It is no coincidence that our culture is spending increasing amounts of money on excessive medical intervention, anti-aging creams, body mutilations, anything that will help us resist the natural evidence of age and spent youth. Inevitably these attempts to resist the natural order fail, and as failures we carry an odd sense of shame about us. Our bodies let us down. But death has to be given its due. While moving away from a concept of death as a natural part of the life cycle, our culture has replaced it with a notion of death that is severed from life and hence unavoidably perverse.
Real death is fragile and moving.
Die Hard was the title of one blockbuster extravaganza, complete with the hero who can't be killed and the villains who kill countless extras. Death, like sex, no longer seems to be able to stand on its own merits, and it must be embellished with a myriad of debauched details and outrageous proportions. In real life you can die only once, but Die Hard has given way to sequels such as Die Harder and Die Hard with a Vengeance . What we are engaging in are new rituals of death. Severed from the life process, these rituals inevitably turn into necrophilia.