Memento Mori: remember you must die. Pretty bleak, right? But what makes us think this way?<\/p>\n
Death in our society is a complex enigma, considered taboo and accompanied by variety of competing emotions. We rarely speak about death, unless prompted to do so. Death has been dressed up as many other characters, using words such as “passing” and religious justification to make us feel better about it. What’s strange, however, is that while we shield ourselves from the concept of death, our own mortality, and the societal baggage it carries, we love to surround ourselves with the morbid through media.<\/p>\n
If you have ever watched\u00a0Criminal Minds<\/em>, you know what I mean. Popular TV and film often incorporate and even fixate on the topic of death in their productions, as the audience seems to be fascinated and intrigued by the concept of the death of others. We “enjoy” watching horror movies, where characters drop like flies, or documentaries about serial killers, in which each killing is grotesquely described. The irony, then, appears in our inability to face our own mortality, yet we love to observe the death and dying of estranged others.<\/p>\n While it may seem a far fletched comparison, this pop culture trend of “death in media” is not all that different from the death photography of Victorian England. The use of photography to capture the last image of the deceased, and to immortalize what once was, is just another way in which media exposes human mortality. In Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” she speaks about how the invent of the photo changed the way in which we view the world, as “taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events” (Sontag, 11). In the case of death photography, the picture “confers on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed” (Sontag, 11). This paradox of death photography emerges in the way in which a photo of the deceased both immortalizes those in the picture, while also provided a permanent reminder of our own inevitable death.<\/p>\n Death in popular TV and media has come to serve a very similar purpose as death photography, in that while in viewing the death of fictional characters (or distanced, real people in the case of non-fiction) we may have a little comfort in the reminder that we are still living, but also that these images of death also serve as a memento mori in their own way. There is something inherent in human nature that drives us to fixate on death, despite our society’s backwards inclination to deny and bury death as it comes to actually affect us. The use of media, and the protection of a “lens” gives us a vehicle by which we can safely view death and remember our mortality, while being distanced enough that we still feel comfortable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Memento Mori: remember you must die. Pretty bleak, right? But what makes us think this way? Death in our society is a complex enigma, considered taboo and accompanied by variety of competing emotions. We rarely speak about death, unless prompted to do so. Death has been dressed up as many other characters, using words such …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":223,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-d"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-c0","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/223"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}