**Real Death, The Final Frontier
From Steve Irwin to U.S. soldiers in Iraq, there's still one video you
ain't gonna see on YouTube*
<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/09/22/notes092206.DTL>
*- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist <mailto:mmorford@sfgate.com>
Friday, September 22, 2006
*T*here is, apparently, videotape of beloved Aussie TV star and
naturalist Steve Irwin getting stabbed by the nasty bayonet-like tail of
a giant stingray. The video shows Irwin removing the lethal blade from
his chest, where it had pierced his heart, just before he loses
consciousness and dies almost instantly.
We will, most likely, never see this film. This is not because Irwin
had, so far as we know, no chance to utter "Crikey!" one last time
before leaping into the Great Crocodile Pit in the Sky.
No, we'll never see it because it is, quite simply, too much. It is more
than we can readily handle. It is The Line.
There exists an audio track from the remarkable and wonderfully bizarre
documentary film "Grizzly Man <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427312/>,"
where the hero, Timothy Treadwell, and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard are
gruesomely mauled to death by a giant, furious bear.
The audio (Treadwell had left the lens cap on the camera when the attack
occurred and hence there's no video of the death scene) is rumored to be
unspeakably, nightmarishly disturbing. There is footage near the end of
the documentary of director Werner Herzog listening to the track on
headphones. His face is all ash and quiet horror. He hands the
headphones back to Treadwell's friend and tells her to consider
destroying the tape. No one should ever hear this, he says. It is just
that disturbing. It is over The Line.
The Line is, of course, real death. That's it. That's our final
threshold, the only thing we really have left to call sacred, the
boundary we rarely want to traverse unless absolutely necessary, the
thing we simply do not want to see up close and personal and all over
YouTube. Witnessing actual death still holds us in powerful, petrified
thrall. For this we can all still be very grateful.
Here's why: Death remains our one true, delicious example of eternal
dark mystery. Sure, we don't understand the human brain, the soul, whale
song, the depths of space, the inexplicable success of Ashley Simpson.
But death trumps them all. What's more: We will never, ever figure it
out. Isn't that fabulous? This is what keeps us human. Lose that innate
fear, lose that terrified wonder of What Comes Next and we're what,
snails? Cockroaches? Ann Coulter? Exactly.
You might disagree. You might say that there are millions who /want/ to
see and hear these things, who claim some sort of tormented fetish for
actual pain and suffering and visible death. What's more, were that
Irwin video posted somewhere, if a bootlegged copy somehow made it to
YouTube, our morbid curiosity would very likely override our better
senses and millions of us would doubtlessly rush to it and click like
crazy just before terribly regretting it for the rest of the decade. You
might argue that fact. And you'd have a pretty good point.
But it's glorious irony, isn't it? That our inborn terror and fear of
death is the very reason we can't help but imitate its tropes and mock
its methods and play with its silky black robes like a dumb child
kicking around a live hand grenade? Death is our eternal fascination. We
cannot, by many estimates, get enough of it.
Just look: Not a night goes by without any number of brutal rapes,
tortures, murders on the various cop shows and hospital dramas on TV.
The stiff and insufferable "CSI" franchise, which includes the nation's
most popular shows, has brutal death as its contemptuous, beating heart.
"Six Feet Under," the most brilliant death-themed show ever, opened
every episode with a new, creative and lovingly detailed scene of
fatality. It was death as pop culture art form, all minimalist
cinematography and a pale green color palette and a sly soundtrack.
But it wasn't, you know, /real/. Fundamentalists may pule and quiver at
the sight of a woman's nipple on TV, NASCAR fans may spontaneously
combust at the sight of gay men kissing, but that ain't nothin' like the
sight of a young soldier getting struck by a bullet. Or a grizzly bear
slashing a woman to bits. Or someone jumping from, say, a very high bridge.
Oh yes. There is also a new documentary, much discussed
<http://www.sfgate.com/lethalbeauty/> in The Chronicle last year, all
about that famous and most popular of scenic suicide spots, the Golden
Gate Bridge. It's called, clearly enough, "The Bridge." The director,
Eric Steel, set up his cameras on nearby hills and let them run. He
captures people walking. He captures many of them stopping, looking over
the famous railing, pondering.
And then something shifts. Something gut-wrenching occurs. A few of
those ponderers do something different. They look. They climb over the
railing. They pause for a moment. They make a final choice ...
Then they jump.
The footage is brutally simple. Even the movie's trailer
<http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/thebridge/> plays up the
quietly disturbing nature of the act. You have but to watch just one
jumper to feel the quick nausea strike you like a punch in the gut. It
is perhaps similar to the footage of people jumping from the burning
twin towers on Sept. 11. Shocking, jarring, perspective-altering. And
not in a good way.
And don't think our fine government doesn't know the nauseating power.
Shots of flag-draped caskets coming back from Iraq? Footage of the
charred women and babies in Baghdad? Film of U.S. soldiers shooting
civilians, of soldiers being blown up by mines? All banned outright.
Support for Dubya's hideous little war would drop to less than zero if
those unspeakable images were to be broadcast (which is why, many argue,
the images absolutely /should/ be shown. Nothing like the raw gory death
of misguided American kids to shake up a nation).
"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war," summarized
the ever-pithy Donald "Black Heart" Rumsfeld. Oh Don, you big jokester.
You said a mouthful.
Should we celebrate the fact that there are some things that cannot be
taken away from the human experience or viciously co-opted by marketing
execs? Should we be glad, in an oddly morbid sort of way, that in the
age of wild gobs of ultraviolence in popular culture, we can still be
jarred to our core by actual death? You could say that.
You could say: We might be the most jaded and burned-out and
fear-pummeled culture on the face of the planet, but at least we have
real death. Sort of makes life worth living, no?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ready for more Morford? Mark can be seen (and heard) in various Bay Area
theaters starting Friday, September 22 through Sunday, October 1, as
part of writer/comedian Johnny Steele's "War On Error," a progressive
political comedy show. See JohnnySteele.com <http://johnnysteele.com>
for details!
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