“The Story of Service”, written by Jessica Mitford, is quite morbid, to say the least. She details exactly what funeral directors must do; specially highlighting upon what they do with the corpse. Although on the surface, this piece of writing does not seem to relate to Joel Spring’s “Movies as a Form of Education: The Film Production Code of 1930”, if you dig a little beneath the surface, it’s not so hard to see how they correlate with one another. Similar to the Hays Code, the funeral directors (or anyone affiliated with the funeral services), have very strict rules that they must follow. For film production, there were a set of subject matter/topics, that could not, under any circumstance, be shown in the films. In “The Story of Service”, Mitford quotes Edward A. Martin when she writes, “‘the use of improper terminology by anyone affiliated with a mortuary should be strictly forbidden'” (Mitford52). There was actually a published list of words that could not be used. Now it is very easy to see how this compares and connects to the film production code.
Going back to Mitford’s text, I found the concept of the embalming procedure to be very strange and morbid. The amount of preparation and alterations that they perform on a dead body is preposterous. By the time they’re done, the person won’t even appear to be the same person they were before. It’s all a show. Everyone at the funeral knows that the body has been prepared for the event. They all know that’s not what a dead person looks like, but the directors want to hide the morbid truth; although what they’re doing is far more morbid. I could not imagine performing the procedures that they do on a dead body. The idea is very strange to me, and it is strange that this concept is so normal within our society.
aspenladieu 