I thought long and hard before posting this blog – I wrote
the majority of it over a week ago – but have since decided that if you can
read about my boogers then you can read this.
Warning: there are some triggers here.
If you have a hard time being in the presence of blood or reading about
gore, maybe you should think twice about reading this post. On the other hand, maybe you are in dire need
of reading this post. Studies are
conflicted on this point. Plus, since
this is both sociological and personal, this is a way to get to know more of
how my mind works, if you are interested, assuming you are because you are
reading my personal blog.
I was thinking recently about death in films. There is something really essential that they
leave out of it. It's easy enough to
show someone being shot. But not so easy
to show what death looks like. And it's
easy enough to cinematically show someone hacking at, really, the ground with a
machete, but not so easy to show what it looks like to hack a body with a
machete.
A few thoughts on this:
The body wants to live. It can
survive really heinous and severe mutilation and live on for hours or even days
afterwards. Even if the person is not
conscious, you would know that they were alive as their body fights.
1.
Consider a gunshot wound to the gut. Gutshot, as the westerns call it. You shoot someone in the gut, it takes them
days to die. And they die of
infection. Not blood loss, not severed
arteries, not a broken spine, infection.
There are all kinds of things in your gut that when punctured leak
things that are really bad for other types of tissue, bile, acid, waste,
etc. Death by gut infection. This is not a nice way to go. The only scene in a movie that describes this
that comes to mind was from the film The Three Kings.
2.
Consider being strangled. How long do you think it takes to strangle
someone? This is not the same thing as
being “choked out” which is a much more severe move, usually nonlethal but can
became lethal if the air passage is continually constricted, but immediately
cuts blood flow to the brain. But
strangling someone is different. Choking
someone out is difficult and takes skills that most people do not have. Strangling someone until they are unconscious
will take over a minute. Strangling
someone until they are dead, because the body will keep fighting for the
breath, takes over 6 minutes. Bizarrely,
if you look up the key words, “how long does it take to strangle someone to
death” there are 1.5 million hits on Google.
The closest thing I have seen to this on film personally was an episode
of Breaking Bad and the film No Country for Old Men. These scenes were both gruesome and
uncomfortable but also shorter than it would actually take. Drowning works similarly, btw.
3.
Most westerners seem to have no idea what a dead
body looks like. It takes a day or so,
but the body bloats and farts and skin and fat begin to, in a manner of
speaking, melt off, blood pools into the parts for the body closest to the
ground. Does anyone know what dead eyes
look like? You know from the movies, but
really, it's worse than that. It's is
the ultimate stuff of nightmares to me.
There are a ton of really interesting philosophical cum psychological
ideas on this. The “deadness” and depth
of human eyes that creates fundamental horror in us. Because they eyes are really the window to
the soul. They are the window to the
ultimate horror – the other. What are
they thinking? You can never really
know, hence the horror.
4.
How easy is it to move a body? Not easy.
Can you imagine moving a 150 pound, or more, octopus where each limb
weighed about the same as the rest of the body?
Even dragging that dead gangly weight is difficult. About the only exposure most people have to
what moving dead bodies, really dead not dummies and not limp live people, but
truly, no muscle use, dead bodies is from films of the Holocaust, of throwing
those bodies into pits and onto piles.
And what does it look like? It's
awkward. Human bodies are terribly,
terribly, awkward. This is almost
unshowable in films. And when they hit
rigor, they are more awkward, because they won’t move in predictable ways. It's not that they do not move at all, as if
they were a log, but they do not move in predictable ways. And what about the rotting body? Moving a body that is already
decomposing? The ligaments let loose and
skin pulls away from flesh and stretches, adipose tissue squishes and wounds
open further and things spill out because the fascia is no longer working to
get organs in place.
5.
Another thing we never see, we never see
anything that realistically looks like hacking someone up in films. There are just countless horror films with
knife stabbings and ax hackings and sword jabbings, but there is no sense of
what it is like to cut off an arm with a machete. Let me give you a hint, do you know one of
the highest paying jobs in medieval Europe?
The headsman. It is very
difficult to take off a limb or a head with one blow even with extreme skill
and a very, very sharp blade. This is
the reason why Madame le guillotine was so treasured as a humane form of
execution for so long. Because it didn’t
hack the head half off. Do you recall
all of those cases in the news, real cases, where some woman was stabbed by her
boyfriend or husband like 76 times and survives? That’s a thing. That happens.
It happens relatively often. It's
amazing how many people can survive having the back of their neck hacked at
with a machete more than 50 times in a failed attempt to severe their head, who
were in a house that was then set on fire and so half their body is also
burned, who escape to live in a stinking fly and mosquito infested swamp for
over a month with no clean water and no food who then survive! That is a real case in Rwanda. The body wants to survive, if it can, it
will. But this we never see. We don’t know what this woman looks like
(because she was a woman). We don’t know
what it looks like to see someone hacked up with a machete outside of horror
films. And that isn’t because it isn’t
on film somewhere. It is.
6.
What about beating? Can you imagine how long it would take, how
many punches or hits with a baseball bat, it takes to kill a person if you were
only beating their head? The skull…it's
really resilient unless you get a lucky shot.
People can be beaten, all over their body, until they literally do not
look human. People can have their skull
fractured here and there and still survive.
I know this from personal experience.
No I didn’t try to beat a human to death (or did I…) But there was an incident with a raccoon that
was dying slowly that I had hit with my car.
It was the humane thing to do and I still bare the emotional scar from
the incident. The only scene I have seen
of anything reflecting reality in this capacity is a movie that you will not
want to see for any reason…it is a French film called Irreversible. It is a really good film and I completely DO
NOT recommend it. It won awards at film
festivals where people walked out of the film in droves because they could not
witness it.
Our issues with death in the United States are really
strange. There is a good book that
discusses the fact that we have the death penalty but we decreasingly use it in
the US and everywhere because increasingly, as we remove ourselves from nature,
we cannot bare to witness the messiness, the smelliness of death. The book is by Phillip Smith and is called
Punishment and Culture.
Academicians make arguments that video games and movies
desensitize people to violence. I think
it desensitizes people to the IDEA of violence.
Makes it seem easy.
The thing is that Americans do not have to really deal with
trauma and they do not have to really deal with death and extreme pain. Of course, we deal with it personally,
individually. We have an entire industry
designed to deal with trauma and emotional pain. This way you can pay for therapy instead of
allowing your culture to explain how you feel for you through the support of
your community. How else can you explain
increased rates of PTSD for soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and
Vietnam but not so much for WWII and other wars elsewhere? How else can you explain that rape victims in
the USA may not be able to function AT ALL but those in Rwanda go on with their
lives. Or even rape victims in the
USA? How can you explain that rape
victims in the US military are totally shattered above and beyond the rates of
those who were the victim of civilian rape?
Culture and support man. If you
do not have a plausible cultural story that allows you to fit your experience
within and explains fully your personal story of pain, then it makes no sense
for you and your identity is shattered.
But, first, the Rwandese do not have this individualization
of trauma and they do have extreme trauma.
Every single person here was affected in some very intense way by the
genocide. And who helped them to deal
with it? Every single person here has
seen what real pain looks like. Whether
through the genocide – seeing a person bleed out because their arm was chopped
off and no one knows how to bind the arteries to keep them from dying (you
can't just put on a tourniquet and bind the wound like in the movies to keep a
person from bleeding to death), or because they have no recourse for the
“regular” trauma of life. That is, rape
(and I know rape shouldn’t be a run of the mill thing that happens to people,
except for the fact that it IS in patriarchal cultures), TB, HIV, random sicknesses,
accidents, again “run of the mill” motives for murder, etc.
On this point I would like to note that, in western
medicalized and beauty obsessed culture, we are no longer privy to viewing the
normal range of human variation anymore.
You can change your looks, you can change your hair color, you can fix
those funny ears or nose or chin or cheeks, you can lose or gain weight
(mostly) depending on the prevailing standards of beauty in your locale. Hell, you can even change your skin and eye
color. But here, there are people with
untreated cataracts, untreated birth defects, un “treated” this and that. It's times like these that I remember that
gorgeous line from Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves: “Allah loves wondrous variety.”
On another but related note: since I have been in Rwanda, I
have been obsessed with the next generation of zombie literature and
films. I am not sure why, but, after
giving it some thought: who are ALWAYS
the real enemies in zombie films? The
living people. The theme of the recent
and highly acclaimed series The Walking Dead points this out. Because, in fact, the title does not refer to
the zombies but to the people left behind.
And this, I think, is one of the main themes running through the entire
zombie genre: genocide. I think this is the reason I have been
obsessing about this genre. Zombies,
they want to kill you. Why? Because you are ALIVE.
Mixed in with this is always other concerns of the day, all
equally relevant: the general “end” of life as we know it culturally for a
thousand reasons that small minded people fear, nuclear hazards,
post-apocalyptic (for any reason) thinking, viruses and illnesses, the
uncontrollability of either runaway multiculturalism or runaway racism as a
response to multiculturalism, etc.
But most importantly, the main point of the genre is always
about globalization (that is, change that we cannot control (not that we have
ever had much control)) and something fundamental about the nature of humanity
which can only be seen in the most extreme of circumstances. And part of this is genocide, bigotry, and
that switch that turns off for SO many of us when culture no longer plays a
part in keeping us in check – the narcissistic or sociopathic switch (BECAUSE
WE ALL HAVE IT – don’t believe me? I can
give you SO many scientific and experimental sources on this). Too much culture and we kill (Nazis) and too
little culture and we kill (there are too many examples to list, but the Old
West of the USA is a good example). It's
the same thing as that old Durkheimian study, and which, though wrong in some
ways, was right on this point – too much culture and we commit suicide
(officers in the military) and too little culture and we commit suicide (teen
homosexuals and those others in isolation for whatever reason).
And last and not least – what is the zombie genre really
“about”? It is about chewing gum. No seriously, chewing gun. Remember in school when you wanted to chew
gum in class but they wouldn’t let you?
Everyone wanted to chew gum and you couldn’t. And what was the, totally reasonable, reason
you were forbidden? Because someone
always, ALWAYS, will spit it on the floor or put it under a desk for you to
find later. Zombies and so many fears,
including most political fears and economic fears, etc., come from the totally
reasonable fear that someone will just ruin it for everyone. There is always some jerk. And what do you do about it? Really?
Last and seriously not least, and to bring it all home – and
the most basic “thing” that zombie movies are “about” – it's about westerners
confronting death. We are utterly
protected from the messiness and gruesomeness of death. Both of dying and of the dead body. A person who passes out because they
encounter blood? This is a VERY recent
thing in the annals of human history.
Again, here, I would like to mention the death penalty and it's
evolution over time. Phil Smith. Punishment and Culture. It's so good.
Read it!
David – I would really like for you to chime in here because
I know you are writing a paper…
A last point, thinking even more sociologically about my
current circumstances…Why do they think that Rwandese are “naturally”
obedient? To a large extent, they
are. It's a giant Milgram experiment. I mentioned before about believing so
strongly in science. Don’t think you
aren’t in the SAME situation. If you
believe that science is an authority, and if you know that scientific
“knowledge” changes all the time, then try to understand that racism was an
utterly “scientific” theory. That the
Hamitic principle regarding the Hutu and Tutsi was supported by science. Everywhere are uniforms with the authority of
skin color and guns and language telling them, with authority, to do
things. Even if those things are really,
really bad, they do them, the same as Americans. Here, the race ideology spoke with so much
authority.
Side note: for those that don’t know, the Hamitic principle
argues that those with lighter skin in Rwanda and elsewhere must have come from
an Arabic origin and were lighter skinned and therefore “better”. This is what, first, the Germans, and then
and even more conspicuously, the Belgians did in Rwanda. They divided people up by wealth and by
looks. If you had more cows or a “longer”
head or a longer nose or lighter skin or straighter hair, you were Tutsi. If you were darker, etc, then you were
Hutu. And they set the new “Tutsi” up to
rule.
A last word (I know, I know, I keep saying “last”), if you
didn’t enjoy reading about the true nature of people being shot or strangled or
bludgeoned or hacked to death, is that you should always be suspicious of any
claim or ideology:
1.
That makes claims based on anything “natural” or
“essential”. If you hear this, your
Spidey senses should already tingle because you are hearing evil.
2.
That draws lines between people and says that
one is better, particularly on the basis of being “natural”. Just look at all these lines, carving like a
machete through the flesh of humanity: women/men, black/white,
religion/religion, religion/atheism or agnosticism, young/old, poor/rich, capitalist/communist,
LGBTQ/heteronormative (or “straight”), fat/thin, healthy/sick, crazy/sane, and
the list just goes on and on and on in a straight line of dead bodies from the
beginning of civilization to what I suspect will be the end.
On a similar to my comment about the normal range of human
physiological variation and slightly more upbeat note: just think, science has recently found that
it would take no more than 1,000 years for an isolated racial community with
white skin supplanted to equatorial Africa to turn black and no more for a
similar community of dark skinned people to move to, say, Norway, to turn
white. Take that science you…um…science!
Again, on a similar and this time on a terribly serious and
totally silly note: you should all read this
compelling anthropological study of a little known tribe in the Western
hemisphere here:
It's short and to the point and really interesting.
And if you don’t get the joke, or if you do, you should read
(but only after you read the PDF you dork!) this Wikipedia article explanation:
I wanted to end up with a few zombie memes, but there are
literally thousands of truly hilarious ones.
So, no contest about it. If you
have some time to waste, just look it up on Google images. Otherwise, here are the immediate contenders:
If these images look bad and if I have less and of lesser
quality than I would like, imagine my frustration at spending an hour trying to
post a post that was already written! Internet
sucks today.
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