May I Touch Your Guts, Please?

There were three games I wanted when I was a kid but never got. One was "Electronic Battleship" ("You sank my battleship!!"); one was an electric football set (the "vibrating field" kind where you used a piece of lint as the football); and then the third one was the game "Operation" -- I remember how the mother on the commercial was walking down the stairs when she hears her kids say they're going to operate, and she cries out in horror: "Operate?!?"... and then after the mom realizes it's just a game and they all laugh, then I remember how they could never get that "funny bone" out without setting off the buzzer. Ha ha, those crazy kids... Those crazy, spoiled kids... 

But I haven't thought about those games for years -- until last Saturday, that is, when I had a whole afternoon of "Operation" flashbacks. 

On Saturday I went to this crazy exhibition currently showing in HK called "The Mysteries Of The Human Body" -- this is a traveling "show" exploring the amazing complexity and beauty of the human body -- that's what they'll tell you, anyway. But it's not so simple as that, because the bodies on display are not life-like reproductions -- THEY ARE ACTUAL HUMAN REMAINS. Here's a quote from a website regarding a very similar exhibit in London to give you a little background:

Now, there are a few things I'll say about this show. First, we weren't 100% sure it was actual human bodies until we got there, though we suspected it. I don't think knowing that would have kept us away, exactly, but still, I should point out that we weren't really sure of the show's content until we were already in the room. 

Secondly, the exhibition was PACKED with people (I mean with people visiting, not with displays, ha ha). We got there about 3:00pm on Saturday and there was a line of about 1000 people waiting to get in. Fortunately the line moved very quickly and we were in within about an hour. 

The third thing I'll say is that it was really amazing to me how quickly I got tired of it, and it lost it's novelty. I'd say after about 20 minutes I was already thinking, "Oh, another cut-up human body? BO-RING!!!" Okay, I'm joking a little bit, but it was strange how quickly I found myself looking down the line and thinking, "Geez, how many more of these things ARE there?!?" My Dad was a biology teacher, so I've seen frogs and pigs and sharks being dissected since before I can remember -- so this show wasn't really a shocker to me in that respect. They were HUMAN remains, yes, and that is definitely different than looking at a dissected frog; but still I left this exhibit thinking that I maybe understood how someone can be a pathologist or mortician -- you just get used to it after a while. And I felt this even though you will nowhere find any more creative a collection of human dissections. I mean, they had people cut in half up the middle, they had people where the right side had the skin and muscle peeled back to reveal the skeleton while the left side was basically intact, they had one body completely sliced from head to toe into 1-inch cross sections which were then displayed like a giant pieces-of-a-human domino set. I mean, I would say, "They did everything you can imagine to these bodies" -- but I'm pretty sure you or I would never actually imagine some of the ways they thought up to present these bodies (for instance, who decided they needed to do a "bowels pulled out and displayed for your viewing pleasure" version?). It was all done very "tastefully" -- it wasn't macabre or anything, in case I'm giving you that idea -- but this variety of presentation meant it was, in it's own way, a very "impressive" collection. One friend I was with -- referring to the obvious "craft" of the people who did the dissecting -- asked me, "Is this science or art?"

(Good question)...

But, anyway, for me personally, the most surprising (and possibly disturbing) thing that I need to say about this exhibit is that it is a HANDS-ON EXHIBIT. 

That's right. If you just now -- when I said "hands-on exhibit" -- imagined literally thousands of people paying $10 each to go into a big room at the convention center and touch, rub, grab and grope at 40 or 50 actual human corpses that have been preserved in a neo-mummy state, then you are RIGHT. That is exactly what this show is about.

I was not prepared for this particular aspect of the show. 

Now, listen, don't let me lead you to believe that I was totally scandalized by it. I wasn't. I guess once you get past the "these are real people!" stage it's not so big a leap to the "hey, why not stick your hand in their gut!" stage... 

So it wasn't like I got sick to my stomach or became outraged at the loss of dignity or something. HOWEVER, I must say that I really did sense a sort of ambivalence on my part about the fact that all these people were sticking their hands all over the actual dead bodies of real human beings. 

Granted, the donors supposedly all knew what their bodies were going to be subjected to. And granted, the process of "plastination" renders the "material" into a rubberized, plastic-like substance. So it was NOT like the old Halloween trick of sticking your hand into a bowl of spaghetti and grapes and pretending it was "guts and eyeballs" or anything like that... It was at least a more sober affair than THAT... 

But STILL -- I remember at one point just standing there and thinking about how I was watching all these people stick their hands all over someone's son's body...

Okay, so I felt a little weird about that, and I haven't quite yet decided if I need to keep thinking about it (because there's some profound moral horizon that has been crossed -- I mean, geez, they had T-shirts and tote bags for sale with photos of these displays on them!), or if I should just chalk it up as another "what will they think of next" experience...

What do you think?

This article was first posted: 16 January 2003

Here are some of the things I think about:

This site is Copyright 2002-2004 by Glenn D Watts
The homepage URL is http://www.hongkongbrother.com
Contact me at glenn@hongkongbrother.com
Here's my disclaimer for the content on this site