Week 7: Popular Culture and Death

Question 1

The Hyper-visibility of Death in a Death-Denying Society

Answer 1

Can provide a means to make sense of death, engage with our fears and questions about death.

Question 2

Film & Television

Answer 2

-Death as a device
-Medical and Crime Dramas
-Morality tale: good vs. evil; innocence/villainy
-Examine social conflict, oppression
-Examine our fears of loss, death, and change.

Question 3

Social Media

Answer 3

-Online obituaries
-Facebook & Twitter death announcements
-Facebook memorialization pages

Question 4

News Media

Answer 4

-Often sensationalized depictions of death, violence, and suffering.
-Reporting on murder, war, conflict.
-Media coverage focuses on worst crimes.

Question 5

True Crime

Answer 5

-Extremely popular genre of podcasts, books, and documentaries
-Can be a means through which people make sense of violence and crime
-Can be a safer way for people to engage with fears, vulnerabilities.
-Can also function to obscure social realities
-Attention to the sensational can obscure the far more common everyday violence.
-Domestic violence
-Race and class

Question 6

Crime in Canada

Answer 6

-Crime has been on an overall steady decline since the early 1990s
-Half of reported violent crime: assaults with little or no injury, uttering threats.
-Homicide accounts for 0.003% of violent crime, 0.001% of total crime in Canada.

Question 7

Death in Animated Films

Answer 7

-Children are often ‘shielded’ from death, with intention to protect them.
-Yet, children often consume information about death from animated films that highlight themes of loss, separation and death.
-Animated films serve a pedagogic function: teach lessons, impart values.
-Films can present “complex reality” of death.

Question 8

Analyzing Death in Animated Films

Answer 8

-Death scenes may “mask the permanence and irreversibility of death” or emphasize permanence.
-Differential emotional impact on death of the villain and death of the hero.
-Traumatic or humorous
-Land Before Time
-Depiction of meaning-making, remembrance, and continuing bonds.

Question 9

Dead Celebrities as Commodities

Answer 9

-Dead celebrities avoid ‘social death’ due to maintenance of ‘continuing bond’
-Artists who die young give ‘an impression of perpetual youth’ as their likeness lives on after them.
-Concerns surrounding the ethics of the use of the image of dead celebrities to sell products, and of dead celebrities’ image being used and re-created in new commercial enterprises.
-Importance of wills>

Question 10

Death as a Morality Tale: Penfold-Mounce (2018)- Parables of Death

Answer 10

-Timely
-Tragic
-Tragic-Foolish
-Tragic-Heroic

Question 11

Timely

Answer 11

-Celebrities that died in old age. (70+)
-Sad, but not tragic
-Often accompanied by the recognition of lifetime achievements
-Reflects social values of long life, contributions to society as symbolizing a ‘life well live”

Question 12

Tragic

Answer 12

-Deaths that serve as a ‘cautionary tale’ about the downside of fame.
-‘27’ club
-Interpreted as tragic
-‘Life cut short’
-Loss of future contributions, talent.

Question 13

Tragic-Foolish

Answer 13

-Variation of the tragic category.
-Don’t inspire collective grief, but derision.
-Used to convey lessons about values of society, consequences for transgression.
-Disenfranchised grief
-Sexism, discrimination in coverage of these deaths

Question 14

Tragic-Heroic

Answer 14

-Deaths that occur due to a heroic, adventurous or otherwise ground-breaking action.
-Social value as ‘aspirational lives’