘digital remains.’ When managing the affairs and accounts of the deceased, physical signifiers of assets such as cheque books or account statements would once have offered valuable information on personal affairs. In an increasingly paperless world digital assets are less easy to determine or access, from electronic banking, media stores and players, to online gaming accounts (e.g. PlayStation and XBox Live). Furthermore, e-book and music subscriptions are now treated differently to traditional physical formats, such as books and CDs. For example, when ‘purchasing’ digital music the buyer receives a non-transferable license to play a specific song or album. Terms of Service operated by companies such as Amazon or Apple cannot be transferred or inherited, resulting in the loss of an individual’s collections and tastes. van der Nagel (cited in Zhou, 2021) advises that “people should spend some time planning for how their online accounts and identities will be managed after they die.” She also encourages the curation of materials knowing that others may one day be accessing them. This chapter presents research that was conducted to achieve a sense of the opinions that individuals hold regarding their post-mortem privacy. Major daily-use online platforms now possess procedures for the treatment of user accounts after death. For example, in 2005 the social media platform Facebook instituted a ‘memorialising’ procedure to preserve a deceased user’s account for 30  days. Later, this service was updated to ‘unlimited’ to allow friends and acquaintances to continue to post messages and express their remembrance of the deceased publicly in this online

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space (McEwen & Scheaffer, 2013). Since 2015, Facebook has also encouraged users to predetermine a ‘legacy contact’ for the administration of post-mortem accounts. Such individuals are not allowed to log in to the account of the deceased but can make decisions regarding who can view the account and post tributes as well as manage features such as profile pictures (Bellas & Wachowski, 2015). When a Facebook account holder dies, a family member or close friend is now able to report the death via an online form, verified by an image of their loved one’s obituary, death certificate, memorial card or other official documentation that verifies the death. Other examples, of consideration given to account holder’s digital legacy include Google’s ‘inactive account manager’ (IAM), introduced in 2013 to automatically notify users to share or delete parts of their account data if it has sat inactive for more than 3  months. While in November 2021 Apple offered a ‘Digital Legacy’ feature that allows a legacy contact to request access to the deceased’s account and remove the ‘activation lock’ from devices. In the event of an accidental death, there have been examples of news media extracting publicly accessible images and information from SNS for the purposes of news reporting. Despite breaches to the privacy of victims and families, there are examples of social media coverage of fatal accidents finding its way onto mainstream news media. Journalistic investigation is aided by being able to filter Instagram by hashtag and location to search and pinpoint images connected to events or incidents. Similar methods can be used for Twitter. In fact, it is possible to enter the latitude and longitude of a location and stipulate a radius to access all public tweets within a certain distance of a particular location. In 2016, when holidaying university students tragically died in a bus accident in Japan, Twitter and Facebook photos were featured in the news reporting. While it is the case that social networking sites, once maintained by the deceased, provide information about their life, questions can be raised concerning the public’s need to know this information should they ever become newsworthy. The extent to which ordinary individuals anticipate having aspects of their life that they once willingly shared with friendship groups and acquaintances revealed to a broader public, without consent, is not known. This aspect of privacy for the deceased is not comprehensively protected by any general laws or terms of service. Edwards and Harbinja (2013, p.  137) define post-mortem privacy as “the notion that the dead are entitled to keep their secrets after death and that this may trump the rights of the family or heirs to access or take possession of their profiles, records etc.

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after death.” Orita and Yuasa (2018) conducted an exploratory survey in Japan on a similar population to the case example cited above (i.e. university students) to discover that individuals felt that their wishes concerning post-death privacy regarding their social media accounts and activity was very likely to differ from that of their family. This has implications for the post-self of the individual after death, which, as Schott argues (see Chap. 1), is co-constructed, should it reflect the preferences of the bereaved over the wishes of the deceased. An understanding of how social media (as ‘documents’ of a life) can be appropriated and used by others after death therefore requires greater attention. As yet, despite some scholarly discussion (e.g. Savin-Baden & Mason-­ Robbie, 2020) there is no agreed legal system or guidelines for handling accounts and data left behind after death. As Harbinja (2020) points out, digital assets have been considered either from a perspective of ‘hard law’ of succession and probate or the intersection of property, contracts and intellectual property. Currently, only major social media platforms have made provisions for memorialisation and account and content deletion, with many smaller services still yet to outline their policies or approach. This chapter introduces a comparative international study that focused on users’ wishes and intentions regarding their SNS accounts in the event of their death, considering several demographic factors. Before presenting the results of survey research conducted in Japan, the United States and France, the chapter first offers a review of relevant literature. It is hoped that the results of this survey could contribute towards increasing the level of consideration given to the treatment of account holder deaths by global media companies to also incorporate the different views of their user communities.

Handling Data Content and/or data left behind by individuals after their death are sometimes referred as ‘digital artefacts’ or a ‘digital heritage.’ A definition of ‘digital legacy’ is presented by Furuta (2020, n.p.), journalist and President of the Association for Digital Remains in Japan, as “a legacy whose reality can only be grasped through the digital environment” that is classified into three types: devices on which digital data is stored (the house), data stored on memory cards, and so on (inside the house), and data and accounts on the Internet (outside the house). Although the cancellation of remaining accounts for various online services such as music

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subscriptions is within the scope of legal representation and trust services, ‘outside the house’ contexts tend to pose the most difficulties. Returning to the results of the exploratory survey conducted on Japanese university students (Orita & Yuasa, 2020), conflicting viewpoints were received regarding the handling of data as it pertains to someone they love or know. Some wished to have the option to retain access to, or keep photos and SNS data when family members or friends died, while others wished to see data deleted in conjunction with an individual’s passing as part of that loss. Differences were also evident in how respondents judged deaths in the past and present-day. For example, with reference to diaries of people who had died more than 50  years ago, 40.0% of the respondents emphasised and understood them to have value as social historical documents, with only 13% concerned about the violation of the privacy of the deceased. Respondents’ views on the appropriacy of accessing individual personal thoughts of someone who had long since passed, was at odds with, and considered much less complicated when compared to the recency of someone’s passing within living memory. As Van der Nagael (as cited in Zhou, 2021) notes, making arrangements for the management of a digital legacy is “daunting option for someone to set up in their 20s, who does not yet [even] own property.” For young people, giving access to a digital private life might be unnerving and potentially exposing and yet platforms like Instagram reserve the right to employ users’ images for advertising (a right that could also be activated after death). Such apprehensions were evident in the way the majority of survey respondents viewed the use and presentation of personal SNSs in news reports of incidents as a violation of the privacy and dignity of the deceased. The option of allowing users to decide what to do with their data before they die is being taken on by large platform companies. However, online practices in life might either persist after death if unknown by an online executor or may become apparent for the first time after death. If the deceased does not want the next of kin to know about the existence of an account, its subsequent deletion would be difficult. In the case of a service that allows users to create multiple accounts, the user may have used different accounts for different identities, reasons and motivations. Revealed after death, this may subsequently compromise the privacy of the deceased. In the personal sphere, it is often a matter of preserving mementos and memories, but in the social sphere, it is also a matter of accessing a record of the life of the individual in that era.

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Online Mourning Regardless of the deceased’s intent in life, a bereaved family may opt to keep their data for remembrance and/or to sustain a bond or connection. There are two generally recognised contrasting approaches for managing grief. The first is the Kübler-Ross (1969) model that is interpreted as arguing that a mourner must learn to cope with loss by accepting it. It consists of five stages of grief through which individuals advance. These are stages of denial, anger, bargaining and depression, before ending in acceptance. Whereas a continuing bonds approach to bereavement maintains that a continued relationship with the deceased is beneficial to the grieving process (Klass et al., 1996). Thus, on the one hand, there is the modernist idea of recovering quickly from loss and reconstructing oneself, while on the other hand, mourners for the dead should continue to be able to express their eternal love. Walter (2017) points out that a grieving culture that includes both of these beliefs established itself during the twentieth century. With the integration of the internet into our daily lives, the grieving process has come to include both the offline and online lives of the deceased. In the late 1990s, mourning online was conducted through cyber-memorials or ‘virtual cemeteries,’ which included both static content (memorials) and dynamic content (guest books) (Roberts & Vidal, 2000). Online communications, especially SNSs, have led to new ways of mourning. Users are able to share memories or write messages to or regarding the deceased, and memorialised profiles have created new spaces or opportunities for grieving individuals to come together. Research in the fields of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human– computer interaction (HCI) has focused on the role of technology in mourning with various approaches for addressed death and bereavement emerging. Massimi and Baecker (2010) classify three major areas of scholarly interest: how the bereaved inherit personal digital devices, using technology to remember, and changes in behaviour and attitudes. Research by Brubaker and Hayes (2011) on MySpace identifies three categories of behaviour by the bereaved: sharing memories of the deceased, posting updates from one’s own life and leaving comments to maintain connections with the deceased. The phenomenon of friends talking to the deceased online was also described in the research of Williams and Merten (2009) who examined how online social networking facilitates adolescent

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grieving following the sudden death of a peer, by reviewing 20 profiles of users aged 15–19 years who died between 2005 and 2007. The comments posted to the deceased profiles were addressed directly to the deceased indicating how an effort was made to cling to an ‘ongoing attachment.’ In contrast, the authors observed little interaction among the living. Japanese journalist Furuta (2020–2021) has investigated digital memorialisation and post-death interactions by examining blogs that have been left behind or taken over after a death, noting the hundreds of comments in response to the last interrupted post. As Campbell (2013, para. 3) observes with reference to online communities: It’s surprising how well you can get to know people solely through interactions online. You learn about their character by whether they follow through on commitments, and by the small things they do for people without expecting anything in return. Little bits of personality come through in everything a person writes.

She notes the case of two respected bloggers, who passed away suddenly, and how their communities responded by producing remembrance blog posts, social media tributes and online memorial fund raising. Based on Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical concept of social life comprising front- and back-stage communication, Getty et al. (2011, p. 998) analysed Facebook users’ (front-stage public expressions) posts before and after a friend’s death. Their findings support the continuing bonds theory, finding evidence for “a continuing relationship with the deceased [that] represents a different kind of relationship situated in entirely changed circumstances.” They found the language of posts made after a death were significantly more ‘immediate’ (directly addressing the deceased) than prior posts, arguing that social media activity was not used to signal distancing or a letting-go. Furthermore, SNS profiles created and maintained in life are considered stronger representations of the deceased than those which are posthumously created by survivors (Brubaker, 2014). While the continuance of an account after a user’s death can permit relatives, friends and acquaintances to maintain a continuing bond, it should also be noted, however, that online memorials are not universally always helpful. Otani (2017) points to the issue of repeatedly reminding people of their separation, while Kasket (2020) reminds us that grief is idiosyncratic and while a digital legacy might be critically important for one mourner, it may be painful for another.

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Identity and Post-mortem Privacy Since the 1990s, communication through and on the Internet has permitted individuals to create an online persona that is not necessarily identical to one’s real-world persona (Turkle, 1995). Individual presence on SNSs is profile based, displaying a screen name (of choice) alongside a visual representation. How SNSs are used by individuals can differ greatly, for example, an individual may limit the number of users who can view their posts or alternatively have multiple accounts using different names (aliases) and profiles. Identity reconstruction is understood to serve a number of functions such as maintaining privacy (limiting or selective personal disclosure), creating access to new or different types of social relationships, allowing individuals to escape inhibitions and/or explore different aspects of personality (Hu et al., 2014). By using multiple SNS services, or even multiple accounts on the same service, it is possible to tailor and control the manner in which we portray our identity. Needless to say, these possibilities, as playful or maybe temporary as they might be, occur as part of our encounter with life but also risk defining us in death The question thus arises: Who owns the online identity or identities of the deceased? Given that an SNS profile often incorporates different facets of the deceased’s life, should one person or particular set of people (e.g. close family) be able to encounter or delve into those multiple versions and portrayals of a person (Brubaker & Hayes, 2011)? Or should the autonomy of user be respected after the death of an individual? Buitelaar (2017) cites commercial services that allow users to record messages before their deaths (see also Chap. 1), commenting that such services also function to allow users to define and express their preferred reputational choice after death to some degree. Subsequent deviation from the context provided by the user in anticipation of death becomes an invasion of privacy, following its definition as the right of a person to preserve and control their reputation and dignity after death (Edwards & Harbinja, 2013; Harbinja, 2017). Under European Union (EU) law, recital 27  in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states: “This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons” (EUR-Lex, 2016). It also goes on to declare that “Member States may provide for rules regarding the processing of personal data of deceased persons.” This reflects (or has resulted in) different privacy and protection laws across European Union States

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dealing with the rights of the deceased (Edwards & Harbinja, 2013; Yuasa & Orita, 2018). As Harbinja (2017) notes, in the EU four States explicitly exclude protection of the deceased (Cyprus, Ireland Sweden and the UK) while ten States only account for the personal data of a ‘natural person’ (Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain). On the other hand, France’s Digital Bill defines ‘digital death’ as the right for all to express their wishes as to what happens to their personal information published online after their death, and to have them respected (Government of France, 2016). While the French data protection authority CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, 2020) claim “a social network profile or email account remains personal and subject to the duty of confidentiality of correspondence,” it is not clear how exactly the will of the deceased or this preference is carried out beyond discounting options provided by global social media companies to retain such accounts. Inheritable digital assets range from tokens and cryptocurrencies, domain names to virtual gaming property, but can also extend to “data associated with email, social media platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), user’s website, blogs, data stored on the cloud (such as pictures, photographs, diary, videos, songs, books), online wallets, coupons, and gifts cards” (Singh et al., 2022, para. 2). The United States has legislated for the transmission of digital assets more extensively than in European countries. In 2012, the Uniform Law Commission established a Committee for Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets to draft an Act to authorise persons with fiduciary responsibility for any action with respect to digital assets. In 2015, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) was enacted (Lamm, 2015). The purpose of this Act is to provide a process for fiduciaries to obtain access to digital data. In an article addressing these issues in China Daily, Zhang (2022) covers the story of a member of the Chinese ‘cloud generation,’ Wu Wanzhen, who planned for her digital afterlife through the China Will Registration Center in Shanghai. In the article she is reported as expressing the view that should she die unexpectedly without making plans in advance, her digital history would be seen by her parents. This is something that she wanted to avoid and plan for. With the recognised inheritability of economic assets the significance of digital assets becomes how it places an individual legacy in a tug-of-war with privacy rights (Lopez, 2016).

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A Survey There are currently over four billion users of SNS worldwide. As Fietkiewicz et al. (2016, p. 3829) state: “Different generations, diversely labelled and defined by researchers, have different motivation for and manner of using the online media.” For example, in Japan, young people in their teens and twenties rarely use Facebook, but instead show a preference for the use of LINE, Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok (IICP, 2021). According to a 2022 report by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications the ubiquity of social media translates to three quarters of Japanese using social media more than once, every day. In this context of regular and diverse usage, if a user dies, it is important to consider the impact of what is left behind for the deceased and their families. With these issues in mind, research was conducted to explore what intentions individuals have regarding their SNS data and account when they pass away. The researcher held an interest in whether there are any clear differences in attitudes by demographics. Furthermore, the use of global SNS platforms also raises issues about how appropriate company approaches, policies and services are for all users worldwide. A survey was administered that focused on asking individuals to detail their intentions regarding what they would like to see happen with their data when they become ‘deceased.’ Additionally, they were also questioned on what they would want to do if the situation is reversed, that is, should a family member or friend die and they become the ‘bereaved.’ The quantitative survey was carried out in different countries to highlight any potential differences by not only demographics such as country of residence, generation and religion, but also identity representation on SNS services. Respondents from three countries were selected for inclusion: Japan, the United States and France. In Japan, where the principal researcher commenced this study, it is understood that SNS users prefer to use pseudonymous or use multiple accounts that match different social groups and roles governing the nature of interactions, and activity online, reflecting how users feel more anxiety regarding the social implications and repercussions of their social media use compared with say the United States or France (MIC, 2013). Orita and Yuasa (2020) have already found that young people in Japan profess to want to erase their own SNS accounts including their posts. A Rakuten Insights Survey (2022) endorsed these earlier findings, also showing that 70% of respondents wished to see their digital presence deleted from the internet when they die. Such findings

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indicate a higher degree of ‘death awareness’ and preparation for a foreseeable future when digital activity could impact a post-self. Participants from the United States were selected for inclusion as many major global SNS platforms were launched and first used there, whilst also accounting for the several jurisdictions (States) where laws regulate the transmission of digital assets. Similarly, as indicated above, participants from France were also included as it is one of the few countries that define ‘digital death’ as a right for all (Government of France, 2016). The purpose of this study was to determine whether country of residence, age, religion and profile use determined views on the desired treatment of accounts after death. The research questions were as follows: RQ1: Which demographic factors reflect differences in intentions regarding the post-mortem treatment of one’s data? RQ2: Does usage of SNS services, including frequency and profile management methods indicate attitudes toward post-mortem treatment of one’s data? (Hu et al., 2014; Petronio & Durham, 2021) RQ3: Do attitudes toward digital legacies alter based on whether it applies to the individual’s mortality and passing or if it applies to the death of family member or friend?

Data Collection In January 2019, using the service of Macromill (a global marketing research company), the research project screened for users of at least one SNS or messaging service from Japan, the United States and France, and collected 1080 SNS user responses. From there the project organised samples in each country according to gender and age group (20–79 years). The survey consisted of 21 questions that covered the participants’ service usage, approach to profile management, and intentions for the treatment of accounts for themselves and for close relatives. The survey also canvassed option on instances such as news reporting that employ images and information sourced online (as discussed above), as well as knowledge and awareness of current legislation as to the protection of the privacy of the deceased. This allowed an examination of the relationship between the various independent variables, in other words factors that influence the outcome, such as users’ demographics and current usage of SNS services, and the dependent variable, their intentions for the treatment of their own account and that of their relatives. Furthermore, the dependent variable

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(intentions) really covered three options: (1) utilising a predetermined ‘memorial mode,’ (2) retain the account as is, or (3) see it deleted. We analysed three globally used SNS services: Facebook, Instagram (both have a ‘memorial mode’ for the deceased) and Twitter (which has the option to delete the account of the deceased).

Results Demographics and Intentions for Their Own Accounts A multiple linear regression (statistical technique used to analyse the relationship between a single dependent variable and several independent variables) was first calculated to determine if it is possible to predict the intent for handling accounts after death based on demographic backgrounds such as country, gender, age and religion. For all services, country of residence and age had significantly determined the nature of the results for the post-mortem handling of accounts, with only Twitter determined by gender. A cross-tabulation was then carried out to examine the differences between countries, the results of which are shown in Fig. 5.1. The results show a significantly higher proportion of Japanese users preferred to have their accounts deleted compared to the United States and France. In particular, a higher proportion of users in the United States chose Facebook’s memorial mode (36.8%) compared with France (24.1%) and Japan (13.3%). Figures 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 show the results of the questionnaire for all responders in the three countries. The results demonstrate that the likelihood of a user wanting to delete their Facebook account increases with age. The only significant gender difference was found on Twitter, where 43.9% of males and 31.2% of females said they wanted to keep their accounts after death. Type of SNS Usage and Intentions for Accounts A multiple linear regression was calculated to predict the intention to handle accounts after death based on SNS usage, such as frequency and profile management/use. For all services, frequency of usage and profile management had significantly determined post-mortem handling of one’s account. A cross-tabulation was then carried out to investigate the differences between frequency of usage, the results of which are shown in Figs. 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7. The overall trend showed that people who use their accounts

5  RETAIN OR DELETE? INTENTIONS FOR SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNTS…  Set Memorial Mode FB-all FB-Japan(N=158)

27.2%

67.7% 22.6%

24.1%

Instagram-all Instagram-Japan(N=104)

Twier-all Twier-Japan(N=169)

43.1%

26.0%

60.6%

38.4%

26.2%

33.8%

35.4%

27.2%

39.0%

38.2%

61.8%

26.0%

Twier-US(N=135) Twier-France(N=110)

47.9%

26.5%

13.5%

Instagram-France(N=136)

40.6%

28.0%

30.4%

Instagram-US(N=164)

48.7%

19.0% 36.8%

FB-France(N=336)

Delete

24.1%

13.3%

FB-US(N=340)

Retain as it is

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74.0% 48.9%

51.1%

33.6%

64.0%

Fig. 5.1  Individual preferences for digital assets (social media accounts) after death Facebook Memorial Mode 35.3%

20-29 30-39

37.4%

40-49

36.5%

50-59 60-69 70-79

Delete

36.0%

28.7%

25.2%

37.4%

22.6%

25.2%

40.9%

23.7%

18.6% 11.6%

Retain

20.7% 17.0%

51.1% 60.7% 71.4%

Fig. 5.2  Intentions for post-mortem Facebook accounts by age

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Instagram Memorial Mode 20-29

39.2% 48.7%

20.5%

30.8%

50-59

30.7%

22.7%

38.1%

40-49

Delete

33.3%

36.0%

30-39

60-69

Retain

51.7%

23.3%

25.0%

59.3%

25.9%

14.8%

70-79 7.1%

57.1%

35.7%

Fig. 5.3  Intentions for post-mortem Instagram accounts by age Twitter Retain 20-29

70-79

51.2%

48.8%

40-49

60-69

49.0%

51.0%

30-39

50-59

Delete

64.3%

35.7% 26.2% 29.4% 19.0%

73.8% 70.6% 81.0%

Fig. 5.4  Intentions for post-mortem Twitter accounts by age

5  RETAIN OR DELETE? INTENTIONS FOR SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNTS… 

Facebook and Frequency Memorial Mode 2 or more /day

once a day

once a week

less frequently

Delete 40.9%

24.9%

34.2%

52.4%

29.3%

18.4%

once 2-3days

Retain

60.6%

18.2%

21.2%

60.8%

27.5%

11.8%

74.5%

10.9%

14.5%

Fig. 5.5  Frequency of use (Facebook) Instagram and Frequency Memorial Mode 2 or more /day

37.3%

once a day once 2-3days once a week

12.1%

less frequently 2.8%

Delete

25.0%

39.8% 18.8%

Retain

37.7%

26.5%

33.7%

29.2% 30.3%

27.8%

Fig. 5.6  Frequency of use (Instagram)

52.1% 57.6% 69.4%

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Twier and Frequency Retain 2 or more /day

Delete

49.2%

once a day

50.8%

36.5%

63.5%

once 2-3days

26.1%

73.9%

once a week

25.0%

75.0%

less frequently

24.4%

75.6%

Fig. 5.7  Frequency of use (Twitter) Facebook Memorial Mode Real Name

29.2%

Maiden/Professional Name

30.8%

Nick Name

18.4%

Online Handle

20.0%

Other

13.3%

Retain

Delete

22.0%

48.8%

35.9%

33.3%

42.9%

38.8%

25.0% 13.3%

55.0% 73.3%

Fig. 5.8  Profile management and Facebook

more frequently would prefer to keep them after death. In Facebook and Instagram, where the memorial mode is available, the more frequently users use the service (more than once a day), the more they tend to want to leave their accounts in memorial mode. A further cross-tabulation was completed to look at the differences between profile management (i.e. screen names), the results of which are shown in Figs. 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10. Facebook originally required the use of real names, but those who changed their profile to use a nickname or

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Instagram Memorial Mode Real Name

Online Handle Other

Delete 35.1%

24.1%

40.8%

Maiden /Professional Name Nick Name

Retain

28.0%

56.0%

50.8%

35.6%

13.6%

54.7%

25.8%

19.5%

50.0%

22.2%

27.8%

16.0%

Fig. 5.9  Profile management and Instagram Twier Retain Real Name

Online Handle Other

52.4%

47.6%

Maiden /Professional Name Nick Name

Delete

50.0%

50.0% 40.0% 29.1% 26.7%

60.0% 70.9% 73.3%

Fig. 5.10  Profile management and Twitter

something else were less likely to choose the memorial mode. It is more likely that such accounts are not used and designed for general audience as they do not seek to be found using the individual’s real name. For Instagram, more than half of those who used their maiden name or other professional names indicated they would select memorial mode. Similarly, for Twitter, the more closely related to real life, a person’s profile is, the

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more likely they were to keep their account, while the more anonymous they were, the more likely they were to want to delete it suggesting a real name is more reflective of a socially acceptable content and conventional presentation of self. Demographics and Wishes for Family and Friend Accounts We asked participants how they would like their family and friends accounts to be handled on social networking sites post-mortem. A multiple linear regression was again calculated to predict wishes regarding handling of family or friends’ accounts after death based on demographic background such as country, gender, age and religion. Significant regression equations were found in wishes for family’s account and in wishes for friends’ account. In contrast to the handling of accounts after one’s own death, there was a significant difference by religion. However, religion was not a mandatory question, only an optional response. The results of the cross-analysis of countries are shown in Figs.  5.11 and 5.12. The largest proportion of respondents who wanted to retain their family members’ accounts came from the United States (39.2%), while the largest proportion of respondents who wanted to delete all of the accounts came from France (39.4%), the largest proportion of respondents who were unsure came from Japan (32.5%). The percentage of respondents who said they would like to keep part of their property was

Family member's SNS account aer death want keep all of them Japan

USA

France

20.8%

want keep part of them 15.6%

39.2%

26.9%

want all of them to be deleted

31.1%

32.5%

17.5%

14.2%

no idea

26.4%

39.4%

Fig. 5.11  Wishes for family’s post-mortem SNS by country

16.9%

19.4%

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Friends' SNS account aer death want keep all of them Japan

14.7%

USA

16.4%

33.9%

France

want keep part of them

want all of them to be deleted

26.9%

41.9%

15.3%

30.6%

no idea

23.6%

11.1%

33.1%

27.2%

25.3%

Fig. 5.12  Wishes for friend’s post-mortem SNS by country

Family member's SNS account aer death want keep all of them 20-29

want all of them to be deleted 26.7%

17.2%

37.2%

30-39

want keep part of them

16.7%

40.0%

40-49

31.7%

16.7%

50-59

32.2%

17.2%

60-69

16.7%

13.3%

70-79

16.1%

13.3%

22.2% 29.4% 22.8%

47.2% 45.6%

no idea 18.9% 21.1% 22.2% 27.8% 22.8% 25.0%

Fig. 5.13  Intentions for family’s post-mortem SNS by age

almost the same in all three countries. In terms of friends’ accounts, more respondents in all countries were unsure. The results by generation are shown in Figs. 5.13 and 5.14. For both family and friends, the majority of respondents 60 years and over wanted to delete everything, while younger generations were more likely to want to keep data associated with family or friends.

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Friend's SNS account aer death want keep all of them 20-29

38.9%

30-39

60-69 70-79

17.2%

36.7%

40-49 50-59

want keep part of them

15.6%

33.3% 21.7% 15.6% 12.2%

18.9% 16.1%

7.2% 10.6%

want all of them to be deleted

no idea

20.6% 16.1%

23.3% 31.7%

24.4% 25.6%

41.7% 38.9%

23.3% 36.7% 35.6% 38.3%

Fig. 5.14  Intentions for friend’s post-mortem SNS by age

Discussion RQ1 What demographic factors reflect differences in intentions regarding the post-­ mortem treatment of one’s data? Respondents were asked about what they would like to see happen to their own SNS accounts (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) after they die; primarily whether they would like to keep them or delete them. Multiple linear regression analyses on the post-mortem treatment of one’s own account by demographic variables showed that country and gender significantly determined views on continued existence of accounts across various services. Additionally, for Twitter, gender emerged as a significant variable. A cross-tabulation of the differences between countries regarding the treatment of their own accounts showed that, for all services, a high percentage of respondents in Japan preferred to delete their data, while a high percentage of respondents in the United States wanted to keep accounts (using a memorial mode, if available); France emerged somewhere between. Respondents from the United States represented the highest percentage of those wanting to leave everything, followed by France then Japan. Fewer people wanted to delete the accounts of family and friends

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compared to their own accounts. For example, in Japan, the majority of respondents wanted to delete their own Twitter accounts (74.0%), compared to 31.1% who wanted to delete their family’s accounts and 26.9% who wanted deleted their friends’ accounts. In terms of age, younger generations were more likely to want to keep their own data (especially in memorial mode) and that of their family and friends. For Generations Y and Z there is high level of familiarity with social media from a young age with much of their communication digitised. Further research is required in this area to explore the degree of social awareness or concerns that individuals have concerning the appropriacy of their content and comments on their accounts. It would also be interesting to note how these differences by age might change as individuals age, develop careers and assume more roles and responsibilities. Although religion was an optional question for all respondents, only the treatment of family accounts was significantly different at the 1% level (p