Tonight was the second event of the ARTivism Speakers’ Lab series, which was a Death Café. As discussed at the event, Death Cafés were started in 2004 and they generally aim to “animate personal, collective, cultural, political and/or spiritual discussions about death”. My experience at the event was interesting and edifying.
One of the topics that really struck me was a larger discussion inspired by one of the question prompts, “What are the aesthetics associated with death and dying?”. My group ended up discussing more broadly how death and dying is represented in media. One of the opinions I brought up was that I feel that death is so much more present in TV and film (specifically drama) than I find it to be in my daily life. When I watch dramatic television shows I am constantly worried about characters getting killed, which I certainly don’t do with the real people in my life. I can only name 3 people that I personally know whose deaths have affected me, but I can name dozens of fictional characters who I have mourned.
Prompted by my musings, someone else in my group mentioned the popular saying in journalism “if it bleeds, it leads”. These two trains of thought really got me thinking about the way that the deaths of fictional characters are often represented, and I felt that there are many connections to be drawn with Rinaldo Walcott’s writings on Black death. Walcott discussed the way in which “Black concerns with being human are always premised upon the intimacy of death” (196). This ties in with the way I feel that I am always so much more concerned about the possible deaths of the fictional characters I know than that of the real people I know. Fictional people’s likelihood of death always seems much more imminent, and my thoughts of them are often tied in with that sense of the intimacy of death.
I began to think about an interview today I held with someone for another class which focused on the representation of women of colour in the media. She spoke of how when watching the film Moonlight, she felt consistently tense, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She pointed out that this is because modern media has trained us to associate images of Black men with violence, and she could barely believe that nothing bad would happen to the characters in the film.
In connecting this with the Death Café conversation, it reminded me of Walcotts’s discussion of the images taken by white photographers of the lynching of Black men. Walcott described these photographs as “desiring lenses” (205). This idea of the desire for images of Black suffering was not a fun thought for me. But when I connected it to the interview I held today it rang true. So many of the film representations of Black men (and women) that we see in modern media are predicated on a necessity of suffering. One of most common takes I’ve seen about Black Panther is that it is rare to see a movie with a Black lead that doesn’t first require them to suffer the horrors of slavery or Jim Crow laws (Lee, Linly, Ransome). And unlike many movies about slavery, or those set in the 60s, there was no fear that this Black hero was going to die.
One of Walcott’s lines that hit me the hardest was the concept of “life that is a living-death” (196), which I interpreted as a life that is lived in consistent fear of death. As Walcott points out, this is a common condition for Black people living today, and one which our modern media often chooses to replicate on-screen. This draws a connection to one of the final thoughts of the Death Café which was why to have one in the context of a media production class. My answer to that question is that in producing images of death and Black folks, we have the choice to either reproduce popular discourses of Black life and death, or to generate counter discourses. I know which one I hope to create.
References
Lee, Chris. “Will Black Panther’s Box-Office Success Change Hollywood’s Conventional Wisdom on Black Movies?”. Vulture, 20 February 2018, http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/will-black-panther-change-hollywoods-view-of-black-films.html. Accessed 6 March 2018.
Linly, Zack. “‘Black Panther’ is a chance for black moviegoers to finally just enjoy the show”. The Washington Post, 12 February 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/black-panther-is-a-chance-for-black-moviegoers-to-finally-just-enjoy-the-show/2018/02/09/a0d86048-0c42-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html?utm_term=.301790db9a13. Accessed 6 March 2018.
Ransome, Noel. “‘Black Panther’ Is Going to Be an Important Movie”. VICE, 12 June 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ywz5dm/black-panther-is-going-to-be-an-important-movie. Accessed 6 March 2018.
Walcott, Rinaldo. “Black Queer Studies, Freedom, and Other Human Possibilities”. Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies, Insomniac Press, 2017, pp. 191-214.