Showbiz Approach to Death Becoming a Worrisome Trend

Gerald L. Zelizer

Don't fret if you missed the recent 60 Minutes broadcast in which Jack Kevorkian assists the death of a terminally ill patient.

A second opportunity to indulge our collective appetites will be provided next summer when the Learning Channel will repeat a BBC program, which broadcast the actual death, including the final rattle, from cancer patient Herbie Mowes in Ireland.

A spokesperson for 60 Minutes attributed this program to the death doctor "trying to raise an issue." The network received its share of criticism for providing this peephole into death precisely during the November sweeps month, when networks seek maximum viewership in order to boost the prowess of local stations in setting the highest possible charge for advertisers.

But none of this death chic would occur if we the viewing public, once reluctant to acknowledge death let alone gaze at it, had not changed our tastes.

We are not yet the ancient Egyptian society, whose collective life -- at least of the rich and famous -- was preoccupied with preparing for death. But we are getting there.

The film industry, too, knows of our change of heart. The most recent, Meet Joe Black, is one of a batch of films, which are show-and-tell on death and dying. A month ago it was What Dreams May Come about heaven and hell, which was on the heels of One True Thing, depicting a daughter's relationship to her dying mother jazzed up with teary songs by Bette Midler. Last spring was Saving Private Ryan, lionized for portraying the gasping breath and gaping holes of death and dying on the battlefield.

Contrast this death stare with a time in America 50 years ago when the novel The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh satirized our culture's propensity to mask death. The setting was the Los Angeles funeral industry, where Whispering Glades provides deluxe service to deceased stars and their families, and the Happier Hunting Ground does the same for dead pets. At Whispering Glades, staff must refer to the corpses only as "Loved Ones."

Between then and now, we have been encouraged to confront our own deaths more realistically, sometimes with positive results. And the proliferation of hospice facilities, for instance, has contributed to a more realistic and caring approach to death and dying.

But at the same time, our preoccupation with death has grown, helped along by instruments of the larger cultural elite.

In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross contributed to this change by teaching readers of her book, On Death and Dying, the different stages of people confronting death.

The theater further set the trend with plays like Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box in 1977. The production was set in three cottages on the grounds of a California hospital where three terminally ill patients and their families look at death from different perspectives.

Last year, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's best-selling memoirs as a terminal cancer patient were a powerful addition.

The media accelerated this show and tell into the mass market. Watching reruns of the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, and reading the detailed accounts of Princess Diana's last moments were to share in the dying of the rich and famous with an immediacy that slaves of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs could only imagine.

What has caused this transformation from masked death to exposed death? The usual suspects are the approach of the millennium, aging baby boomers, and the proliferation of nonstandard religions that want to leapfrog over the institutionalism and bureaucracy of classic Judaism and Christianity to a more direct experience with spirituality both in and after life.

But I think there is a more comprehensive psychological reason that underlies all of these.

Locating death on the silver and TV screens provides us with the illusion that we can control what is uncontrollable.

I come from a religion whose instinct is to concentrate on life and not on death. Of course, each of us is better off when an awareness of death focuses our life. Because we know that we will die, each accomplishment and each relationship on Earth takes on even more significance. Our earthly days are not infinite, and we may run out of time to recover each relationship or accomplishment squandered.

But it is easier to watch soldiers dying on the screen on D-Day, than, for example, to devise effective strategies that will reduce teen-age suicide today. It is more innocuous to witness Dr. Kevorkian assisting a terminal patient to self-destruct than to concern ourselves with the destruction of children in America who die below the poverty line.

We should not permit death chic to transform us into new pharaohs, providing a ready market for television and cinema, because it is real life that suffers.