The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium by Mark Dery

Author:Mark Dery [Dery, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9780802196125
Google: JbSGzfR-Q_IC
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Published: 2007-12-01T03:55:44+00:00

Damien Hirst, “Some Comfort Gained From the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything,” 1996. Steel, glass, cows, and formaldehyde solution. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube, London. Photographer: Stephen White.

6 / MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM: THE OPERATION

Autopsy. Copyright © Max Aguilera-Hellweg.

At the end of Poe’s gothic horror story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” the protagonist’s body dissolves, in an image worthy of Tales from the Crypt, into “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.” In truth, all bodies are “nearly liquid” masses of blood, bile, and soft tissue, as any who have seen The Operation, on the Learning Channel, know too well.

The cult-fave cable show offers more or less unabridged documentaries of actual operations, from brain surgery to bunion correction, heart reduction to hair transplant, bookended by before-and-after interviews with the patient. There’s at least one gut-clencher per episode, and moments of jaw-dropping surrealism, like the shot of steam swirling around an abdominal incision, in the hot camera lights, as the narrator informs us, “Dr. Gross is now putting temporary staples in the abdominal wall …” On occasion, there are unintentional laugh lines, like the surgeon’s offhanded observation, in the vasectomy episode, that “this operation was used in a more radical form to create eunuchs in the golden age of the Greeks.” Er, exactly how radical, doctor?

One episode documented what might be called an in-your-facelift, replete with close-ups of yellow fat globules being squelchingly pared off muscles, bloody slivers of skin peeled off eyelids, blobs of fat tweezed from the bags under each eye—fat which “on its own, without any prompting from us, is about ready to launch itself out of her eye,” as the surgeon matter-of-factly remarks. It’s Naomi Wolf s worst nightmare, as directed by David Cronenberg. At one point, the surgeon slips his gloved fingers under the anesthetized woman’s face and peels it back. After a lifetime’s exposure to the prosthetic horrors of special-effects artists like Tom “Night of the Living Dead” Savini, the patient’s limp, sallow skin seems somehow less real than painted latex, her glassy-eyed, slack-jawed face less convincing than the fake corpses in most horror movies.

It’s the body’s job, these days, to be a symbol of “detestable putridity” in the eyes of an information society characterized by an exaltation of mind and a contempt for matter, most of all the body—that aging, earth-bound relic of Darwinian evolution that Net junkies sneeringly refer to as “meat.” In late-twentieth-century America, Descartes’s mind/body split has widened into a neognostic chasm. When artificial intelligence theorists like Hans Moravec speculate about transferring human consciousness to robot ships and heading for the stars (the flesh being, you know, “so messy,” as Moravec puts it) or UFO cultists like the Heaven’s Gaters disparage their bodies as unworthy “vehicles” and the Earth as a cosmic discard destined for the recycling bin, they’re speaking the language of gnosticism, an early Christian heresy that reviled the body as a “corpse with senses” and the material world as the creation of an evil demiurge.

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