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The Lure Of The Lurid

A few days ago one of my online friends soberly announced that he had just seen a photo of Chris Farley's corpse on the Internet. The remains of the late comedian had appeared on Rotten.com, a site that, according to its own slogan, has been dispensing 'pure evil since 1996.' I remembered visiting the site a few years back but had managed to expunge it from my consciousness, like some traumatic early-childhood memory of falling into the toilet. Now I felt impelled to drop in for another visit -- not merely to contemplate Chris Farley's lifeless husk but to experience the dark shudder of unadulterated ghoulery for a few minutes as I made my way around the site. I felt myself pulled helplessly by some strange and sinister gravitational force -- call it the lure of the lurid. I imagine it's the same force that compels us to bend our necks as we're driving past the scene of an accident. It's not a pretty instinct, as instincts go, but it's an ancient one.

Until the Victorian era, public death was as common a spectacle as backyard barbecues are today. Roman citizens calmly strolled past victims of crucifixion on the main roads out of town, and they relished the sharp thrill of death in the arena (as long as it was happening to somebody else), whether by gladiators' swords or lions' jaws. During plague years, open carts full of twisted bodies would wind their way through the narrow streets of most European towns. The Aztecs used to watch their priests carve the beating hearts out of human sacrifices. In Shakespeare's time, the decaying heads of executed convicts decorated the entrance to London Bridge like ghastly Christmas tree ornaments. During the French Revolution, the freshly guillotined noggins of aristocrats were hoisted into the air to rousing cheers, while the English and Americans turned out in droves for public hangings. We like to look back on lost ages of innocence, but innocence must have been lost at an early age when death was a spectator sport.

In our time, death has been largely banished to the private chambers of our hospitals. Aside from veterans of war and emergency rooms, most of us pampered twentieth-century natives have ripened to full maturity without ever having glimpsed a human corpse outside of a funeral home. Our civilization might be sliding down the laundry chute, but it has done a remarkable job of protecting us from the spectre of real-life death. Instead, we grow up squealing at Hollywood horror films littered with teenage slasher victims. It's all harmless fun, and we can enjoy the mayhem without guilt while we munch on popcorn and slurp sticky soda. But don't we need more than pretend-corpses to satisfy our primitive bloodlust for death and carnage? Are we trying to repress an irrepressible human instinct? Are our inner Neanderthals starved for honest-to-God, bloodcurdling, blow-me-away glimpses of man-as-meat? 

The folks at Rotten.com evidently think so. The site has emerged from obscurity to service the needs of over 200,000 gore-deprived visitors each day. And in doing so, Rotten.com has carved out its own uniquely repulsive and edifying niche in the long-suppressed culture of death and depravity.

I arrived at Rotten.com and found it slickly designed as well as shrewdly written. This wasn't the low-budget home page of some seedy pervert with overdeveloped sideburns and two brothers named Earl. One section, irresistibly titled 'Celebrity Morgue,' treated us to death photos of Rasputin, Evita Peron, John Dillinger, Mussolini, Elvis, Jesse James, the infamously murdered Sharon Tate and the assassinated John F. Kennedy on the slab, his once-mirthful eyes vacant and troutlike, in several grim autopsy photos that I had already seen, bizarrely, on a TV documentary hosted by the affable Walter Cronkite. I beheld a purported photo of Edgar Allan Poe in his coffin (most likely the corpse of an unfortunate impostor) as well as Lincoln in HIS coffin (authentic but hazy). The photo that affected me the most was that of a twentieth-century icon linked with JFK in her lifetime: it was the face of Marilyn Monroe at the morgue, a somewhat grainy shot in near-profile, sheet pulled up to the chin, her celebrated countenance blotched and coarsened by death but still unmistakably hers. She looked tired and disappointed. Was this the face that launched the dreams of a hundred million men? I paused to reflect, then resumed my tour of the site. 

I viewed galleries of severed heads and hands, murder and suicide victims, autopsies, electrocutions and massacres. Red seemed to be the prevailing color in most of these shots. I observed, with some skepticism, a respectable-looking Asian gentleman apparently dining on a roasted infant; I cringed slightly at a flippantly captioned 'Burnt Crispy Person.'

Rotten.com wasn't entirely devoted to death; there were plenty of genitals, too. I spied at least a dozen grotesque examples -- large and small, male and female, human and subhuman -- as well as photographic evidence of people doing things that nature never intended for them to do. There were comical but harmless photos of Nixon bowling, Nixon meeting Elvis. 

But my mind kept returning to the images of death, and I began to gage my own response to the accumulated horrors. This, I suspect, is exactly what the crafty webmaster wanted us to do, and this is what connects Rotten.com to the 'shock art' now parading through museums around the world. Are we appalled? Numbed? Thrilled? Saddened? Scandalized? I can guarantee you that thousands of adolescent boys are gawking at the images and thinking, 'Heh-heh. Cool.' As for me, I was upset that I wasn't more upset. I kept clicking on photo after photo, almost as I might have checked out the antique maps on eBay. The photos threw horror at my waiting eyes, and I recognized the enormity of the horror. But somehow the slick format and flip commentary cushioned the blows. 

I was falling for the bait. Rotten.com seemed to be the ultimate expression of postmodern irony, the almost pathologically detached mentality that has infiltrated everything from literature to 'Seinfeld' to everyday conversation. To look upon horror and remain unmoved; to find amusement in the deaths of others: is it cool, or is it a subtle form of evil? Does such an attitude expose the unsightly underbelly of cynicism, or is it beyond cynicism? Did I become an accomplice to the horror by gazing at those photos? I had to ask myself those questions as I retreated from Rotten.com and into a cleansing book of nineteenth-century nature essays by John Burroughs. I never did find the photo of Chris Farley's corpse, and I'm content to let the poor man keep one last vestige of his trampled privacy. Meanwhile, I'd like to read about birds and trees for a while.

Cynic's Pick of the Week
So the U.S. finally apologized to China for the spy plane incident in which a Chinese fighter pilot was lost. Now it turns out that the lost fighter pilot was, in the words of Time magazine, a 'notorious hotdogger' who deliberately swooped into the path of the American plane. Still, the U.S. was expected to cough up 100% of the remorse before China returned the crew. For our next act, maybe we should apologize to Japan for Pearl Harbor.

© 2001 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. If you'd like this column to appear regularly in  your own site or publication, write to UPBEATmag@aol.com.

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

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