COLUMN

Another Body on Another Slab

Another Body on Another Slab

Soraya Roberts
The Critic
no. 6, Spring 2022

There’s no end to capitalism’s ability to erode culture and the self, and no end to Soraya’s ability to hone in on all the ways it happens. She’ll be here in every issue, showing us how. In this one, all our columnists started with one phrase: “marginalized bodies.”

I’ve never seen a dead body, but I know exactly what one looks like. I know it looks like a battered young woman who’s somehow still beautiful even though she’s lifeless. I know because that’s all you see — in the steady stream of crime series that Netflix pumps out, in every foreign crime drama that finds its way here, in almost every crime movie anyone makes anymore, even in most real-life crime news. Objectification is so culturally ingrained that it follows us into the afterlife.

In the Icelandic crime series Black Sands (Svörtu Sandar), the dead body is as beautiful as you would expect it to be. A conventional version of beautiful. A television version of beautiful. Which is to say white, thin but not too thin, voluptuous but not too voluptuous, angled cheekbones, dainty nose, full lips, long hair in the right places (head), no hair in the wrong places (armpits, legs). “She’s cute,” a young police officer whispers to his friend, as a newly arrived female cop inspects the body. “You’re talking about the cop, right?” his friend replies with a smirk. When the female cop subsequently pulls the deceased woman’s pants down to give her a rectal exam (to determine her temperature and hence her time of death), she has to motion for the two men to turn around. This dead, almost marble-colored cadaver, eyes glassy and head bloody, is a sex object.

It fits the plot, to present the victim this way, but that makes it no less disconcerting. On-screen, a beautiful body, even dead, is often a sexually attractive body. As though this aspect of the woman — because as I mentioned before, the corpse is usually a woman — is eternal. A woman is beauty is sex. Is an object.

Marginalized people are often reduced to their bodies — but, paradoxically, that body always exists in relation to the individual within it, even when that person is dead. Without the person inhabiting the body and everything that person means to the people around them, the body means nothing; it just is. Marginalization plays out starkly in death. Gender, race, weight, ability: all of it is distilled to the essence of prejudice, the reduction of a person to the skin they are in. And on-screen, that person is often fictional, embodied by an actor who can never truly fill them in as a full, complex human, so the body doesn’t even have the benefit of existing in relation to a real individual. The deceased is diminished and then diminished again.

I’m trying to think of the times in which the corpse in a crime series hasn’t had that old Hollywood-starlet brand of beauty; there aren’t many. The first exception that comes to mind is not a series but a film, David Fincher’s 1995 serial killer thriller Se7en, in which a shockingly distended dead body is the very reason the person ends up nothing but that. The murders that animate the film’s plot are carried out according to the seven deadly sins. Gluttony is the one viewers tend to remember, because of its visceral horror. I remember the victim’s white skin marbled with purple veins, I remember his dirty white vest, I remember the dank apartment, I remember his face shoved into a bowl of noodles. I remember Brad Pitt, agog, walking around this fiction whose stomach has burst inside him after he was forced to eat to the point of death, shining his flashlight on what is presented as the pinnacle of American degradation — a fat man overeating. I’d forgotten the autopsy scene, but watching it again I was surprised the victim’s corpse fit on the metal slab; the slab always seemed designed only for “beautiful” women. As the pathologist in Se7en says, “It took four orderlies just to get him on the table.” This man is no longer a man. He is a placeholder for gluttony, reduced in death to nothing but excess.

“When you look at a fat person now, regardless of your own weight, you see a manifestation of ob*sity because of a social process called pathologization, which… reduces an individual down to the qualities or stereotypes of a disease as dictated by dominant medical knowledge.”

Read Spring 2022’s feature story, “No Health, No Care.”

I’m trying to think of the times in which the corpse in a crime series hasn’t had that old Hollywood-starlet brand of beauty; there aren’t many. The first exception that comes to mind is not a series but a film, David Fincher’s 1995 serial killer thriller Se7en, in which a shockingly distended dead body is the very reason the person ends up nothing but that. The murders that animate the film’s plot are carried out according to the seven deadly sins. Gluttony is the one viewers tend to remember, because of its visceral horror. I remember the victim’s white skin marbled with purple veins, I remember his dirty white vest, I remember the dank apartment, I remember his face shoved into a bowl of noodles. I remember Brad Pitt, agog, walking around this fiction whose stomach has burst inside him after he was forced to eat to the point of death, shining his flashlight on what is presented as the pinnacle of American degradation — a fat man overeating. I’d forgotten the autopsy scene, but watching it again I was surprised the victim’s corpse fit on the metal slab; the slab always seemed designed only for “beautiful” women. As the pathologist in Se7en says, “It took four orderlies just to get him on the table.” This man is no longer a man. He is a placeholder for gluttony, reduced in death to nothing but excess.

It’s telling which of the seven deadly sins (pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth) are represented by women in this film. Lust is a prostitute killed by a bladed strap-on, pride is a model who commits suicide after being disfigured, and, of course, worst of all, envy. We don’t even see this victim: the beautiful husband’s reaction to the head of his beautiful wife — her death representing the killer’s envy of their life together — is enough to manifest it in our minds. Even in our heads, the woman endures as an object of desire.

Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer (left), alive and well, in a flashback with Lara Flynn Boyle.

The forerunner to the glut of small-screen corpses was another object of desire: Laura Palmer. Almost two decades before critics would ask why there are so many dead women on television, Twin Peaks co-creator David Lynch was casting around for a blonde nobody “just to play a dead girl.” The dead girl was simply a narrative catalyst to unearth the rot within the fictional town of Twin Peaks. “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.” is the first description we get of her. At worst, she is simply a body washed up on shore; at best, she looks great in her prom portrait. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” inquired the ads for the series.

No one was asking who Laura Palmer was, but actress Sheryl Lee showed up to answer the question anyway. Lee is an example of what happens when a real woman takes the place of a body — the body ceases to be just that. After Lee was cast, Lynch added flashbacks to flesh her character out, but he ultimately decided even that wasn’t enough.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the 1992 big-screen prequel to the series, was made to resurrect Laura Palmer as a fully-fledged person. “I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside,” Lynch said. “I wanted to see her live, move, and talk.” Film had a much lengthier tradition with crime, so it would likely have been a lot easier for Lynch to rework the character here. Fire Walk with Me tells the tale of a young woman destroyed by incest. And while she still ends up dead, wrapped in plastic — a body on the beach, just like the body in Black Sands — Laura Palmer becomes a person here. Her history is known; her death is inseparable from her life. And this time around she dies at the end, so her objectification is finally corrected: she is no longer just a body now, she is a human being.

“When you look at a fat person now, regardless of your own weight, you see a manifestation of ob*sity because of a social process called pathologization, which… reduces an individual down to the qualities or stereotypes of a disease as dictated by dominant medical knowledge.”

Spring 2022’s feature story, No Health, No Care

Soraya Roberts is the author of In My Humble Opinion: My So-Called Life. Along with being a columnist and editor-at-large here at Pipe Wrench, she is a columnist for Defector and is currently working on a book about criticism.

Portrait by Libby Greenfield

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Breai Mason-Campbell

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Marquisele Mercedes