Hearts without Names

All over Seattle, there are billboards and buses showing bodies -- the insides of dead human bodies. This is not a metaphor; it is advertising for a science/entertainment exhibit of preserved cadavers called "Bodies: The Exhibition." It is hard for me to get past the "I see dead people" aspect of this, but on reflection it's pretty amazing.

The exhibition website describes it as an educational exhibit that tells the story of ourselves "with reverence and understanding." I would hope so. These are the real remains of real human lives: The muscles, bones and skin that grew with these people from childhood. Legs and backs that worked for a living. Lungs that breathed and brains that dreamed. Arms that held lovers and cared for babies. These bodies aren't just artificacts of life -- they were life itself.

In every culture, human remains are treated with some kind of ritual and reverence. Even when they are destroyed through cremation or funeral pyres, it is not because they are so much waste -- it is because they have so much relevance. For the people who became the "Bodies" exhibition (all former Citizens of China), their funerals consist of a transportation across the United States for public education and viewing. The exhibition is their final rest.

I love science -- in fact, I love anatomy -- and find myself staring in wonder at the complex interplay of tendons and muscles on display I see on the side of the Metro Route 15X bus. Perhaps the exhibit itself (like others, such as the display of ancient Egyptian mummies in Chicago's Field Museum) lists the dead by name and respectfully asks for prayers in their memory. But the advertising (which is everywhere) doesn't. I see a skull without a face; I see a heart without a name. I know science and education are public and social goods. But is this?

I'm happy to find, on doing some quick research, that it's not just me: The Seattle P-I has written a cogent editorial about consent; unlike human cadavers used in medical study (which I have seen, in educational settings), there is no evidence that the people exhibited intended to donate their remains to public display. The Exhibition has affirmed that it has a "contract with a Chinese university" which, while it apparently guarantees the bodies are not from political or religious prisoners, doesn't say much else about the source or intention of the remains. The Stranger's article, "Unrest in Pieces," includes an article written by an employee there who describes the moral and political ambiguities of law and death in China.

So at least it's a "controversy," in the headline-grabbing sense. Yet I'm still kind of surprised that this is this where our standards are: It's socially acceptable to display tastefully flayed dead bodies on billboards, as long as they weren't executed for political reasons by a totalitarian government. Apparently, under our American values system, the victims would be much more sympathetic if they were killed for exercising their civil rights. Perhaps it would be okay if they were criminals, executed for morally reprehensible crimes like rape or muder. Or best of all if they'd simply died "naturally" from malnutrition, disease, poverty or unsafe work conditions.

I wonder whether the cause of death even matters. Or is it that, in contemplating the specifics of individual human deaths, we must see these as individual human lives. And maybe the issue of "consent" distracts us from the real moral question of whether there are some things just too intimate to buy and sell, no matter who consents. Anna Nicole Smith, for instance, has apparently sold the video of her cesarean section to Entertainment Tonight (sorry, not linking to that one). Like the Bodies Exhibition, it speaks its own truth (yes, that is a "section" cut out of a real woman, knifed in half and bleeding, crying through drugs for her baby). It is indeed educational. But the fact that we can view it so casually (even unwittingly -- be careful clicking on links that read "Anna ET Video, TMI") raises questions of exploitation, profit, and dignity.

When it comes to prostitution and pornography, our culture draws the line -- too much potential for abuse, too much exploitation, and at some point, just "too much" -- consent or not. Yet when it comes to death, we tend to deny its intimacy. I remember being so disturbed by the decaying flesh of the Pirates of the Carribean Zombie-Ghosts. Why is it cinematically appropriate to represent the inner structure of a human arm as it loses its rotting skin, but a healthy woman breast feeding a child is quickly criticized as "too much?" Death, violence, injury, surgery -- these involve our vulnerability, privacy and humanity, as surely as sex does. But we're supposed to act tough -- to turn away -- to shake it off -- to see it as tecnical, academic, and scientific. What have we lost?