Morbidly fascinated

I went to the Bodies: The Exhibition the other day, and it scared the crap out of me.

For those of you not familiar with the show (currently running in the Eaton Centre until January 15, 2010), the website describes it as a scientific exhibition that “displays whole and partial body specimens that have been meticulously dissected and preserved through an innovative process.” That process is called “plastination,” and it was originally developed by anatomist, artist, entrepreneur and overall creepy looking dude Gunther von Hagens (who has his own series called Body Worlds). The process takes all the water and fat out of a body and replaces it with plastic, so you end up with a durable, waterproof, non-decaying specimen positioned any way you want it. Basically it’s like getting an ID card laminated, except instead of getting a little plastic rectangle that tells people who you are, you end up with a skinned dude kicking a soccer ball. Oh, also it costs a million dollars per body and takes a year.

When a friend suggested we go to the show, I immediately started getting that hot, sweaty feeling in my brain. It was a strange mix of horror and excitement—like when you’re making breakfast totally naked, singing showtunes and your new roommate walks in with his mom to show her his “sweet new pad.” On the one hand, I had a morbid fascination to see dead things, most likely propagated at a young age by an unhealthy obsession with horror movies. But on the other, I am, in reality, a total pussy and the sight of my own blood makes me want to run screaming in horror until I pass out in the fetal position under some furniture. How would I deal with this? I mean, I think it’s awesome to watch a skinned guy walking around and kicking ass in Hellraiser, but these skinned people are real. These people are dead. And not just dead and skinned, but made to do weird things that dead skinned people shouldn’t be doing, like playing sports. I was prepared to be disturbed.

When I finally got to the exhibit, I did end up being disturbed. But not for the reasons I thought I would be. Obviously, the point of the exhibit wasn’t to have laminated corpses popping out to scare the shit out of people, but rather to take visitors through galleries providing an up-close look inside the skeletal, muscular, reproductive, respiratory, circulatory and other systems of the human body. Inside, there were display cases featuring lungs, legs, tendons, spinal columns and the digestive tract. Each were scientifically labelled and were replete with factoids like how newborn babies have more bones than adult humans, showing a healthy lung vs. a smoker’s lung and a description of the different shapes of bones in our bodies (“sesamoid” was my favourite). The whole thing was respectfully done, clinically thorough and very scientific. The problem was, it was almost too scientific. I found myself just looking at the parts and learning stuff, and when I was done, I wondered if I could have learned these things by looking at sculptures. The parts were so separated from their humanness that they ended up being mostly just models. Only one section, the artfully and, frankly, beautiful display of arteries, gave me the space to marvel at the intricacies of the human body.

Indeed, it’s easy to separate the humanness when just looking at parts, but even the displays of skinned full bodies that peppered the exhibit were less than inspiring. One particularly strange display showed the musculature of a body balancing hand-in-hand and toe-to-toe with its own skeleton. I’m sure the point was to have people marvel at the balance and relationship between these two systems, but I had to step back and wonder where this guy came from, and that if he knew he would end up skinned in a mall being ogled by an obese guy going, “Check ça! Ostie q’c’est cool!” would he have signed up for this. (Later research revealed a controversy surrounding the origin of the cadavers in the exhibit causing the owners of Bodies… The Exhibition to add a disclaimer to their website saying that they cannot prove that these bodies did not come from executed Chinese prisoners. Disturbing in the least.)

In the end, Bodies… The Exhibition really freaked me out. But not because I saw the body of a human cross-sectioned as if she had just played patty-cake with Wolverine, and not because in the end they had a station where you could handle a human brain (which was actually pretty cool). But rather because I worried that the mystery of human life, and the depth of what it means to be alive, escaped most viewers. It was all kind of cold and scientific. And that was the scariest thing of all.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA