Gene Hackman's Body
Mass Culture as Necrophilia
1
A judge has ruled that police video of Gene Hackman’s Santa Fe house-tomb be published; the bodies will be blurred, but the videos themselves will be public. This has been opposed by the family, alongside right-thinking people everywhere. A man who died in intentional reclusion has the discovery of his corpse handed to the public. Poetry.
No, I’m not going to watch the videos. The autopsy has already ruled out malfeasance (his wife Betsy had hantavirus, and himself heart disease), and the police gave their statements. It’s unclear what revelations were hiding that could be unveiled by a bodycam on officer whatshisnuts’ shoulder. What might be shown, besides the final recorded moments of a life- (and now death-)span lived onscreen. Hackman’s life and afterlife belong to the people, says the Judge. Public interest demands that tabloid-porn be available to republication, for some reason.
It's worth noting that other parts of the Hackman footage and photography were not released. All that’s hit the internet so far is external to the house itself. So you may be saying, what’s the matter?
So I should note that my real opposition is to bothering Gene at all. A man died. Isn’t that news enough? When he shot one of his own boys in The French Connection the camera barely covered it, and Hackman himself (as Popeye Doyle) ran on into another room without a word.
2
You’ll say, “that’s just a movie.” So is the body cam footage.
Images have power. Reproduction collapses space, and in this case takes us across a property boundary. The publication of the video is an intrusion. The viewer will see moments meant to go unseen. And that the body is only implied is probably a greater perversity: more offensive for its lack of transgression.
It’s not like a corpse would be anything new. Anyone using X: THE EVERYTHING APP is used to seeing bodies, some dead and some alive, flesh mangled and skinny limbs ripped off. I’m talking about Gaza, obviously, and a few other humanitarian disasters (Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar), but mostly Gaza. It’s Gazans who I see most, their bodies destroyed by bombing or their skin hanging loose off starved arms. Somewhere between 50 and 186 thousand Palestinians have died since Israel’s campaign began. An accurate count is impossible, and will remain impossible for years. The destruction is at mind-boggling scale—perhaps comparable only to the utter devastation of Europe after the Second World War.
I know this because I see it every day on social media. And I see the crowd regurgitate it—
Let’s stop that thought there.
3
This will go live on Easter Sunday. I haven’t been going to church, because the church hasn’t had much to say to me at this juncture. Presumably, I won’t attend the Easter service, but I might. There’s a great Tom Waits song where he burbles out “get down off the cross, we could use the wood,” and in some ways that’s how I feel about Easter.
Globally, a lot of people will be celebrating the commemoration of a petty criminal’s rising from the dead. Some people are paid to think about what it means to call said petty criminal God. A lot spilled ink about it, either to argue gnosticly that he didn’t really die, arianly that he wasn’t really God, or whatever. There’s been a trend to cast him as some kind of Jewish revolutionary leader, in the historical run-up to the first Jewish-Roman War. That would track, if there were any extra-Biblical record of Jesus’ existence. Sure, historians agree today that an itinerant preacher named Jesus ran around the Judean countryside at that time, but it seems to me to be a left-wing recreation of prior Christo-centric tropes to say he was a political figure.
No, if he preached anything, odds are it’s what the Bible says he did. Imagine that.
I’ve been hanging around with Hegelians lately, and Hegel says that the real magic of Christ’s incarnation is his death—and the real resurrection (if you can call it that) is his remembrance, which mediates between the community and the individual, strengthening our common bond. Very nice. An example of Hegel’s very point will be this Sunday, when millions globally will show up to Church for the first time in six months and maybe even take communion. Maybe I’ll be there.
Let’s consider our points of reference. A man died in Judea two thousand years ago, and we’re still arguing about what it means. Maybe it didn’t mean anything; to mean something, it would have to be bound to our strictures of meaning, and in fact would have to have some worldly purchase. It would have to be on banners, a symbol on a nation’s flag, flying high over sacked Jerusalem as armored men put the residents to death. Or maybe it would be a contemporary call to arms, of some or other political point.
But there’s that absurd scene in Mark, where Jesus castigates Peter for saying the Son of Man need not suffer.[1] They put this bit in red, in some Bibles: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” It’s a command to follow, not to interpret; and clearly not to remember. And it’s not a charge to action; after all, he tells Peter off for having in mind “merely human concerns.”
Doesn’t it make you wonder how we’re using the body of God? The broken and bloody son of God, all covered in dirt, hanging off the rough-hewn pieces of a tree; staring at it, wondering how we can use him.
4
Yes, Hackman runs right over that body! On to the next adventure, into the sequel fittingly called The French Connection 2, where it is somehow glossed over that Popeye killed an FBI Agent in more-or-less cold blood. Cops get a pass.
5
I want to clarify a point—thoughts I’d like to turn into a full length someday. There’s a growing pile of bodies, as the 21st Century finally heats up. The agonizing end of the end of history, which everybody knows about and is happy to discuss, sits side by side with what we might call the age of pornography.
We’re a visual culture. Now culture has always been visual, but in the contemporary we’re all eyesight, all the time. We’re not even really postmodern, because—1) postmodernism is dead (nobody reads anymore) 2) nobody reads anymore (and the people who do read are back on plot, in a big way) 3) the structural conditions of contemporary capitalism are functionally the same as they were a hundred years ago. It’s all just modernism. Stupid modernism, maybe, but modernism nonetheless. Evidence for this thesis—what some people in my corner of the world have been calling the American years of lead are co-terminus with the global years of porn.
I don’t mean just pornography in the sexual sense (though that’s certainly incorporated). It’s an inability to look away, being taken advantage of by producers leveraging that inability to generate income. They do this by posting content. That content could be anything, but it should be constant, and it should be eye-catching. Yes, Virginia, this has included AI Slop, and yes, it includes actual porno (most of it softcore). But it also includes rage and disaster porn, which weasels out of the woodwork every time a humanitarian disaster erupts.
This horrific streaming of mass violence is made all the worse because on one hand, it holds a humanitarian purpose. The worldwide movement for Gaza would not have taken the form it did if not for the constant barrage of messaging around it. That said, at the edges of every such movement are the Thénardiers’ of the day, coming through the corpses for a speck of gold. Consider that for every video Bisan takes of herself giving a news update from the refugee camp, there are other images being circulated of the mutilated body parts of children. The politics of witnessing are at play here.
What does it actually mean to bear witness to atrocity? And what must we bear witness to? I’ve been thinking this over for months, but I was turned to write by a conversation with a specialist in the political science of the Middle East. There’s a new form of solidarity sweeping the world, one only made available by the digital resources of the age; one could call it a solidarity of sentiment, one that wraps in new types of people (consider the number of upper-middle class people who attended their first protests in the past five years). And this has been true, dating to Black Lives Matter’s 2020 resurgence. But there is simultaneously a solidarity of aesthetics, one that some Black writers noticed in that movement—a solidarity that is based around not only the aesthetics of one’s own appearance (as fitting into the movement of the moment), but around an exploitative interest in the subject of the movement.
The morbid fascination with viewing suffering is certainly exploitative. There’s a voyeurism to it, and worse—it participates in the profit generator. Dead bodies, the pains of the wretched of the Earth, grist for the mill.
There’s a beautiful moment in last year’s A Real Pain, where Kieran Culkin’s character (a Jew on a Holocaust tour of Poland) freaks out on a train. He declares his discomfort with riding first-class, and picks a fight with an older co-tourist, arguing that it disrespects their heritage to travel in such comfort. There’s an existential terror in his voice as he worries about making history’s greatest tragedy into a tourist experience for the well-to-do. The brilliance of the scene is that despite the obvious discomfort he is causing his fellow travelers, he’s identifying real tension within the practice of witnessing. If movements against atrocity are to have any serious future, they must learn to avoid the consumerification of their subject.
6
Gene Hackman’s body is none of our business. His movies are. That’s all.
The age of obsession has always been around; it was in the Black Dahlia, in the call to “Remember the Maine!” It’s a dark-flip side of every technological development that’s brought us too close together. The controversy today, that we all know too much about each other (about the world, even), is coupled with the near-inconceivable advancement of the tools of death and the enshittification of everything existing.
But anyway, it’s Easter. Come on up to the house; there’s bombs dropping somewhere, and a tank just obliterated a holy site. But there’s food in the fridge, and besides: this world ain’t my home.
[1] Mark 8:27-38