Death Be Not Chic

Our culture doesn’t ignore death. In modern films and on television dramas, it’s everywhere: on fictive battlefields and in outer space; in the ER and the forensics lab; in the dire diagnoses of some crusty, limping doctor on a Fox network drama and ballooning from the plumped-up lips of brilliant babe doctors on Grey’s Anatomy. But here is the insurmountable problem: Their kind of death is not death. Or to put it another way: The death you see on the screen will not be the death you have.