Punishment and Redemption

Abstract

The preoccupation with body horror no doubt taps into fundamental fears about the fragility of the human body, and the unpredictability and inevitability of death. The fascination that these mysteries hold for many of us is no doubt one of the reasons why representations of spectacular deaths recur in our culture. In our own time, in our own culture, part of the appeal may well lie in the fact that the sight, smell and feel of a dead body is as mysterious to many of us as the conception of what may lie beyond it. For the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, more familiar with the reality of death (and more sure of its consequences in terms of damnation and salvation), spectacles of death may well have been a way of sublimating their own fears, and answering their curiosity about the body and its obscure relationship with the soul, and the life that they understood to lie beyond the grave. This is not the place for a comprehensive investigation of different understandings of death and the after-life in early modern culture, along the lines of the major studies offered by Michael Neill and Robert N. Watson.¹ However, there is a striking parallel between deaths in revenge tragedy (often protracted to ensure the relevant characters have the opportunity to voice lengthy dying speeches), and many instances of violent death in contemporary violent cinema, where the impact of the key scenes is enhanced by ensuring that the characters concerned are given time and space to register their imminent doom.