<<TRANSMATHOME

3.8 Death Film: Mondo, Necro and Fakes

The desire for the corpse is a sexual pathology, according to psychological discourse. It is never spoken of to my knowledge in forensic texts, despite the fact that the pathologist bases her/his life around the desire to touch, excavate and appreciate the value of the corpse. Thwarting desire for the corpse in society involves both a massive investment in the creation of a rigid discourse around the corpse as filth, while simultaneously retaining an irrational respect that invests the corpse with the subjectivity that is no longer animate within it. According to psychiatrists Louis Franzini and John Grossberg there are three broad categories of necrophilia:

1.) Violent necrophiles, who kill to obtain corpses for sex acts, or get a charge out of mutilating dead bodies.

2.) Fantasy necrophiles, who imagine or play-act sexual contact with corpses, often without direct physical contact

3.) Romantic necrophiles, the bereaved who because of their extreme grief cannot bear to be separated from their loved one, and continue to relate sexually to their beloved much as they did in life. [103]

The authors go on to recount the case of a violent necrophile, not a killer but a digger, who is also cited as a case study in Krafft Ebing’s famous Psychopathia Sexualis. [104] The necrophile, Sergeant Francois Bertrand, was seized with the desire to tear apart the corpses of females. Franzini & Grossberg state

Although his hands were bleeding, he continued to dig in a frenzy until the corpse’s abdomen was exposed. He tore it to pieces, then neatly refilled the grave. After this episode he proceeded to mutilate and destroy the corpses with his sword or pocket knife... he masturbated several times while touching the corpse’s intestines. [105]

Though the inclusion of masturbation places the act of Bertrand’s necrophilia entirely (and safely) within the realm of the primarily sexual, the rest of his actions - the mutilation, the careful focus upon the intestines as well as his display of neatness in refilling the grave - aligns him with the modern day performer of autopsy, despite Bertrand’s necrophilia being performed in the 1840s. His use of more than one ‘tool’ for evisceration and his desire to dig (which mirrors the pathologist’s relentless desire to dig into the body for information) at the cost of his own flesh makes us wonder if he also had a ‘murder bag’ for the scene of his crimes? Though Bertrand’s sexual psychopathology is ‘true’; it sounds as if it could be a filmic tale. Il Mostro e in Tavola... Barone Frankenstein is the story of a doctor, the familiar Baron Frankenstein, who ‘comes out’ as a necrophile. The revelation that this scientist, who works with corpses all day in order to create, investigate and re-animate, is a necrophiliac comes as little surprise. Baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier) lovingly unpicks the neck-to-navel scar of his female creation (Dalila Di Lazzaro), inserts his hand and later his penis into the wound, and as he fondles the entrails coos “spleens [sic], liver, kidney, gall bladder!” He promptly orgasms. The Baron’s tactile knowledge of the organs within his female zombie, and his arousal at their feel relies entirely on the fact that he is a doctor and hence familiar by touch with these organs. Similarly, necrophilia is L’Orrible Segreto del Dr. Hichcock! The necrophile here then, must be a doctor, not a crazy layperson, as the sexual psychopathology text would have us believe. The urban myth that those who work with corpses (though doctors of all kinds are pristinely avoided in this generalization) are often those who take sexual favors with them is not entirely apocryphal. Quigley points out “Those most often suspected of acts of necrophilia are those with easy (and private) access to the newly dead, including hospital orderlies, morgue attendants, and funeral home and cemetery workers.” [106] It could be suggested that the reason these people are suspected of necrophilia is their desire to work in the field, without wishing to excavate truth in the corpse, their non-aversion to being around corpses and their repudiation of the cultural conviction in the abjection synchronous with remnant subjectivity of the dead body.

Doctors are notably absent in this equation. Is this because their work is seen as ‘scientific’ or because the fondling of entrails, the fine slicing of flesh is not seen as sexual - is the necrophile only she or he who genitally derives pleasure from a corpse? The necrophile ironically is here constructed as completely sexually normative in act and in sexual preference except that the object is now deceased. [107] The fascinating pleasure of slicing and dicing for ‘real’ that is performed by forensics seems repressed, and only the slice-and-dice movie (or slasher film) is allowed to give pleasure. Films that include forensic details are objects of fascination. Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs (US, 1991) was the first horror film in history to win an Academy Award for best picture, and the first horror film since William Peter Blatty’s scripting of The Exorcist in 1973 to win best screenplay (by Ted Tally), which defines these movies’ success from the more common Academy Awards won by horror films, namely best special effects or best make-up effects. The Silence of the Lambs depicts an autopsy (though it is quite a pristine affair) and it also marries the excavation of clue and corpse. As the FBI agent searches for the serial killer responsible for the deaths of women, these women’s bodies become sites of knowledge also to be searched. [108] The popularity of this film comes from mass audiences indulging in the pleasure of corpse excavation; a pleasure that I’m sure no forensic pathologist would admit was the prime motivation for career choice. The audience enjoys the fascination of disgust as much as the ‘intellectualized encyclopedic’ body, but the combination of the two is entirely absent in forensic texts. Catching the killer by reading his psychological pathology runs concurrently with the reading of the cadaver, similar to cases of death through ‘sexual misadventure’ such as autoerotic asphyxia. Franzini & Grossberg cite the forensic pathologist’s task, in one particular asphyxophilia case, of the “ ‘psychological autopsy’ that augmented their traditional physical autopsy”. [109]   Clues in forensics, and hence in films which include forensics, traverse divided discourses and homogenize the texts of criminal artifacts, [110] flesh files and the psychological profile of the criminal mind, itself in the process of becoming artifact.

Even in film, the context in which the text is read plays a vital role. In the necrophiliac film there is much more likelihood of offence being caused than in a film such as Silence of the Lambs. The body must be given the ‘respect’ not it, but we, require. To libidinalize a corpse is to take it for what it really is, an object which cannot say no, and repulsion is a mingling of offence at the defilement of the corpse as well as disgust at what the corpse is and sexuality’s close proximity to that. There are, however, other kinds of corpse movies, [111] the mondo movie and the snuff film. Possibly the most famous mondo films in Australia are the Shocking Asia (Emerson Fox, Germany/Hong Kong, 1974) [112] series of films, which are relatively tame compared to other mondo movies not readily available in video stores or outright banned in Australia. Mondo films began due to a crossover in discourse. Though Mondo Cane (Gualtiero Jacopetti, Italy, 1962) [113] is credited with being the first mondo picture, even films such as Häxen (‘Witchcraft through the Ages’, Benjamin Christensen, Sweden, 1922) which claim to educate the audience in the ‘secrets’ of the world by shocking and entertaining them, include elements of mondo. The mondo movie is that which hides behind the veneer of factual education. It only ever shows footage of a documentary nature, but the presentation of this ‘factual’ documentary encourages the audience to look at it for shock and entertainment value. While this automatically suggests a less than honorable technique of film making to the ‘high art’ critical audience, it also places massive emphasis on directorial (i.e. author) intent, a concept which was all but abolished by Barthes and Foucault. Kerekes and Slater, in their definitive text Killing for Culture, point out that despite authorial intent and non-authorial intent being considered important in the contextualization of these films, the claim of passivity by the production team is a necessary myth for the genre

For many people celluloid is the truth - whatever it shows and whatever it says is not an issue for contention. Which is why Go, Go, Go World! can smugly proclaim in its advertising, ‘We didn’t make the world - we just photographed it!’.” [114]

The belief that celluloid exhibits that which was passively filmed, a concept that partners the documentary as truth idea, is not what mondo films are most outrageously provoking in their genre. It is true that the idea of the truth found in documentary is pushed when the sensational and ‘unserious’ is filmed rather than the serious or grave subject matter of other documentaries. But the mondo movie is also asking its audience to feel pleasure at sensationalism. Where a ‘serious’ documentary stays within its solemn discourse, begging of the audience a serious mindset, the mondo movie uses all the shocking things it films for pleasure rather than information. The corpse and the suspicion that forensics releases pleasure as well as information may be further examined through this form of film. The mondo movie could be compared to the forensic book which accompanies a photograph not with “... passage of the adjacent double [bus] wheel over the abdomen has extruded the intestines though the perineum” [115] but ‘can you believe the bus pushed the intestines out of the rectum?!’ In many ways this is what the forensic book is stating by including the unusual picture for the pleasure of other pathologists. Just as the mondo movie is a horror film masquerading behind a documentary purpose, so too the forensic text is an intellectual textbook hiding behind its dry discourse the pleasures it holds for a forensic pathologist with a passion for her/his work. Pedagogy, presumably, would be used as justification of interest, but when is interest only for learning and not for pleasure, and how is pleasure extricated from learning? As I have already stated pleasure insinuates a self, while learning is about the transition from ignorant subject to invisible observer. Taking ‘serious scientific’ images out of their intended purpose, where death strangely becomes science and not something that is irreducibly universal, claims that the scientific gaze or means of perception is sanctioned to see correctly. Similarly the documentary (rather than the mondo) is created by a director whose entire aim is to look and see but not to impose his look onto that which is filmed, an aspiration that smacks of all the same suspicious claims of objective knowledge upon which science founds itself. Documentary, like science, relies on what Virilio calls the “ineluctable progress of technology, in a technically liberated cinema. In August 1939 Grierson wrote that the ‘documentary idea should simply enable everyone to see better’.” [116] The camera takes on the fallacious objectivity of the microscope, where to look claims to inject nothing of the gazer. Virilio quotes Paul Valéry in the context of his argument stating “ ‘Man has extended his means of perception and action much more than his means of representation and summation’.” [117] Scientists and documentary makers contract the furthest reaches of space and the most minute parts of inner space into their overwhelmingly overvalued ‘objective’-subjectivities while all along claiming there is no distinction between (their) perception and summation. Pleasure is void because the viewer, like the scientist and documentary director is encouraged to simply see, passively, without any overlaying of subjective vision upon the image. In precisely this way death is imagined as being able to be known objectively in exactly the same way as natives in the African jungle or pathological cells under a microscope. According to science, because all seem to exist before the scientific observer, none can be overwritten with the observer’s subjectivity. Knowledge lays waiting to be captured by the microscope or camera. Knowledge of death is simply waiting to be viewed but any pleasure admitted in the image by the viewer is seen as unprofessional, disrespectful of the empiricism of death and hence perverse. Ironic that the subject so overvalued in psychoanalysis and philosophy becomes an anti-subject, a subject who claims not to be there, in scientific observation procedures.

There is little difference in watching a mondo movie to borrowing a forensics book and utilizing it for un-forensic purposes, and thus the offence that a mondo movie may cause, before there is a corpse in sight, is that of untamed discourse. The very high wall which separates the ‘real’ from the ‘unreal’ or filmed, is made gelatinous by the mondo movie. The audience only trusts, as with forensic texts, that what they are seeing is real because they have been told it is real, in a prologue or on the video cover. But this knowledge changes the audience and almost breaks the contract between audience and film of mutual trust at the unreality and un-believability implicit in the meaning of the word ‘movie’. The reasons for renting a mondo movie then could be because of the promise of the ‘real’, the desire to break the bond of eternal phantasm on the screen. Or it could be because a film which promises the ‘real’ sets itself apart from all things filmed, a claim it can never achieve by its very being as filmed footage. So the audience denies the claim of ‘real’, and whether the footage is ‘real’ or ‘unreal’ (filmic or faked) it will always be safe because it is set behind the glass of the television set.

The corpse in mondo movies is an unusually vindicated object. Where films such as NekRomantik 2 and Macchie Solari (‘Autopsy’, Armando Crispino, Italy, 1974) are unavailable or outright banned in Australia, the mondo movie is freely available. The tamer ones at least are available at most video stores, though even one of these, Africa Addio, available in Australia as Africa Blood and Guts, shows a man actually being shot. The less obscure The Killing of America, a film most Australians would be able to pick up at their local video store, depicts real death - murder, suicide, execution - ad nauseam. [118] Many obscure, mainly European horror films which deal with necrophilia and cadavers are suppressed by the censors in Australia, yet mondo films, which are also primarily European produced are available freely. Is there a belief that the ‘real’ cannot be helped, its existence cannot be suppressed because it is ‘real’ despite the fact that it is still, by virtue of being filmed, on a screen? A film from an imagination that depicted the most diluted of the forensic images discussed, would undoubtedly lead to an outright ban. What, then, is the ‘real’ corpse? Is it an unshakeable signifier, whereas the faked corpse is something we are able to prevent signifying before its existence? The availability of the mondo movie could be constructed almost as a conspiratorial move which severs our desire to see faked death (hence we would make no complaint towards censorship) by illustrating in garish doco-style the grainy, sensationalized real deaths of people. This aim towards reality misses the point of the phantasy of death. The examples included in this chapter have already shown that the faked death in film is often glamorous, clean and potentially erotic in its performance of a state no one can actually phantasize. Perhaps if context were entirely absent, a condition that could not exist but hypothetically shall for the moment, the audience may wonder at the lack of color or sheen upon the corpses of a mondo film, put it down to a low budget or lack of imagination. But more likely they would not know the difference. Death image, like death itself, is impossible to pinpoint, is difficult to define and is as tentative being ‘real’ as it is performing the real.

The film Men Behind the Sun (T.F. Mous, Hong Kong, 1987) caused censorship uproar in Australia for the violence it depicted. What seemed to cause less of an uproar is the suggestion that real cadavers were used in the film’s many scenes of autopsy, experimentation and mass graves. [119] Upon its very quiet subsequent video release the cover claims no sensationalist use of corpses in the film. Was this ‘serious’ film, about the atrocities performed on the Chinese by the Japanese during World War II, above crossing discourses to include a curious form of entertainment alongside its ‘social moral’ message? Why then were real corpses used? It is clear that those audiences who know about the real corpses would watch the film differently, yet frequently audiences are found saying ‘that corpse looks real’ in high-camp films such as NekRomantik 2 when those who have actually seen a ‘real’ corpse are probably few. The real corpse itself does not resemble itself. In university medical morgues, where embalmed bodies lie for the educational purposes of the students, the age of the bodies since death, usually about 18 months to two years, gives them a waxy sheen and a stiffness whereby they cannot be imagined as ever being alive. They could be described as looking like dummies or dolls. In the documentary on Tom Savini Scream Greats (Fangoria, US, 1988) a crew-member who posed for a decapitated rubber head recalls placing the head (whose mouth gaped open and shut by mechanical mechanism) on his bed. His mother found it and went into shock, because she did not even contemplate it being ‘unreal’. Fakery and the contextualization of images as ‘real’ are the prime features of the next form of death film - snuff.

The snuff film is as mythical and as prevalent as urban mythology itself. What is a snuff movie? It is supposed to be a film where a human is killed for ‘real’ for the purpose of being filmed. Unknown amounts of films have claimed to be snuff, despite the threat of criminal prosecution this carries. By claiming to be a snuff film, the film guarantees its own success. Fascination with the corpse and the mechanism of death drives the snuff audience. This may relate back to the idea that death is not a moment, not a substance that may be seen or known in present time but that is always retrospective, futuristic or fake. Perhaps the idea of the snuff film is not, as many believe, taking pure pleasure in the suffering of another, but a desperate attempt to ‘know’ death by watching it in the ‘real’. To know that one has watched a ‘real’ death is almost to harden oneself to death by falsely believing that by seeing one knows. The pleasure then in watching a death film in the ‘real’ is compromised by the driving desire to somehow overcome the fear of nothingness that accompanies the fear of death. We fear death because no one knows what it is or what happens so by watching it maybe we will know. Lingis states “It is this death that makes our surfaces appear to one another not as contours enclosing chunks of subsistent substance but as surfaces of exposure to one another, surfaces that are afflictions upon one another.” [120] Like amateur forensic pathologists, we hopefully watch the purported ‘snuff’ film to see the exposed surfaces and perhaps in them to ‘see’ death - what it is, what it feels like, what happens after. But the opening of the flesh of another, instead of offering information, offers only affliction. To the non-pathologist the opening of another’s flesh, on ‘real’ film or in three dimensions, is the opening of our own body’s potentiality for becoming pure (only) flesh. This may be the reason the layperson has such a problem with the task of forensic pathology - why does the pathologist’s subjectivity not suffer the affliction of the surfaces of a corpse’s flesh as we do? Even the face of the strangulation victim in forensic texts acts as an interior surface (interior because it was always there but only opened up after death) which afflicts, most powerfully. It is defacialized in the sense that it tells us not who that person is but traces that person’s suffering. This perhaps is the ‘face of pain’ that James Elkins claimed to see. It is the moment when faciality actually admits to telling us what we believe we see, rather than who we are looking at. By watching snuff we are not made sentient about death but only about our potential to die. “Whenever death can be designated as ‘soon’ the dying has already begun” states Elaine Scarry, “Ibbieta [from Sartre] is dying not because he has yet experienced the damage that will end his life but because he has begun to experience the body that will end his life, the body that can be killed, and which when killed will carry away the conditions that allow him to exist.” [121] Death in film, in forensics texts, in front of our eyes, exists only as something that happens to others, to those who have bodies, which have been reduced to pure body. The idea of death encroaching is the moment when the body finally makes its supreme power over the mind, the psyche, subjectivity felt. It is the moment that the subject realizes it is nothing but body, and it is subject to its own body, that its subjectivity may only be an idea, never a reality. The snuff movie focuses upon the body of subjectivity, rather than the body of the character, the fake model or the accidental victim. It is a purposeful annihilation of a subject by victimizing it to its own body’s supremacy (over whether the subject lives or dies) and vulnerability (to everything outside and inside).

Whether snuff movies actually exist, the idea of them being real is what creates their appeal. The fact that they are defended and prosecuted reveals the fear of the existence of a desire to purposefully cause the death of another within a film that may be exposed to the eye. By watching one becomes a participant, a crony in this ordeal. Like looking through a forensic book, the guilt of watching a snuff movie is the sickness felt at violence towards the body borne of a sickness at the body’s potential for violence and breakdown from it. It also evinces the humanity and inextricable disgust invested in the corpse. In snuff both the victims on-screen and the viewer are victims and perpetrators of violence: violent representation of death on-screen, violent digestion of disruptive image off-screen; the victim as victim of on-screen death stands against the viewer’s breakdown off-screen. Though I do not claim to have seen any ‘real’ snuff movies, those I have seen which have since been proven fake still positioned me, at time of watching, witnessing a real death. Faces of Death 1-4 (Conan Le Cilaire, US, 1978-1990) were famous for a time as snuff films until they were meticulously proved fake by a multitude of articles, in books such as Killing for Culture, but especially on the net, [122] which took each scene and described its various flaws. But by ‘proving’ their ‘untruth’, these theorists were buying into the idea that truth may exist on film. Whether a snuff film ever depicts a ‘real’ death or not, it would be virtually impossible to tell. The deaths in Faces of Death 1-4 range from obvious fakes to real deaths, which are actually taken from stock news footage (such as US State treasurer R. Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out on television). Autopsies are also shown. Other films such as Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust claim to have footage of real murders ‘found’ by filming primitive tribes in South America to avoid claims of murdering in a ‘civilized’ country. This film is also a fake snuff, admitted by the director himself. In an appearance at the Eurofest Horror film festival in London in September of 1998 Deodato relayed his idea of reality. He claimed that the natives he used for Cannibal Holocaust were not ‘native enough’ in appearance so he asked them to wear wigs that fulfilled his idea of what a native cannibal look like. The film series Guinea Pig (Kazuhito Kuramoto, late 80s Japan) was investigated by the US FBI as a real snuff film. [123] Actual snuff films no doubt exist due to the proliferation of home-video cameras and murderers. There are film footage files of various serial murderers who taped their victims (Leonard Lake), but this is a situation, as with child pornography, where it is the crime that is primary, especially, and importantly for the victim. The representation of such is a secondary and almost irrelevant feature. When it becomes important is when institutions begin to speak for and in place of victims. [124] The common fantasy is that snuff movies are an industry made mainly for the filming of death and not the murdering of someone with a camera handy. Linda Williams states

Even after the hoax was revealed though, the idea of snuff continued to haunt the imagination. For many the horror shifted from the bloody content of the film to the spectacle of the viewers who would pay to see what they thought was the ultimate orgasm. ‘Going all the way’ in hard core could now encompass the possibility... of the perverse pleasure of witnessing the involuntary spasm of death. [125]

Making death into a capitalist commodity haunts the disgust behind the concept of snuff movies while also being a driving force in wanting to watch one - to ‘own’ death, to grasp it, have it, experience it and hence no longer fear it - an aim which is as phantasmatic as the existence of the films which drive it.  The body is continually bypassed for the person - is s/he dead yet? Yet only the body is able to dictate the divide between life and death. While ‘death’ remains a phantasmatic concept to grasp through witnessing ‘it’, ‘the dead’ have served their purpose and are redundant. Hollywood film continually represents death but not ‘the dead’ - the murder of an other is never passed over for the affect of the self when confronted with the corpse. The glory of death is not the gory dead; a material death is always bypassed for a conceptual death. In annihilative death it is the death of the phantasmatic subject, in regressive and aggressive death it is the killing off of ‘some thing’, not acknowledging that while we were bodies in life we continue to be bodies in death, regardless of whether we are embodied as subjects. The repudiation by culture of the corpse (as corpse and not simply as a series of clues) is perhaps simply a continuation of the repudiation of the body in life. A particular kind of subject stands as the most valuable subject and hence the least susceptible to its own body (and bodily signifiers). If this subject is a white, youthful male it is only such a subject because culture refuses to focus on the significations of its body when compared to bodies of difference who become all body - through color, through sex and so on. The corpse both represents subjects as purely susceptible to their own bodies, and demands a confrontation with many ideas culture actively negates in order that living subjects may ‘be’ (Kristeva’s abject).

People do not want to know about the details of forensic or funereal work because they frequently find those who ‘work’ with death disdainful. However, there are currently huge numbers of students enrolling in forensic science streams, and representations of forensic work are more popular in film and on television than ever. The most important element in this seemingly unbalanced equation is, however, the emphasis on ‘work’ when we speak of those who work with corpses. The clues, the knowledge and the praxis around the dead body, remain its only ‘attractive’ features. Its capital ability to produce answers redeems its being as the supreme symbol of capital waste. The corpse is repressed or re-repressed by its transformation from waste symbol of abjection to a ‘working’ object that ‘tells’ us scientific truths. Science is further justified in its search for truth by pointing out that the most useless symbol in culture, the corpse, is extremely useful in excavating truths, and even more so because in death the corpse is hyper-object-ive. It cannot lie because it no longer exists as such. The marketing of the idea of snuff also involves dirtying one’s hands by working with death and hence inspires horror and revulsion. The passivity and absence of death is muddied by the active workings of those who focus on the body post-or in-mortem. The cadaver and the present absence of the subject are made past tense, repressed by forgetting the existence of the corpse. To focus upon presence, to work towards answers in the future by using the monumental symbol of past tense which is the corpse not only crosses discourse but time and body space. The image of the corpse is suppressed because it is death as presence rather than subjectivity passed. We say ‘passed away’ not ‘now we are corpse’. Death and the corpse remain objects of abject-ed imagination which divide discourses - of the scientific and social, the real and unreal - while giving up in their signified absence, concepts of self, truth and falsity.

<<TRANSMATHOME|NEXT>>