Speaking of resurrections, let’s talk about funerals in media.
Admittedly, this isn’t something that’s on my mind constantly. It wasn’t really until I started catching up on SyFy’s latest original series, Superstition, that I pondered the dubious depictions of the death care industry. It’s a personal issue too as quite a few people in my social circle have their hands in this business. Slight changes in public perception affect their jobs for better or for worse, and media plays a big part in that.
Superstition is a show that centers on a black family-run funeral home. That is a nice combo of representation The funeral industry on television is usually overwhelmingly white with a subgenre focused on the mystery of the “black funeral”. In this case, the Hastings family happen to also be demon hunters but you still get a nice look at the inner workings of a black funeral home without being exploitative (ironic for something with Mario Van Peebles). Superstition manages to be somewhat realistic while keeping it fun and campy as one would expect from the home of the Sharknado franchise.
Death itself is not one of those things that media never touches. In fact, we touch it all the time. It’s not uncommon to see a funeral as a starting point of a murder mystery or the climax of an action movie. And of course, in the horror genre you’ll see bodies sliced and diced and julienned from the first frame to the last. The toll of death and the aftermath of mourning is a trope that occurs again and again. After the death of my grandfather in 1997, I was passed along a children’s book called Cemetery Quilt. In that book, a young girl works through her grief and having to attend her grandfather’s funeral. It shows the ritual of dealing with death and how the living come to terms with the loss of a loved one. That book was from 1995 and seems a big step in normalizing funerals for a young audience.
And yet? Death is still a taboo subject. The inner workings of the death care industry are still mysterious even though it turns out they are pretty mundane. Funeral homes are still usually left to the realms of campy horror like the Phantasm series or the aforementioned Superstition, which doesn’t seem fair to the real people that work in this field.
Since I have a few connections to the industry, I decided to ask local funeral director K. L. Hawkins for her thoughts on the portrayals of the funeral business in media. Hawkins has worked in the industry since 2014 and brings a bit of an outsider perspective as an art student and a woman in a still largely male-dominated industry.
When asked if she had any pet peeves about how the funeral business is portrayed on our screen, she brought up a common gripe I’ve heard: bodies. Dead bodies on our screens are often pristine even well into the process of decay. Anything over a day or so old gets a discretion shot. It’s a less common occurrence in movies and in books; as a young reader, I was all about mystery books and true crime, so I was well aware what state a body should be in and at what time. And that seems to be the deciding factor in when a body is shown: death is often messy and very inconvenient for FCC regulations. But does not showing this reality for comfort increase the fear and discomfort? I’m reminded of a story in which a cousin opened my deceased aunt’s urn and was surprised to find cremains in a bag.
The other disservice media does to the funeral industry is portray morticians and funeral directors as sketchy characters not too far above graverobbers. We’ve probably all heard tales of the mortician moonlighting as a serial killer to keep his trade well supplied or untrustworthy directors. But as Hawkins points out, in reality the lowest of the low attempting to take advantage of people in mourning are relegated to simple hustling.
“I’m not going to say that every funeral home worker is a paragon of morality. But the ones that are shady are more banal, like funeral director at the end of The Big Lebowski who is trying to sell Walter and The Dude an expensive urn for Donnie that they didn’t want or need.”
No mention of the legendary Six Feet Under? Hawkins isn’t fond of the show but notes that it did include input from actual funeral directors and professors for accuracy.
Although Six Feet Under is still the most notable show dealing with the funeral business in pop culture consciousness, I asked Hawkins what she thought were the most helpful depictions of the funeral business as an ordinary job. She mentions Harry Sultenfuss in My Girl and April Cleaver from the psychological horror film I Am Not A Serial Killer. Both characters are hardworking with families and their morbid occupations are just that: an occupation. To this, I add the underrated reality television show Funeral Boss. Much like Superstition, Funeral Boss introduced the viewer to a black family running a funeral home. But unlike the high camp horror of Superstition, Funeral Boss focused more on the different hats each member of the family wore to keep the business running. And personal drama. Lots and lots of personal drama.
Will better mainstream portrayals of the funeral industry assuage our fears of death? Maybe, maybe not. It’s worth trying. The death care industry is certainly an industry that deserves to be explored because it touches all of us. There are many intersections to discuss such as race, gender, religion, and cultural practices but there’s something keeping us from scratching more than the surface. As there seems to be an upswing in interest in death and respectful burial practices thanks to the efforts of Caitlin Doughty’s Ask a Mortician channel on Youtube and the larger Order of the Good Death, perhaps our media is finally catching up to take this industry back from the clutches of cult horror and b-movies and give it the respect it deserves.