Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary by Malkowski,J.

Reviewed by: Candi K. Cann, Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA

In the 80s, when I was a middle-schooler, the video Faces of Death, a film that demonstrates various violent deaths and acts, circulated its way through American suburbia along with horror movies, video games, and teenage rebellion. In particular, Faces of Death seemed to be popular with boys. My younger brother and his friends would spend hours discussing the various violent deaths depicted in the movie, without, I believe, ever having watched it. The film was taboo because of its violence and subject matter, but also depicted material that few people in middle-class White America ever encountered—in real life, or up until then—in film. Like pornography, Faces of Death provided a means for people to view and discuss death and violence, subjects that both scared and fascinated them. In the pre-Internet age, passing a pirated copy of a banned film from person to person also operated as a sort of bonding ritual that allowed for a rebellion as spectator, but not necessarily as participant, and provided opportunities for people to discuss what these death acts signified. Today, however, in the Internet age, the genre of death recordings has expanded significantly and is much more easily accessible via the World Wide Web. Videos of acts of both dying and death are posted daily and most people who view them are not with others, but alone as they view these images on personal laptops and smart phones.

In her book, Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary, Jennifer Malkowski, PhD, assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at Smith College, traces the trajectory of recorded death images and posits ethical challenges regarding their use and purpose. She begins her examination with postmortem photography, arguing that while photography captured images of the dead, it did so in a “too late” fashion (p. 28), often photographing the dead subjects as a substitution for the lack of a photo of the subject while they were living. In this way, photos were not merely unsatisfactory, but also elusive, unable to capture the living alive and not doing justice to the dead.

Malkowski goes on to describe the role of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries in both documenting war and the circulation of lynching photographs. The limitations of photographic technology meant that photography could not capture the action of a battle, but rather only its results. The need for still subjects and the lengthy process of exposing and developing film meant that photography couldn’t work in real time, but only as a commentary to war and its effects. Malkowski argues that these limitations were capitalized upon with lynching photographs, since the dead subject demonstrated, postmortem, the deadly power of White supremacy. She deftly criticizes the U.S. government’s tendency to censor photographic coverage of the two World Wars (which prevented some of the more gruesome photos from being published and circulated), while not merely allowing, but indirectly condoning the circulation of lynching photographs in both media and the U.S. mail. This aspect of Malkowski’s argument is what I most appreciated about her book. She is not merely documenting the rise in the prevalence of death photography and film; rather, she forces the reader to engage with the ethical issues she explores behind such media, along with their political implications.

From photography, Malkowski moves on to an examination of dying as portrayed in film and the push to “capture” death as a culmination of a life well-lived. In her second chapter, “The Art of Dying on Video: Deathbed Documentaries,” Malkowski challenges the assumptions behind the “good death” movement, which emphasizes finding meaning even in the final act of life. She observes, “When death is meant to be a final expression of one’s unique personhood, the natural ‘moment of death,’ becomes a homogenous obstacle to that expression” (p. 73). Death is more often than not a process, rather than a moment, and thus the filming of dying and death were often tedious, and uneventful, antithetical to the medium of film.

In Chapter 3, “‘A Negative Pleasure:’ Suicide’s Digital Sublimity,” she moves from the general filming of dying and death to the emergence of a death film genre geared toward the recording of suicide, with a searing analysis of The Bridge, a film that recorded an entire year of footage at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, documenting suicide jumps from the bridge. According to Malkowski, “one viewer wrote about it [The Bridge] as ‘Faces of Death’ for the Starbucks crowd” (p. 149). Malkowski questions the ethics behind films such as The Bridge which focus on recording suicidal acts rather than intervening. She posits that many people jumping to their death in such a public place actually want to be stopped from their decision to die. Malkowski worries that films such as The Bridge are problematic because of the statistical probabilities for copycat suicides and wonders why the Golden Gate Bridge authorities haven’t built a jumping barrier to prevent suicide deaths. Malkowski’s emphasis on the need for a barrier reminds readers that the “jumpers” one sees in The Bridge are real people and not merely a product of cinematographic construction. On that note, in 2017, the bridge’s budget committee has apparently voted for such construction to begin, but as of the publication of her book and this book review, construction has not yet begun.

Chapter 3 reminded me of the recent Netflix hit TV show, Thirteen Reasons Why, based on a novel by the same name. A huge cult classic that addresses teen bullying, sexting, and date rape, Thirteen Reasons Why also demonstrates in graphic detail the suicide of its main character, Hannah Baker, whose postdeath voice narrates the episodes with a series of audio tapes she has left behind for her friends. The show is well-acted and extremely well-done; however, it is also highly problematic for its targeted teenage audience as it demonstrates an effective way of completing suicide and presents the narrator as somehow still alive postmortem. With the second series of Thirteen Reasons Why coming out soon, and its wild popularity among both middle-school and high-school age teens, more therapists and scholars should be speaking out about the importance of suicide prevention by watching for “copycat suicides.” Malkowski’s emphasis on activism is an important reminder of one of the most valuable aspects of our roles as death educators.

In Chapter 4, “Streaming Death: The Politics of Dying on YouTube,” she quickly moves from exploring the shock sites online (she terms them—accurately, in my opinion as “death porn”) to the proliferation of death videos filmed and uploaded via smart phone technology, examining how this new technology is making death both more visible and accessible. Malkowski focuses on the death recordings of Oscar Grant and Neda Agha-Soltan as two “case studies” on the role of death recordings as a form of political activism. Oscar Grant was the 22-year-old African American man fatally shot in the back by police officers while he lay face down on the platform in the Fruitvale BART train station on New Year’s Eve, 2009. Other train commuters captured his death online and posted it to YouTube, garnering much attention and protest, including half a million views in a matter of days. Agha-Soltan was a middle-class Iranian college student protesting the Iranian election in 2009 when she was shot in the chest while walking back to her car. Her death was recorded by bystanders who zeroed in on her face as she died, revealing her last moments. Agha-Soltan became a symbol of Iranian dissent. Those who honored her memory or attempted to help her as she died (the doctor) were forced to flee Iran and go into exile. Whether against police brutality or unjust and violent governments, Malkowski shows how these two death recordings had an effect on both local and global politics.

I really value Malkowski’s willingness to unflinchingly critique the intersection of death and media and question if and how these various media might better serve political activism against injustice. She writes,

… it is painfully clear that the technological wonders of new media have very limited power against systemic racism and, in fact, can be motivated in support of racist power structures as well as against them. These technologies’ interventions can only go so far in securing justice for lives that are still not fully grievable in our country. (p. 199)

Her book emphasizes the irony that while some might fetishize death through spectacle and digital recordings, recorded death can also function as visual and ethical rhetoric against repressive regimes and hegemonic forces. I think this is her most significant contribution and reason to read this important book.