June 27th, 2008
For my brother’s birthday, I bought him a ticket to Body Worlds, the museum exhibit where they take actual plasticized bodies, strip them of their skin, and display the wonders of the human body in all its icky glory. Two things in particular struck me while I was strolling down cadaver lane.
One was the fact that I really wasn’t particularly weirded out by the whole experience. Sure, I was looking at some guy’s intestines without so much as a sliver of glass between his bowels and my face, but there was really only one time that I actually made the connection in my head that these were real people. Most of it still looked fake, or my brain just insisted on interpreting it as such. The only things that were kinda creepy were the eyeballs which, ironically, were the only fake parts on the bodies.
But overall, there was only one part of the whole exhibit that was a little weird to me. I called it the “dead baby room.” They had specimens of babies in various stages of the pregnancy; early examples were in test tube-like thingies and sorta looked like tadpoles or a cloud of spores (yeah, I know there are no actual spores, but that’s what it looked like). At eight weeks it really looked like a tiny, translucent baby with eyeballs, fingers and everything, no bigger than my thumb.
But soon I came face to face with much more developed dead babies curled up peacefully in glass cases. They were totally intact, not dissected like the other people. And it was eerie. I was just looking at actual dead babies in glass boxes. I mean, what if that had been your child? These ain’t no Cabbage Patch Kids. In fact, there were two nuns near us who left to go get their tickets back as soon as they saw their first placenta in this display. And here’s how Body Worlds instilled confidence into more socially conservative visitors: a sign that said that all of the specimens died of natural causes “to the best of their knowledge.” Uh, great. Why not just go ahead and lie a bit and say you know for a fact it’s not a room full of abortions?
Anyway, the other thing that struck me was how much sick fun some of these people must have had posing the bodies. There’s a dude with his chest split open, holding all of his internal organs above him. There’s a woman whose spine is yanked out perpendicular to her body, tearing open a gaping hole in her back. I mean, look at this shit! It’s a dude holding his own skin! I can just see the scientists sitting around, going, “hey, let’s take this dude’s penis and split it down the middle, peeling the sides off like a banana so it’s just the head floating and attached via the urethra to the guy’s body. And let’s have him leaping over a hurdle at the same time!” You think that last one was a joke? Cause it wasn’t.
Anyway, I found the whole thing pretty fascinating, and if there’s an exhibit in your area and you’ve considered checking it out, I say go for it. It’s worth the $20 ticket. Oh, but it’s probably not the best first date idea. Just so you know.
