Frederick-Death as a Taboo

American's fear death. To America it is seen as the ultimate defeat, and in a culture that values success as one of the most important achievements, it is the ultimate fear.

I think there could be many reasons individuals would choose to ignore the inevitable reality of death, but as a culture, I believe American’s chose to ignore it because of it’s finite end. Death means that everything you have built in your life, all of your success is null. When a culture, such as America’s, views success as wealth and career progress, that culture cannot also value and accept death, because death ruins success. This would make the culture a very negative one. America, being a relatively optimist culture, refuses to believe that all of the work they do in their life ceases to matter once they are dead. Beyond that, American’s have a somewhat narcissistic belief that it is not possible for they themselves to not exist or matter after death.

Another reason American culture could deny the idea true death, or absolute death, would be the religious/Christian basis on which we were founded. The Christian belief in an afterlife mutes the effect of death by saying that we don’t really die. Only our physical body does not our soul, as seen in Beetlejuice.

In the scene directly after they die, the Maitlands walk back into their house as if nothing horrible had even happened. They were dripping from the creek, but other than that, unharmed. This scene shows denial of death in that nothing in their life was immediately changed. Their home was still theirs (for the moment), and they still cleaned and maintained it. The slept in their same bed, and at first hadn’t even realized they were dead! This scene directly denies that death changes your life. It treats death more like a different stage of your life. It could be comparable to going from a youth to an adult. Different stage, different problems, but still life.

At the very end of the movie, the last scene in which Lydia come home from school and the Maitlands greet her further denies the significance of death. They greet her as if she were their daughter, the daughter they never could have. Earlier in the film, it mentioned how the Maitlands wanted children, but were having trouble. It’s ironic that after they die is when that goal is symbolically achieved through Lydia. This scene represents how death does not stop them from achieving goals which they had while they were alive.

One last reason as to why death is so anathema in American culture could perhaps be that America, with a young, still developing culture, has not made up its mind entirely about death. They whole issue surrounding death is perplexing, and we will never understand what it really means. Perhaps the best way for American’s to handle that uncertainty is to deny its finiteness and treat it as taboo. Rather than deciding what death is, and developing ways in our culture to deal with death, we deny it as an end, and instead of living to die, we live to live.