"Bodies, Inc.'

Sunday in the morgue with ghouls:
A few thoughts about gainful employment for the dead

ROBERT ZALLER

When Gunther von Hagens's "Body Worlds" first showed up in Philadelphia for an extended run at the Franklin Institute in 2005, I wondered at the throngs eager to see it. Since then, another show called Bodies . . . the Exhibition has received a wildly successful nationwide tour that has now become, apparently, a worldwide carnival, Even pre-civilized societies treat the human corpse with respect. There are laws that prohibit abusing the dead, or exploiting them for profit.

It did not reassure me that the Franklin Institute show’s promoter is a German. Displaying corpses in amusing poses, with witty props and paraphernalia, put me in mind of Nazi lampshades made out of human skin.

Some people I know did see the show, and reported no regret or revulsion. It was an acceptable frisson, a modest entertainment in the carnival that our culture itself has become.

I tried to think this through. I considered seeing the show myself, not for the display of the dead but to observe the behavior of the living. I gave it a pass. I have a pretty strong stomach, or so I like to think, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to see schoolchildren being taught to ridicule human remains.

Propped up in carefree gaiety

Of course, the deal here was that the bodies were not in what would have been their actual corporeal condition, but altered by a process called plastination that allowed them to be displayed in a partly eviscerated condition without fear of decomposition. In short, they were partly real objects, and partly manufactured ones.

The show’s promoters promised not only entertainment but also medical enlightenment. Here were cadavers that could be safely beheld, not on a dissecting table with the stench of blood, but propped up in attitudes of carefree gaiety, like the characters in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George.

We dress up dead people all the time as if they were living, like the jocund Ben Franklin who makes his daily rounds among the tourists in Old City; we exhibit cave men in natural history dioramas. Ralph Archbold, the actor who plays Franklin, though, is most assuredly living; and the figures in dioramas— at least the human ones— are sculpted objects. An actor with exposed viscera strapped around him wouldn’t be amusing (a Center City scam employed such a device several years ago to stun horrified passersby into shelling out money); a mere diorama would hardly attract millions of customers around the world. The gimmick in Bodies is that the bodies are real and fake— comfortingly fake, so that one merely beholds another simulacrum in our increasingly virtual world; excitingly real, because what one sees was certifiably once a man. And would you ever guess the fabric my embroidered lampshade is made of?

The Chinese connection

The original Body Worlds relied entirely on voluntary donors who agreed to donate their bodies while they were still living. But not long after the rival Bodies began its current hit run, questions began to surface as to the provenance of its corpses. It was noticed that they appeared to be of Chinese origin, although most traces of ethnic origin had been erased. The Chinese, as is well known, do a flourishing business in executions, as well as in the covert sale of body parts and organs.

Sure enough, the bodies were from China, but no hard evidence about them remained. According to a joint statement by Premier Exhibitions, the owner of Bodies, and the New York State Attorney General’s Office, “There is no written record that any of those persons [displayed] consented to the plastination and exhibition of their bodies. Rather, those bodies were unclaimed at death, collected by the Chinese Bureau of Police, and delivered to . . . universities in China for education and research” (New York Times, May 30, 2008, B2).

“Unclaimed” and “collected.” Uh-huh. “Consented to plastination.” None too likely.

Satisfaction or your money back

According to the settlement between Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Premier, the current exhibit at South Street Seaport must now state that it cannot affirm that the bodies on display were not victims of torture and execution, and must offer reimbursement— at $28.72 a head— for aggrieved former patrons. I don’t think this will necessarily make much of a dent in business; as one 85-year-old tourist commented, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. What difference does it make?”

On the other hand, a bill introduced into Congress last month by Rep. Todd Atkin (Republican of Missouri), would ban the importation of plastinated human remains into the U.S. No problem here, either; Premier is already examining potential “donations” of bodies from within the U.S. Texas would be the obvious place to look, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has given the go-ahead to resume executions. Consent might not be that much of a problem, either: a few years ago, a condemned Texas prisoner agreed to have his body sliced and diced by cell section in the interests of science. Imagine getting paid to educate and amuse the general public!

Let’s not forget the 220-odd residents of Pennsylvania’s Death Row, either— one of the true unexploited assets of the Commonwealth. If whole neighborhoods can be sacrificed for the sake of casinos, can’t Philadelphia’s convicted killers do their bit for tourism?

Of course, there are still all those bodies drifting downriver from the recent Chinese earthquake, all dead of natural causes. A pity to waste such a windfall . . . but I’m sure the Chinese authorities are already on the case. At the very least, there’ll be no reason to have any empty seats at the Beijing Olympics this summer.



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