Too Clever By Half?

The Bodies Exhibit, Washington DC

The exhibit is held at the too-modern for words Newseum at The Dome in Rosslyn. The locale is extremely futuristic as befits this post-modern, post-moral, post-mortem. The rather stark entrance-way leads directly to the stark-raving coat-check fellow, who rambles semi-coherently about flash photography. Then up the stairs to the Will-Call window and a quick stop at the trivia-festooned bathrooms. (Hint: Toes is the correct answer.)

The exhibit itself: It starts out with a whimper. From behind a small partition you emerge into the soft light of a scapula and the first of the eerily standing corpses. The lighting is subdued, bringing out the brown of the epicanthically-folded, oddly taxiderm-ish eye on the plasticine'd cadaver. The initial reaction is one of stressless shock. It hasn't sunk in yet that there are former human beings posed around. You still have your vaguely clinical detachment, as you move to the second room, noticing that the trivia motif has continued, that the lighting now shows anatomic structures on the walls and that your mind insists that they are only patterns. That's when two things strike you, hard: the flesh is shiny, wet-looking, too biological to be detached from; the second is the tiny, blood-red bug trapped in the case with the sagittal section of the brain and skull. It's moving about, Escher-like, with the maggot assurance that there is food somewhere. You insist to yourself that it is old-fashioned, archaic, to be grossed-out. You try as hard as you can not to imagine it eating anything... That's when you enter the room of the disembodied flesh and your gorge starts seriously to rise.

If you've ever seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, there's an immediate reference, but it sends you reeling into horror terminology and becomes one more thing to repress...

Past partition after partition, past the respiratory system, some grisly hearts and the absurd anti-smoking section, you stumble half-heartedly. The question of the participant's willingness keeps rearing up, but it's not till you move downstairs that the force of it shocks, literally shocks your system.

In a series of jars, preserved like berries at Grandma's house, are succeeding stages of fetal development. All questions of willingness, voluntary participation or free will dissolve at the recognition of the miniature fingers, toes, eyes and hearts. The increasingly manic trivia proclaims the beginning of the heartbeat and the helpfulness of the placenta. To be fair, you can side-step this room, but it doesn't make the room not exist and you no longer have any desire to be fair.

The final room contains a lab-coated museum worker to offer a scholarly benediction, to point out the scientific value and natural wonder of what you have just seen. Like an apologist at an abattoir she directs your gaze around the dissected Asian bodies that haven't already shocked you. A stronger stomach than yours would have been quaking by now, and you are feeling sick to death of it. The crowd around her, in a religio-scientific rapture excoriates our, "insane morality," for holding us back from performing this act on our own. And one can't help but reflect on the other horrors that have been encouraged in the name of science.

If this seems a breathless, or an over-excited review, it is only because perspective has not yet been reached. It is an artful exhibit, well set up, cleverly controlled and brilliantly propagandized, but one can't help but lose perspective in the host of unanswered moral dilemmas that no one in the room seemed even slightly bothered by.