My lectio praecursoria, i.e. the 20-minute lecture to be presented in the public defense of a doctoral dissertation, was recently published in Tahiti – taidehistoria tieteenä 2-3/2020, and will soon be published also in Thanatos 1/2021. Thanks to my co-conspirator Pauline Greenhill, I translated the lectio so that it would be accessible also to the English speaking readers. The translation was funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada‘s (SSHRC) grant number 435-2019-0691.
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Lectio Praecursoria presented at the successful public defence of dissertation “Gendered and Contagious Suicide: Taboo and Biopower in Contemporary Anglophone Cinematic Representations of Self-Willed Death” 2.10.2020, Jyväskylä
Venerable custos, honored opponent, esteemed guests,
In December 2017, the American YouTube entertainer and social media giant Logan Paul uploaded onto his YouTube channel a vlog shot at the Aokigahara forest, also known to Western audiences as the “haunted” suicide forest of Japan. Coming across a corpse of a suicide, the video captured Paul cracking jokes at the expense of suicide and the people whose lives had ended in the forest. In the vlog’s immediate reception, both Paul and YouTube as his platform, slow in its response to the video, were judged for disrespectful and derogatory behavior and for trying to monetize this sensational and click-worthy human tragedy. That the video caused a scandal could easily render the Paul case a singular exception to how suicide is generally discussed and represented in media and entertainment. Yet, studied as an extreme example of suicide’s position in the Western attention economy, the Paul case rather crystallizes some positionings that frequently recur in Western entertainment’s depiction and discussion of self-willed death.
Starting with seeking thrills from the haunted forest of Japan, Western entertainment regularly strays to Aokigahara or another similarly exotic or hair-raising setting to face the topic of suicide. Suicides touch the hearts and lives of many individual human beings across all socio-cultural divides, yet when it is presented in entertainment media, the topic is frequently addressed at a distance, through exoticizing frames and the context of horror. As such – as an exotic and spectacular death – suicide has gained a rather visible foothold in Western entertainment. To give an example from the heart of my research, Anglophone cinema witnesses approximately 250 new titles featuring self-willed death every year. The films included within this commercial mass, however, are notably rarely about suicide. More frequently, suicide is featured in these films as a narrative instrument reduced to its shock value as a particular kind of bad death and as an affective spectacle, shaped by its history under Western institutions of morality, punishment and knowledge production. In this sense, reality – with its many lived life stories, experiences and emotions related to self-willed death – escapes suicide when it is represented and reiterated in Western entertainment.
Similar loss of lived realities is reflected also in the many mundane contexts where suicide appears as a metaphor. For instance, news headlines that I, as a scholar researching representations of suicide, have fortuitously encountered over the years, discuss the professional suicide of a news reporter, the geopolitical suicide of a Western nation and the suicide orbit of one of the moons of planet Jupiter. Many readers will have witnessed similar use in their daily encounters, where individuals not only use suicide as metaphor for their mundane struggles but also emphasize their words by lifting fingers up to their temples as an imitation of a self-inflicted shot to the head or by mimicking wrist-cutting with imaginary knives. Often such metaphoric use is intended to emphasize the weight of the issue discussed, but sometimes also to render it laughable as excessive or ridiculous.
The point, related to suicide’s use and manifestation in the Paul case as well, has surely become clear so far. When the vlog is approached through suicide’s conventional use as a shocking death – a macabre metaphor, attention grabber or narrative device – the vlog’s derogatory approach to self-willed death deviates only very little from the usual representation and discussion of suicide. More often than not, self-willed death is featured in a variety of contexts as if it were something other than a human tragedy or a complex individual, social and cultural phenomenon. Both as a concept and as an image, suicide is too frequently used in news media, entertainment and everyday discussions as merely a violent – either tragic or comic – spectacle, instrumental to some gain. At the same time, suicide remains a particular type of taboo in its socio-cultural contexts and in the media, when real life suicides and their bereavement are discussed; when we try to find fictitious or documentary narratives, where self-willed death would be discussed in depth as a human phenomenon.
Suicide’s tabooed status is testified for instance by a recent autobiographical Finnish-language book (Surun istukka, 2019) by Finnish translator Kaarina Huttunen. Having lost a daughter to suicide, in her book Huttunen affectively describes the stigma imprinted on her by this death. A mother’s mourning is made lonely and disenfranchised by the silence of both kin and strangers, who one after another turn their backs on her grief. Next to these lived life experiences of suicide’s taboo-ridden bereavement, this death’s prevailing ontology as a socio-cultural taboo is illustrated in the reception of Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, facing requests for censorship and silencing on its release in spring 2017. Of the many reasons for the moral panic surrounding the series, voiced or implicitly expressed between the lines, several were related to the fact that in the series the suicide of the protagonist, a seventeen-year-old girl, is studied particularly emphatically as a death that – instead of simply being presented as caused by madness – is shown as a planned decision caused by accumulated hardships.
The dynamic I seek to describe, related to the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of suicide in Western cultural discussions as a shocking death and a taboo, first caught my attention fall 2011. I then graduated from University of Jyväskylä with an awarded master’s thesis in which I had studied suicide’s appearances in visual artistic modernism and postmodernism. As one of the results of my thesis, I recognized suicide could be considered a “pornified” death, based on how it was depicted in some works of art belonging to my corpus, referring to wider culture’s appropriation of the aesthetic pertinent to the “body genre” of pornography (Nikunen et al, 2017, Williams 1991) or its “romanticism” with spectacular deaths (Aaron, 2014). Using the theory of British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer, this “pornography of death” could be seen to illustrate the phenomenon where a socio-cultural taboo was in art or culture represented in graphic ways aiming to provoke reactions in the viewers or readers, without effects on the tabooed nature of the topics thus represented.
Moving on to accomplish a doctorate, in my doctoral dissertation I wanted to direct my gaze on this dynamic according to which suicide could be argued to have been “pornified” in contemporary art and culture while still maintaining its ontology as a silenced, stigmatized and shame-ridden death. I wanted to center in particular on self-willed death’s nature as a taboo, as a result of which I dived deep into the conceptual history and theory of taboo in the discipline of anthropology. I also ended up using the Foucauldian theory of biopower. These two concepts, taboo and biopower, could be considered as symmetrical in that both refer to normative and classificatory systems and mechanisms of control and knowledge production that seek to regulate individuals’ bodies, sexuality and deaths – self-willed deaths included.
Today, approximately nine years later, I am standing before you ready to defend a dissertation in which these two theories form the analytical backbone for my scrutiny of how suicide is represented in contemporary Anglophone cinema. In the dissertation, by employing discourse analysis, semiology and visual analysis I examine contemporary cinematic representations of self-willed death with theoretically oriented considerations of taboo and biopower, as I try to understand how Anglophone films make sense of this death. The research materials are a corpus of 50 Anglophone feature films produced between 1985 and 2014. For the four research articles, constituting my dissertation alongside a theoretical introduction, I also conducted three case studies of the films Unfriended (2014), Vanilla Sky (2001) and The Moth Diaries (2011) as well as of the first season of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why (2017), each seeming to crystallize a fundamental principle about the topic of my dissertation.
The research questions guiding my dissertation are qualitative and query how the chosen cinematic representations of suicide participate in the practices of self-willed death’s biopowered regulation on the one hand and how these representations both reflect and renew suicide’s tabooed position on the other. In other words, I examine the kinds of cultural meanings of suicide that are created through its commercial cinematic representations: What kind of death does suicide appear as, when we consider for instance the films’ reiterating ways of representing characters who either die by suicide or are susceptible to it? Or: What kinds of chains of events lead characters to contemplate or accomplish suicide in these films? Or: In what ways do the films feature self-willed death as part of their narration?
In several ways my dissertation bolsters the presumptions regarding suicide’s pornification, that I depicted as having raised my interest on the topic. Yet many of the cinematic ways the so-called “pornography” of suicide manifested were surprising. For instance, in my analysis I witnessed suicide’s gendering and sexualization: the suicides and suicidality of female and male characters were depicted in different ways depending on their gender. As social philosopher Katrina Jaworski describes, the general understanding of self-willed death connects suicide to masculinity as one of the manifestations of male violence. Yet in my analysis, suicides were visually embodied especially through female characters. This paradox caused me to focus in particular on the ways suicide was in varied ways attached to femininity in the films studied.
In order to better understand how the evident gendering occurred in a field that featured what appeared to be an even number, in terms of gender, of self-harming characters, I chose to apply Durkheim’s typology differentiating between egoistic and altruistic suicides. The notion of suicide cinema’s gendering also led to the adoption of theoretical approaches pertinent to gender studies, especially those drawing on feminist and queer theories. In short, I noticed that when a death was not depicted as beneficial to the community – as it would be for an honorable sacrifice in the war field, typed altruistic in the Durkheimian scale – the films tended to focus on female characters’ “egoistic” suicides. The gendered characters were also offered gendered motifs for killing themselves: the suicides by female characters were connected to their bodies, emotions and sexuality, and rendered understandable based on alleged feminine irrationality and weakness. When they recovered, it was because of significant help from other characters or a rescue by heterosexual romance, whereas male characters were also offered rational reasons and even possibilities for recovery on their own.
I also noticed that the self-destructive storylines of female and male characters were intertwined in parallel narratives, where main characters often survived at the expense of side characters killing themselves. Often the protagonists were male, and the side characters female, and their relationships heteroromantic, like for instance in such high-profile productions such as Vanilla Sky (2001) or Inception (2010). In both films, the suicidal spirals of male characters, studied through abstractions and metaphors, are rendered explicable through the suicides of their female lovers whose minds have been disturbed. Other kinds of parallel narratives could also be found, for instance from box office hit Girl, Interrupted (1999), where a young woman diagnosed as borderline personality recovers in a mental institution among male psychiatrists, female nurses, and teenage girls manifesting a variety of different mental disorders, having been made vulnerable by promiscuous relationships to boys and men.
Central to most films I studied appeared to be suicide’s instrumentality to maintaining a binary conception of gender and the hetero norm of love relationships. Most glaring examples of this were those films where suicide was connected to homosexual characters or LGBTQI2S+ figures, who were often, as if punished for their allegedly deviant sexuality at the end of the film with suicide, loaded with the value of spectacular, violent and bad death. Atom Egoyan’s whodunnit Where the Truth Lies (2005) stands as testimony of this type of use for suicide with its besieged self-willed death of a bisexual murder suspect with compromised means for protecting his reputation. The manifestations of the stereotypical male violence were in the films treated in varied ways from empathic to ridiculing, yet their most exemplary forms could be discovered from the deaths of so-called villains, who were similarly punished with suicide. Such is evident, for instance, in The Shawshank Redemption (1994) where the suicide of a corrupt prison warden closes the film along with the protagonists’ escapes to freedom.
As these cinematic illustrations I have brought up might already have given away, next to self-willed death’s gendering, another important discovery I made in my analysis was related to suicide’s medicalization in the cinematic corpus studied. Suicides were often made sense of with diagnoses, pertinent to medical knowledge production, as well as to their popularized versions: vernacular depictions of madness. At their most medicalized, the films studied suicide in institutionalized settings like the aforementioned Girl, Interrupted, or in other similar contexts such as The Sixth Sense (1999), where a murder-suicide by a schizophrenic patient to the child psychiatrist protagonist opens the film. In opposition to such diagnostic, and often quite pejorative, depictions of madness, willingness to understand suicidality, when it was connected to depression, sometimes also facilitated even empathic interpretations of self-willed death, as for instance in Tom Ford’s acclaimed A Single Man (2009).
Although many films also offered possibilities for reading these representations against the grain, or even in significant ways reiterated some of the conventions in representing suicide against the norm, I deduced that cinema tends to represent suicide in ways that participate in its marginalization and stigmatization. As hinted in my opening lines to this talk, rare were the narratives about suicide which showed interest in self-willed death as a human phenomenon, in opposition to the wealth of films rendering suicide a mere narrative instrument.
Both marginalization and stigmatization can be connected to taboo and biopower, which rely on normative and classificatory mechanisms of knowledge production as means to regulate individuals’ bodies and deaths. The medical mechanisms of knowledge production and the dominant discourses regulating gender and sexuality have already been exposed in the context of biopower. The connection to taboo – a less popular field of study – instead, manifested particularly clearly in the reception of 13 Reasons Why. The Netflix series was subjected to the aforementioned volatile discussion alongside requests for censorship, that extended from cutting out the show’s suicide scene and amending the age limits to discourage the young audiences from viewing, to prohibiting the series’ discussion in some Anglo-American schools.
The series was criticized by medical specialists for its limited representation of medical diagnoses and treatments and for representing the suicide of the protagonist under too rationalist a lens, among other flaws. For these and other reasons, various authorities feared the series would cause a wave of imitated suicides – a suicide contagion – among its young audiences. As it was connected to these authorities’ simultaneous criticism of suicide’s insufficient connection to depression, suggestive of audio-visual fiction’s dominance by such institutions of knowledge that bespeak of biopower and whose hold over art and culture could be questioned, to me this fear of contagion was symptomatic of self-willed death’s biopower-regulated and tabooed ontology, suggestive of the regulation and censorship directed at suicide’s manifestation in popular culture.
These suicide contagion arguments were made particularly thought-provoking in anthropological theories. In this discipline, taboo has a complex theoretical history as a normative structure seeking to protect the so-called social body from specific kinds of risks and dangers. This structure is empowered by ideas of dirt and contagion in instances where classificatory borders and collectively agreed values are threatened or breached. Fascinatingly, it is this selfsame fear of contagion that helped the pre-war era anthropologists, burdened by a colonialist baggage, deem taboo a primitive structure in opposition to Western rationality. It could also be argued these prejudices can make it hard for many contemporary viewers to recognize the regulation of taboo happening in contemporary culture, including in the context of pornified self-willed death.
So what, you may enquire: why is this all valuable? My research constellation, that recognizes the effect of the normative structures of biopower and taboo on how suicide is represented, arises from a paradigm central to cultural studies, which witnesses cultural discourses’ influence over human lives. The repetitive conventions for representing or discussing suicide hold tremendous influence over how we perceive self-willed death or react towards individuals expressing suicidality in their lives. These representations can also affect the individuals battling against suicide in varied ways. My discoveries of marginalization and stigmatization are made particularly significant by the recognition that taboo, shame, guilt and the closely related fear of being stigmatized are among the reasons that might discourage individuals considering suicide from seeking help. In studying biopower’s and taboo’s effect on suicide’s representation, we are specifically discussing the popular cultural production of such modes of being, that are made to look abnormal, unnatural, bad, filthy and shameful.
Thus, in particular triggered by the discussions related to 13 Reasons Why, I find it necessary to close my talk with an emphatic question for the viewers and producers of suicide cinema alike: why is an empathic representation of self-willed death – finding many reasons for suicide – considered more problematic as cinema’s reiterating manner of representing suicide than, for instance, a comic spectacle or a narrative instrument for punishing women, sexual minorities or villains. At their best, the fiction of art and culture could be argued to provide nodes of identification also for such individuals who find it hard to discover themselves in the norms and ideals constructed by the biopower-regulated society. Whether in considering the diagnostic, gendering or other dominant modes of representation, holding fiction in their reins, their excessive normativity and stigmatization can easily become more problematic than stray empathy.
Honored Opponent, docent Leena-Maija Rossi, I now call upon you to present your critical comments on my dissertation.
References
Aaron, M. 2014. “Cinema and Suicide,” in Death and Moving Image. Ideology, Iconography and I. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 40-68.
Durkheim, É. 1897. Suicide: A Study in Sociology (trans. J.A. Spaulding & G. Simpson 1951, reprint 1966). New York: Free Press.
Gorer, G. 1955. “The Pornography of Death,” in G. Gorer (ed.) Death, Grief & Mourning in Contemporary Britain, 1965. London: The Crescent Press, 169–175.
Huttunen, K. 2019. Surun Istukka. Helsinki: Schildts & Söderströms.
Jaworski, K. 2014. The Gender of Suicide: Knowledge Production, Theory and Suicidology. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Nikunen, K., Paasonen, S. & Saarenmaa, L. 2007. Pornification: Sex and sexuality in media culture. Oxford: Berg.
Williams, L. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44(4): 2-13.
Allekirjoittaneen, eli FM Heidi Kososen taidehistorian väitöskirjan “Gendered and Contagious Suicide: Taboo and Biopower in Contemporary Anglophone Cinematic Representations of Self-Willed Death” tarkastustilaisuus pidetään perjantaina 2.10.2020 alkaen klo 12.00. Vastaväittäjänä toimii yliopistonlehtori, FT Leena-Maija Rossi (Helsingin yliopisto) ja kustoksena professori emerita Annika Waenerberg (Jyväskylän yliopisto). Väitöstilaisuuden kieli on suomi.
MA Heidi Kosonen defends her doctoral dissertation in Art History “Gendered and Contagious Suicide: Taboo and Biopower in Contemporary Anglophone Cinematic Representations of Self-Willed Death”. Opponent is senior lecturer, FT Leena-Maija Rossi (University of Helsinki) and custos is professor emerita Annika Waenerberg (University of Jyväskylä).
It’s a busy fall! I’ll be defending my doctoral dissertation of Art History (visual studies) in two weeks, October 2. I’m honored by having Ph.D., Docent, Senior Lecturer and the pioneer in Finnish visual studies Leena-Maija Rossi act as my opponent in the defence.
Another exciting thing that will be published next week is the first blog post to Jytte’s new blog series edited by myself and Melissa Plath from Researchers and Teachers of Jyväskylä. 
THEORY OF TABOO 