Last Taboo Falls in Body Worlds
editorial, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, May 12, 2006
Linda Schulte-Sasse


I don't know what is creepier:  The display of real, "plastinated" human corpses at the St. Paul Science Museum, or the fact that nobody seems to mind.  Quite the contrary, we're hearing that "Body Worlds" is "educational" and "inspirational."

To be sure, Body Worlds' creator, Dr. Gunther von Hagens, is committed to education.  So much so that in 2002 he performed an autopsy in London to educate a public audience paying $19 a head ("head" being figurative in this case).  And his passion for education has taken him on an arduous path from Germany to China and Kyrgyzstan, where raw materials are easier to come by (don't be alarmed; the only thing he's been caught at is buying 56 corpses from a mental institution in far-away Novosibirsk). 

Call me a cynic, but I'm not quite ready to concede that it is a quest for inspiration that has led 15 million people in 23 cities worldwide to pay big bucks for Body Worlds tickets and spin-off products.  But in a few parts of the world the exhibition has inspired something: a fierce debate on medical ethics.  In von Hagens's native Germany, for example, where folks are touchy about the uses and abuses of the human body. 

The anonymous donors are not the only thing dead in Body Worlds: Deadest of all is the last taboo.  Body Worlds most literally solidifies the body's place in consumer culture, assuring us that nothing is left that can escape becoming a commodity.  Given the resources already devoted to transforming living bodies into timeless and display-worthy commodities, what could be more logical than to do the same with dead bodies?

While living we affirm our unique "selves" by undergoing procedures that make us all look alike.  In death von Hagens morphs us into an everyday synthetic product, plastic, while re-making us as objects d'art that restore the humanity just discardedÑon an even higher, "artistic" level.   It used to be that works of art imitated real life; now real death imitates works of art.

The celebrated plastination "The Chess Player," for example, was once a real man, but today he, or rather it, imitates both popular culture and high art.  The brain protruding from its sawed -off skull recalls a familiar on-screen psychiatrist who liked to have old friends for dinner.  On the high culture side, Chess Player's posture crouching over a chessboard with chin resting on fist updates Rodin's "Thinker."  It seems engaged in the very activity that makes us human: thinking (perhaps about the boundary between science and commerce, education and exploitation).

Yet isn't thinking the one thing we know the poor guy cannot be doing?  And what was he thinking when he gave his remains for von Hagens's circus?  Von Hagens's unprecedented feat lies not in selling his product.  Rather it lies in convincing customers that it's an honor to become his product.  And in getting us to couch the ultimate form of commodification in transcendent terms like "inspirational."

An indirect spin-off of von Hagens's lucrative project was the popular 2000 German thriller Anatomy, set in Heidelberg, hometown of von Hagens's institute.  In the movie, plastination is the invention of the "Anti-Hippocrates," a secret sect of physicians engaged since 1940s Germany in medical research "unrestrained by petty bourgeois ethics."  So zealous are these educators that an occasional loner awakens to find his own plastinated body being dissected before his eyes. And so inspired is one med student by his ex-girlfriend's beauty that he plastinates her lest she waste herself on less appreciative beaux.

Anatomy proves that it really does take one to know one.  The movie is trash that exploits the sensationalism of Body Worlds for its own commercial purposes.  But it deserves credit for some insights that are lacking in our local conversations about von Hagens's exhibition.  It puts Body Worlds in its proper genre: horror.  It understands that Body Worlds is about voyeurism.  And most importantly, it both remembers and imagines a world where somebody can all too easily be utilized as some body.